Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (44 page)

The thing put both hands on her waist and squeezed. It felt like
being in a vise and she groaned from the pain.

The monster lifted her off the floor in those strange arms as if
she were a child. Then it opened its grisly, horse’s mouth and began to lower
her down onto it. Bailey had a fleeting vision of being held up like a
thing
while
the monster snapped at her flailing limbs, her blood flowing out of the gaping
wounds and running over its maniacal face as it ate her alive, one bite at a
time.

Bailey looked into the thing’s lunatic eyes, and the rage in her
exploded.

“You
sonofabitch!”

She brought up both hands and jammed them down tight on the
creature’s eye sockets. On the smooth, red skin, the fit was perfect. She
tightened that strange grip then pulled with all her might. Before the thing
could respond, she jammed down hard again and took another grip and pulled with
a deep grunt. The creature slammed her down and knocked her hands loose with a
blow to her forearms. Her hands came away with a
smack
. Then,
the monster roared, the roars turning to whimpers.

As Bailey stumbled away from it, she saw a thin line of blood
running from each eye socket. When the thing swept the area in front of it with
its antenna arms, she knew she’d damaged its eyes, maybe blinded it completely.

She turned and ran. She left it there stumbling against the walls.
She heard a sound over her shoulder. She hoped it was the thing’s tortured
groaning and mustered enough strength to smile a crooked smile of delight.
“Nasty bastard . . .” she uttered weakly.

She walked and shuffled a few hundred yards farther then
collapsed.

She tried to get up. She rested for a while then began to crawl
slowly down the tube, one agonizing inch at a time. The seam was at least
another hundred yards away, and she knew she’d never make it. Even if she did,
she’d die there. The idea of getting someone’s attention by yelling at the top
of her lungs was now a remote and implausible notion. The entire plan had been
doomed from the start.

She stopped after just a few yards and rested her head on the
not-cool, not-hot surface of the tube. She didn’t know if she would die soon or
not-so-soon, but she knew she would die. She turned her hand over and looked at
the bizarre patch of tissue the aliens had given her. It looked so strange but
felt so oddly natural. She smiled at it and made it contract once just so she
could see it one last time.

Then Bailey Hall closed her eyes and dreamt of bright, cold
streams of water.

*
 
*
 
*

Water has little real taste, but it has sensation. The greater the
thirst, the stronger the sensation. The sensation of water on Bailey’s mouth,
tongue and throat was so extreme, it felt like the very celebration of life
itself. She gobbled it, sucked at it and drank it in great mouthfuls. Her
dehydrated tissues sang in a chorus of relief.

She heard distant voices as if through a pipe. She drank.

“Slow down. Slow down,” Ned’s voice said.

“Fuck that,” she heard Phil say. “Let her drink.”

“So she was just playing along with Gilbert?” Mary’s distant
voice asked.

“That’s a good bet,” Phil said. “I doubt she was really part of
his bullshit at all. There’s no telling what she’s learned from him.”

She swallowed water until her body told her to stop with a sharp
cramp in her abdomen. She put her head back and drifted on the cool lake the
water had formed for her. Then she was aware of being moved and of firm,
caring, human hands on her arms and legs. She felt a familiar and gentle
feminine touch on her brow. She opened her eyes and could see only a blur, but
she knew the shape in front of her eyes was Mary.

“More water . . .” she pleaded.

The edge of a plastic bottle was the hard prelude to the gush of
wetness that covered her mouth and tongue once more. She gobbled and swallowed
until the lake was full again.

“What the fuck are those things?” Mary’s faraway voice asked.

“I think those are how she climbed up the wall of the shuttle
bay,” Phil said.

“Oh, my God,” Mary said.

“There’s no other way up to this section of the ship.”

Mary reached out and touched one of Bailey’s suckers like it was
an insect. Her voice drifted over the water to her.

“I don’t wanna know,” Mary said. “Don’t take me there.”

A corner of Bailey’s mouth curled up and smiled.

*
 
*
 
*

When Gilbert was a boy of ten, he’d been made to sit in the first pew
after services and wait patiently while his mother and father met with the
Reverend. Sometimes he’d have to wait for an hour, sometimes for two hours
while they talked. On the times when the door to the manse was open to the
church, he could hear his father’s voice drift out in long monotones.

He would sit and rub his fingers over the smooth, stamped texture
of the Bible’s cover and stare out the high square window in the painted cinder
block wall and try to think of how the clouds were made. His father would come
out finally and stand in front of him and ask the question he always asked.

“Are you praying, Gilbert?”

“Yes,” he’d say.

“Did you ask God to guide your thoughts?”

“Yes.”

Later, with the smell of corn and ham and bread on the table and
his hunger gnawing at him, he was made to wait patiently while his father
washed up. When his father finally came to the table, his thin face and hands
would be polished red from the scrubbing he’d given them and the smell of soap
would mix with the smell of the food.

“Are you praying, Gilbert?”

“Yes.”

“Will you say grace? Gilbert, please.”

His mother would fold her hands and bow her head, and Gilbert
would look at the sharp white part in her black, pulled-tight hair and say
grace.

They would eat then and Gilbert’s father would drone on about this
or that while Gilbert watched the clouds out the v-shaped space in the lacy
curtains behind his mother’s head.

He’d finish his minuscule portions early but could not leave the
table until his father and mother were finished. His father would eat slowly
and sometimes, between bites, he’d lean over closer to his mother’s lowered
head to make his point better by jabbing the tines of the fork in her
direction. Gilbert would sit with his hands folded and think about what shapes
he’d make the clouds in if he could make them.

Finally released from the waiting, he’d go outside to look at the
clouds from the front porch.

Sometimes he’d watch summer storm clouds gathering, and the
thunder and lightning in them filled Gilbert with awe and pleasure.

He was watching clouds and waiting now. He’d never seen the clouds
from this vantage, but his thoughts about them were as they’d always been.
Clouds were power. They carried the weather and God’s weather controlled man’s
work. It planned his days and his nights. It made the crops to grow and the
rivers flow. Now God’s weather would carry the pestilence and God’s Judgment
would come to pass.

He had
made it so.

He turned from the wall port and side-stepped over to the ledge
and sat down. He looked down at his big legs and his narrow feet with their
twisted toes and thought nothing of them whatsoever.

He knew Bailey had been gone too long, but there was nothing to do
for it at the moment. It would be impossible to find her and she had been
warned not to go into the restricted areas. If she did, there would be nothing
to do. There would be plenty more where she came from, and now he knew that his
covenant with the aliens would allow him to have any of them modified for any
pleasure he wanted. Bailey wasn’t the only one with interesting thoughts about
pleasure. He had some ideas of his own. There was no end to the combinations he
could achieve with the aliens’ help. He thought about the clouds and how they
combined and bled together and reformed into more and more interesting shapes.

He laid his stone-white body down and dreamt images of freakish
pleasure that ran over and under his loins like warm mud.

The thought came to him to look at the trophy he’d taken from Phil
Lynch; to hold it in his hand and touch it. He’d thought about destroying it,
but like the gold star he’d taken from the Jew, he believed it made a fine
artifact and a relic of the events in the ship. He could see it encased in
clear plastic in the museum erected in his behalf. He wasn’t quite sure what
the little plaque next to it would say yet.

He walked over to the box, picked it up, put it on the ledge and
started to remove the clothes. When he lifted the shiny green slip that he’d
carefully folded and placed over it and found the phone gone, his mouth drew
into a straight, hard line.

Then he lifted his head and closed his eyes in a great show of
disappointment. He looked again and carefully lifted out the remaining pair of
pants and underwear, hoping that the phone had shifted under them as he moved
the box. He lifted the green slip again just to be sure. Then, holding the
smoothly draped slip with two dainty fingers, he stared down into the empty bottom
of the box and swallowed hard with his teeth apart and his mouth slightly open.

*
 
*
 
*

The shuttle bay seemed a likely place to start, so they’d made it
their destination with the goal to find some weakness in it, something they
could sabotage or destroy.

Ned had argued that they should go back to the larvae cache, crack
open the canisters and destroy every last one of the pupae in them. Phil
thought it over again and held it open as an additional option.

It was Ned who’d spotted Bailey lying unconscious in the tube.
They’d moved her into one of the shallow cells that lined it. Mary had wanted
to carry her back to her hole so she could care for her properly, but Phil
suggested that Bailey was now a bona fide desperado—best to keep her hidden.

Mary had managed to get Mary’s clothes back on her, working them
over the odd attachments on her arms and legs while trying not to touch them.
Then she helped her to sit up and lean against the wall.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better,” Bailey replied. “I needed water.”

“You sure did. You drank all we had.”

“Sorry.”

Mary gave her a compassionate smile. “Anytime,” she said, then
reached over and took Bailey’s face in her hands. She was so glad to see her.
She had worried about her so much. She resisted her lips and kissed her
forehead instead. She could feel Bailey’s big smile through her hands.

Phil sat down close enough to Bailey to touch her. They smiled
into each other’s face. Bailey was like a lost child found. Phil held up the
notebook. “Give me every detail,” he said.

Bailey started and talked for over an hour. She’d taken notes on
everything she saw, just like Phil had told her to. The drawings were up to the
high standards they’d come to expect and she used them as memory joggers,
recalling information she hadn’t yet written down.

Phil was very interested in the fact that the ship was mostly
empty; but it was the central nervous system that interested Phil the most,
just like she knew it would.

“How big in diameter is it?”

“Maybe three feet.”

“What’s it made of? Does it have a sheath, a covering?”

“It feels rubbery. Like thick, soft wire all woven together.”

“Can we cut it?”

“That I don’t know,” she said. “It looks strong and tough.”

Phil drummed his fingers on his knee. “That’s our target,” he
said.

“I knew it!” Bailey said. “I knew we could kill it!”

“That might be stretching it, but the idea’s got potential.” Ned
was standing and leaning heavily against the wall with one arm. He was the
color of paste and still sweating profusely. His mouth drooped down in a
perpetual open frown. He nodded his head just slightly in response to Phil’s
comment.