Read Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) Online
Authors: David Coy
Tags: #dystopian, #space, #series, #contagion, #infections, #fiction, #alien, #science fiction, #space opera, #outbreak
Mary
sensed it. She looked at Phil and raised her eyebrows.
This should be interesting,
she thought.
“What
kind of a pointless fucking question is that?” Phil asked back firmly.
Gilbert
swallowed with his mouth open and smelled shit. He acted like he had something
more to say but wouldn’t just then.
For some
reason she could scarcely understand, Gilbert was as transparent to Mary as
glass; she knew that look on his face. He’d wait and say something behind
Phil’s back to somebody, probably his crony, Tom Moon.
“Thanks for
your input,” Phil said squarely to Gilbert. “Why don’t you go back and join the
others now?” He put both hands on his hips and tilted his chin up once in the
direction of the dissolving group.
Gilbert
swallowed again, hard, with his mouth open.
The dismissal
was perfect, delivered with precision perfect, and unbending. It gave Mary
more satisfaction than seeing Phil’s fist smash Gilbert’s nose.
Gilbert
stood there stupidly, for a beat, and Mary could hear his mind twisting at high
speed. He turned and walked back with that loping walk Mary hated so much. His
very walk, like his speech, his face, and his hands and how he used
them—everything about him—was sanctimonious and affected.
She
looked at Phil, and Phil winked back. That made her smile.
Phil took
a step or two toward the remaining knot of captives standing in the tube.
“It’s
okay!” he yelled to make himself heard. “It’s dead!” He stepped over to Pui’s
chamber and looked in. Pui lay there like a mannequin, his eyes frozen,
unblinking, fully conscious but unfeeling—for the moment.
“What
now?” Ned asked soberly, looking over Phil’s shoulder at Pui. “The man’s got a
major problem as I see it.”
“You’ve
got that right.” Phil could see the little worms in his mind, hatching out of
their eggs and moving, feeding, growing as fast as bamboo shoots. Without the
bizarre medical intervention of the aliens, Pui was doomed to be eaten alive
from the inside out.
“We
should kill him before he gets his feeling back,” Mary said flatly.
Phil
looked at her, then at Ned. It was the only humane option. The problem was that
someone would have to actually put the cord or wound-up shirt or belt around
Pui’s neck and choke off his air until he died. It was one thing to say it and
quite another to do it.
“What do
you mean
we
?”
Phil said and regretted it in the same breath.
Mary
realized her comment had been poorly phrased. It wouldn’t be her who killed Pui
if it came to it.
“Sorry,”
she said.
Phil
touched her arm. “It’s okay. Me, too.”
He looked
back at Pui, but tried not to see the blank, staring eyes. Behind them, he
knew, Pui was thinking of the worms that would hatch into his flesh—that and
nothing else.
“Leave him where he is for
now,” Phil said. “I have to think about it.” The “it” was how he was going to
kill him. He’d already decided he’d have to do it. He just didn’t want to do it
right then.
*
*
*
Gilbert walked up to Tom
Moon but did not look at him. He swallowed with his mouth open and waited for a
question. Phil’s comment had been dirty, and it was very rude how he said what
he said. Gilbert wasn’t angry about it because Gilbert didn’t allow himself to
get angry.
“Was it that one he
brought back like Bailey said?” Tom asked.
Gilbert just changed his
face and knew Tom could read the ever-so-subtle affirmative written in the line
of his mouth.
But Tom couldn’t.
“Was it?” Tom repeated.
Gilbert tried again and
raised his mouth into just-the- very-start of a smile, still not looking at
Tom. He could feel Tom’s eyes moving over his face like Braille-trained fingers
trying to read the message there.
Tom waited for an answer
and finally shook his head.
“Well, hell, I guess you
know,” Tom said.
Everybody
in this place is crazy, he thought.
He walked away from Gilbert shaking his head.
Gilbert just stood there, staring, his mouth agape. From
time to time he swallowed, mouth open.
It is
important for people to know how to read these facial words,
Gilbert thought.
Phil is an evil man. Evil men do evil things. Soon there will be
no evil men to say evil words.
His neck and cheeks felt flushed and hot.
*
*
*
Pui
Tamguma blinked and knew he was going to die. He knew the wasp’s larvae were
hatching and in minutes they would begin to feed: first one, then a few, then
many. They were small now, but as they fed they would grow. As they did, so
would the pain.
He rose
slowly up on one elbow and felt the first one move deep in his leg, just a
twitch, in response. He had been cycled twelve times and knew the horror well.
The torture chambers of the aliens were nothing compared to what would come. He
got to his feet and stood there sweating in fear. He wanted to move but knew if
he did, he might stimulate them somehow to start feeding sooner. His breath
came in short bursts like a panting canine and soon the sweat was dripping
from his chin and off the tip of his nose. He began to feel them moving,
squirming in his tissues and he began to scream. He screamed not out of pain,
for it was not yet there.
Pui
Tamguma screamed out of fear for the pain to come.
Phil was
lying there waiting for it and he knew immediately what the sound meant.
Numbly, he got up and slipped on his shirt and shoes. He reached down and felt
for the belt around his waist. He ran his numb hands over it just to make sure
it was there and felt the cheap brass buckle. He’d picked it up in the clothes
pile outside the soakers. That was odd for him because he rarely wore a belt at
all. At the time, it just seemed the thing to do. He thought about how it did its
job—this inanimate thing—so well and without thought or conscience. He
wondered if it might not feel something now, somehow.
No,
he thought.
The belt can feel nothing. The belt will do just fine.
Mary and
Bailey lay not sleeping. Bailey pushed her fingers gently into Mary’s back and
said, “He’s awake.”
They
would not let Phil do this alone. Together they got up and walked toward Pui’s
chamber and his screams filled the hollow tube like a solid thing they could feel
on their arms and legs. Mary shuddered and folded her arms tight. Phil was a
few feet ahead and she watched him strip off his belt as he walked. She heard
it slap against the belt loops as it came out, and she felt a chill of fear.
When Phil
entered his chamber Pui stopped screaming and stood there panting and sweating.
Phil locked eyes with Pui for a second, then he gently placed his hand on Pui’s
shoulder.
“I’m
sorry,” Phil whispered to him. “This was my fault. What I’m about to do is as
right as I can make this goddamned situation, and I hope like hell that you can
forgive me.”
Then Phil
moved behind him and placed the noose around Pui’s neck and cinched it down
tight and held it. Pui closed his eyes and looked relieved. Phil just stared up
at an angle with his mouth set tight and held the noose against Pui’s neck with
his left hand and pulled hard with his right. Pui’s hands came up to the strap
around his neck but didn’t try to pull it loose. They just rested against it.
When Pui went limp, Phil continued to hold him up by the noose. Mary could see
the veins bulge in his arms and wrists.
He’s so
strong
, Mary thought.
So very
strong.
Then she
wept.
He
lowered Pui to the chamber floor very gently and Mary could see that Phil’s
eyes were wet. She noticed that his hands were shaking a little when he took
the noose off.
They
carried Pui’s body back to the soakers and left it there in a far corner, but
in a spot where the first goon that went out the exit seam would see it easily.
Phil said it should look like Pui had died there, far from the other captives.
“Sick and
dying animals often did the same,” he said.
8
They’d called Sheriff Bob Lynch from Edna’s and told him about the
blood they’d found in the tent and the footprints all around. Lucky for them
Edna and Ronny were out when they made the call. Linda was sure it would have
sent Edna into a state of shock again. But the blood and the footprints had
little impact on Linda. To her, Phil was dead already, and if he’d been buried
and someone told her his grave had been robbed, it might have had the same
impact as this revelation. She thought it was tragic and strange and freakish
that Phil had been killed by aliens from outer space but the fact remained that
Phil was dead; and that was that. Somebody else’s spilled blood, which just
substantiated the facts, was trivial at this point.
They’d
tried not to disturb the crime scene, but George was so intensely curious, it
was impossible not to have some impact on it. He’d poked around inside the tent
and under the sleeping bags looking for anything that might shed some light on
what happened. She watched him back up and step right on one of the three-toed
prints in his zeal and she grimaced as his footprint obliterated the alien one.
He wasn’t satisfied until he had looked at every inch of the scene, and Linda
considered it a miracle that only one footprint had been lost as a result of
his brow-knitted probing and lifting and poking.
Bob Lynch
told them over the phone not to touch anything, which Linda denied they’d done
several times, and then he sent them home—he’d take care of it, he said.
The ride down was much
quieter than the ride up. Linda managed a few brief naps against the window
using George’s wadded-up jacket as a pillow. He’d offered it and she’d taken it
acting timid, but accepted it gladly. The collar had a different but not
unpleasant scent of an undefined cologne deep in it. She wondered what the name
of the cologne would be that a man like George Greenbaum would wear and
chuckled to herself over a few names she thought up. Later, in a half-sleep,
she turned the make-shift pillow around so she couldn’t smell it.
It was early evening when
they pulled into the drive of Phil’s house. The sweet smell of ocean was thick
in the air at that time of day. Its warm scent was a sharp contrast to the
crisp, earthen scent of High Ridge.
“I’ll run these samples
right to the lab in the morning,” George said. “I’ll let you know what they
find out as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” Linda said. “Well,
thanks for driving.”
“It’s pretty long that
drive.”
“You get used to it.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Well . . .”
“Deep subject . . .”
“Ha, ha.”
“I guess I’d better hit
the road.”
“Yeah. Thanks again for
driving.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Linda got out of the car
and hitched her heavy purse up onto her shoulder. She was aware that the car’s
engine had not started by the time she got to the front door. When she finally
heard the engine start, she was sorry she hadn’t asked George if he might want
some coffee or something before he left. She turned around and waved at the car
as it backed out of the drive, but she wasn’t sure George saw her.
She walked straight to the
bedroom and flopped on the bed.
All
things begin and end here,
she thought.
Right here in this
bed.
She’d
fallen in love with Phil in this bed, mourned his passing in it and now she’d
resigned herself—come to grips with Phil’s death—right on this bed. She rubbed
her face with her hands and groaned defiantly.
Hunger
hit her like a wave she hadn’t seen.
A
hamburger,
she thought.
Nice
summer night. A big-assed barbecued hamburger is what I want—with lettuce,
tomato—and onion—a thick slice of white onion on it.
She got
up and before she got to the kitchen, she’d done an inventory for the
components of this amazing burger and was very pleased with the results.
When the
doorbell rang, she thought it was her neighbor, Hugh, come to borrow the lawn
mower.
She was
quite shocked when she opened the door and saw George Greenbaum standing there
with a broad smile and two big bags from Burger King.
Linda
looked at the bags. “Those burgers got onions on ‘em?” she asked.
“You bet,” he said.
*
*
*
Tom had a
special hiding place for his good stuff. The floor of his hole had a depression
in it about two feet long, and a foot wide. Not big, but it did the job. He
kept one of his sleeping bags over it and slept on the other one. It wasn’t the
most secure place, but it kept spying eyes off his stuff. You couldn’t trust
anybody nowadays. Gilbert knew about the hidey-hole but stayed out of it. At
least Tom had never caught him snooping in it. He didn’t think Gilbert would
steal from him, but you never knew.
Thieves
are everywhere and you never know who’s one of ‘em.
The worst
time was in Missouri one summer when a partner stole his backpack and
everything in it after he’d set Tom up by sending him on a wild goose chase
saying he’d just seen about two hundred pounds of canned goods in a dumpster behind
Slater Brothers grocery. He even had about fifteen cans of peaches in a box to
prove it.
“Go get
yourself some,” the sonofabitch had said. “Hell, I’ll watch your things.”
The
dumpster had about two hundred pounds of garbage in it, but no canned goods.
When Tom got back the pack and his partner were gone. The pack had all his
extra clothes—including a pair of good boots he was saving for winter—and all
his trading things in it: a clock, two or three knives, a bunch of rings, shoe
laces in the pack, some watches—always a favorite—and a whole carton of
cigarettes he bought from a fat guy in Kansas for five dollars. He could do
without most of it, but the worst part was the money he had stashed down in one
of the pockets. He’d had better than eighty dollars in there. He could live for
a long time on eighty dollars.
He’d had
to start over from square one and the first couple of weeks were hard. He’d had
to get himself arrested for vagrancy after two or three days just to eat and
he hated to do that. They only keep you in jail for forty-eight hours for vagrancy,
and there was a good chance you’d get hurt in jail. He panhandled himself back
up and found a good place to camp in a bunch of trees off the freeway downtown
that nobody else was in. There was plenty of cardboard around in the alleys,
and he made a tent out of it that kept him dry enough. He stayed there and
worked that area for the rest of the summer. It was a damn good thing it was
summer time. It’d taken him a full year or more to get all that stuff together
in one place and he swore he’d catch the sonofabitch someday and get even, but
he knew the chances of that were zero. It was a big country.
He futzed
around with the watches in the hidey-hole, picking each one up in turn and
holding it. He polished the face of his favorite with his shirt tail—one of
them ones with about a hundred controls on it. He opened the solar calculator
and pressed at the soft keys with his thumb a few times.
He didn’t
think it worked, but it was nice anyways. The key ring was a nice something,
too. It had a leather thing and said “porch” on it. He didn’t know what he’d
ever do with the keys, but the Mexican guy he’d got it from said he could have
the car and laughed when he handed the keys to Tom. Tom knew he’d never find
the car. He wasn’t stupid. It was the key ring he wanted. The guy died later.
He saved
the phone for last. He opened it up gently and touched the keys then placed the
phone up to his ear and said “Hello.” He laughed silently and looked over his
shoulder to make sure nobody was in the chamber. “Hello,” he said again. That
cracked him up and he laughed again without making a sound. He pressed the
little button called “PWR” and a second later the phone startled him with a
chime and some letters showed up on the screen. One of the big words said
“Ready.” A little line of something started to move back and forth like steps
then disappeared.
He turned
the power off, folded it back up and put it in the hole. He didn’t want it to make
any other noises and draw spies. He covered the stuff up with the sleeping bag
and was smoothing it out when Gilbert’s voice surprised him.
“Do you
have something new in there?” Gilbert asked, coming in.
“Sure do
and keep out of it,” Tom said. “It’s mine.” He kept smoothing the sleeping bag
over the pit, even if Gilbert did know where it was.
“That
sounds like a threat,” Gilbert said and swallowed with his mouth open.
“Yeah,
that’s right—I’m threaten’n you,” Tom said with his stolen pack still fresh on
his mind. “Stay away from my stuff if you know what’s good for you. I told you
before.”
“Secrets
are evil things.”
“Too
goddamned bad.”
The word
“goddamn” filled the air around Gilbert’s nose with the smell of sewage.
“You
shouldn’t use those words.”
“That’s
too goddamned bad, too. If you don’t like it you
can leave.
Stay away from my damned stuff.”
Gilbert
just turned his head away and waited for Tom to say that he was sorry for using
dirty words. He didn’t. That’s when Gilbert knew that Tom was evil, too. He had
secrets and was trying to protect, them and he used dirty words. He opened his
Bible and looked at the pages. He could feel Tom looking at him and kept his
face blank. Tom would never be able to tell that he was planning to see just
what he had in that hiding place. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his
thumb and middle finger then fanned the air slowly with his hand to clear the
bad smell.
Tom laid
down and turned his back to Gilbert.
Let
him read his Bible,
he thought.
Crazy
damn dummy.
Inspired
ideas were virtual strangers to Tom Moon, but he’d had a few close
approximations. In Pittsburgh one cold, fall season, he’d thought it would be a
good idea to put electric heaters in park benches so people could warm up their
asses on a chilly day. In L.A., during a pounding winter storm one year, he
wondered if he could keep his feet dry by wrapping them in plastic bags. It
worked for a while.
One
hundred miles up, in the belly of an alien starship, he wondered if the
cellular phone he had stashed under his sleeping bag would work from there.
Maybe we
could call the cops,
he thought.
Phil or Mary would know.
He pulled
back the sleeping bag and slipped the phone into the loose front pocket of his
pants, all the time keeping it hidden from Gilbert. Gilbert seemed so involved
with his Bible, Tom didn’t think he’d even look up, but he did when Tom walked
by.
Got it
hid in my pocket, you dummy,
Tom thought.
Phil
lived two or three holes down and, Tom could have covered the distance in a few
seconds if it wasn’t for the two big bastards standing in front of Phil’s
chamber.
He saw
Mary standing a few yards down the tube with her arms crossed, watching.
He moved
up against the wall and tried to look as passive and non-threatening as
possible. That was always a good policy when a big bastard was in the tube.
Phil had
heard the whistling sound and knew they’d come for him. His heart pounded in
his chest when he heard it as if someone had turned the speed up on it with a
dial. He stepped out of the hole and looked up at the face of the goon. The
head seemed to grow out of the massive trunk like a grotesque tumor. The face
was so hideously swollen it wouldn’t have been recognizable as human if it
wasn’t for the eyes at the bottom of the fleshy eye sockets. He felt
overwhelmed by the thing’s physical mass. He turned in the direction of the
exit seam, but couldn’t quite get his feet to move. The goon nudged him down
the tube with the back of its hand, and it felt like he’d been bumped by a car.
The urge to flee, to run full speed from the big bastard nearly overcame him,
but there was nowhere to run. The fight or flight reflex swung like a pendulum,
and he had the impulse to turn on the bastard and throw his fist into its mushy
face. He would have done it if he hadn’t been sure it would kill him right then
and there.
He
resigned himself to the coming ordeal and bumped along as the big bastard
nudged him.
Let him push me,
he thought.
I’ll not give in
utterly.
“It
ends!” Mary yelled at him. “It always ends!”
Phil turned
around and licked his dry lips and nodded. The goon nudged him again and nearly
knocked him down.
Tom
watched as the goons marched Phil toward the exit seam. When they’d left, and
the seam had closed, Tom looked over at Mary and raised his hand in a “hello.”