Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (5 page)

When the creature was done it raised its bloody face and looked at
Bailey. She was in shock, and not entirely in possession of her faculties, but
she could have sworn that the head smiled an evil little smile at her. She
heard the distant sound of an odd fog horn and thought how strange it was to
hear it just then. She wondered dimly how it came to be that someone installed
a nice fog horn right here in this peaceful canyon.

*
 
*
 
*

Phil jumped out of bed and pulled on his pants. This was no jet
engine he was hearing and it was right over the cabin whatever it was. He
pulled on his boots, grabbed his shirt and put it on fast. He snatched up his
large five-cell Maglite off the dresser and headed out of the bedroom. Just as
he was getting to the bedroom door, he dashed back, opened the top dresser
drawer, stuffed the stainless steel, forty-caliber Smith and Wesson auto into
his back pocket and raced out.

Better
safe than sorry,
he
thought.

He crashed out the front door and vaulted over the porch rail. He
had the light on and pointed skyward before he hit the ground. The sound coming
from above was deafening.

Set for a narrow beam, his light drew a bright pencil-thin line on
it, illuminating just a small spot. Phil quickly twisted the head of the light
to get a broad flood light on the thing’s underside.

Phil blinked and shook his head. When what your senses tell you in
the now runs contrary to what they have so carefully gathered in the past,
history usually wins. “That thing’s impossible,” he said under his breath.

He was looking at the shining underside of the creature’s carapace
and could make out the huge flat, overlapping plates that armored it. Phil was
no biologist, but he knew enough about natural science to know that he was
looking at something very close to an arthropod. It was more insect-like than
crab-like. It had no visible appendages, as if it were an immature or larval
form rather than a fully developed adult. Its color was dark brown, like a
beetle. Phil gauged its size at about forty feet in length and fifteen wide.
The entire rear section was encased in a framework of dull metal-like
machinery. Near the anterior where the machinery was the heaviest, the creature
had grown into and around it like a tree will grow around offending barbed
wire. The craft was stationary, and Phil panned the light toward the head. The
head lacked detail except for the eyes that looked precisely like the compound
eyes of any bug he had ever seen. The light found an open orifice some three
feet wide in the thorax. As he watched, a brown plate slid over the hole and
the deafening sound stopped. The auditory void seemed to leave his head wrapped
in cotton.

Phil’s hair suddenly stood up as if influenced by static. The
craft banked and moved off without a sound down the westerly side of the hill
just above treetop level as if it were sliding down on ice. The motion had an
element of smooth grace to it. He tracked after it with the light until it was
lost in the darkness of the canyon.

Phil Lynch was not subject to hallucinations. He had never had
one, auditory or visual, either drug-induced or otherwise. He questioned at
that moment whether or not he had just had one. He replayed the entire incident
and carefully viewed the details. No holes existed. Nothing had been lost in
some mental fog since the craft drifted away. There was the creature in his
mental play-back, shiny, insectoid—the machinery woven into it—the sound organ
booming its unearthly throat-singer’s harmonic at a jillion decibels.

There it
was,
he thought.
I saw it. I heard it. It
was not from Earth. It was alive. It flew because somehow all that grown-over
hardware allowed it to do so, and it made noise. It was all of these things
—
and it was real.

He pursed his lips in thought but felt the smile starting
somewhere deep in his facial apparatus. He held it down at first, but let the smile
out, finally, and felt its stiffness, its ambivalence, like smiling at a cop
who was writing him a ticket. It was far too important to smile about, this
event, but smiling was the only possible response. He had just seen a thing
that had changed his perception forever about Heaven and Earth.

It was one thing to imagine a biological impossibility, to draw
it, say, or model it. Nothing in Phil’s history supported even the remotest
possibility of the honest-to-god, there-it-is reality of the bizarre animal he
had just seen. So he smiled.

“I’ll be godamned,” he said.

There was something else, too. The creature had left a sense of
alien danger in the air like a residue. He held the light under his arm, took
the pistol out of his pocket, racked the slide and chambered a round. Just to
be fully prepared, he took off the safety and wrapped his forefinger around the
trigger guard.

He stood there for a minute, gun in one hand, light in the other
shaking his head in disbelief. He shined the light over the immediate area and
the cabin, looking for any artifact the craft might have left that could add
real matter to the memory of it.

He was checking out the rocks a hundred feet to the east when he
heard the running sound some distance behind him down the hill. He spun and saw
just a glimpse of the animal as it scrabbled up behind a juniper thicket down
the hillside about fifty yards distant. He wasn’t sure what it was, but the
Marine in Phil didn’t like the motion it made one bit. The movement sent a
series of very telling messages to the part of Phil’s psyche that was trained
to react in the gravest extreme to open threats to his person. In the Corps
they taught you not to die for a cause, but to make the enemy die for his. Like
the skull tattooed on his shoulder, that idea had faded somewhat with age, but
it was still there, etched on his soul, still legible. It was his righteous
duty to preserve his life and expend that of his enemy, if necessary, in the
process. Period. In light of recent events, rational thinking was giving
ground to a much older, highly reactive set of responses.

He began to form a clearer idea about the sounds he’d heard coming
from the campsite below. That wasn’t raucous play he’d heard; they’d been
attacked.

As he watched, the animal left cover and scrabbled up to another
thicket some fifty feet closer. He got a clear enough look at it this time to
see that it was definitely
not
local fauna. It was big, about two hundred pounds, fast, and
moving with what looked very much like hostile intent.

He wasn’t quite convinced it was an assault, but the thing wasn’t
extending an invitation to tea, either. Phil knew by that unmistakable
maneuvering cover to cover that
he
was the object, if not the
target
of its
approach. He did a quick tally of his assets: light, hill, truck, porch, pistol
with ten rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. He had the advantage. He
narrowed the light’s beam and put it directly on the thicket. As he watched,
another one just like the first scrambled up to the former’s first location.
The intention of these things was now leaning very strongly toward the
unfriendly side. He hadn’t seen anything that resembled a weapon on their naked
bodies, but it was foolish to think there weren’t any.

He needed cover.

He walked quickly backwards until he could move in tight behind
the truck’s open back door, all the time keeping the light and his sights on
the thicket. There was very little between him and them in the way of cover
now; and despite the fact that there were two of them, he felt sure he could
plant all of his bullets in them if they charged. He wished suddenly that he
had an extra magazine with him, but eleven rounds of .40 caliber, high
pressure, jacketed hollow points was enough to stop an elephant. He raised the
light up on his shoulder and aimed at the thicket, placing the light’s beam
right over his sights—and waited for their next move.

His breathing was shallow and quick. Bad. He deepened it and
slowed it down.

This is
crazy, especially if it’s real,
he thought.

There was no trace, no facts to see, only his memory to rely on
for the truth. He needed to see the damn things, to capture them in the light.

Come out!

His breathing was getting short again. He breathed deep.

There was no movement from the thicket. This was nuts.

He was holding a thicket at gunpoint that was all. Phil thought
back on everything he had eaten that day, looking for the source of the
botulism he had ingested.

Still nothing. A bat flicked down out of the darkness and through
the light for an instant then out again.

Come out!

The first gray hunter leaped from behind the thicket and with
great strides of its powerful legs, sprinted up the hill toward Phil’s
position. There is no doubt about the meaning of some behaviors—charging, snarling
behavior being one of those that is especially clear. It came out and ran
directly up his sights, and Phil had no trouble at all seeing that the wicked
teeth in that vicious head had him as their goal. It kept its head oddly level
as

it ran,
providing a fairly steady target.

This thing is stupid,
he
thought.
I’ve got it cold.
Hallucination or not, Phil held the sight on the thing’s head,
squeezed the trigger and felt the comforting recoil of the pistol. When the
barrel dropped back down on the target a millisecond later, the creature was
still moving. He shot again and again, timing each shot just right, dead on
each time. The animal crumpled and dropped forward like a sack after the fifth
shot, raising a cloud of dust, not more than twenty feet from him.

Goddamned
things can take a bullet and still move like lightning.

He breathed deep and put his sights on the thicket, waiting for
the second one to attack.

No
weapons. They should have come at the same time, charged in unison,
he thought.

The strategy was clear and Phil swallowed hard. He turned the
light on the fallen creature in front of him and chanced a good look at it.

Alien.
Nothing like that on Earth, ever.

The thick, long neck was twisted and the musculature was clearly
visible under the thin skin. Its skin looked wet; and, even though it was dead,
Phil got a sense of overpowering malice and strength from it. He could see the
black dots where he’d hit it. He’d hit its head three times, once directly
between the eyes. Looking at the creature, it occurred to Phil that what he was
seeing just wasn’t capable of building or using the thing he’d seen floating
above the cabin. The feet/hands were the clincher. The fingers were blunt, only
three to an arm/leg, and it had no opposable thumbs.

No thumbs, no grip. No grip, no tools. No tools, no technology.
That was the law. This was an animal in front of him, and it was not capable of
fabricating the flying thing he’d seen.

He turned the light back on the thicket, and no sooner had he done
so that the creature behind it galloped and weaved away down the slope. It was
soon out of range of the light and the pistol, and Phil thought better of
shooting at a retreating threat and wasting sparse ammunition.

The sound was a
phoop
sound like a child’s pneumatic toy. It came from the rocks to the
west. The projectile was slow, because he remembered having time to turn his
head fully toward the sound before it hit him. It had come within a hair of
striking the truck’s door and whacked him right in the midsection, just under
his sternum. He remembered thinking what a nice shot it was as he turned the
light down on his abdomen to see what kind of hole, exactly, an alien weapon
would make.

Stuck in his chest was a dark burr about the size of a golf ball.
It was covered with sharp, inch-long spines and the body of it, which pulsed
slowly, was iridescent like the sheen on a buffet roast. Its forward inertia
must have created a sizable dent when it hit, because fully half of the spines
were stuck at various depths in his flesh. A warmth radiated immediately
outward with the burr as its center. It spread rapidly through his chest and
out his arms and down his legs. He turned the light on the rocks and saw
nothing that might have launched it. He started to raise the pistol up and
heard the
phoop
sound again. The second burr struck his gun arm square in his
forearm, and he knew from the angle that the shot must have come from somewhere
in the vicinity of the cabin. There were at least two weapons on him at right
angles to his position.