Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (21 page)

When he
got to the alpha’s chamber, the alpha was standing eating from a large dull
metallic cup. It was older, Felix guessed, by a factor of fifty than its peers.
It was uglier, as well, if that were possible. Its bone structure was quite
expanded, gaunt and angular, compared to the others. It moved slower and was
more deliberate, as the aged are. One of the questions Felix had been able to
ask was the alpha’s age. The alpha said he was over five hundred Earth years
old. It was fitting, somehow, that this hideous creature was old. Most invading
alpha aliens were, after all.

Felix had
asked about their diet once and confirmed what he knew already: they were
exclusively carnivorous. They had evolved not so much from parasitic stock but
from flesh-boring predators that used their own bodies as weapons against the
ancient and enormous relatives of the very ship that carried them. Felix knew
how dangerous a little grass seed called a “fox tail” could be for dogs and
other creatures unfortunate enough to have one work its tip under their skin.
The one-way spines on it kept it moving, sometimes throughout the animal’s
body, causing massive physical damage, infection and trauma. This alien race
still possessed the evolutionary remnants of similar spines that operated in
precisely the same way for the same purpose. He could imagine the smaller,
harder, more
pointed
ancestors of this creature attacking
en
masse
, squirming into the body of some hapless behemoth through any
available orifice. He had wondered what higher ethic or system of morals could
evolve out of behavior with such a ghastly foundation. He decided that the
answer was right around him.
Silly
question.

Today the
ugly fucker was lifting limp strips of red flesh out of the bowl with his thin
fingers, as if the flesh were soggy, crimson French fries. Looking at that
grisly repast, Felix decided then and there that he would never waste a
question that sought to expose the exact nature of the meat they ate. He just
didn’t want to know.

“Good
day,” Felix said on entering.

“Good
day,” the alpha replied with its rasp of a voice.

“May I
ask a question today?” Felix asked, wasting no time.

“Today
was the day you tell me of the weather.”

The use
of the word “was” encouraged Felix. “I refuse until you allow my question,” he
said, standing squarely. He didn’t know if such body language had any meaning
at all to the alien but it was worth a shot. He smiled.

“If you do not tell me of
the weather, you will suffer greatly.”

“Then I will suffer.”

“You are foolish.”

“Perhaps,” Felix said
staring into the alien’s little black eyes. He’d taken the gamble and rolled
the dice. All that was left was to see how they landed.

The alpha lifted another
strip of meat up out of the bowl and sucked it into its spiny mouth.

“You are foolish,” it
repeated.

The stare from the alien chilled
Felix, and he was again reminded that this was not a human, but an alien being
swept here from some unfathomable corner of the galaxy. Weakened by the force
of those shark-like eyes, Felix was inches from rescinding his request and
hoping he could somehow avoid the consequences of his action when the alpha
spoke.

“Ask,” it said.

Felix slumped from the
sudden release of tension. He had posed this particular question before in many
forms and watched the alien deftly avoid it in all its incarnations. The alpha
would find an outright lie an abomination, but it was quite skilled at not
answering a question it thought imprudent. Felix had the bastard nearly
checkmated now by its own alien
glitch
and its desire for the climate information. This question had
burned in him since he’d been captured. The question occupied his nightmares
and he would have his answer.

“Why are you here?” Felix
almost demanded.

The alien sucked down
another piece of meat.

“To keep the chosen planet
habitable,” it said.

Felix stared then laughed
briefly and it came out like the bark of a small and helpless mammal.

Of
course. It
’s
perfect, just perfect. You’ve come to fill the pit we’ve reserved
for you. It’s a deep, dark hole with your name written on the hatch in
apocalyptic script. We’ve been waiting for you. Every culture, in every age,
has waited for thee.

His fears
were confirmed: a pogrom beyond imagination was in the making on board this
alien vessel. Within the walls of this strange craft, the utter destruction of
Homo sapiens was being planned, worked, implemented, and executed.

It
sounded so silly in his head that he barked again—a kind of chuckle, brief and
deep.

As he
stared into those dark, impenetrable eyes, fear dimmed his vision at the
corners, leaving only a fuzzy tunnel with the alien’s hideous head at the end.
Before he could stop it, his bladder released a teaspoon of urine into his
borrowed pants.

Felix
stared and thought of what to do next and found few options. Marshaling some
strength of will sired by late-night stories of his family’s resistance and
silence in Nazi Germany, Felix spoke the oath in his mind:

This
creature will get no more information from me. Silence is the only option and I
will turn to stone before I speak more.

Feigning
nonchalance, Felix opened his mouth to go through the motions of asking a
logical follow-up, then asked himself why he should even bother. He’d heard all
he needed to know. To make the planet habitable for this alien race, the
dominant species on it would be neither subjugated nor ruled, but eliminated
utterly. There could be no co-habitation with such an abominable species as
this one. The puzzle was complete.

“Talk of
the weather now,” the alpha continued.

Felix
felt his mouth go dry as if it were packed with warm sand.

“I will
talk of the weather only when I understand more about you,” he said with a
flourish of false bravado. The sentence took all his air; and when he breathed
in, he heard an audible tremble.

Felix had
never seen the alien smile and had assumed it was impossible for it to do so.
But as he watched the being’s face, he could have sworn he saw just a hint of
one. The alpha put the bowl down on the pedestal and walked up to within inches
of Felix’s face. For the second time, Felix felt his will
melting under the alien’s repulsive gaze.

The alpha
reached out and lifted Felix’s right hand by the wrist. The unpleasant, cool
touch put friction on Felix’s muscles and joints, making him resist the alien’s
pull involuntarily. Holding it like a palm reader, the alien held a forefinger
of its free hand up in front of Felix’s eyes. Felix watched as the very tip of
the finger peeled back like a sheath to reveal another substructure, striated
orange and yellow, underneath. The structure was tipped with a needle-like stinger.
Felix felt the alien’s strong grip tighten on his wrist just as it turned the
finger around and jabbed the stinger down into the center of Felix’s palm.

The pain
radiated out from the point of entry like scalding water, and his mouth shaped
a scream before he had time to draw a breath. When he finally gulped air and
screamed, the scream came out high-pitched like a child’s and the heat of the
pain dropped him to his knees. He would have fallen over had the alien not
supported him by his hand. He felt the fire flow down through his veins, like
lava; and he would have spun into unconsciousness if it hadn’t mercifully
slowed, then stopped just short of his shoulder.

As
quickly as it started, the searing pain retreated and cooled to nothing.

When he
finally wobbled back up to his feet, the alien was still holding the stinger
over Felix’s hand. Felix could barely see or hear, but he knew enough to clench
his fist as tightly as he could in defense from that evil bristle.

“You will
tell me of the seasons now,” the alpha said. The words drifted in on the fog of
shock one hissing syllable at a time and after they settled, Felix assembled
them into words, and prepared his answer. Before he did, he prayed for the
first time in his adult life.

“I will .
. . tell you . . . of the seasons,” he said finally and firmly. “When . . .
you . . . kiss . . . my . . . ass.”

The alpha
released the hand. Still clenched, it came to rest at Felix’s side.

The hand
was still clenched when the goon carried his convulsing body, covered with
small puncture wounds, out of the chamber eight hours later.

Now used up as source of
information, he was taken directly to an inoculation chamber and stung
again—this time for a quite different reason. Over the months, Felix had
watched in disgust as the aliens harvested these awful grubs. Now under the
alien tools, he watched through the red haze of pain as the surgeon, one he had
once watched from a safe distance, now removed larvae from
his
tissues. As he
looked over at the translucent jug holding the bloody larvae, he asked how
many would die from his
own
obscene spawn and the pain of that thought resonated deep in his soul.

*
 
*
 
*

From the
soakers, Felix crawled on his hands and knees through the dripping water and
lay on the pile of clothes in the adjoining chamber, unable to move, for what
seemed like days. From there, he made his way to the tube and crawled like a
wounded animal up into one of the holes that lined it, then collapsed.

When he
awoke again, he saw the bespectacled man sitting cross-legged reading a
 
Bible. He was so peaceful sitting there,
reading, turning the gossamer thin pages of the holy book so silently and
slowly that Felix was reminded of his Uncle Sol. Not a religious man himself, Felix
was nonetheless comforted by the thought that he would die in the presence of
one.

It had
been months since he’d spoken to a human and the weight of it had built up like
water behind a dam. Over the next few hours, Felix Bronkowitz talked and talked
and related to the man, as if by confession, everything he had learned from the
alpha about the alien’s culture, their thinking, the ship, its power source—and
finally, the reason the aliens had come to earth in the first place. The man
listened, and except for a few comforting words and platitudes, spoke little.

Felix
told the man what he knew about the predatory wasps and how they could not be
deployed without advance information about the weather. The weather, he
explained, was the key to the whole invasion, and the wasps could only function
and proliferate in a very narrow temperature band. Release them at the wrong
time in the wrong hemisphere and the advancing cold would stall or halt the
pandemic completely. The plague had to be released along a global ribbon, and
had to be optimized by the weather conditions in the months following
deployment, the latitude of the release points had to be perfect.

Getting
the weather information wasn’t so easy because they had no direct taps into
Earth’s data. There were only two ways left to get it.

One was
to wait for the weather and plot it yourself and they probably had the
technology to do that—but not the time. It would take at least a full year,
probably two, for sufficient accuracy—and Felix guessed that they had to set
down on the planet before then.

The
second was to get it from a native who knew it. Felix fit the bill perfectly.

“With the
information I have,” Felix grinned, “I could have traded an entire continent.
You’re looking at the man who saved Homo sapiens from extinction.”

Those
were the last words Felix Bronkowitz ever said because Gilbert Keefer, not
knowing exactly how to go about it, put his hands over Felix’s nose and mouth,
first one way, then another, and clamped tight until Felix stopped struggling.
Gilbert thought at the time how weak Felix was. He had expected him to put up
more of fight.

When
Felix was dead, Gilbert lowered his head and thanked God for the miracle He had
delivered to him. He reached over and plucked the gold star of David off
Felix’s neck and placed it in the open pages of his Bible. It would make an
appropriate bookmark and be an eternal remembrance of this time and place in
God’s history.
Someday, Gilbert
thought, I’ll have a shrine built for that. All I have to do, right now, is
find this alpha creature. I know a lot about the weather.

Gilbert
Keefer, an alumnus of Ohio State University, was a degreed and—until his
abduction—a practicing meteorologist working for the National Weather Service
in Akron, Ohio.

He dumped Felix’s body out
in the floor of the tube then dragged it back to the clothes pile near the
soakers. It was a common place to die and none would be the wiser.

*
 
*
 
*