Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) by Michael R. Hicks Page B

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.
    “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.  
    The screeching, at least, had stopped. Any of the things that had been in here were now dead.
    Now all that remained was to clear the animal husbandry building and then manage to leave the facility alive.
    * * *
    Mikhailov led the platoon down the connector to the entrance to the last of the large buildings, where the