The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 8

  “As far as we know, yes, but that’s still an assumption. We don’t have any way to know what else the harvesters might have been up to.”

  “Okay, I’ll grant that. But let’s start with The Bag, and for the moment let’s say that some of these incidents are what we think they are. How could we have multiple outbreaks so far apart, and in a window of only a few weeks? What’s the link, besides them being located in corn-producing regions?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. If we look at it as an epidemic, there has to be a vector, right? A delivery agent, like fleas carrying the plague. I guess we should think of the New Horizons plant as the index case, since that’s really ground zero for The Bag. Assuming, of course, that we’re not just making this up out of paranoia.”

  Jack stared at the wall across the room, his eyes unfocused and mind spinning through possibilities. “It’s the timing. If there’s a vector, let’s assume it’s someone from the facility, someone we missed somehow. He or she must have stayed out of sight for a while after the New Horizons facility was destroyed.”

  “Maybe they weren’t lying low, Jack,” Renee mused. “If I remember correctly, Naomi said that this corn variant was fast growing, taking about sixty days from planting to harvest. So if the corn’s ready for harvest now in late January, it must have been planted sometime in late November or early December, right?”

  “The presidential election,” Jack mused. “Curtis’s policies on exporting or smuggling any genetic material or technology out of the country without authorization were as tough as the terrorism laws, but Miller had made a campaign promise to open up the floodgates again. So maybe our vector was waiting for a better time. Curtis was a lame duck, Congress hated those policies because they put a huge stick up corporate America’s ass, and the incoming President made it clear he was going to tear down that particular wall.”

  “So if our little thief holding The Bag,” Renee snorted at her own pun, “had been busy lining up buyers, he — or she — would have been ready to do a little kettle corn carpetbagging.”

  “And any of those countries, and more, would have paid a small fortune for the technology in the New Horizons seed.”

  “It’s ridiculous, Jack. Wild speculation.”

  “I know. Totally preposterous.”

  “Shit.” Renee blew out a breath, and it sounded like a tiny hurricane on Jack’s end. “What do you want me to do?”

  Jack thought a moment, trying to get past the feeling of being caged. Right when he most needed the authority and resources he’d had at SEAL, he was losing them, becoming Joe Civilian again. “I doubt there’s any way we’d be able to pin down buyers coming to meet our hypothetical grain salesman here in the U.S. There are just too many variables. So let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did most or all of the traveling, at least to deliver the seeds.” Jack had a hard time imagining that getting the seeds out of the country would be difficult. The vector could have sewn a few in the liner of his jacket, or just dropped some in a plastic bag and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the biggest weakness in his little election day trigger theory: getting the seeds through customs wouldn’t have been hard, so whoever it was must have been sufficiently worried about the steep penalties of the GMO tech transfer policies that they hadn’t dared to take anything out before Miller opened the floodgates again. “Let’s run with that. Make a list of anyone who traveled between the last week of October and mid-December, for starters, to all the countries with potential events. Then see if you can cross-index any matches with phone records or any other personal data for people affiliated with bio-tech companies or government organizations. If we don’t find anything juicy, we can expand the date range of the search.”

  “I like how you said we, Jack, considering that you’re going to have your ass on the beach in LA in a few days, watching girls in skimpy bikinis while I do all your dirty work. Which, I might add, I can’t legally tell you about after Friday.”

  “Yeah,” Jack replied, a trace of bitterness in his voice, “there’s always that.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll figure out some way to let you know what I find without getting our asses thrown in jail. What about potential buyers for that technology here at home?”

  “I don’t even want to think about that Renee.” But her logic was irrefutable. The most logical market the buyer would sell to first was right here in the States. “And there’s something you’re wrong about.”

  “Oh, do tell.”

  “I won’t be laying on a beach in LA working on my tan. After I get this mess cleaned up and hook up with Naomi, I’ll be on the first flight out to India. If Vijay discovered something, I want to find out what it was. Assuming that he lives long enough to tell about it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As Mikhailov stood there, staring at the stalks of corn that were clearly ripe for harvest, he was struck with indecision. The last thing he wanted to do was to send his men through it, as their visibility would be reduced to arm’s length, even with the flashlights. If anything was hiding in this forest of malevolent-looking stalks, his men wouldn’t stand a chance. If he had thought there was the slightest chance that anyone was left alive in this place, anyone human, he would have ordered his men in without a second thought. Going in harm’s way was what soldiers did. But he had no intention of mindlessly sending them into a potential slaughter for nothing.

  There was something else that puzzled him. “Why is this even here?” He turned to Rudenko. “Why is this corn not all gone like whatever had been planted in the other building?”

  “Perhaps it — they? — were sated?”

  “I do not believe so. The lab building was devastated. The greenhouse behind us was cleared out. While we have not yet seen inside, we know the animal husbandry building that lies before us suffered damage.” He looked around. “But in here, in between, all appears normal. None of these plants have been touched. Why?”

  Rudenko shook his head. “Perhaps they had no taste for this kind?”

  “Or perhaps they do not care to eat their children.” Mikhailov moved closer to the nearest stalk, looking carefully behind it with the aid of the light attached to his shotgun. The eerie shadows cast by the plant sent a shiver up his spine. He turned to Rudenko, whose eyes shone like curved glass in the glare of reflected light. “Move the men along the central walkway here to the other side of the building. Then burn everything to ashes.”

  With obvious relief, Rudenko turned and quickly relayed Mikhailov’s orders. The men of the platoon began to move quickly along the central walkway, keeping their eyes and weapons trained on the corn stalks and whatever might be lurking behind them.

  * * *

  Ryadavoy Pavel Ivanovich Sleptsev heaved a sigh of relief as he heard the whispered orders for the platoon to move forward into the next building and get out of this accursed place. The corn stalks, standing twice his own height, their shadows dancing in the moving beams of the flashlights, made his skin crawl. A native of Saint Petersburg, a city boy, this was as close as he had ever come to being on a farm. He did not consider himself a coward and would never admit it to anyone but his closest friends, but his stomach was bound in a tight knot of fear. While he had no better explanation, it was clear to his young eyes that whatever happened here had not been a terrorist act.

  “Come on.” The man next to him, Kamensky, headed toward the central walkway.

  Sleptsev turned to follow him.

  “Help me.”

  He stopped at the whispered words, his head whipping around. The voice had come from behind him. From somewhere in the corn.

  “Help me, please! I’m hurt.” It was a young woman’s voice, now barely above a whisper. She was obviously in pain. “I can’t move.”

  “Kamensky!” The other soldier didn’t hear, and Sleptsev dared not raise his voice any more or Rudenko would cut his balls off for violating tactical discipline.

  Kamensky’s silhouette disappeared into the darkness.

 
Sleptsev was alone.

  Turning in the direction of the woman’s voice, he pointed the light of his weapon into the corn, careful to keep his finger off the trigger so he didn’t accidentally shoot her.

  “Listen,” he said urgently. “I’m going to get you some help. I’ll be right back.”

  “No, please!” She sobbed. “Don’t leave me! Everyone else left me. I’ve been here all alone. If you leave me, you’ll never come back!”

  “Yes, I will! I promise. It’ll just take a moment.”

  “Please, just take me with you. I can’t stand it here.”

  He tensed as he heard a rustle of movement. A hand emerged from the corn. An arm, then a face as the woman, barely more than a girl, dragged herself toward him, panting with exertion. Her face was dirty and caked with blood, her blond hair matted. She looked at him, a desperate expression on her face, with one bright blue eye; the other was swollen shut by an ugly blue-black bruise that ran from her forehead to her cheek.

  That clinched it. He couldn’t just leave her here in the dark. “Okay,” he told her, slinging his weapon over his back. “You’re going to be fine. Give me your hand, I’ll carry you.”

  A stinger as long as his hand whipped out of the corn and plunged into his upper neck, just above the collar of his uniform.

  Eyes wide with shock and surprise, Sleptsev tried to raise his arms to pull the thing out, but couldn’t. His arms were useless, paralyzed, as a wave of burning agony swept through him. He collapsed to his knees, then slumped forward, his last breath gurgling out of his ruptured trachea as the scrotum-like base of the stinger continued to pump poison into his body.

  The stinger pulled away, and he heard a sickly, wet sucking sound in the darkness above. Someone knelt beside him, and for a moment he dared to hope it was Kamensky. Then he felt his rifle and the RPO-M rocket being unslung from his back, and his clothes quickly being stripped off. The flashlight was again flicked on, and in its reflected glow the last thing he saw was the image of his own face as his body was dragged into the rows of corn.

  * * *

  “Sleptsev,” Rudenko called as the young soldier passed by, the last one of the platoon to file by, “what the devil took you so long?”

  “I am sorry, starshiy serzhant. I thought I heard something in the corn, but I was imagining things.” He paused. More quietly, almost embarrassed, he added, “I do not like this place.”

  Rudenko grunted agreement. “Come on. Cover me. I have a little job to do.”

  Sleptsev nodded, then followed Rudenko into the connector that led to the lab building.

  “Watch the corn,” Rudenko ordered. “If anything moves, don’t hesitate. Shoot.”

  “Understood.”

  Propping his shotgun against the wall so the light reflected from the ceiling, Rudenko pulled out a white phosphorous grenade and some fishing line. He tied the grenade in place against the lowest hinge of one of the double doors. Then he tied the filament to the hinge of the opposite door, and then to the pin of the grenade.

  “A little surprise for any of those svolochi who might try to run this way,” he muttered to himself. He knew that Mikhailov could have put a squad on this side of the complex to block anything that might come out of the corn fields when they burned, but he didn’t want to split up his men. A squad, not truly knowing what they were up against, might be quickly overwhelmed.

  Grabbing his shotgun, he tapped Sleptsev on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go.”

  The two crossed the walkway, making their way toward where Mikhailov had gathered the rest of the platoon.

  “Ready, kapitan.” Rudenko was secretly happy to be back with the rest of the men. He had felt uncomfortably exposed while he and Sleptsev had been on the far side of the field. Rudenko could swear that there were eyes in the corn, watching them. Waiting. Before Spitsbergen, he would have told himself that he was just being an old woman. Now he told himself that he was just being prudent.

  Three men stood on either side of Mikhailov and Rudenko. The rest of the men were in the connector, some guarding the doors to the last building of this nightmare complex, the rest watching for the fireworks about to erupt here and ready to act as a reserve in case of the unexpected.

  “White phosphorous grenades.” Mikhailov’s order was followed by the rustling of web gear as the men extracted the special grenades. They normally did not carry so many, but it had been another modification Mikhailov had made to their weapons loadout before the deployment. “Now.”

  There were seven pings as the pins were pulled and the safety handles flew from seven grenades, six from the soldiers and one from Rudenko, as they sailed into the darkness of the greenhouse building.

  A few seconds later, Rudenko and the others were rewarded with muffled whumps followed by a spectacular fireworks display as the grenades exploded, sending burning fragments of white phosphorous soaring in graceful arcs over the dark corn stalks.

  The response was instantaneous. A series of piercing, unearthly shrieks echoed through the building as the fragments of white phosphorous, burning at nearly three thousand degrees Celsius, transformed the corn field into a raging inferno. While the harvesters were extremely tough, with a skeletal structure formed of a natural carbon composite, their Achilles heel was fire. The parts of their bodies that they could morph to make them look human caught fire as easily as kerosene.

  “Steady!” Rudenko bellowed to be heard above the din, sensing the fear of the soldiers around him. He tightened his grip on his KS-K shotgun, his right eye glued to the sight.

  There was a sudden bloom of light on the far side of the walkway at the entrance to the connector to the lab building as the booby trap Rudenko had set went off. There were more shrieks, and he could see three apparitions, wreathed in the glare of the white phosphorous that covered them, performing a dance of death. He saw two other shadows dart toward the connector, then retreat: the grenade had covered the walls, floor, and ceiling with white hot flame, an impenetrable barrier to creatures whose bodies were inherently flammable.

  The shadows disappeared behind the corn on the far side, no doubt trying to make their way to this side through the few patches of stalks not yet ablaze.

  “Contact right!” Mikhailov’s warning was followed by a volley of Dragon’s Breath shells from the soldiers on that side who were armed with shotguns, punctuated with the staccato firing of an assault rifle. Someone screamed.

  One of the soldiers on Rudenko’s side turned to look.

  “Watch your sector, you idiot!”

  As the man’s head snapped back to watch the left side, something leaped at him from the corn.

  Rudenko had seen a harvester in its original form once before, on Spitsbergen, but its appearance was still a bone-chilling shock. While he knew that they were totally alien in appearance, his mind was actually expecting them to look human, just as they had on Spitsbergen when they had assumed the form of the Spetsnaz soldiers who had murdered most of his company.

  The dark shape that lunged at them now wasn’t remotely human. It was insectile, the dark skeleton exposed and glistening in the light. Multi-jointed arms with rapier claws at the end reached out for the soldier in the middle, the one whom Rudenko had warned. Parts of the thing were covered in doughy tissue, and there was some sort of pod attached to its thorax, from which a whiplike stinger had emerged to stab the soldier in the eye.

  The soldier went down, screaming, as the thing snatched at him.

  Rudenko had the impression that it wasn’t trying to attack the man so much as get him out of the way so it could escape.

  That, however, it would never do. Two shotguns and an assault rifle fired simultaneously at point blank range. Both the beast and the writhing soldier disappeared in a flare of Dragon’s Breath and a hail of bullets.

  “What was that?” One of the men turned a fearful face toward Rudenko.

  “Terrorists!” Rudenko would have laughed at his own lie had the situation been any less serious.
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  “They have advanced body armor!” Mikhailov added to the lie. It was far more palatable than the truth.

  That seemed to calm the men somewhat as the inferno grew in front of them. The heat was becoming too much to bear, but Mikhailov had them hold fast.

  Two more shapes burst from the corn down the walkway on Rudenko’s side. One of them was a spinning pyre, its form masked by the flames.

  The other was that of a young woman. Naked, with claw marks on her flesh, she stumbled toward Rudenko and his men, holding an arm up to her face to ward off the heat and flames.

  “Fire!”

  For once, the men hesitated.

  “Fire, damn you to hell!” Rudenko pulled the trigger on his shotgun, sending a torrent of Dragon’s Breath that enveloped the girl.

  Her nude body exploded into flame. The flesh oozed and melted, falling in burning gobbets to the walkway. An insectoid head emerged as the face dissolved, the chitinous jaws opening to let loose a shriek.

  The two soldiers with Rudenko fired. The girl-thing disappeared behind a wall of fireworks from the Dragon’s Breath shells. The screeching stopped, and the twitching corpse fell to the hot concrete, the soft flesh still burning, popping and spattering like grease in a pan.

  “Pull back!”

  Rudenko felt a hand on his shoulder. Mikhailov.

  “Pull back now!”

  Grabbing the two soldiers with him, Rudenko pushed them back toward the connector, covering them as they withdrew. His hands and face were blistering from the heat now, and he would not be surprised if he suffered second degree burns.

  Before him, the flames from the corn rose all the way to the ceiling of the building, and the place was rapidly filling with thick smoke.