Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (26 page)

“Who should
we call first?” she asked.

Phil was
already thinking about it and had an answer. “Linda,” he said.

“Who’s
Linda?”

“Linda
Purdy. My friend.”

“Oh.
Okay. That’s good. Whatever. I just thought you might want to call the Pentagon
or maybe the cops. I don’t know. Silly me.”

“No, no.
Linda is the one to call. She’s exactly the one to call. Once we give her the
complete picture she’ll run with it. We’ve only got what, a couple of hours of talk
time. We have to make sure that at least one person gets the whole picture on
tape right from the get-go. And we have to hold some battery power in reserve
in case she needs more, or if we have to talk to someone else. We have to
maximize it.”

Mary thought
about it.

“Okay.
But what about the Pentagon. When do we call them?”

Phil
gently pushed the antenna down into the phone.

“Look. It
could take all the power we have just to find out who in the hell to talk to in
the Pentagon. And think about it Mary, they would never, and I mean
never
ever believe a
word of it anyway.”

Of
course. Of course. I got way ahead of myself,
she thought with
sadness
. It was just wishful thinking.

“We’re
dead. Even with the phone we’re dead, aren’t we?”

Phil
considered the unsavory alternatives for a flash, then Mary herself finished
the thought for him.

“If we’re
lucky that is,” she said.

“Rescue
isn’t just unlikely. It’s not possible,” he said in his most professional
voice.

Mary
drummed her fingers on the rim of the dish and thought about it.

“Everybody’s
gotta die of something,” she said and sat down to work on the dish. “I’ll have
this thing workable in a few minutes if you want to stick around.”

“Sure.
Where’s the notebook?”

Bailey
pulled it out from under the covers, held it up and wagged it slowly without
turning around. Phil took it from her and thumbed through it looking for an
empty page. He wanted to make notes about what he wanted to say. He didn’t want
to leave anything out.

The first
couple of pages had neat notes with the date and times of various events in a
straight column on the left. Most of it was a record of who was taken and when
they returned. The last had an entry that read:
“Phil
returned from being incumbated. Seems okay. Picked silly clothes. ”

Above that
was: “6/22/06 7:06 AM—Gilbert stabs Tom with knife in his neck.”

“What’s
this?” he asked Mary.

“What?”

“This Tom
and the knife thing?”

“Can you
believe it,” Mary said. “ I watched the whole thing. I’d just given Tom a hug,
if you can believe
that,
for handing over the phone. Gilbert just stabbed him in the neck when Tom had
his back turned to him. I was surprised Tom didn’t kill him.”

“I take
it he didn’t die. How’s he doing?”

“From
what I could see, it wasn’t much of a wound. I took a look at it a few minutes
later and it had stopped bleeding. It’s not serious I don’t think. He went into
his hole. Gilbert’s in there with him. Go figure. I haven’t seen them since.”

No
telling what sparked that weird-assed event, he thought. There was a clinical
description for Gilbert’s condition: he was nuts. That particular diagnosis
didn’t help very much, however. Phil knew that Gilbert was so twisted in his
thinking he never would shake off his unique and distorted world view. The
first thing that came to mind about the attack on Tom was that it was a simple,
vanilla-flavored homosexual rage ignited by Mary’s hug. It was hard to believe
that Tom Moon could be the object of anyone’s desire, but you never knew.

He took
the pen out of the spiral binding and started making notes; dates, times,
number of captives, the ship, the procedures, the larvae, the goons. He drew a
little circle as a bullet next to each item. He intended to cover each one
during the call, and as he did, he’d check it off.

He
stopped.

Christ,
he thought
. She’ll be shocked as hell to hear my voice. Too shocked to
listen. That’s the first problem. She must think I’m dead or kidnapped.
Probably murdered. How am I going to break it to her that I’ve been abducted?
How do you lead into that? It will sound exactly like I think it will. She’ll
think some freakish psychosis has caused me to run away. As soon as I say I’ve
been abducted by aliens, her mind will high-step for cover and it’ll take me a
half hour or longer just to get her to come back, if I ever do. It would be a
perfectly normal reaction. Just like in the movies. Cognitive dissonance at its
best—or worst.

Above the
first bullet he added another and wrote “I am not psychotic. I am not on drugs.
I am in control.” It sounded lame, especially the last, but the flat truth
right up front, before he got underway with the bizarre and unlikely details
might smooth the rough road he’d have to traverse. He read the words silently
to himself several times to practice them—and perhaps just to convince himself
that they were true.

“There,”
Mary said, holding up the phone and dish arrangement. “Try that.”

Phil took
it and held it up to his head. The foil fitting had been modified so that it
fit more tightly.

“Ready?”
she asked.

“Yeah.
I’m ready.” He sat down and crossed his legs and put the open notebook in front
of him. Mary pointed the antenna down at Earth.

He
thought about dialing the number at Linda’s house, but a hunch told him to dial
the number at his instead. He entered the area code then the number, pressed
the “Send” button and put the receiver gently to his head.

Bailey twisted around and
sat up to listen.

*
 
*
 
*

“It’s
Phil. Just relax.”

There was
a sound like a squeak at the other end, and he could imagine the look on her face.
He grinned broadly then cut it short.
No
fawning over each other.

“What do
I do?” Linda asked in an odd monotone.

“Listen
for now. Plenty of time for questions.”

“God. I’m
listening. Talk to me,” she said.

“Get the
tape recorder and the phone attachment out of my desk drawer. Figure out how to
use it and attach it to the phone. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

“Bye,”
she said instantly and hung up the phone.

She was
at the desk rummaging through the drawers before she realized she could feel
no pain. On her way back to the bedroom she heard little whining or groaning
noise and it took her a quick step or two more to realize they were coming from
her.

She
licked the suction cup on the microphone and stuck it to the receiver end of
the phone. Nearly dry, it fell right off. She licked it again and pressed it
hard until it stuck, then plugged the jack into the little tape recorder. When
she checked and rewound the tape, she saw her hands begin to tremble. She
steadied them on her knees, then checked the record function. That done, she
put the tape recorder down neatly next to the phone, stood up and screamed a
loud
whoop!

The
emotion came like a swift river’s flow and her thoughts and questions swam in
great numbers up through it. She sat on the edge of the bed with her back
straight and her hands folded neatly on her lap and watched as from a distance
as the thoughts and questions flowed past. From time to time, one or the other
would make her smile.

The phone
didn’t get to ring once fully before she snatched it up off the hook.

“I’m
here,” she said pushing the record button on the tape recorder at the same
time.

“I’ll
give you the overview of what’s happened first. That’ll answer a lot of your
questions then it’ll be your turn. This is a cell phone. We only have a few
hours talk time. Deal?”

“Can I do
one small one first?”

“Go.”

“Are you
hurt, injured?”

“No. Shut
up now, okay?

“Okay,”
she said and felt relief rush over her.

Phil
looked down at his notes and considered the first bulleted item. He drew a
breath.

“I’m not
crazy. I am not on drugs or . . .” That was as far as he could get.

Linda’s
eyes welled up as if someone had turned her tear ducts on. Following the spirit
of Phil’s instructions, but not the letter of it, she allowed herself to
silently mouth the words “I know . . .” through her tears.

“Listen
carefully,” he said. “I’m in control of my senses for the most part,” he began,
then drew another breath. “I was attacked last Friday night by aliens and
abducted.” He wanted to laugh.

I was right. I’m always right,
she
thought with irony.

“I know.
I figured it out,” she said, breaking the law.

Of course she did,
Phil thought.

That was
a relief. He could cut right to the chase and let it all out now.

“Good
job,” he said.

“Go.
Talk,” she said, lips trembling.

He spoke
clearly and quickly. “We have no idea where they’re from. It doesn’t matter.
They capture live specimens, mostly human. They have a number of
paralytics—drugs—one is delivered with a weapon used by hunt teams. It fires a
spiny burr about the size of a walnut. No distance, but very accurate. Their
technology is biologically . . . based. They’re organic engineers, Linda.
Their building materials and most of their tools are organically based.

“The ship
is huge, aircraft-carrier sized or bigger. The ship itself is an
animal—mostly—that we believe is still alive. We’re in low orbit, but they keep
the sun directly behind us at all times. Even with specialized equipment, you’d
have a hard time spotting it with the sun as a backdrop.”

Smart
, Linda thought.

Phil
checked off a couple of items.

“It’s a
factory ship, Linda. They’re producing what we think is food. We play a part in
it.”

That
sounded benign enough. The way Phil said it made it sound as if they were
baking cupcakes and using humans to mix the batter. A bizarre image of Phil in
a baker’s hat came to mind. His smiling face covered in flour, he waved at the
Earth through the window of a white, egg-shaped spaceship. She brushed the
silly image away impatiently.

Don’t be stupid. Wait for the facts,
she
thought.

Some
things he couldn’t tell her. He told her about the farming process and some of
the details, but he spared her the unbearable part about the labs and the hunch
he had about the idea that nothing ever died here if the aliens chose not to
kill it.

As Phil
continued, Linda re-built the story in her mind piece by piece and there was no
cake batter or smiling faces in that dark and horrific image. When he was finished,
the picture was incomplete, still just a sketch she had to fill in with details
and color.

“How many
canisters of larva-things?” she asked.

“Eight or
nine thousand that we know of, maybe more.”

“Are they
dead? The things inside?”

“I
thought they were.”

Phil
described the incident with Pui Tamguma.

“How many
humans on board?”

“Twenty
in this tube. There may be more.”

“The
wasp-thing didn’t attack you or the women. It went right for the oriental . . .
or . . . Asian or whatever?”

Phil hadn’t
exactly thought of it like that. Who knows why an alien wasp would do anything?

“Yeah. I
guess that’s right.”

She was
overloading. Linda’s skin crawled starting on her arms then down her back and
legs. She swallowed.

Linda
questioned, and Phil answered. Finally, she ran out of questions.

There was
so much that had gone unsaid between them; and now it seemed to her that the
chance to say anything that mattered to them had been lost completely,
overpowered, drowned by what she’d just learned. It was all so horrible. It was
so terribly unlikely, and horrible.

Phil felt
it too. The list of notes was a defense mechanism—a defense against the
inevitable. The list in front of him with its checked off items was a dead and
a meaningless thing.

Linda
started to cry.

This is
just Phil’s voice. He’s still dead and can never return. Soon even this link to
the netherworld will fade and be lost forever.

“I’ve
loved you so much,” she said.