Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (15 page)

Then she ran another search of foreign travelers to the U.S. during the same time period from those countries, and saved off the data.

Digging through her personal collection of programs and files, she hammered together a routine that would compare the images in the huge pile of results that she had saved off and present her with any likely matches. She knew it would likely generate a lot of junk results, and wouldn’t find her bad guy if he had made any real effort to disguise himself for his passport photos. But it was the only way she stood a chance of finding him in the hundreds of thousands of records she’d saved.

“Well, this ought to bring the network to a crawl.”
 

With a tired grin, she clicked the button and the program began to run.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As the jeep rolled forward toward the darkened village, Jack had to use every ounce of willpower not to beg Kiran to turn them around and get the hell away. The headlights swept across the rutted dirt road, and twice Jack saw large pools of a dark, viscous liquid. He shuddered at the sight, knowing that he was seeing all that was left of one or more human beings.

In the seat behind him, the girl had begun to moan. Surya had his arm draped protectively around her shoulders, holding her shivering body close. Like the jeep’s headlights, her eyes were fixed straight ahead, unwavering, unblinking.

On the right, barely illuminated by the edge of the beam cast by the headlights, the maize stalks shook as if something large had just passed by.
 

“What the devil was that?” Kiran glanced at Jack, then snapped his eyes back to where the maize had been disturbed, now only a few feet from his window.

The girl’s moans grew louder.

As the outlines of the village huts emerged from the darkness, a figure stepped from the maize to stand in the middle of the road. It was a woman, one of the villagers. She stared at the jeep with an unblinking gaze.

Kiran brought the jeep to a stop a dozen meters from her. “Another survivor.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Jack leaned forward, his body tense as a coiled spring. He had expected the harvester —
harvesters
, he corrected himself — to attack. He’d never believed they’d make it even this far.

“Wait, no!” Surya’s cry from the back seat was punctuated by the sound of one of the jeep’s rear doors being flung open.
 

Jack saw the girl dash past him, running for the woman who still stood in the road, staring at them. “Shit! Stop her!”

As he and Kiran got out, Surya was already running past them in pursuit of the girl. He managed to grab her just before she reached the woman. The girl began to scream and kick at him, her arms held out toward the woman, who was now watching them with an expression that was utterly, terrifyingly empty.

“Surya, get back!” Jack watched in slow motion, his gut churning with horror, as the woman’s chest
changed
. Her right breast seemed to bulge outward, distending the fabric of her sari. In a blur of motion, a stinger the length of Jack’s hand shot out. It struck Surya in the chest, just above his heart, and missed the girl’s face by only a few centimeters.

“No!” Kiran screamed as he reached his brother. He took Surya’s free hand, as Surya was still clinging to the girl with the other. Kiran tried to drag them back toward the jeep, but the stinger remained firmly stuck in Surya’s chest, and the woman, the
thing
, refused to let go. Between them, the umbilical of the stinger, which looked like a snake that had been turned inside out, thrashed like the tentacle of a squid.

Jack knew they only had one chance of survival, and it was perilously thin. Grabbing up a handful of the dry maize husks from the edge of the road, he held his lighter beneath them and flicked the igniter. The flame immediately caught. Holding the tip of the flame to the husks, he watched in growing frustration as the husks blackened and tiny fragments glowed, but it refused to catch fire. “Come on, damn you. Come on!”

He looked up as he heard a wet ripping sound, and Surya shrieked in agony. Kiran had pulled the stinger, which Jack saw had barbs to which bits of Surya’s flesh still clung, clear of his brother. The two men collapsed to the ground, the stinger dancing over them with obvious menace, venom dripping from its tip. The girl lay beside them, completely still, her eyes closed.

The woman, the harvester, began to move closer to its prey, and Jack now heard something moving in the maize on both sides of the road.
 

They were out of time. And still the damned-to-hell maize husks refused to catch fire. The lighter was so hot now it was burning Jack’s thumb as he pressed down the button to keep the flame going.

“Kiran! Get up! Get them in the jeep!”

Galvanized by Jack’s voice, Kiran, who had been staring at the abomination now advancing toward him, got to his feet and bent over to pick up his brother.

“No,” Surya told him, his face twisted in agony. He pushed Kiran’s hands away. “The girl. The girl!”

“Bloody hell,” Kiran hissed as he obeyed his older brother. Reaching down, he swept the girl into his arms and dashed back to the jeep.

* * *

Surya faced the thing that was now nearly on top of him. The stinger had been pulled back into the creature’s thorax, the wet umbilical disappearing into the flesh. Only the tip of the stinger protruded from the torn fabric of the sari where the right breast should be, glistening in the jeep’s headlights like a serpent’s tooth.

But something else was emerging from the thing’s chest now, resembling a skinning knife as long as Surya’s forearm. He whimpered in fright and pain and tried to push himself away from the thing with his feet. He could no longer move his arms, for they were completely paralyzed. And behind the wave of paralysis followed a burning agony as he had never before known.

He was vaguely aware of Kiran taking the girl to the jeep, and he hoped that they and Jack would reach safety.

As he watched his death approach, the thought of the girl comforted him. She reminded him so much of Pravalika, his young sister, and the moment of her death as their car slammed into an oncoming car flashed through his mind. To die now was his karma, he realized. And, perhaps, his sacrifice in trying to save this poor village girl would help ease his soul’s rebirth into the next life.

Despite the agony burning in his flesh, a great sense of relief washed over him. He closed his eyes, an image of Pravalika, laughing and smiling, fixed in his mind as the blade stabbed into his abdomen.

* * *

Jack watched as Kiran shoved the unconscious girl into the back of the jeep. That’s when the maize husks decided to explode into flame.
 

With a gasp of pain, Jack dropped the lighter and ran toward the harvester that now stood over Surya. Vijay’s young cousin screamed as the creature’s organic carving knife sawed into his guts.
 

The thing snapped its head up and it crouched to spring away from Jack, but didn’t get the chance. Kiran swung the utility axe he had grabbed out of the jeep, lodging the blade into the thing’s malformed chest

Jack threw the wildly burning handful of maize husks at the harvester, then turned and dove to the ground. Remembering that Kiran wouldn’t know what would happen, he screamed, “
Get down!
”

Behind him, the first burning bits of maize husk touched the creature’s malleable flesh. In the next instant the harvester was burning as if it were coated in rocket fuel. With an unholy shriek, it yanked the blade from Surya and staggered in circles as the fire quickly consumed it, the flames lighting up the area for dozens of meters in every direction.

Jack looked up. Near the huts in the village, he caught sight of several people on the ground, some still, others thrashing around. Two of them raised their arms toward him, screaming in desperation for him to help them. Their voices tore at his heart: there was absolutely nothing he could do to save them.

Over the crackle and screeching of the burning harvester, Jack heard yet more noises coming from the maize around them. Some sounded as if they were receding, perhaps other harvesters running away from the flames.
 

But some were coming closer.

Getting to his feet, he ran to help Kiran, whose uniform was scorched and smoking. Together, they lifted Surya from the ground before they began a stumbling run for the jeep, carrying Surya between them.

Jack thought they might just make it when Surya screamed and his body was yanked right out of their grip.

Whirling around, Jack and Kiran stared in uncomprehending horror. Surya was being dragged backward across the ground. He was in the grip of an amorphous mass, like a gigantic amoeba whose bruise-colored, mottled surface glistened in the headlights. Part of it, a pseudopod, was attached to Surya’s lower back. As Jack watched, he could see the coloration of the thing change along the boundary where it held its victim, the blue-black-yellow flesh taking on a decidedly crimson color. Blood, Jack realized with sick certainty. He also caught glimpses of something yellow-white through the thing’s translucent flesh, and it took him a moment to realize that he was seeing the bones of Surya’s spine.

Stepping forward, Kiran reached for his brother, but Jack held him back. There were tears in Kiran’s eyes.

“Surya!
Surya!
”
 

Surya’s eyes were open, bulging, his gaze fixed on his younger brother. Surya took in a gulp of air and began to scream, but it died in his throat, replaced by a wet gurgle as the thing that held him in its grip ate into his lungs.

“I forgive you,” Kiran whispered as Jack grabbed the back of his uniform and dragged him away toward the Jeep. “I forgive you.”

There was a spark of understanding in Surya’s eyes just before they glazed over as death took him.

Shoving Kiran into the passenger seat, Jack ran to the driver’s side and got in. Starting up the jeep, he threw it in reverse and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. He turned around in his seat so he could see out the small rear window, guiding the jeep in an undulating path away from the village. The road was just barely visible in the glow cast by the reverse lights, not really enough to drive by, but he didn’t care.
 

He caught a glimpse of something black and angular in the rear lights. There was a wet crunch and a violent bump as the wheels ran over something. Jack winced, but kept the accelerator pressed to the floor. He wasn’t going to stop now for anything. Nor was he about to look back toward the village.
 

If he did, he might again see the other wet shapes that he had glimpsed oozing out of the maize to join the one that had killed Surya.

* * *

After nearly flipping over when he tried to negotiate a sharp turn in the road, Jack stopped the jeep. He guessed they had gone at least two kilometers from the village, maybe three, and thought they might be safe here for a few minutes, if anywhere could be called safe anymore. He kept his hands on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly as the shakes hit him. His stomach was a sour, twisted ball in his gut.
 

Beside him, Kiran had been completely silent, his eyes staring straight ahead, as if focused on an invisible point on the windshield. He held his fists clenched tightly in his lap. In the back seat, the girl remained unconscious.

“Kiran.” Jack reached over and touched the younger man’s shoulder.
 

Flinching away as if Jack had slapped him, Kiran slowly turned his eyes, the whites around the dark irises glowing in the light from the jeep’s instrument panel, to stare at Jack. “Surya.” Kiran licked his lips. “We must go back. I cannot leave him there.”

“He’s gone, Kiran. You can’t help him now. I’m sorry.”

Kiran’s eyes misted over, and his face twisted into a snarl. “What were those things, Jack? What the
devil
were they?”

“We call them harvesters. We don’t know where they came from originally, but as you saw, they’re not human. But they can perfectly mimic humans. That’s what makes them truly dangerous. They’ve been with us, with humans, for a long time, and infiltrated key industries, the military, and even some governments, including ours. We killed all of them last year, all the living ones we knew about, at least, and stopped their plan to infect humans on a mass scale with a genetic weapon, something that would literally transform us into them.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. “The weapon was delivered through corn, although they were working on other crop delivery systems, too. But we were able to destroy it all. All except for one goddamn bag that someone made off with. We’ve been trying to track it down ever since.” Opening his eyes, he turned to face Kiran. “That’s why Vijay called us, called you, and wanted us to come here. This company, AnGrow, must have gotten some seeds and planted them. The villagers ate the corn, and then…well, you saw what happened to them.”

“It’s impossible.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Tell that to Surya. You saw it. Accept what you saw. I know it’s hard, but those things are real. And we’ve got to stop them from spreading.” He reached in his pocket, ignoring how badly his hand was shaking, and pulled out his cell phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Someone who might be able to help.” Jack punched one of the fast-dial numbers. “And I suggest you do the same. You need to get your unit down here now, before these things get their act together. In a few more hours, you won’t be able to tell them from humans without a thermal imager or exposing them to open flame.” He suddenly thought of Alexander. “Or a cat.”

Kiran looked at him as if he were insane, but then pulled out his own phone.

* * *

Carl Richards had just sat down in his chair after pouring his morning coffee when a jarring, buzzing ring tone sounded from his phone.

Pulling the phone out of his suit jacket pocket, he glanced at the display. It was Jack. He hit the answer button before the second ring sounded.
 

“Richards. What have you got, Dawson?”