Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (10 page)

She moved
back over to Bailey and tightened the blanket around her shoulders.

“Who is
that?” Bailey asked.

“The enemy. Another one,”
Mary replied.

*
 
*
 
*

He could feel nothing.

There was no way he could tell
how long he lay there, unmoving, under that brown light.

Bones and tissue conduct
vibration as effortlessly as a tight string between two tin cans. After an
eternity of lying there in the soundlessness of the cell, he began to hear the
barely audible sound of the wasp’s grubs eating him alive. It started as a
rhythmic scratching noise down deep, and as the hours passed and the worms
grew, the sound got slightly louder. He could visualize the hundred or so sets
of mandibles working as they snipped through fat and strands of muscle tissue
like tiny scissors. The sound was now his personal and grisly white noise. It
had bleached his thoughts of all rationality for hour upon hour.

They moved as they fed,
and he knew they were leaving a trail of by-products in their foul channels to
be dispersed and absorbed by his tissues. The growing infection from invading
bacteria would be enormous. He knew also that he was bleeding from a thousand
severed capillaries and small veins. Since he was still alive, he questioned
whether the grubs’ instincts warned them off the larger, critical arteries,
nerves and organs. Protein was what they sought, and they could find an
abundance of it by staying in muscle tissue alone.

Clever
little sonsofbitches,
he thought.
Keep the food alive and fresh longer by not killing it too fast.

He didn’t feel sick, but
he knew he had to be slowly dying. It was just a matter of time until the
toxins from the inevitable infection would overcome him. He was captive now to
their gruesome purpose, but he would escape them eventually. The surgical
grazing of the grubs, despite its terrible purpose, could not prevent his
certain escape from it by dying.

For the millionth time, he
closed his eyes and shut out the sickly brown light of the cell.

Of all
the bizarre ways to die one could imagine,
he thought darkly,
I’ve topped them all.

A moment later, he felt an
itch on the end of his nose. That itch sent him into a new panic as surely as
if he’d been set aflame by it.

I can
feel.

There was
a sharp pain down deep in the back of his arm like the pinch of tweezers.
Another followed in his chest a quick breath later, and then another and
another in his legs, and then abdomen. He lifted his right arm just an inch or
two out of reflex to the pain and realized clearly that his motor ability, and
with it the perception of pain, was quickly returning.

Before he could retreat
into deep shock, before he got anywhere near those hallowed gates, he felt the
collective mincing bites of a hundred cutting mandibles as they tore his
tissues and he watched his body, as if from afar, writhing in the pain of it.
He saw a pale gas-like smoke filling the chamber from a small vent next to the
light. He felt himself being jerked down almost violently into painless
unconsciousness. Deep blackness was his world, and he was sure must now be dead
and was thankful for it.

*
 
*
 
*

He
floated in black oblivion. Somewhere in the nothing, an impossibly small sphere
of substance grew to an impossibly large sphere of substance and back again,
time and time and time again with an ethereal rhythm.

He rose
out of death slowly like a bubble through tar and was greeted by the low,
groaning sound of human pain and despair. He was surprised he could turn his
head and lift it, and he did both. The first thing he saw was the inch-wide
viney tube stuck square in his chest just under his sternum. It was held in
place with root-like appendages radiating out where it pierced him, as if it were
growing out of him. It ran upwards into the light, and he lost it in a jungle
of other tubes and instruments above. Beyond the cluster of equipment above
was a dark ceiling that seemed to want to swallow him with its blackness. The
brown light was somewhat brighter here and he could see naked human bodies
lying all around him on the tops of smooth, black, table-like structures. Each
one attended by an alien being.

The human
bodies were cut and splayed open like biology
class
frogs.

The groans
were the groans of the humans as the alien beings cut with their hissing
instruments and probed into the bodies of the humans with their strange tools.

He
watched as the alien working next to him probed into the man’s body and pulled
out a squirming two-inch long grub. The alien held up the squirming larva and
examined it.
 
The alien then carried the
larva to a gallon-sized container and dropped it with a slick little
plop.
The walls of the container were
translucent, and Phil could see that it was at least half full with wiggling
grubs.

They’re
harvesting the goddamn things,
he thought dimly.
Are they food?

While his
shocked and dulled brain replayed the question, an alien appeared at his side
and began to feel his body with its hard, thin fingers, testing him like he was
a ripe melon. It reached below and pulled up an empty alien container like the
one on the opposite table. Phil was a smart man, even when in shock and
drugged. It came as no surprise to him when the alien tugged a small cutting device
down on its umbilical from above and started to cut him open. He didn’t feel
the pain until the cutter hissed deep into his abdomen.

The hours
passed and Phil watched as the being cut and probed and pulled out of his body
grub after grub. He vacillated between outrage and horror and when he wanted to
scream from the pain and wail at the being to
stop
,
the most his voice could produce was a flat monotone groan. This infuriated him
as much as the cutting and he tried desperately to modulate the sound, mold it
into some shape, if just an approximation of words that would impart a clearer
imperative. The more he tried, the more he realized that the sound, though
devoid of the shapes of words, conveyed his anguished meaning quite clearly and
required no further sculpting whatsoever.

He
watched the blood flow freely from the wounds and thought at first that he
would surely bleed to death. His dwindling blood supply, however, was replaced
with the deep purple fluid flowing into his aorta from the vine-like tube stuck
in his chest. He soon saw none of his own blood flow from the clean incisions,
but only the bright alien substitute.

They want
to keep me alive,
he thought bitterly
.

A thin
veil of shock still clung to his senses and helped insulate him from the horror.
After a few hours, Phil became, if not emotionally accustomed to the horror, at
least acquainted with the process of it. The pain fluctuated wildly from low to
high, from sharp to dull, and during periods when it was tolerable enough not
to scramble his perceptions, he tried to learn what he could about the grisly
procedure being performed on him. If he was going to endure, he had to learn
something, anything, even if the facts were as palatable as carrion.

The more
exotic tools were attached to structures above, which either supplied power or
delivered some other material through the umbilicals connected to them. The
being used nearly all of them at one time or another and the speed with which
it reached and grabbed the probes, cutters and separators, sometimes without
looking, suggested even to Phil’s torpid mind that this species had reached
some unfathomable pinnacle in the use of this family of instruments. The tools,
especially the knives and cutters, fit the being’s hand in such a way as to almost
become an extension of it. So enabled, the tools in these alien hands were
capable of the most precise cutting and separation of tissues. Phil wondered
how many eons would have to pass before the form of any hand device on earth
would become so bonded to the user.

The
surgeon’s hands in themselves were tools, incredibly deft and nimble and the
being closed the larger incisions with such quickness and perfection that Phil
would have been impressed except the open incisions it closed were in
his
body. One of the
devices delivered what was unmistakably a surgical glue which accomplished the
adhesion normally reserved for stitches. There were several types of this thick
substance in various shades which were applied, Phil thought, to different
kinds of tissues. The surgeon would work the alien applicator along a raw seam
with one hand and close it up as it went, without aid of clamps, with the
other. It did this almost gently it seemed, but Phil knew there was no hint of
sympathy whatsoever in the bedside manner of this practitioner and that the
light touch was designed not to reduce the patient’s suffering but only to
ensure a quick, neat closure.

It worked
quickly and often had as many as four or five large incisions open at one time
as if the pursuit of the wiggling grubs buried in his tissues had an excited
heat about it that made secondary the closure of the now fruitless and
abandoned incisions.

There
seemed little concern for the possibility of infection, since the surgeon
worked without benefit of gloves or body covering of any kind. Phil questioned
whether the blood substitute might contain some very powerful antibiotic to
destroy any invading bacteria. The hypothesis seemed to make sense and the air
was suffused with a slightly bitter scent, he believed from the blood
substitute that imparted a metallic taste on the back of his tongue not unlike
that of penicillin.

Once it
had found a grub and extracted it, it flushed the entire vile channel with
copious amounts of what looked like clear water. It would then follow with
another device which had a rough, spinning ball on it not unlike a large
version of a dentist’s drill that Phil guessed scoured and knurled the tissues
lining the grub’s channels, thus freshening them for the closure to follow. It
was this scouring device that caused the most pain.

The being
never once looked at Phil’s face with those beadlike eyes. Phil was nothing
more than a thing to it, just a place that housed the grubs it sought. It never
rested. It was as devoid of emotion as a shark, and it worked with a tireless
persistence of hand and eye that was nothing short of miraculous. It never
stretched so much as a finger or yawned or scratched and was so focused on the
task at hand that it seemed at times to Phil to be more machine than living
organism.

After an
eternity of open wounds, the being closed the last of them and flushed Phil and
the entire area surrounding him with water. Then it pulled down each of the
tools from above and carefully flushed them off as well.

Phil lay
there unattended for what seemed like days. He looked over at the man on the
table next to him at one point and they exchanged the emotionless looks of the
recently damned. Phil tried his last time to utter the word “why” to the man.
What came out of his tortured throat wasn’t a sound with any specific human
meaning, but the same hoarse, animal noise he’d made for the last ten or twelve
hours. Then, exhausted by the ordeal and this last effort to speak, he blinked
out of awareness as if by a switch.

When he
came to again he was adrift vertically in a bath of thick, warm fluid. Another
of the viney tubes ran into his mouth and down his throat this time and he felt
an odd fullness in his gut as if he’d just eaten. He could feel the soothing warmth
of the fluid against his skin and could move his arms and legs. He waved his
arms slowly through the fluid as if he as was treading water and tried to
stretch down and outward to touch bottom or the side walls but found no hold.

He
reached slowly up and felt the thick vine rammed down his throat and the thin,
wire-like roots radiating out from it and around his head. The roots were quite
snug but not dangerously so. He took hold of one of them with his fingers and
lifted it up away from his cheek. When he released it, he felt it slowly go
back into place and adhere there. He bit down on the thick vine to test its
composition and felt its rubbery resilience under his teeth. His neck was
tilted back, and he realized then that the vine was keeping him afloat in the
fluid and if for some reason it let go, he would probably drown in it. He let
the vine alone after that.

He’d lost
completely the sense of time and wondered how many hours or days had passed
since the wasp first stung him. He hurt all over. He suspected he’d been given
some kind of analgesic at some point because his violated body hadn’t signaled
the brain to shut down. The overwhelming pain, which would persist long after
the actual trauma, must have been masked by something.

He felt a
crawling tickle on the top of his right foot and brushed it off quickly with
his left. It came right back the way a mosquito will pursue warm skin, then to
his renewed horror, he felt another tickle then another. He began to panic as
visions of waterborne parasites and other crawling evils filled his head, and
he brushed them off his arms and legs as quickly as the resistance of the
thick fluid would allow. As his panic rose, their number grew and blended into
an indistinguishable crawling mass that covered his entire body. Fatigued and
with no further will to resist, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the
appetites of this teeming, alien horde.