Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (16 page)

“What is
it?” Ned whispered.

Phil put
his finger to his lips. Phil knew what it was already. He’d seen enough in his
peripheral vision to know that the movement was a very human-like head, this
one ducking quickly back into the hole.

Whoever, or whatever it was must have seen us
, Phil
thought.
So why the cat and mouse?

Phil
approached the hole cautiously, keeping close to the wall.

“Hello!”
Phil called.

No reply.

“Hello!”

Phil
motioned with his hand for Ned to turn around, unzipped the flap of the
backpack and dug out the flashlight. He checked the beam then turned it toward
the hole. The thin beam drew a yellow spot on the wall, and Phil brought it
slowly around. When the light found the thing in the back, the shock of it
nearly knocked Phil down.

“Ah god .
. .” Phil said.

There was
no fear in the thing’s eyes, only a forlorn emptiness like the eyes in a cheap
painting. They were the eyes of a lunatic, and Phil could tell it had no reason
or desire to make contact with them. It had obviously started out as a human,
but with the exception of the head and arms, had little in common with Homo
sapiens. It stood hunkered and stooped like a wounded dog, as far from the
opening as it could get. The chamber was strewn with cans, debris and waste.

“What is
it?” Ned asked.

Phil
thought about it with a scowl of disgust. “A lab animal. An escaped lab
animal,” he said. He was sure the description was accurate.

Ned moved
up and looked in.

“Christ,”
he said.

The thing
just stared blankly at the light.

“Leave it
alone. There’s nothing we can do for it. Let’s go.”

Phil
turned off the light and left the thing to the meager comfort of the chamber’s
darkness.

How did it get there,
Phil wondered. Had it leaped up
at the right moment and run through an open seam on those powerful alien legs, human
arms waving. Had it sneaked away unseen? Had it been set loose for some
unfathomable reason? Where was it getting food? Was someone or something
feeding it like a pet? Was it snatching body parts to feed on them like a
hyena?

God, get
me out of here.

Phil was
suddenly filled with such an overwhelming hatred for the things that could
create
that
thing, transmute living
flesh. He heard in his mind the combined anguish of the millions of living
victims sacrificed to build this science, and the voices rose like a chorus of
the damned. Phil was helpless to do anything about it and the anger and hate
turned in and crushed him. The strength of will and steady confidence Phil
Lynch had spent a lifetime building crumbled away like old bricks. He stumbled
up against the tough, rubbery wall of the alien tube and vomited.

“You
okay?” Ned asked, resting his hand on Phil’s back. “No,” Phil said, spitting
bile. “I’m not. I’m not okay. Are you?” he added hatefully. “Are you okay?”

Ned
patted him almost imperceptibly with his fingers. “No. I guess I’m not,” he
said.

Phil spat
up again and rested there with his hands on his knees. The smell of vomit
filled the air and he longed to move away from it, but couldn’t just then. He
felt Ned’s big warm hand on his back and envied the Canadian’s seeming
insensitivity to the horror of it all. Ned didn’t seem especially fearful or
concerned, though any human would in these circumstances. It has to be
something in his background, Phil thought. Something makes him either the bravest
or the dumbest man I’ve ever known. Phil took a deep breath or two, wiped his
mouth and straightened up.

“What
line of work were you in, Ned—before all this?”

“Sales.
Car parts.”

“Where’d
you grow up?”

“Hog farm
up in Montreal.”

Bingo.

Phil led
the way again. “Let’s go. I’ll be all right.”

As they
moved down the tube, Phil felt the temperature drop suddenly, like walking into
a meat cooler. A moment later it was cool enough to see their breath and Phil
breathed out a noisy cloud of fog at Ned.

“What do
you think?” Phil asked.

“Got me
there,” Ned replied. “Looks like we’re at the end of this tube if that counts
for anything.”

The tube
ended in a seam just twenty feet or so ahead. They’d passed several seams along
the way and had tacitly agreed not to try to open them. They were covering
good ground without the added complication of opening a seam into a nest of
goons, or something worse. The seam ahead, though, invited them to test it. It
was the terminating seam in this long tube.

“Well?”
Phil asked.

“It’s cold here. What if it opens
into space?” Ned replied. Phil thought about it. “Not likely. Possible, I
suppose, but not likely. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

With that
and a stiff smile, Ned stepped up and put one hand on the opener. When Phil
added his, the seam parted with the sound of tearing meat.

Sticky
threads of viscous material stretched across the opening like an amorphous
spider web, suggesting that the seam hadn’t been opened in a while. On the
other side were shelf-like racks lined with neat rows of jug-sized objects that
shone like gray pearls. There were seven tiers or shelves going from floor to
ceiling. Each shelf was six objects deep. Phil guessed that the chamber was
about one hundred feet long and the racks lined each side of the chamber like
mirror images. The objects were placed in the racks with such precision, Phil
imaged they may have been placed there by a machine, or by the alien equivalent
of a monk with an unerring, or even compulsive sense of
neatness
.
Another seam could be seen at the far end of the chamber.

“How many
of what-ever-they-are is there, do you think?” Ned asked.

Out of
his own bag of stray compulsions, Phil had pulled out the one that caused him
to count neat rows of things and was already putting it to good use.

“Eight,
maybe nine thousand.”

“What are
they, do you think?”

“No
idea.” As Phil looked he noticed that the rack on the left was not quite full.
The top three shelves would need sixty or so more objects to be a twin of the
right-side rack.

“No idea at all,” he said.

*
 
*
 
*

The thing
that was Gail Hollister felt no remorse, only the deep itch of desire. The
desire created grinding anger. She stood in the living room of the house and
pulled the limbs off the frail one because she knew it was dead and the cool
ones should have the meat. The tearing soothed her. Before she’d killed it,
she’d smelled it and knew it was sick and unfit for capture, so she’d killed it
by crushing its head between her hands. She did this because she had no choice
but to do it and it soothed her. Some of the hot desire died as the sick prey’s
fluid ran down her arms.

She threw
the limbs out the open front door of the house and they landed with a spray of
gravel on the driveway just a few feet from the hunters. They moved up and bent
their long necks to the meat and tore at it and fed.

Her
partner had a good, healthy one trapped on the roof of the house but the
opening to the roof was too small for her partner to fit through. She’d feed
the cool ones then go outside and shoot the prey off the roof. Perhaps the fall
from the roof wouldn’t kill it.

When she
got outside, she turned her bulk around and looked up at the roof and could see
the prey crouched on the very top of the house. It was making loud sounds—prey
sounds—trying to attract the attention of other prey, but there were no others
in the area, only the ones in the house. They had already captured one and had
it in the net. Capturing this one on the roof would be good—provided they
didn’t kill it. If they did, they’d have to wait until the next hunt, and
suffer the pain of desire, before they’d get another chance. The thought of going
without food angered her. She unslung the burr weapon, brought it to bear on
the flank of the prey, and fired.

The prey
flinched when the burr struck and she watched it slip down the steep roof until
it dragged itself to a stop. She moved up close to where she knew the prey
would roll off the roof when the burr numbed it and waited there. She heard the
prey tumble and roll down. When she saw the limbs flop off the roof not
directly where she was, her lightning reflexes bolted her over and under it in
plenty of time for her to catch it. The prey had not crashed to the ground and
died. This was good.

She
carried the prey under her arm over to the porch and stuffed it in the net with
the other one. She batted the head of one of the cool ones with a huge hand
when it sniffed at the back of the prey. She walked into the house and was
joined by her partner when it lumbered down the stairs. Together they walked
through the house and gathered up prey-stuff to take back to the ship. She
gathered up bedding and other stuff and put it into another net bag. Going
through the prey’s house and gathering up things and putting them into the bag
gave her an odd twitch of pleasure. She picked up a small figure of an animal
from on a low platform and turned it over and over and round and round and
could not remember why she should do this. Confused by her own actions, she put
the figure in the bag. The thought came to her then that she still didn’t know
how much it was, but probably had enough money to buy it.

A moment
later she forgot what money was.

There was
a box on the wall with a clear cover that contained long weapons, and she knew
that these were never to be taken back. She moved around the room picking up
one object after another and turning them over and around until she saw a small
object in the seat part of a sitting-thing. It had some special appeal to the
creature that had been Gail Hollister, and she picked it up and turned it this
way and that. Using the very tips of her huge fingers, she pulled it open and
saw a group of raised symbols she could push with the very, very tip of her
smallest finger. When she pushed them they made a single long and pleasant
sound. She seemed to know that the itsy dark knob on the end of the object
would pull out into a stick if she pulled at it with her finger nails. She
knew she could push it back in with her fingertip and if she did it gently, it
would not break or bend. This object gave her pleasure and she closed it up and
put it in the net bag with the other prey-stuff.

A moment
later she forgot that the object ever existed.

They left
the remote house carrying the food and the stunned prey in the net sacks. She
looked down at the remainder of the limbs on the gravel drive and decided to
leave them there. It was not a clear thing whether or not she should do so, but
the limbs were old and thin with little meat left. Her partner had more
experience in hunting prey than she and he too walked past the limbs with not
so much as a look. She would not be punished for leaving the meat behind.

The craft
had spotted some large animals in an enclosure over the hill earlier and she
decided that they would gather some before they flew back to the ship—just to
be sure.

As they
walked through the brush, a mosquito, attracted by her mass of just-right
warmth, landed on the thing that had been Gail Hollister and bit. She
remembered how much she hated mosquitoes and slapped it perfectly flat with a
huge hand.

*
 
*
 
*

Linda had
slept for twelve hours again.

She’d
awakened to Phil’s scent on the pillow and drew it in with a long, slow inhale.
She’d been in his house for three days now, wanting to surround herself with his
things, his clothes, his papers and bills—and his scent. She hadn’t cried in a
while but thought she could at almost any time. Yesterday, she’d cleaned his
house top to bottom, unstacked the dishwasher, vacuumed the floor and scrubbed
out the shower. She’d done this as a way to touch all the things that were his,
to touch and arrange his shirts and his jeans. She’d washed the clothes and
stacked his underwear neatly in the dresser. She’d changed the bed clothes but
left the weird old paisley pillow case—the one Phil refused to throw away—on
his pillow. It had his scent on it.

Her team
leader, Joe Smith had called last night and done his best to do his duty and
asked her what the hell was going on. She’d been vague on purpose, telling Joe
only that Phil was missing and that no one knew what had happened to him. She’d
used the phrase “I don’t know” at least a hundred times in the conversation.
That was the only blatant lie she’d allowed herself. She was sure she’d left
Joe with more questions than he called with, but she couldn’t help that. At the
end of the conversation he’d stiffly asked her when she thought she’d be back
to work.