“Shit!” Jack cursed. There was no point in risking more lives than necessary if the dome collapsed. “You men!” he called to the agents. “Get out of here. Go back to the junction and help the others.” Giving Jack an unsure look, the two men didn’t question his orders and made their way back out of the dome. Turning back to Renee, he said, “Let’s get this done.”
“Here, help me move this,” she told him, gesturing at a pile of equipment and debris blocking the door to the electrical systems area.
After a few minutes of grunting and heaving, the door was finally clear and Renee opened it.
“Well, that’s some good news,” she said guardedly.
“What?” Jack asked, looking around the pitch black room. The only thing he could see was a large bank of red and green indicator lights off to the left.
“The batteries are okay,” she told him, moving toward the lights. “Like I thought, the breakers went, but that we can fix. Here, help me with these.”
In the glow of the indicators, he saw her move toward a set of six large equipment cabinets, each of which had a set of large buttons and a single large handle. “Pump each one of these three times,” she told him, pointing to one of the handles, “then the handle should lock.”
Jack followed her directions, pumping and locking the handles. “There’s too much power flowing through there for a simple mechanical switch,” she explained as she pushed buttons and flipped breakers on one of the other panels. “So we get to do it the fancy way.”
“Done,” Jack told her, slamming the last handle home.
“Okay, here we go...” She pushed one of six large buttons on the console before her, and the first cabinet made a loud thunk. They were rewarded by the main lights – what few were left undamaged by the blast – flickering back on around the periphery of the dome from where they were suspended under the mezzanine level.
“Oh, shit,” Renee hissed.
“What is it?”
“Look what we’re standing in.”
Jack looked down in the flickering light and saw that the floor was wet. “Water. So?”
She shook her head and moved back away from the electrical panels. “It’s not water, Jack. It’s diesel fuel. Can’t you smell it?” She looked up at the wall just below the mezzanine level, where the tunnel into the exhaust complex was. There was a trickle of liquid down the wall. “At least one of the tanks or lines must have been ruptured by the blast.” As they watched, the trickle grew into a steady flow.
Jack could smell it now, even over the stench of the smoke. And he remembered Naomi telling him that there was enough fuel in the tanks up there to power the backup generators for a couple months.
“Christ,” he cursed, looking again at the shimmering pool that was quickly spreading across the floor. “Once that hits those breakers...”
“Yeah,” she told him. “The breakers will arc and ignite the whole shebang.” She looked at the other five breakers that needed to be reset.
“Don’t even think about it,” he warned her, taking her arm and pulling her back. “We’ve got to get out of here. Right now.”
“We need the power, Jack,” she protested, but she didn’t struggle against his insistent grip.
“It’s not going to do us any good as soon as that fuel hits the first live circuit,” he told her. “This place is going to turn into an inferno, and we need to be long gone when that happens.”
Jack turned to head back toward the door to the junction, and that was when he saw the cats. He momentarily felt guilty for not even thinking about Alexander since the trip to Spitsbergen, yet here the big furball was. Koshka was with him, as usual, and so were three others. He leaned down to try and shoo them toward the blast door and out of the dome, then realized that all of the cats were staring in the same direction: toward the air intake tunnel on the mezzanine level.
Where the larval harvester had been trapped.
Alexander suddenly arched his back and stuck up his tail, growling. Koshka and the others joined him, and all at once they scattered, taking cover where they could behind the debris strewn across the floor of the lab dome.
“Renee,” he called quietly over his shoulder as he scanned the mezzanine. He couldn’t see the mouth of the intake tunnel through the smoke.
“What?” she said from close behind him.
“We have to go,” he told her, drawing his pistol, the big .50 caliber Desert Eagle, and snapping off the safety. He hadn’t thought to bring a rifle with him. “Now.”
“What else could be wrong?” she asked, trying to make a joke. Then she saw the cats: silent, intent, as if waiting in ambush. Or trying to not draw the attention of a much more ferocious predator. “Oh, God,” she whispered, realization of their predicament suddenly dawning on her.
“Come on,” Jack told her quietly as he began to edge toward the blast door leading to the main junction.
“Jack, wait,” she said suddenly, pointing at a white refrigerator that was still standing along the dome wall, not far from where the animal storage area was. “The antivenin is in that refrigerator. We should get that before–”
“No,” he said, catching sight of a powerful, alien limb slowly descending from the smoke that wreathed the mezzanine level stairway. The creature was much closer to the door than they were. “There’s no time. Move! Now!”
Pushing her in the direction of the door to the junction, he moved toward the stairway and the creature that was now fully revealed: a harvester, its black exoskeleton shimmering in the glow of the lights while the malleable tissue oozed around its core as if unsure of what shape it should take.
Praying that firing his weapon wouldn’t ignite the diesel fuel, Jack raised the big pistol and took aim at the harvester’s center of mass. Just as he pulled the trigger, the cats broke from cover, yeowling and hissing at the creature.
The harvester reacted with lighting fast reflexes, leaping back up onto the obscured mezzanine. Jack’s shot blasted a chunk of concrete from the wall where the harvester had been, and the cats darted for the door, their desire to survive overriding the instinct to fight the creature.
“Go!” Jack shouted at Renee, “Get the hell out!”
“I’m stuck!” she cried. She had forced her way into the gap between the blast door and its frame, but one of the straps on her body armor had caught on an exposed bolt in the door’s locking mechanism. “Help!” she cried into the junction, which was now empty, the two FBI agents who had been with them earlier having followed Richards and Franzman down the tunnel toward the silos. “Help me!”
Jack tried to free her with one hand, holding the pistol with the other. He couldn’t. “Goddammit,” he growled, shoving the Desert Eagle back into its holster so he could use both hands, “hold still!”
But no matter what he did, the strap refused to come off the head of the bolt. Renee’s fierce struggling had only succeeded in wedging her body in more tightly, and at just the wrong angle. She was well and truly stuck.
Giving up on using his bare hands, he reached down and pulled out the flip-out utility knife that he always carried. “Hold still or I’m going to cut you!” he shouted at her.
That finally got her attention, and her struggles ceased. Jack shoved the blade under her armor where the straps connected and began sawing through them.
He was almost done when he felt one of Renee’s hands squeeze his shoulder in a death grip.
“Jack,” she whispered, her eyes wide with terror. “Behind you...”
***
“Thank God,” Naomi breathed as she took the brief casualty reports from the leaders of the three apartments adjoining the missile silos. Renee had restored the power to the blast locks just as Naomi and the others had arrived at the first lock, allowing the others to get out. The worst casualty had been a young woman with a broken leg. Other than that, bruises and abrasions were the worst they’d suffered. “What about the arks?”
“All intact,” said Wade Livingston, one o
f the engineers who had helped design and build the nitrogen-cooled seed storage units inside the silos. His face was lit only by the reflected light from a dozen heavy duty flashlights the others carried. The tunnel and the rest of the complex beyond the first blast lock were still without power and lights, except for the short-life battery backups in each of the silo complexes. “There’s a lot of heat bleeding through the silo doors, but the radiant barriers and ceramic insulation are coping with that. It’ll cost us some extra nitrogen to keep the temperatures down, but not as much as I’d thought. The silo batteries are all intact, so we’ve got backup power for a while until we can get the mains back on.”
“What about radiation?” Naomi asked, worried. She was concerned for her people, but the arks were even more important. They’d poured millions of man-hours into preserving genetically pure seed, and the last thing she wanted was for any of it to be compromised by radiation from the bomb.
“All the dosimeters are showing radiation well below any danger levels,” he told her. “We certainly took some, but I’m happy that the designers of this complex were as lavish with concrete as they were. And that whoever decided to paste us used an air burst and not a ground burst.”
Richards snorted. “If they’d used a ground burst, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he muttered. A ground burst would have sent a shock wave through the ground that would have shattered the concrete. It would also have produced a huge amount of radioactive fallout, which apparently was something even the harvesters and their minions hadn’t wanted to do.
“Other than that, damage was fairly light,” Livingston went on. “We had some breaks in the utility lines and some other minor things. The only serious damage was the tunnel past Blast Lock One: it partially collapsed. I’ve got a team shoring it up, but that’ll take some work to fix.” Suddenly breaking into a ragged cough, he told her, “I think the biggest problem right now is air. We’ve got to get this smoke cleared out.”
“Renee is working on that,” Naomi reassured him. “But we’ve got to get the mains back on-line first, and–”
“What are you idiots doing here?” Richards suddenly snapped at the sound of approaching footsteps. The agents he’d left to guard Jack appeared in the flashlights that were suddenly turned their way.
“Dawson sent us to see if we could help,” one of them explained. “Chunks of the ceiling were falling inside that dome they went into, and he ordered us out. So here we are.”
Naomi saw Richards’ face contort in anger. He opened his mouth to give the agents a tongue lashing, but didn’t get the chance as the unmistakable sound of a gunshot boomed down the tunnel from the direction of the main junction.
“Oh, no,” Naomi moaned. “Jack!”
Richards bolted down the tunnel in the direction of the sound, his rifle at the ready. With sick looks on their faces, the other FBI agents turned and followed him.
***
“Behind you!”
Jack reacted instinctively. Dropping the knife, he slid his right hand to the grip of his pistol, holstered under his left arm. He knew he wouldn’t have time to draw it and turn around, so he leaned over and twisted his torso, pointing the gun’s muzzle behind him before pulling the trigger while the gun was still in its holster. He had no idea if he’d hit anything, but the muzzle blast might startle the creature and at least give him a chance.
He fired, and was rewarded with an ear-piercing shriek. Drawing the gun, he turned around and dropped to one knee so he could take more careful aim.
The harvester had been shoved backward by the impact of the big .50 caliber slug, one of its “arms” shattered by the bullet just above the lowermost joint.
It launched itself at him, the chopping blade in its thorax slicing through the air toward his face.
He waited until it was right on top of him, the muzzle of the Desert Eagle nearly touching the glistening blade before he pulled the trigger. The creature staggered backward, and Jack saw tissue and chunks of exoskeleton blasted into the air behind it. He fired again, blowing a ragged hole as big as his fist all the way through its thorax, then again.
Shrieking in agony, the thing dodged to one side to avoid the last bullet, and its stinger shot out, aimed at Jack’s face. He ducked, and heard Renee scream as the deadly lance spanged into the metal door less than an inch from her face, venom spattering from its tip.
The creature withdrew its lance and turned to flee, taking great leaps toward the steps leading up to the mezzanine.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Jack shouted, bolting after it.
“Jack!” Renee called after him. “Jack, don’t!”
He heard her, but didn’t listen. He wasn’t about to let this thing get away.
Even injured as it was, it flew up the steps, faster than any man could run. Jack paused to take aim, firing at the thing as it reached the mezzanine. The harvester twirled in mid-leap, the bullet just nicking its misshapen head. Screeching again, it dodged around the biohazard room before disappearing down the intake tunnel.
Jack followed right behind. Two shots left, he warned himself as he moved past the metal plating that had been ripped off by the nuclear blast, then entered the tunnel that led to the air intake complex. He could barely see anything in the thick smoke, and he covered his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his left arm to help him breathe. Ignoring the stinging of his eyes, he crouched low to get below as much of the smoke as he could.
He reached the end of the tunnel, which opened into the rear section of the intake complex, where he found a gigantic squirrel cage fan that was at least twelve feet across and so high that it disappeared into the smoke. Jack had never seen anything like it, and was thankful it wasn’t turned on.
He moved through an access door, then up a ladder, heading closer to where the blast valves were. The smoke was thicker here, and it was getting much more difficult to breathe. He passed more giant-sized equipment as he went deeper into the complex, which was like a large cylinder placed on its side.
Hathcock was wrong, he thought, when he said you could hide a Volkswagen in here. You could hide a goddamn Cadillac.
The smoke was so thick on the platform that he nearly fell off the edge when he reached the end. He could barely make out the round shapes of the five blast valves, each of which was four feet across. They were closed, except for one where he could see a tiny glow of heat where the metal was white-hot. He couldn’t see the bottom of the complex, but figured it must be a good ten or fifteen feet below the platform he was on. That would’ve been a bad fall, Jack, he thought grimly.
As he turned, intending to go back, he caught sight of something on the platform behind him. He dropped flat onto the metal flooring, where the air was slightly clearer.
It was the harvester, moving stealthily toward him. He couldn’t see its body through the smoke, only its insectile feet, stepping closer.
“We think they can see and smell about as well as we can,” Naomi had told him, what seemed like ages before. The harvester knew he was here, but the smoke was blinding it and it didn’t know enough to get down low.
With only two shots left, Jack couldn’t risk firing blindly into the smoke. He had to be able to see his target. Which meant bringing it down to the floor. Close.
He waited until the thing was practically on top of him before he kicked its feet out from under it with one of his legs. Screeching and flailing its limbs, it fell to the floor right beside him. Before he could shoot, it had him, its arms around his chest, pulling him to its thorax and the deadly mix of organic weapons there.
“No!” Jack shouted, bringing his knee up to block the chopping blade that suddenly extended from the creature’s chest. The harvester’s claws dug into his flesh where they gripped his waist below the body armor, and Jack gasped with pain.
The harvester suddenly rolled on top of him, its face right above his, and its mandibles parted to reveal rows of serrated teeth. It lunged at his neck, but Jack was ready: instead of tearing o
ut his throat, its mouth closed over the muzzle of the Desert Eagle.
“Fuck you, you bastard!” Jack shouted as he pulled the trigger. The big bullet blasted out the back of the harvester’s skull, and the creature rolled away from him, limbs flailing as a wet rasp issued from its throat.
Jack pinned the thing against the wall of the chamber with his foot and stuck the pistol against the harvester’s chest before pulling the trigger on his last bullet. It blasted through the creature’s exoskeleton and tore into its vital organs.
After a final shudder, the harvester lay still. Dead.
“Jack?” he heard a strangely muffled voice calling a few moments later. “Jack, where are you!”
“Here,” he managed, trying to hold back the coughing that threatened to take hold of him.
A moment later, he saw lights moving in the smoke, and then hands were pulling him to his feet. Naomi and Richards.
“Renee?” he asked.
“She’s fine,” Naomi reassured him.
“She needs to go on a diet,” Richards complained as he pulled a smoke hood over Jack’s head so he could breathe easier. “It took both of us to pull her big ass out of that door.”
Jack took one last look through the smoke at the harvester’s oozing mass before he followed Naomi and Richards back into the tunnel to the lab dome.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Christ Jesus,” President Curtis whispered, his face ashen as he stared at the Predator drone’s video footage of the enormous mushroom cloud that rose over Sutter Buttes in central California. The yield of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive yield of about fifteen kilotons. The one that Curtis had ordered dropped on his own country had been twenty times more powerful.
“It had to be done,” the creature masquerading as Ray Clement soothed. “There was no choice.”
Curtis turned from the horror on the screen in the situation room to stare at the thing. General Coleridge, who had no idea what Clement really was, glared at him. The Secretary of Defense, Wilburne, looked ill.
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