Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (13 page)

Phil turned
around and saw Mary Pope squatting in the opening of her chamber. Unlike the
others he’d seen so far, she had a measure of strength and defiance left in her
face and her steady eyes told Phil she meant what she said.

“I guess
you’ve tried,” Phil responded easily. He turned back around and took another
look at the mechanism.

Mary
studied the newcomer before answering. He stood there with his hands on his
hips like the pneumatic systems instructor she’d had for a class once and liked
a lot—all full of confidence and brains but not condescending. His hair was wet
so she knew he’d come out of the soakers. He’d been though the hell of
incubation and extraction, but wasn’t disoriented and seemed in control of his
faculties, which was a real surprise in a first-timer. The fact that he was in
control of his senses enough to try to get out was especially encouraging.

“Some,
but not much. We think it’s safer here than on the other side.”

“That
could be a reasonable assumption. How many others are there?”

Reasonable,
Mary
thought.
Now there’s a word I haven’t
heard recently.

She dug
out a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket and shook one out and offered it
to Phil. Phil looked at it and thought about it. He hadn’t smoked in years. He
took it and lit it up. The first puff made him reel.

“There’s
about twenty incubators in this tube alone,” she said. “There’s more in
different pockets of the ship. We’ve seen them when they move us. No one knows
how many for sure. The ship is full of tubes and holes.” She pointed with her
cigarette at one of the raised plate-sized patches on the wall.

“Incubators?
Those are people, I take it?”

“Yeah,”
she said. “That’s what I call them.”

“By the
way, that’s an opener,” she said, pointing to the button. “Every seam has a set
of them like that.”

“One
closes—one opens?”

“Right.”

“So . . .
one’s a ‘closer’?” Phil said one-eyed.

“Yeah,”
Mary grinned at the childish logic.

Mary felt
herself wanting to tell Phil everything she knew, to spill it all. This wasn’t
Tom Moon or Gilbert or the gook brothers, but someone who spoke English and had
some sense.

“How do
those big bastards open these seams?”

“Goons.
They just put their big ass palms on them.”

“I made
it twitch when I touched it.”

“You
did?”

“Yeah. I’m
sure of it. I bet it works by detecting some electrical potential. Just the
right level or enough voltage or amperage or both, some shit like that. How
much do you weigh?”

Mary
thought about it. “When I was first taken I was about one-sixty—I’m maybe
one-fifty now—I don’t know.”

“Go get
somebody else, another person, anyone who can walk.”

Mary went
in and came back shortly with Bailey, still looking shocked and confused. Mary
helped her down to the tube’s floor.

“What’s
on the other side of this seam?” Phil asked.

Mary
thought about it before she answered. She had a quick vision of the people in
the milk bottles and of the place she called Dr. Mengele’s Party where the only
things recognizable were the human body parts.

“I don’t
have words for everything they do,” she said.

Phil
reached up and put his palm on the left opener. “Take her hand. Hold it—and
keep your fingers crossed.”

Mary put
Bailey’s hand in hers. Without knowing at all why, except that she’d been told
to do it, Bailey crossed her fingers.

Phil
reached out to Mary with his right hand. “I’m Phil Lynch,” he said.

Mary took
Phil’s hand and shook it firmly. The seam parted with a slight, wet, tearing
sound revealing three tubes going in different directions on the other side.

“I’ll be
damned,” she said.

“Maybe
not yet,” Phil said then reached over and put his hand on the other button.

The seam
squeezed closed.

*
 
*
 
*

When
Buddy woke up he thought he was in hell. It had to be hell because he could see
the demons right there in front of him. Buddy Davis’ view of the world had
never been sullied by any real empathy whatsoever for another living thing
because like all sociopaths, he wasn’t capable of feeling the pain and suffering
of others—only his own.

He was
getting a full dose of undiluted, Buddy-only pain now. He hurt all over and
knew it was because the demons had
beat him with
hickory sticks while he was unconscious.

He felt a
buzzing chatter against his skull that rattled his teeth and knew that the
demons were trying to cut into his head, maybe to eat his brains.

It was
when he tried to open his mouth to holler for mercy that he discovered that
his head was encased in some rubbery shit that kept him from opening his mouth
all the way. When he lifted his hand to try to feel what it was that covered
his face, he saw that his hand and arm were about four times the size they
should have been, swollen like the feet and hands of some giant side-show
freak. He turned his hand around and tightened it into a fist and thought about
how he could beat the shit out of these god damned Hell demons with a fist the
size of that honker. He could pound them into mush with a hammer like that.

You just
wait ‘til I get up offa this table.

The vision
of his now giant fist squashing their heads flat was the last violent thought
Buddy Davis would ever have as a human. As the alien probes, as thin as hair,
entered his brain and delivered the fluids to just the right places, few
thoughts of any consequence to the former Buddy Davis lived. The fluid
contained chemicals that dissolved synaptic connections by the billions upon
billions. Buddy perceived the erasure as a cacophony of images, sounds and
scents that flashed and exploded in a storm. Then, suddenly, gone were the
memories of his drunken father, his bedraggled and abused dog Copper, the taste
of fried chicken, the first girlfriend he ever clobbered, the look on the face
of the first person he ever killed with a knife, the memory of his first blow
job, and the feel of his cock in his hand.

The
probes flushed away all that Buddy Davis was and left only a tiny kernel of
cognition. It was a deep memory of dark waters and warmth and Buddy floated
securely in it. Then the probes pulled slowly out of Buddy’s brain and were
replaced by others, slightly larger, that squirmed and sought with wiry, alien
persistence and dug down deep into the folds of his brain to release their
chemistry from microscopic polyps that oozed it like oil. The material these living
probes delivered clung to the synapses and rebuilt them into diffuse memories
alien and impoverished, of wetness and the smell of acid mold, of still,
shallow seas teeming with life, of life so dark and crawling it overcame the
last red coal of human memory like worm-filled mud.

New
memories coalesced from nothing. Suddenly it knew when and how and where to
move the frail ones, when to kill them, when to pull them apart. It knew where
to put the waste parts and when to put them down the holes. It knew how to operate
the many tools to feed and find and fly. It could do all this as easily as a
spider could weave a complex web or a bee dance out the location of nectar to
its sisters.

It could do all this and
more without thinking, because strictly speaking, it could no longer think at
all.

*
 
*
 
*

 
“I’m a heavy equipment repairman,” Mary was
saying, “or at least I used to be. What about you?”

“I teach
social studies.”

“Are you
intelligent?” Bailey asked. It would have been a fairly dumb question if it hadn’t
been so innocent. She’d asked it just like she was asking his name.

“Very,”
Phil said with a smile.

Mary
thought how nice it was to see a smile and was filled with respect for the
person who could produce it so easily in these circumstances.

They sat on
Mary’s bed and ate at random from the cans and boxes and noisy plastic
packages. The feel of it wasn’t too far removed from the thousands of
conversations she’d had with friends who’d talk, knosh and talk some more.

“How many
cycles does it normally take before you wind up like the African down the
tube?” Phil wanted to know.

“It
varies quite a bit. I’ve seen them fold and give up after the first one. When
that happens the goons drag you off and that’s it.”

Mary
could feel Bailey’s rapt attention on her face like the glow of a wood stove.
She wasn’t crazy about having Bailey hear all this right now, but she seemed to
be taking it well. She watched her take another big bite of Sara Lee
cheesecake.

“Where do
they take you? What happens?” Bailey asked through her food.

Mary
studied her face.
Okay, we all
have to grow up sometime,
she thought. She took a deep breath
before she spoke.

“These
beings, the witches, use flesh like we use building materials. They craft it
like we work iron or steel. This ship is an example. It’s alive—for the most
part. But that’s just the beginning.”

Bailey
swallowed fast so she could ask it. “This room is alive?”

“Yes,”
Mary said. “The whole ship or station or whatever you want to call it, the whole
superstructure is alive. And it has to eat.”

“What
does it eat?” Bailey asked, her eyes wide. Mary fixed her with a strong, but
measured look.

“Well, it
doesn’t eat cookies. There are orifices spread throughout the ship that must be
feed holes. They’re four or five feet wide. I’ve seen the body parts piled up
around them and seen the goons pushing the parts down—human and animal. I’ve
seen them dump whole bodies down them, too. All the waste goes down the holes.
If you can’t get up, if you’re too weak, you’re waste—and down the hole you
go—usually.

“So they
use us until we can’t get up?” Phil asked.

“That’s
it exactly. For some reason, being weakened and debilitated doesn’t get it if
you’re an incubator, so off you go.” She paused for a second. “But you don’t
always end up in a feed hole.”

“Where
then?” asked Phil.

She
looked at Bailey who had stopped chewing and was waiting anxiously for the
answer.

Okay. You
asked . . .

“This
incubation stuff is just part of the picture,” she began. “I said they use flesh
as a building material—it’s their wood, iron, steel, brick, whatever. Imagine
that you’re a builder of chairs or beds or pliers or hammers, whatever. You’d
need a lab for building the prototype of what you wanted to build and a lab for
testing it. But even before you got the first one of the thing you were
building built, you’d have to have a lab to do the materials testing and
analysis. What are you going to make it out of and how? Well, that’s where some
of us wind up—in those testing labs, or as building material.” She looked over
at Bailey with as much sympathy as she could muster.

Phil let
the thought sink in. He remembered the thing he shot the night he was taken and
how alien it was. Not alien so much as bizarre and unnatural.

“They use
parts,” she went on. “Systems, structures, units -living components—and can
modify the shit out of them and then recombine them any way they want.

“Just
think, what’s a better tool than a human hand? It can do more and manipulate
more things than any other device on Earth. Well, what if you could take its
basic structure and enhance it for a special purpose, say just to crush soda
cans end to end—the hard way.” She picked up an empty Coke can and
demonstrated. “It would have to be bigger, first of all, and have a much wider
grip, so you’d have to force it to grow bigger—I don’t know how you do that
little trick, but you do it. It would have a reinforced palm to withstand the
force of repeated closures against metal and stronger fingers too. In fact, it
wouldn’t even need fingers, so why not fuse them together into another
palm-like structure and reinforce that.” She used her hand as a model. “The
muscle in the forearm might not be big enough so you make it massive like
Popeye’s ‘cuz there’s a lot of cans to crush in the world. Fuck the rest of the
arm . . .” She held her own arm out and made like she cut it off at the elbow.
.”..be- cause you want to attach it to a better handle anyway. Make the handle
out of some other material, say a goat leg that moves the hand part out and
back real nice and gives you something to hold onto ‘cuz it’s thin and strong.
Now insert a controller to move the hand out and back and another one to open
and close the hand. The wires, or nerves you can get from either the man or the
goat—if you have the tools and the knowhow. The controller could be a real
switch or one of those opener switches. Power it all up with a little glucose
and oxygen and you’ve taken a human hand and enhanced just one function of it
to do a specific job. You’ve taken advantage of what evolution has done already
and saved your precious wood, iron, copper, flint, whatever—if you had any to
begin with—for other things that flesh can’t do.