Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (42 page)

The worst was from the hospital complex just east of the racetrack parking lot where the team had been huddling for the last half hour. There had been a steady stream of ambulances coming in, trying to push their way through a crowd of hundreds of people, all trying to get into the emergency room.

But about fifteen minutes ago, there had been a sudden flurry of shots fired, and since then there had been nothing but panicked screams, even as more ambulances arrived.
 

Naomi could only guess, but she had no doubt that at least some of the people who’d been taken there had been attacked by larval harvesters. She shivered as she watched the oozing thing in the big glass jar, imagining what a nightmare the hospital’s emergency room must be now. Beyond that, there were probably casualties now among the hospital’s staff, doctors and nurses who had been attacked by the creeping horrors as they’d fought to save their dying patients.

“I doubt we’ll have to worry about any threats from the hospital,” she said, turning her attention away from the larva and getting back to her feet. “The harvesters will congregate there as long as there’s a food supply.”

“I don’t mean that.” Boisson pointed to the stables. Several harvesters had appeared, running headlong away from the stables. “That.”

Everyone tensed, watching the creatures as they bolted across the huge parking lot. A couple were heading in their general direction, but the others weren’t. They were heading in random directions, anywhere that took them away from the stables.

“It looks like they’re trying to get away from something.”
 

Naomi forgot whatever else she’d planned to say as a flood of harvesters, dozens of them, came out of the stable area across the parking lot. She watched in fascination as one of them stumbled, then fell to writhe on the ground. She tapped Boisson on the arm. “Can I borrow your binoculars?”

Boisson reached into a pouch and pulled out her Pioneer binoculars and handed them to Naomi.

Putting them up to her eyes, Naomi stared in rapt fascination at the downed harvester. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. In their natural form, the harvesters tended to gather their malleable flesh around the torso, which in part gave rise to their quasi-cockroach appearance. This one had that, but had more wrapped around one of its arms, and that arm was clearly quite a bit shorter than the other one. “My God! It’s being attacked by one of the larval forms!”

“Cannibals? Now there’s a pleasant surprise.”

Naomi wasn’t sure if she should be surprised or not. This was their first insight into how the larval forms and the adults interacted. It looked like a little bit of good news for a change.

“There goes another.” Boisson pointed to another creature that tumbled to the pavement, maybe twenty yards from where the first had gone down. “Oh, Jesus!”

They saw what the adult harvesters, of which there must have been hundreds now, were fleeing from across the expanse of the parking lot.
 

Naomi swiveled the binoculars to the left, toward where the stables were, and gasped. There was a line of larvae advancing across the parking lot. Unlike the specimen they’d captured, or even the one that had dropped from the upper floor of the mall when Garcia had pushed her out of the way, these were huge. They were, literally, each as big as a horse. Some were larger.
 

As she watched, she saw that some still hadn’t fully digested their most recent victims. A horse’s leg rose up, as if begging for help, from the mass of one of the biggest larvae as it rolled across the parking lot. It slowly disappeared, sinking into the bruised-looking mass of tissue.

“Naomi.”

Naomi couldn’t speak. She was both fascinated and repelled by what she was seeing.

“Naomi!”

“What?” Naomi lowered her binoculars and looked at the team’s leader.

“I think we’d better get going,” Boisson told her in a tight voice. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but we have an awful lot of company heading our way.”

Looking back to the north, seeing the entire view rather than just the narrow perspective provided by the binoculars, a chill ran through Naomi as she saw just how many harvesters were fleeing right toward them.

Boisson called out to the men and women on the team. “Make a line in front of us with the lighter fluid, but don’t light it yet! Carson,” she said to the agent holding the larva, “set that damn thing down about twenty meters behind us, then get on the firing line. Doctor, you stick with me.”
 

Then she keyed her radio. Naomi noted that it took her several tries to reach the LA ops center this time.
 

“This is Boisson. Yes, we’re still at the fucking mall. I know you can’t send evac yet, but there’s a pair of Marine Cobras working over some positions one or two kilometers to the south of our position. I want at least one of them up here to cover us.” She listened for a moment, and Naomi could see her face go rigid with anger. “Get me the SAC. Now.”
 

To Naomi, she rasped, “Those stupid fools are going to get us killed. Not only do they not have any choppers available to pick us up, but the LA FBI building was attacked by rioters and the mobile command post doesn’t have any communications with the local military commands. Christ, what a fuckup. Hang on.” She listened a moment. “Yes, sir, this is Boisson. No, there’s been no evac. We were told that no choppers are available for at least another half hour. We’ve got an army of these monsters coming right for us, and there’s a pair of Marine Cobras just to our south.”

 
By Naomi’s guess, the closest harvesters were maybe a hundred and fifty meters away. She turned around to look at the helicopters, which were still circling.
So close
, she thought.

Boisson nodded at whatever the SAC on the other end of the radio was saying, but her expression told Naomi that it wasn’t good news. “Yes, sir. Understood.” Keying off the mic, she looked at Naomi. “He’s going to do what he can, but I think the only way we’re going to get out of this is on our own.”

Taking a quick look at the approaching harvesters, she reached into her combat vest and pulled out a flare. “Get ready! Try to knock some down close to us. We’ll set fire to them and maybe that’ll help keep the others away.”

Naomi knelt down, gathering the cats close to her. They seemed to be overwhelmed by terror now, knowing that so many harvesters were close. She tied their leashes to her web belt so she could have her hands free for the shotgun. Boisson had positioned her behind the defensive line of FBI agents, but that hardly meant she was safe. And ten or so meters behind her sat the glass carboy with its precious, horrible contents.

“Steady.” Boisson held her assault rifle in one hand and a lighter in the other. She stepped forward and knelt down to the pitiful stream of lighter fluid that was all that separated her team from the oncoming horde of apparitions. “Steady.”

When the closest of the creatures was a mere ten meters away, she ignited the lighter fluid and jumped back. “Fire!”

As her team opened fire, she turned and slammed her fist against the base of the flare, launching it in the direction of the Cobras orbiting to the south. Naomi saw her mouth something, maybe a silent prayer that the Marines would see the dazzling red ball that soared toward them. A red flare.
Send help
.

“Back up!” At Boisson’s order, the agents began to slowly move back, away from the sputtering line of burning lighter fluid.

Harvesters went down under the barrage of fire, and just as Boisson had hoped, several of them skittered or stumbled forward into the burning lighter fluid and exploded into flames. Other harvesters, unable to stop in time, tried to leap over. Some made it, only to be blasted to pieces by the concentrated fire from the FBI agents. Others didn’t, and they joined their brethren in flames.

In no time at all, the pitiful line of lighter fluid had been transformed into a conflagration, with flames reaching a dozen or more meters into the sky. The agents had to move back, away from the blistering heat.
 

“Spray more fluid on our flanks!” The harvesters were now streaming around them. Most were keeping well away from the flames, but Boisson wasn’t taking any chances.
 

“I’m out!” One of the agents tossed away his empty can of lighter fluid and raised his rifle toward a harvester passing close by. He didn’t see the one that skittered perilously close to the fire. It stabbed him in the neck, just above his armor, with its stinger in passing, just before two of the other agents blasted the creature in the torso, knocking it down.

Naomi held her fire, mainly because of the cats. They howled in fear at the roar of the guns, the crackling heat of the creatures now burning on three sides of them, and the sense of harvesters all around them. Alexander panicked, but instead of bolting away, he clawed his way up her leg. She cried out in pain, but let him go. She wasn’t about to try to pull him off in the middle of a firefight, not that she’d be able to, anyway. There was nothing else she could do.
 

He climbed up her back, where his claws found purchase on her web gear, but couldn’t sink through her body armor. With his front claws lodged in the web gear over one shoulder, his muzzle was right next to her ear, and his pitiful cries joined the maelstrom of noise around them.

Koshka, not about to be left alone, followed her feline companion, lodging herself on Naomi’s back next to Alexander.
 

Making a decision, Naomi undid their leashes from her belt. If she went down, at least the cats would have a chance at survival on their own. She wouldn’t doom them to die because they couldn’t escape the anchor of their dead mistress.

Three harvesters leaped over the flames on one side. Four agents went down under them in a ferocious melee of whipping tails, slashing claws, and automatic weapons fire.
 

Naomi stepped forward with her shotgun and blasted one of the harvesters in the head while two of the agents pinned it down. One of the other creatures leaped to its feet and ran off after decapitating another agent. Naomi dropped it with two rounds from her weapon. The third harvester twitched and died after another agent stuck the muzzle of her shotgun in its gut and pulled the trigger.

Grabbing the woman under the arm, Naomi pulled her to her feet as the other two agents scrabbled away from the still-twitching harvester.

“Thanks,” the woman gasped.

As bright and hot as the harvester bodies burned, they didn’t burn long. Already their protective wall of fire was guttering, dying out.
 

Naomi froze as she saw one of the enormous larvae pass by. The smaller ones couldn’t move very quickly, but the relative speed of which the things were capable seemed to increase with size. Naomi could easily escape one, but she’d have to move at a brisk trot to do so.

Boisson stood beside her, watching the thing glide past. “Holy shit.”

They both heard a sound, a loud, deep hum. The giant larva rippled, then exploded. Burning chunks of it were sent skyward in all directions as the main body caught fire.

Naomi looked up to see one of the Marine Corps SuperCobras coming up fast from the south. The sound she’d heard was the gunship’s twenty millimeter triple-barrel gatling cannon. It fired again, blasting another larva that she couldn’t see.

That’s when she remembered the bits of the first creature now arcing down all around them. “
Don’t let any of it touch you!
” She shouted out the warning again, pointing up at the bits of what looked like flaming bacon grease.

Boisson and most of the other agents looked up, horrified expressions on their faces as the gunship continued to fire at targets all around them.
 

Naomi screamed again, trying to warn the agent that had carried the carboy. He looked up in time to catch a fist-sized piece of the giant larva square on the face below his helmet. Dropping his weapon, he put his hands to his face and fell to his knees, writhing.

Then she was flying through the air, landing hard on her chest. Her chin and the end of her nose banged into the asphalt. The brim of her helmet saved the rest of her face from the impact.

Dazed, she rolled over on her side to look back. A piece of the giant larva, as large as Alexander, had landed right where she’d been standing. It was on fire, but was rolling around, as if still looking for more prey.

On the far side of it stood Boisson. She’d pushed Naomi clear.
 

“That’s the second time one of those bastards has tried to fall on me,” Naomi said to Alexander through his non-stop cries. “I think I’m a bit sick of them doing that.”

Boisson helped her back to her feet, weighed down by over thirty pounds of terrified felines in addition to her combat gear.

Now both of the Marine gunships that had been to the south were circling over them, firing non-stop. One of them hovered for a moment, and with a
whoosh
fired several rockets back toward the stables. Then it fired more. The southeastern end of the stables disappeared in the resulting explosions as the rockets hit, sending a shower of wood and metal into the air.

“I’m out!” One of the agents nearby tossed his rifle to the ground. While they had come armed with heavy weapons, they hadn’t planned to take along enough ammunition for a full-up firefight.
 

Naomi handed the man her shotgun, then took the ammunition out of her pouches and stuffed the shells into his.
 

She backed up next to Boisson, feeling utterly naked without anything more powerful than the Glock 23 that she pulled from the holster strapped to her thigh.

One of the Cobras fired again. Then it came down low and hovered where they could see the pilot and the gunner. The gunner pointed to the nose where the cannon was, then ran his finger across his throat.

“Looks like we’re not the only ones running dry,” Boisson shouted.

“No,” Naomi breathed as the helicopter pulled up and turned away. The other Cobra turned to join up with it. “Oh, no.”