Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (11 page)

He was
surprised when later, contrary to what he expected, the crawling swarm had not
pieced him or burrowed under his skin by the thousands or eaten him alive, but
began to drift away in great numbers.

The seam
above his head parted with a ripping sound and he realized for the first time
that the fluid-filled cell he was in was a living structure. Hidden muscle had
pulled the seam open as surely as it had held it closed.

When the vine began to
lift him up, he grabbed it firmly and held on tight with both hands to keep it
from breaking his neck. It pulled him up and out of the warm fluid and
deposited him onto the resilient floor of the chamber. No sooner had he touched
down than the tendrils around his head let go and the vine slid up out of his
throat. This caused him to gag then vomit out a great spurt of translucent
brown fluid. A reflex to avoid the odious stuff spent his very last token of
strength as he rolled slowly away from it.

*
 
*
 
*

“Have
some corn,” Mary said. “It’s from my home state,” she added with a smile.

Bailey
took the open can from her and shook a big mouthful into her open maw. No
sooner had she downed that one, that she followed it with another. Bailey
didn’t talk much, and Mary figured she was still too dazed and confused to be
thinking clear enough to form a complete sentence anyway. She was eating well
enough, that was for sure. She’d just packed away half a pack of oatmeal
cookies and a can of peas. Now the corn. Mary began to wonder if they’d have
enough to last till the next feeding. If she had to borrow some from her
neighbors, nobody’d mind.

Bailey
finished the corn and left a kernel of it on her chin. Mary reached over and
brushed it off. Bailey followed up with a brush of her own hand just to be
sure.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Want something else? We’ve got plenty.”

“No.
Thank you.”

Bailey stared
at the wall for a moment and Mary could see her brow knit just a little and she
knew Bailey was formulating those questions. She knew what the first one would
be.

“Where
are we?” Bailey asked.

Mary
wished she’d had a dime for every time she’d heard it. She had the answer to
that one, though, and knew from experience it was better to just show her than
to tell her. Nothing took the place of the
show
in
show and tell
.

“Come
on.”

She got
up and led Bailey out of the hole and down the tube to another hole some twenty
yards toward the grocery. The opening was higher up on the wall, and she had to
lift herself up a little to get inside. Once in, she held a hand down to
Bailey and hefted her up. She was surprised by the strength she felt in
Bailey’s hands and arms as she clamored in.

The
chamber was smaller than Mary’s and was nearly round inside, so the floor was
difficult to stand on straight. It was filled with clear light, and Bailey
wasted no time in finding the source of it. She looked down through a thick
irregular plate on the floor, seemingly feet thick, at the floating globe of
Earth. The image was so big, she couldn’t see all of it from her vantage point.

“Oh my
heavens,” she whispered in awe.

“Yeah.
Well, that’s where we’re not.”

“So this
is some kind of space ship or something.”

That’s
it,
Mary thought.
Simple.
Yet far from it.

“How long
has it been here, or how long have you been here?”

“The
first question is longer than six months, and the second is about six months,
I think. Me and Gilbert, he’s the Bible banger you met earlier, and another guy
named Tom Moon and my friend Fred have been in this tube the longest. Everybody
else is either dead or in another part of the ship doing other duty.”

“What do
you mean, other duty?” Bailey asked with a sideways look.

“Skip it.
I’ll tell you later. Too much too soon and you’ll just freak out on me.”

There,
she’d said it.

It was
true and she’d told Bailey just what would happen if she knew the ship’s other
horrors. There was a premium on sanity in the ship. If you could keep from
going mad, you stood a much better chance of surviving longer. Gilbert had his
Bible, Tom Moon had his mind of tough, dumb leather, and Mary—well, she had her
own inner fortitude. It did no good to dwell on what happened in the other
parts of the ship. She and others had seen things that just weren’t possible or
imaginable, yet were horribly both. Sink too low, don’t get up when you’re
called and you’d wind up there in those other parts of the ship yourself.

“I’m
freaked out now,” Bailey said.

“Nothing
to be ashamed of. We all are.”

“Who are
they anyway?”

That was
the one. That was the question that burned deepest. If we had that one,
Mary thought,
we might have something. We wouldn’t have much, but we’d have
something.

A name
was more than just a name. If you attached a name to a thing, you knew the
thing. In order for the name to make sense, and to be more than just a sound,
you had to know something about the thing to begin with. They knew practically
nothing about the beings in control and had assigned a purely visual moniker, a
broad, unfortunately meaningless description.

“We call
them witches.”

“Witches?
Not Betazoid somethings.”

“No.
Witches. If you can think of a better name, let us know.”

“I don’t want
to think about them at all.”

“Good
policy.”

Mary
watched the slight smile grow on Bailey’s face as her gaze drifted inexorably
back to the floating globe of Earth. She’d seen that look before. She’d even
possessed it for a moment herself the first time Fred had brought her to this
chamber. Why they were allowed to view their home planet was just another
mystery.

Then she
watched the smile pale. Mary knew the feeling. It was like being shown a
picture of your all time most favorite place in the world for the last time.

“Come
on,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Tom
Moon’s hole was just up ahead and Mary felt uneasy walking past it. She moved
involuntarily in behind Bailey to get a foot or so away from it as she passed. Mary
had no magical leanings, but she got an unmistakable sense of bad
juju
coming from that
hole. It was so strong, she could almost see it pouring out like some mist. If
she discovered somehow that Gilbert cornholed Moon in there
while
he read the Bible
to him, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

Sure
enough, just as they passed by, she caught just a glimpse of Tom as he popped,
ferret-like, out of the opening. Mary thought how annoying it was that the
sonofabitch always came up on her from behind somehow, never to her front. As
soon as she heard his little feet hit the floor, she turned to face him.

“What?”
she asked testily. “What’s up?”

Mary knew
Tom was thick and dim, but she didn’t think he was so dumb that he couldn’t
detect the extreme intolerance his presence puffed out of others.

He cocked
his head and pursed his lips for a full two seconds before he spoke.

She
waited patiently.

“What are
you so antsy-pantsy about, anyways?” he asked.

“I’ve got
gas. What’s it to you?” She watched that shitty little smirk cross his face and
she wanted to slap him as if he’d just shown her a mouthful of food.

“Who’s
your friend?” His glance bounced off Bailey’s breasts and landed like a turd on
Mary. Bailey looked at Mary for direction, for some clue what to do. Mary figured
she’d let her decide on her own. She was a big girl.

“Bailey
Hall,” Bailey said finally.

“Any
relation to George?” the ferret smiled.

“Who?”
Bailey was confused again. She looked at Mary and knitted her brow.

“You
know, George Hall—the President.”

Mary
rolled her eyes and let Tom see it. Bailey tried to smile open-mouthed and
brushed a strand of hair off her face.

Poor
Bailey,
Mary thought.
Not much
in the sense-of-humor department right now.

“George
Hall, the President?” Mary chuckled. “Jeezus keee..ryst . . . ”

Tom’s
eyes dropped to the floor. “You think I’m stupid. You as much as just said so.”
He glared at Mary. Tom’s left hand went into a fist.

Bailey
saw it. “Oh, jeez . . . ” she said and turned away from the blooming
confrontation. She knew where this could go. She’d seen it happen before. Too
much pride and a few wrong words could cause a fight real easy.

Mary
watched Bailey amble away.

Hell with
it
, she thought.
This is
ridiculous. No sense getting this dumb asshole’s panties in a knot over
nothing.

She
reached out and put her hand on Tom’s shoulder like they were true buds. The
feel of wire and gristle under his clothes and his musky scent made her
slightly ill.

“Tom, I
don’t think you’re stupid,” Mary said. This immediately softened Tom up. “It’s
just that you caught me at a bad time—if you know what I mean.”

She just
patted his shoulder a time or two and walked away.

For dinner, Mary opened
cans of vegetable soup and they had that and bread as the main course. They
drank the soup cold out of the can, and Bailey dipped her bread in it. Mary had
a tube of Pringle’s potato chips she’d been saving for a while and she popped
that open, too. They ate silently and while they ate Bailey would sometimes
drift off right in the middle of chewing and stay gone for as much as a
minute. She’d just stare with her mouth full of food, then come back into focus
and start up chewing again.

Mary understood perfectly.

Worse than the obvious
horror of being abducted by aliens was the fact that it was completely, utterly
unexpected and unanticipated. It wasn’t unexpected in the same way you would
not expect to get hit by a car, or not expect to fall down and break something,
but so far removed from the realm of possibilities as to be singularly
impossible.

Sometimes it helped to
talk it out. “How in the world could you ever imagine that you would ever wind
up here in this place with these creatures controlling your life?” Mary said.
“No matter how low you might sink, how sick you might get, how desperate you
might become, you could always say that at least you hadn’t been grabbed by
brain-sucking aliens. How could you be?”

The answer was that you
couldn’t be—ever.

The more you thought about
it, the more ridiculous it became. Then you drifted back into focus, and there
it was—even far worse than you remembered it because it was real—wet, slimy,
dark—and real.

You’re
eating white bread and cold soup out of the can in a living alien prison. Wake
the fuck up.

Bailey’s head dropped and
she shook it to shake the reality out of it—to throw it up and kill it. She
started to groan in a low monotone. Mary watched her fall slowly over and curl
up into a tight shape and pull the blanket over her head. If it hadn’t been so
damned horrible and pathetic, it might have been cute.

I know,
sweetheart. I know.

*
 
*
 
*

There was
only one way out of the chamber, a tunnel about twenty feet long leading to
another chamber beyond.

Navigation
is easy,
Phil thought.
You just
go where there aren’t any walls.

He walked
toward the tunnel and with each step he felt the sticky, resilient floor tug at
his feet. He watched the clear liquid dripping from the nipples covering the
roof of the tunnel for a moment, then stuck his hand out cautiously into the
rain to make sure it was really water and not acid.

He
stepped slowly into the tunnel, letting the lukewarm water rain down on him
then began to wipe the thick fluid off his body. He felt somewhat refreshed
after sleeping some on the floor. His body felt polished and clean under the
thick fluid. He looked at the razor-straight, clean, thin scars on his chest,
abdomen and limbs and wondered how the skills to produce such scars could ever
become part of a species’ behavioral repertoire. The scars were completely
healed and his first thought was that he had been unconscious for days, perhaps
weeks after the procedure.

He closed
his eyes and remembered the nightmare he’d just had and how he’d lain there on
the table and how the bloody, white grubs had looked when pinched tight in the
alien tongs.