Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (4 page)

Maybe
there’ll be cigarettes today,
she thought.
I’m almost out.

*
 
*
 
*

The night was Phil’s favorite time on the mountain, moonless
nights especially. When there was no moon the stars shone their brightest and
God the number of them. Some ninety miles from any significant light source,
and conveniently shaded from stray light from L.A. by the Tehachapi Mountains
to the south, the undiluted view of the stars from High Ridge was incredible.
Phil was somewhat nearsighted, not to the point where he wore glasses all the
time, mind you, just enough to lose some of the heavenly detail he so enjoyed.
He got a kick out of going outside, looking skyward, slipping on his old horn
rims and seeing the stars and Milky Way pop into sharp focus.

He walked some fifty feet from the cabin and its view-obscuring
trees, to a spot that gave him an unrestricted panorama.

Just as he was about to slip his glasses on, his teeth started to
vibrate in his mouth. It was the damndest sensation. He thought at first it
must have been a rocket or jet engine test from Edwards Air Force Base
southeast of Mojave. The sound was almost omni-directional but as he turned his
head from side to side, he thought he could isolate it coming from somewhere up
the canyon to the north. The sound stopped as abruptly as it started. He waited
for a minute to see if it would start again, and it did. This time the sound
was louder and coming distinctly from the southern end of the canyon. The
southern sound stopped, too, and Phil dismissed it finally as some engine somewhere
or some aberrant event he didn’t understand.

He slipped on his glasses and
stood on the rim of the pad gazing up.

Look at them there stars,
he thought.

2

Bailey and Jim Hall knew they were trespassing. Haight canyon was
private property, but it was also the most fantastic place to camp. Not only were
there great hiking areas, but two fresh water streams in the canyon, one of
which emptied into a crystalline pool the locals called “Diana’s Bath.” It was
just the place for newlyweds to frolic and enjoy the outdoors. Jim was sure
they could spend the entire weekend there and not run into another person. He’d
done it plenty of times. There was just the single cabin up on the ridge at the
far end, but that was at least three miles away.

He had driven the bus up the canyon road and passed all the dozens
of Nazi “No Trespassing” signs and turned off along a barely visible trail just
wide enough to let him by. He’d stopped about a hundred feet in, then Bailey
and him had run back; and using pine branches off the convenient tree, had
brushed away the tracks to hide their passage. With that bit of “woodsy trickery,”
as Bailey called it, they had disappeared in the canyon. Completely undetected.

Diana’s Bath was just a ways down the draw and the gentle trickle
of the stream that fed it was so restful at night. It was Bailey’s first time
at Jim’s secret grotto getaway, but Jim knew right away that she had taken to
it as quickly as he had. They’d had sex as soon as camp was made, and then made
a bitchin’ meal of barbecued steaks with big potatoes that they wrapped in foil
and baked in the coals. Jim had no idea, until that very moment, that Bailey
was such a damn good cook. He had never felt so good after eating that meal and
later with his woman under his arm walking barefoot in the cool little stream.
He thanked the stars for her.

They made love again just after dark, and full of food and fresh
air and tired from the sex, they curled up like kittens in the double sleeping
bag and went fast asleep.

At about 11:00 p.m., had they been watching, they would have seen
those pans and utensils with iron content, the ones Bailey had left by the
dwindling fire, twitch as the alien craft drifted silently over their camp
site, just fifty feet above the ground.

*
 
*
 
*

Phil watched the stars until his neck got tired of craning up.
He’d folded his arms around himself and wondered whether it was from the
night’s chill or the overwhelming sense of vastness above that he’d done it.

He took off his glasses and turned to go back inside when he heard
the long, low grunt coming from the southern end of the canyon. It was faint,
but he easily heard it. It sounded a lot like one of Westberger’s steers, but
not quite. One of the peculiar advantages of his high, virtually unobstructed
view of the canyon from High Ridge was the fact that sound traveled up to him
on the ridge as if it were traveling over water.

He cocked his head so an ear was pointing south just as he heard
the faint high-pitched feminine squeal from the same spot and the male yelling
and some more screaming, then nothing. He didn’t like that much. He didn’t
care for raucous sounds in his canyon late at night. It sounded like a
squabble, but it could have easily been horseplay. They could chase themselves
around at night somewhere else. He’d talk to them on the way out Sunday if they
were still there.

He started back to the cabin and swore at himself again for
walking around in the dark without a light. This was serious snake country.
Walking around at night was the best way in the world to get bitten. He hoped
that’s not what he just heard down in the canyon.

He went to bed about eleven thirty and lay there naked thinking of
Linda. She’d be there tomorrow before nine, practically careening up the road
to get there. She wasn’t careless or reckless, she was a no-nonsense woman who
knew how to get from here to there and usually did it in a hurry. She was the
one who’d flash her brights on your ass if you didn’t get out of her way on the
freeway and was the first to give you the finger if you challenged her.

Though unmarried, they’d had a long and fairly smooth relationship
and were about as close and caring as two people could be. They maintained the
illusion of independence; yet, their love for each other bound them tightly.
They shared every behavior of the happily married save one—they refused to
cohabitate. Never mind that they spent several nights each week and awoke in
each other’s bed, the idea of living together never took solid shape between
them.

There were many things he liked about Linda. She was his best
friend; and he trusted her completely. Over the years, through some bonding
mechanism he had yet to define, they had developed common speech patterns and
similar ways to express ideas. In short, they sounded like each other, just
like most married people.

Linda Purdy was a computer system QA analyst for AT&T in
Sylmar. “Type A” personalities are invariably good at their jobs, and Linda was
no exception. It was her unerring sense of what was logical that served her
best. Her officially stated position on analysis of any kind was that she
rarely jumped to conclusions or theorized in “advance of the facts” as she
said, because it was folly to do so. “That’s what Holmes would say,” she’d
argue.

Once the facts were known she could extrapolate perfectly to the
extent allowed by them and could put her finger on the problem or unravel a
knotty system anomaly with unparalleled precision.

It was her unfathomable leaps of intuition that perplexed and
amazed her co-workers. If her logical reasoning was her staid servant, intuition
was her spirited muse.

Her job was to ensure that the software that controlled the
switching computers manufactured at the Sylmar facility was as bug-free as
possible. Linda Purdy was the first line of defense against the inevitable
“events” and “undocumented features” that create error in all software
programs approaching a million lines of instructions. Since Linda did not write
the code, hers were the fresh and vigorous eyes and mind that watched, worked
and exercised the software for relative peanuts prior to using it for keeps
when millions of dollars might be on the line. Telecommunication is a complex
realm of acronyms and arcane interactions and to gain the right perspective on
what the software did or ought to do, logical reasoning sometimes just isn’t
enough. Imagination and visualization are tools rarely used by both the right
and left sides of the brain. Phil was fairly sure that Linda’s brain used those
instruments frequently and with genius. He had studied her mind for ten years,
not with the cold detachment of a scientist, but as her warm and admiring
friend and companion.

Phil had once misplaced his car keys and searched for hours
looking for them in every pocket of every piece of clothing he owned. After a
several minutes-long interview with Linda about where he was and what he had
been doing, she told him his keys were in the bathroom on the back of the
toilet. She said it with a calm certainty that contained no doubt about the
keys’ whereabouts. That’s exactly where they were. It wasn’t as if she had seen
him put them down on the back of the toilet, and the facts moved all around
that particular solution without ever being cemented directly to it. She had
caused that very specific event to coalesce out of the miasmic gas of one
person’s behavior—his. Amused by the talent, he was made to wonder what other
truths she had gathered in this way.

Being the healthy male that he was, and with the gentle breeze
gliding cool over his naked body, his mind drifted back to the legs in the Honda
coupe on the freeway on the way up. The Land Cruiser’s height had provided a
good view into it. The woman behind the wheel was dressed in a light sleeveless
cotton shift. All Phil could see, though, were her legs. Her legs were not
long and perfectly shaped in a traditional sense. They were not thin but round
and full with an insinuation of warm, sexual strength. The legs were smooth and
the texture of alabaster—so much so that the sunlight shining in from the far
direction left a bold wet kiss of luminescence on her left knee. He couldn’t
see her face from his vantage, but the woman’s smooth, bare legs made her face
a moot characteristic of her anatomy. The effect of the sheer cloth draped so
carelessly up around her strong thighs was dizzying. He longed to experience,
with those strong limbs as willing partners, if not the act of breeding, at
least the slow, wet and voluptuous behavior which often leads to conception. It
occurred to him suddenly and with delight that the thighs he had lusted for so were
remarkably like his own Linda’s. He smiled with the thoughts of her body and
her mind.

Fatigued by the week’s events, the long drive up and the hour, he
drifted to sleep.

He woke with a jolt when for the second time, the loudest, lowest
bass tone he had ever heard shook the bones in his head and made his teeth
buzz.

*
 
*
 
*

Jim Hall knew the sound of a black bear snooping around camp when
he heard it, and he was hearing it now. They’d mess up your camp if you didn’t
shoo them away. He wanted Bailey to see it though, just to scare the shit out
of her—before he chased it the hell out of camp.

He sat up and nudged her gently awake. “Bailey, wake up,” he
whispered, shaking her butt. “Wake up, there’s a bear outside.” He reached
over, picked up the flashlight and turned it on.

Bailey’s eyes were immediately wide open and as big as saucers.

“A bear? Outside?” she whispered back, gasping for air.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a lot more afraid of us than we are of
it.” He started to zip down the tent’s door. Bailey grabbed his arm.

“What exactly are you doing?” she asked incredulously.

“I’m gonna show you the bear. It’s okay, believe me,” he said
smiling. “I’ll say ‘boo’ and he’ll split. Watch.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t.”

They could hear the bear sniffing loudly around the door of the
tent. It was awfully loud sniffing. There were some stray cattle in the canyon,
and if Jim hadn’t known that cows didn’t move at night, he’d have thought it
was a steer outside by the volume of the sniffing.

“Bailey, Jesus, would I let a darned bear drag you off and tear
you to pieces? Besides it’s a little ‘ol black bear not a damn grizzly. Just
relax.” He took hold of the zipper and started to pull it down.

The gray hunter didn’t wait for the zipper to come all the way
down before it shoved its head on its long neck into the tent, right into the
full beam of Jim’s light.

“Jesus . . . what the hell . . . ” Jim stuttered, yanking Bailey
back away from the head. Bailey screeched so loud it hurt Jim’s ear.

It was clearly not a bear. Some automatic mechanism in Jim
insisted on treating the creature as if it were a bear anyway. “Git!” Jim
yelled at it. “Git!”

The head just watched them menacingly.

Jim looked closely at the head. The eyes were human, no doubt
about that. Mean eyes, yes, but it was a person. He started to laugh.
I get it.

“It’s a darned mask!” he said and reached out to touch it. “Who
are you?”

The head snapped at the hand with its powerful mouth and bit right
through Jim’s fingers.

“What the hell! Jesus Christ!” he cried, clamping his other hand
over the stubs of his fingers. Bailey screamed again and scooted as far as she
could to the back of the tent.

Without thinking Jim whacked the head with the flashlight, but
the head just snarled then tilted up and grunted loudly. Jim lifted his right
foot up out of the sleeping bag, pulled it back and stomped hard at the head.
The creature took the full force of the kick directly on its flattish face. Jim
hauled back with the foot a second time and stroked down hard. This time the
creature ducked around and clamped onto the side of his foot with its teeth.
Jim yelled with pain. The creature shook like a terrier and pulled off half of
the foot in a big chunk.

“Jesussss Chrrrrist!” he yelled. “Get ooooout!”

He raised the flashlight again to whack at it. This time the
creature lunged in at Jim with its horrible mouth open wide and clamped to his
gut. Jim whacked at the head and thick, strong neck with the flashlight. Bailey
pressed herself into the far corner of the tent and watched as the creature
shook and tore at Jim’s midsection.

“Staaaap!” he said through clenched teeth and swung the light down
as hard as he could time and time again. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Bailey had never seen so much blood. When the head shook, the
blood splattered the inside of the tent. She watched in shock as the creature
bit and tore and Jim hit it with the flashlight. She watched until Jim was
dead. She heard odd sounds outside the tent. They sounded something like words
but made no sense to her like the big words on her father’s radio did when she
was a child, just word noises.