The Harvest (30 page)

Shane suppressed a gag and looked away,
guiding the group well clear.

“We best get friendly with it,” Liam said
grimly, though his accent made everything sound more chipper than
it should. “We’re going to see lots of dead blokes in this
city.”

It was evident the Australian boy had seen
his share of bodies back in his hometown. His unruffled reaction
brought to light the one thing they all had in common. They’d seen
their parents die horrible deaths, and they had been forced to
leave their bodies behind to rot. Giza was their chance for
revenge.

Zigzagging across the tarmac, Shane tried to
keep some distance between them and the corpses. The breeze died as
they approached the terminals, and the smell grew thicker. The
buildings must be filled with the dead, adults who’d turned on each
other when the limbic manipulator was active. Shane stopped
breathing through his nose, unable to bear it any longer.

They found an area where an aircraft had
plowed through a section of the chain-link fence surrounding the
airport and walked out onto the road leading into the city.

“It’s a heck of a lot quieter than I
remember,” Jake mused.

“You’ve been here before?” Laura asked,
seeming to crave the distraction of conversation.

“Yeah, when I was ten,” he said, a nervous
tremor in his voice. He walked between Shane and her. “We came and
saw the pyramids on holiday.”

“That’s information you might’ve shared
earlier,” Tracy pointed out. She sounded calm, like she’d done this
a thousand times.

“Well, I don’t remember much.”

“What do you remember?” Steve asked. His eyes
scanned the environment around them, and he held his gun in front
of him, his grip appearing light on the stalk and ready to bring it
up so he could aim and shoot in an instant.

Along with Tracy and Maurice, he looked like
a seasoned soldier. Shane realized his eyes were automatically
searching for threats as well. The experience in Atlanta and the
training he’d received had turned him into a fighting machine. From
a distance, he imagined they must look like a veteran Special
Forces unit slipping into the city.

He glanced at Laura, Jake, and Liam. They
looked anxious and out of their element compared to the others.
They had the same training, but they were not yet christened to the
real horror of combat. Shane both envied their innocence and feared
it could be a liability. Knots tightened in his gut, realizing that
Kelly was now on a team where five of the seven were
inexperienced.

“Not much,” Jake continued, running his
fingers through his dark hair. “I remember it being hot.”

He was leaner than the rest of the Aussies
and a little shorter than Shane was. In addition to playing rugby,
he ran cross-country and had a kid brother waiting for him back in
Australia. The athletic boy had captured the flag for his team
several times. Shane didn’t know much else about him, but he knew
the kid’s strength and endurance would be an asset in the fight
ahead.

“Yeah,” Laura said, pulling her vest off her
chest as if to get more airflow between it and her skin. “I can see
how that would leave an impression on you.”

“And I remember the traffic being a bugger,”
Jake said. “We only stayed for a couple of days. The pyramids were
awesome.”

“Anything else?” Tracy was all business.

“Sorry mates—that’s all I remember.”

The airport behind them, a mix of the modern
and ancient buildings of Cairo loomed ahead. Random gunshots grew
louder as they approached, and he hoped Kelly’s team wasn’t under
fire.

The streets were congested with cars and
trucks, some abandoned with their doors hanging open like the
driver had fled in a hurry, and others with their drivers and
passengers dead inside. The animals had done a number on the adults
of Cairo, but there were also lots of bullet holes in the cars they
passed.

“Oh man,” Maurice said, putting his hand over
his face.

“Don’t breathe through your nose,” Shane
advised.

“And try not to look at them.” Laura’s face
had a greenish hue.

It was harder to follow her advice. The dead
were everywhere. Bodies hung out of windows, littered the
sidewalks, and lay twisted and broken on the steps of buildings,
like they’d fallen from above. There was a constant humming sound,
the flies busy feeding and sowing maggots. It made him feel even
sicker to think Leeville looked like this right now, though on a
much smaller scale. It was easy to be disgusted at the bodies, and
not recognize them for what they were. These were people—people who
deserved a better end than this.

“Where are the survivors?” Steve asked,
panning his gun left and right so its barrel followed his gaze. “I
expected we’d be getting harassed by now.”

“Clearly the smell drove them out,” Tracy
replied, her shirt pulled up over her nose and mouth.

Shane imagined this place hadn’t been vacant
since it was created. Cairo was so much older than any city he’d
ever visited in the States. He sensed ghosts of the past, roaming
the empty streets and welcoming the souls of the rotting corpses
who’d so recently joined them.

It felt like Cairo itself was dead. He
wondered what the future would be if they defeated the Anunnaki.
Would the old cities be reoccupied, or would they start over with
new cities? How different would they be on the other side of this
apocalypse? Maybe, like the prior visits by the Anunnaki to ancient
Earth, in a few thousand years, people would believe the stories of
this war were just myths. People might once again believe they were
alone in the universe.

These thoughts weighed heavy on him as he
hurried down the street, passing towering glass office buildings,
shopping areas, and temples that looked like they’d been around
since the dawn of time. He noticed Maurice glance up at an old
church with reverence, but Shane couldn’t take any interest. He
just wanted to get beyond the dead to a place where he could get
fresh air.

Swarms of flies grew so thick that they had
to copy Tracy and wear their shirts over their noses and mouths to
keep them out. This city belonged to them now, along with squawking
buzzards, sulking dogs, and feral cats. A movement ahead caught his
attention. He swore he saw the legs of a body disappear, dragged
inside an open door. He held his fist up and squatted, signaling
his team to stop.

“Go away!” a boy’s voice yelled in Arabic.
“They’re mine. Go find your own.” Shane understood him and wondered
how many other languages the rebels had uploaded into his
brain.

“Sounds like one of the crazies Jones warned
us about,” Steve whispered. He was next to Shane, their guns
pointed at the building where the voice came from.

“Leave them alone,” the voice said angrily.
“They aren’t for you.”

“We just want to pass,” Shane called back in
the boy’s native tongue. “We won’t touch anyone.”

He sensed the longer they stayed here, the
more agitated the boy would become. Darting to the next car, he
crouched behind it, directly in front of the building. The rest of
his team took turns crossing the exposed space between
vehicles.

Slowly raising his head, he looked into the
dark doorway, but he couldn’t see anything.

A gun went off behind him, and the metal of
the car’s fender complained with a loud ping as a bullet ripped
through it. Shane dropped to his belly, rolling so he could bring
his gun’s barrel to the other side of the street. There was an
ancient, five-story stucco building with most of its widows busted
out. He didn’t see any movement inside.

“Damn it,” Steve cursed, sweeping his gun
back and forth. “Where did that come from?”

“They’re mine,” the Egyptian boy on the right
side of the street yelled angrily, firing a burst of rounds from
his hiding place. The plaster erupted off the side of the building
four stories up, where Shane guessed the first shooter took
cover.

“We don’t have time for this,” Tracy
growled.

She propped on one knee and took aim at the
building. The grenade launcher made a whomp sound. A second later,
a fireball erupted through the open window, presumably from where
the first shot was fired. Pivoting toward the other side of the
street, she fired a grenade through the door where the legs had
disappeared.

Shane covered his head until the plaster
stopped raining down, his ears ringing from the explosions.

“Holy crap, Tracy,” Laura said. “You didn’t
even know if this one was going to try and hurt us.” She rose to
her feet, looking into the dusty shell of the building on the other
side of the car.

Amongst the rubble was a fresh corpse, still
smoking from the blast. The charred boy was lying face down, like
he’d tried to leap out of the open window just as the grenade went
off.

“Sorry, but we don’t have the luxury to wait
until they kill one of us,” she replied coldly, her eyes looking at
the buildings around them for another threat. “If they point a gun
in my direction, they’re going to die.”

She sounded heartless, though he knew she was
right.

“Let’s move,” Shane ordered, worried the
noise might attract more of these poor kids whose brains had come
unhinged.

They hurried along, guns aimed in every
direction. The temperature had to be well over a hundred. Sweat
gushed from him, and he felt like he’d go mad if he didn’t get away
from the dead soon. Ahead was a meat truck with greasy stalactites
hanging beneath the back doors. The unrefrigerated box must’ve
turned into an oven under the desert sun, broiling the cargo into a
rotten stew. He didn’t dare take a whiff, but he could guess how
bad it smelled by the way flies were particularly concentrated
around it.

Swatting his way through the buzzing insects,
he froze in front of the truck. His eyes locked on a red Honda
Civic. The hood and roof were splattered with blotches of blackish
mud. A step closer revealed these were the dried, bloody footprints
of dogs.

Vomit rose in his throat, and the sun’s heat
seemed to double in intensity. He came to the driver’s window, his
boots crunching in broken glass on the ground below it.

“Mrs. Morris,” he groaned, putting his hand
on the roof of the car to keep from collapsing. There she sat,
wearing her Leeville High Football Team T-shirt. Her face was
missing, replaced by a writhing mess of maggoty flesh.

“You alright, mate?” Liam asked. It sounded
like he was speaking to him from the top of a well.

He tore his eyes away from Aaron’s mom and
looked at the Aussie. Liam’s nose and mouth were covered by his
shirt, but his brow was furrowed with concern. A glance back at the
car told him he was losing it. The small sedan was red, but he
didn’t recognize the brand. It was not a Honda. The dehydrated
carcass of an old lady lay across the center console.

“I’m fine,” he replied. “Just a little
hot.”

He smacked at the flies and lifted his shirt
back up over his face, turning away before Liam could study him
long enough to figure out he might be coming unhinged.

It could just be a side effect of the neural
upload, but he also worried that somehow, his slave gene might have
been activated and he was going crazy like the two Tracy had
killed. He remembered how he felt when the limbic manipulator made
him want to murder Tracy and Steve. He’d been so certain it was the
right thing to do. A chill ran down his spine.

He pushed the thoughts aside, forcing his
attention on the buildings they passed. Nothing could stop him from
doing what had to be done. He wouldn’t be distracted. He had to
lead his team.

“On the left,” Steve whispered, and they all
dropped and pointed their weapons in that direction.

A skinny kid who looked to be about fourteen
walked through the intersection a block away. He wasn’t carrying a
weapon, and his oversized red tank top hung loosely, showing his
ribs. He disappeared between the buildings. Shane pitied the boy,
who was headed toward the pyramids where the Anunnaki would land,
marching toward his doom.

“Guess that means we’re going the right way,”
Liam observed with a despondent voice.

After another mile, the street sloped upward
and away from the buildings, joining with a bridge. A breeze pushed
the stench and flies away, and a wide river with calm, green water
flowed by below.

“The Nile,” Jake muttered distantly.

“Once we cross this bridge,” Tracy had the
map open, “Giza is to the south.”

She folded it and shoved it back into her
vest. They crept up the bridge, scanning the area. Ravens screeched
in the palms lining the river, and Laura dropped into a crouched
position and aimed her gun at the sky. Her eyes looked wild, filled
with terror.

Shane put his hand on her shoulder, and she
jerked her gun toward him.

“It’s okay,” he promised, pushing the barrel
out of his face. “They won’t attack you again.”

She scanned the sky once more, and her
attention came back to him. Sighing nervously, she stood. Panic
loosened its hold on her expression, replaced by a sheepish
grin.

“The others must’ve already come this way,”
Tracy said, pointing at a wrapper from a granola bar, the same kind
they were all given.

“Who in the devil could eat at a time like
this?” Liam crinkled his nose.

“Probably Jules,” Maurice answered. “Nothing
will stop that girl from eating.”

“And that’s the bloody oath if it is hers,”
the Aussie replied, shaking his head with disbelief. “I’d be
chundering after one bite.”

He doubted Maurice’s confidence in her
appetite—Jules wouldn’t have eaten if someone on her team had been
killed. The little green wrapper told him Kelly was all right.
Tracy picked it up, shoved it in her pocket, and then continued
climbing the bridge.