Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (28 page)

Phil let
go of the arm and grabbed a fistful of the loose meat on Gilbert’s face and
pulled. That brought an immediate gasp and Gilbert dropped his Bible and his
hands came up and wrapped around Phil’s thick forearm. Phil pulled his face
close and locked Gilbert’s eyes with his.

“You
think about that before you fuck up again. It’s hard enough staying alive in
this nightmare without worrying about shit like you hurting somebody.”

Phil let
go of the side of his face then palmed it and shoved Gilbert’s head hard into
the wall. Gilbert’s glasses came off and he stumbled and fell down trying to
catch them.

“Christ,
boy,” Phil said, watching him stumble. “You’re like a damned rag doll. You
oughta get some exercise.”

Punishment,
Phil
thought as he walked away.
Works
every time with lab animals and humans.

He looked down at his strong
right hand and flexed it. He was surprised he hadn’t pulled Gilber’t face right
off with it. He hadn’t felt that much
righteous
violent emotion in
years. His civilized personality had let go of the leash and let the old dog
loose, and had Gilbert put up even the smallest fight, Phil was sure he would
have spent the next few minutes killing him with his fists, knees, elbows and
teeth. It would not have been pretty, but it would have been appropriate.
 
He glanced back at Gilbert and Phil thought
he looked nothing more than pitiful; sorrowful and embarrassed by it all. That
little spark of remorse in Phil was drowned a second later when the dog lifted
its leg and pissed on it.

Fuck ‘im,
Phil thought.
Next time I
will
kill him.

*
 
*
 
*

Gilbert
got to his feet and stood there hunched over and worked his glasses back onto
his head then picked up his Bible and straightened the pages.

His mouth
had fallen open again and stayed in that slack position as he stepped back up
into his chamber. He stood there in the center of it, holding his Bible. Then
he wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and middle finger.

Gilbert
remembered being shoved down like that once before when he was just a child. He
couldn’t remember the names of the children who did it, but the faces were
clear.
He remembered that they had called him a liar when
they did it.

Gilbert’s
cheeks felt hot as if he’d just stepped out of a steam bath.

We’ll see
who fucks who in the ass,
he thought.

*
 
*
 
*

“Tom’s
dead,” Mary said.

Phil lowered
his head for a second. “Poor bastard,” he said.

“Yeah,”
she said and wiped a tear on the back of her hand. “He just went to sleep. He’s
got no pulse, no respiration—nothing.”

“Well,
that’s the way to go, if you’re gonna go,” Phil said. “He’s better off.”

Mary
nodded her head in agreement. “I guess we should carry him down by the
soakers.”

“Sure.”

As they
laid him down in the far corner, once again Phil thought about how efficient
the aliens were with their resources. And he hoped to hell the law of “dead
once, dead forever” held true within the confines of this vessel. He couldn’t
shake the thought that it just might not be true.

*
 
*
 
*

“How
about this one,” Bailey said to Ned. “It’s got light in it, and it looks big
enough to crawl through. Even you could make it.”

She
hadn’t meant it as an insult but as such statements in regard to another’s
girth are concerned, it got taken as a small one. Bailey saw it and realized
right away what she’d said.

“I didn’t
mean that like it sounded, Ned. Sorry.”

Ned just
winked at her.

“After
you,” he said, with his palm open toward the side tube. Bailey hitched the pack
up tighter and started in. The tube was about four feet in diameter and led off
in a slightly upwards direction. Bailey was reminded of the big pieces of sewer
pipe she used to play in along the highway next to her house as a kid. That had
been fun. This was fun, too. She turned around with a big grin.

“C’mon.
This is great.”

Ned
wasn’t so sure. He climbed in and crawled along after her, wishing to hell this
were happening to someone else. It had become his favorite fantasy over the
last few weeks to think that. Sometimes he could almost make it seem true.

The
passage zigzagged and changed direction with no reason he could discern. At
several points the upward angle was so steep they nearly had to climb to make
progress. Ned couldn’t tell if it was getting warmer, or if he was just working
up some heat from the crawling, but he began to sweat. The dimming light could
have been his imagination, too; but he swore the light organs along the top of
the narrow tube were getting weaker, or perhaps smaller.

“This
thing’s going on forever,” he said, wiping his brow on his arm. “Let’s take a
rest and break out some lunch.”

Bailey
worked her way back to Ned’s position and slipped the pack off. She’d brought
an unopened loaf of bread, some grape jelly and a half-full jar of peanut
butter—but nothing to
spread either with.

“Sorry .
. .” she said on discovering the fact.

She
managed to spread the peanut butter with her fingers after asking Ned if it
would be okay. They both passed on the same procedure for the jelly; somehow
that was going too far.

After
eating, they went on for five or ten more minutes.

“Bailey,
stop,” he finally said.

He watched
Bailey stick her head and shoulders into a smaller side tunnel. A moment later
he watched as her feet disappeared in it.

“Be
careful,” he tried to yell.

He closed
his eyes for what seemed like just a second and when he re-opened them, Bailey
had her head and shoulders out of the hole and was looking at him, grinning.

“Hey,
guess what?” she said.

“What?”

“We found
the bus depot.”

“What bus
depot?”

“Better
come and see.”

She
backed up into the tube and disappeared. With a grunt, Ned got into position
and crawled forward, regretting each dog-like step.

The side
tunnel was even smaller than the one they were in, and Ned felt a flush of
claustrophobia come over him like a heavy, musty blanket. He could see Bailey
up ahead lying on her stomach. The tunnel ended and seemed to open into a wider,
better lighted area. As he got closer, Bailey turned around and waved for him
to get down lower. Wishing his wish that it were happening to someone else, Ned
crawled the remaining fifteen feet to Bailey’s position on his stomach and
elbows.

“Stay
down!” she hissed and put her hand on his head and ducked down herself.

“What is
it?” he whispered back.

Bailey
grinned. “You’ll see. Be quiet. Wait.”

She
lifted her head finally then pulled Ned’s up by the hair. “Okay, look.”

The
shuttle port was enormous, at least one hundred yards across and forty feet
high. Like a blow on the head, that single view drove home the enormity of the
vessel. The area was divided into two sections by a wall composed of the same
thick, translucent material used in the wall chambers in the labs. The
shuttle-craft could be seen on the air-lock side of the divider, resting like
huge scarabs in a neat circle around an immense star-shaped seam in the floor.
Two goons stood near a section of the wall on the staging area. The wall there
was covered with what were obviously controlling mechanisms. As Bailey and Ned
watched, one of them began to touch the controls.

“Watch
this,” Bailey said. “I’ve learned a lot while you were asleep.”

Ned
looked puzzled. “How long was I asleep?”

“Couple
of hours. Okay, watch.”

Couple of
hours? Christ.

Two seams
on either end of the divider squeezed closed. There was a sound of rushing air
as a ring of vents around the upper section of the airlock opened wide. When
the air inside the lock was evacuated, the star-shaped seam began to open.
Bright white light filled the airlock from below and spilled through the
divider’s window, whitewashing the brown interior and illuminating the entire
facility. From their vantage high in the wall of the staging area, they could
see down through the divider and view the crescent shape of the earth beyond.
As they watched, a shuttle drifted up through the opening, turned slowly and
set down gently in an open space between two others, completing the neat ring
around the seam. No sooner had it set down that the one to its right lifted off
the floor, drifted over and dropped out of the port. Once it was out, the seam
squeezed closed, and the sound of rushing air once again filled the facility. Bailey
grinned over at Ned. “Cool, huh?”

“Those
are the shuttles they use on their runs back and forth to Earth, eh.” Ned
asked.

“No duh.”
Bailey laughed quietly.

“They
look like bugs.”

“Cool,
huh?”

“Well,
are they?”

“Yes! Yes!”
she said patting his head. “And all we have to do is sneak onto one and catch a
lift back to Earth.”

Ned
wasn’t a genius, but he knew that performing that little trick would be next to
impossible. Between them and the unlikely bus on the other side of the window
were two hundred feet of alien space, weird biological controls they didn’t
know how to use—not to mention that the bus itself was, quite literally, a
giant bug. Getting on board one of those things and getting a lift home would
be like some fairy tale from a children’s book. “Uh, I don’t think that would
be possible,” he said. “Besides we can’t even get back to where we started, let
alone get down into one of those damned things.”

Bailey looked at Ned like he was
a child who’d dropped his ice cream cone. “Poor baby . . . look, what other
chance do we have? I’m gonna get out of here.”

“Not
right now, you’re not.”

“No, of
course, not now!”

“Oh . . .
”

“Look, we
have to get back to the tube. We have to tell Mary and Phil and them, and then,
we have to plan how to do it. It’ll be like a prison break or something. We’ll
have to plan every little detail. Everybody’ll have a special job to do. We can
use these watches like Phil said and like synchronize the whole operation.
It’ll be cool! We can do it!”

Ned shook
his head. “I don’t know . . . ”

“What
other choice do we have?”

“I don’t
know what difference it would make.”

“What?”

“What
difference does it make? We’d just be jumping from the frying pan into the fire
as I see it.”

Bailey
looked at Ned like he was nuts. “Ned . . . you’re a Canadian. Do you have any
idea how much firepower the U.S. of A. has at its disposal?”

“A lot,
eh?”

“You bet.
Our military can dust this whole invasion before you can say kweebeck.”

“Keebeck,”
Ned corrected.

“Whatever.”

“That
still leaves the little problem of convincing your almighty military that the
invasion even exists.”

Bailey
looked out at the shuttle port.

“You’ve
got no imagination, Ned,” she finally said.

“And
you’ve got enough for both of us, eh?”

“Maybe. But
I’ll tell you one thing, I’m gonna get out of here if it kills me. I don’t want
to die in this nasty place.”

Ned
thought about it. He rubbed his arm. It was an evil place. No one wanted to die
here. “That’s probably a good enough reason to try, eh?” he said, finally
conceding.

“Oh, Ned,
we can do it. I just know it.”

“Sure,”
he said and winked at her.

Bailey got all excited. “Look,
I’ve got a plan for us.”

“Uh-oh.”

“We stay
right here and make notes about every little thing that happens down there. That’s
the key to getting out of here. If we can figure out how that control panel
works we stand a good chance.” She’d said it with such certainty that Ned
almost believed it.

“I wish I
had some binoculars,” Bailey added.

Ned
reached over and started to open the backpack and Bailey, puzzled, twisted to
accommodate him. With a grin like Santa Claus, he unzipped a side pocket and
pulled out a pair of compact binoculars.