Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (50 page)

“Well, there’s more to do,” Phil said shaking the circulation back
into his hands. He picked up his darts and considered them. “These things work
great!” He shook them in victory in Seseidi’s direction.

“Phil, we can’t just leave these people like this,” Mary said.

Phil looked over at the woman on the table and saw the look of
thanks on her face. She must have seen the entire bloody bacchanal.

He pulled Bailey around and dug the plastic bag full of poisoned
slivers out of the pocket of her quiver and gingerly took one out. He thought
about it, then reached over and laid it gently into a deep incision on the
woman’s abdomen. Then he reached down and touched the woman’s head and brought
his face close to hers.

“It won’t hurt,” he whispered then held the bag out to Mary and
Ned.

“Do the others.”

“I . . . uh . . .” Mary started.

“Just do
it, goddamn it!”
Phil
snapped
.

There were four people on the
tables. A moment later, they were dead.

He considered opening the impregnation and incubation cells and
killing the captives in them but decided against it. If they were successful,
and Phil had his way, the entire ship and everything in it would be dead soon
enough. Besides, the impregnation cells had wasps in them, and he had no idea
how to remove them.

“Let’s go,” Phil said. “Where’s the spinal cord from here?”

“It’s . . .” Bailey began but didn’t finish.

An all too familiar
phoop
sound filled the chamber. It was followed by a quick
smack
that
made her jump, and Bailey looked at her arm. The burr had pinned her denim
shirt to her flesh right at her bicep. She barked a crazy laugh and looked at
Phil with a broad, silly smile. “Uh oh,” she said like it was a joke then
collapsed like soft clay.

Phil looked at the far entrance. Standing in it were three goons,
all armed with burr shooters. He roared a deep roar of rage and turned; but
before he’d taken a step, they fired, and he felt the solid smack of the burr
in the center of his back. The burr’s heat covered his back and neck instantly,
turning his bones to putty. The black, rubbery floor came at his face in slow
motion.

Mary was in mid-stride when the burr hit her in the left buttock.
She continued for a few more steps before the paralyzing warmth drew the
strength from her legs and sent her sprawling on the floor.

Her mind formed not a word, but a sound, like a wound-up thing
running down.

*
 
*
 
*

Phil willed his muscles to move, to twitch; to work his will, but
they totally refused.

He forced his eyes to focus.

He was upside down and could see his own arms dangling down and
the floor of the tube beyond his limp hands. The motion stopped and his arms
came to rest against the backside of the big bastard carrying him.

His mind was as numb as his body.

The words came through the damp cotton of his mind like thick
drops and splattered, wasted on the dark rubbery floor.

I’ve lost
it all. Linda . . .

He heard the tearing sound of a seam opening.

He could see past the tattooed arm of the goon into an enormous
chamber. The chamber walls were covered with growths of some kind like long
moles. Oblong, with one end tapered and a thicker end by which they attached to
the wall, the growths were oddly familiar to him. Randomly spaced, they hung
like loathsome fruit by the thousands and seemed to squirm and writhe, twisting
and straining at the point of attachment.

The goon shifted and gave him an auspiciously better view of one
of the growths just inside the chamber opening, and he could make out better
details, especially the papery surface texture. He could also see hundreds of
raised cup-sized scars on the chamber wall. As he watched, one of the growths
separated from the wall, waved its thick end back and forth like a caterpillar
and re-attached itself. He got a glimpse of a circular row of teeth and of
all-too-familiar little arms sticking out of it.

A brood
chamber,
he thought
.

He was looking at the aliens’ offspring, stuck like leeches to the
living wall of the chamber, suckling the wall itself like parasites. It made
sense to him then why the ship seemed so hollow and empty: most of its
occupants were foot-long larvae.

He would have smiled if he had been able.

Of
course,
he thought dimly
. Why
waste the ship’s physical resources on adults when you could transport the
seeds for a fraction of the cost?

He’d assumed that the aliens had overcome the barrier of
faster-than-light travel and had reduced the impossible distances they would
have had to come by generating equally impossible speeds. It seemed plausible
now that they might have only been able to create speeds a mere fraction of
light speed, but had overcome the second parameter of travel time, by traveling
for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

The goon started to move again, and the view of the brood chamber
slipped out of his field of vision. A moment later he was aware of being
dropped roughly to the floor, but experienced only the sensation of a sudden
jolting movement as if he were a video camera suddenly dropped.

The chamber was dark and the air was suffused with sound, a sound
like a hiss coming through syrup. Somewhere there was a deep moan, persistent
and pitiful; and, though he couldn’t tell for sure, he thought finally that it
was the voices of many joined as one—the very harmony of damnation.

He lay on the floor, eyes open and staring, looking into Mary’s
barely visible face, similarly frozen, staring back at him in the dim light.
Behind the frozen mask was fear so profound he felt his gut twist in spite of
the paralysis.

The burr’s drug wore off slowly; and as it did, he was able first
to move his toes, then his hands and feet. Finally, he could move his neck and
head, and hours later it seemed, he could sit up. He could see Mary’s face
twitch and her hand trying to move, but she was recovering more slowly than he.
He inched his way over to her and forced his hand to close around the burr
stuck in her backside. The brittle spines flaked off in his hands. He worked it
out in circles and lifted steadily until the short roots pulled free. He could
barely see the twisting roots, but he could feel them knocking and flailing
against his fingers. He flung it into the darkness and heard it splat against a
distant wall. His torpid brain wandered senselessly to Mary’s algebra lesson
about distances, and he gauged the minimum width of the chamber from the
imagined distance the burr flew before it struck.

Meaningless,
he
thought.

He rubbed her hands and arms, trying to work feeling and function
back into them. She came around slowly. He rubbed her back and legs until she shifted
her limbs in big, awkward, unfocused movements and tried like a colt to rise to
her feet.

Their first attempts at speech were more like grunts than words.
They grunted at each other not to try to talk and rubbed each other’s hands and
arms in the dim light until they were nearly normal. When she was able to work
her hands well enough, she pulled the burr out of Phil’s back.

“Where’s . . . Bailey?” she asked, like a drunk trying to sound
sober. “She . . . was . . . burred . . . firsht.”

“Bailey!” Phil called.

“Heeeer . . . .” came the weak reply. “I’m heeer . . . ”

They both scrambled off into the darkness toward the voice on
hands and knees until Mary bumped right into her just fifteen or so feet away.
Mary lifted Bailey’s head and rested it on her lap. She could make out the burr
in her arm. She worked it out and pitched it aside.

“Where . . . are . . . we?” Bailey asked.

Mary didn’t know where they were, but this wasn’t good. They had
killed several witches. There was no telling what kind of retribution this
alien species had in mind.

“I’d say . . . it’s some kind of brig or jail,” Phil said.

“No . . . lack of such facilities here,” Mary said, her tongue now
working better. “Where’s the Indian?”

“I think we lost him,” Phil said.

“What’s . . . that sound?” Bailey asked.

They’d listened to it for hours, but they stopped stock still and
listened a moment more to the moaning sound and the barely audible slickering
sound that filled the dark air.

“I’m scared . . .” Bailey said.

“I know, we all are,” Mary replied, gently patting her cheek.

“No. I mean I’m really scared,” she said, her voice tight.

“It’s okay,” Phil said. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not
okay!”

“Easy . . .” Mary tightened her hug on Bailey’s head.

“Phil.
Kill me, ”
Bailey said
evenly
. “Please kill me. ”

“Hey . . . ”

“Kill me
goddamn it! I’ve seen you do it!
 
Kill
me!”

“Stop it!”
Mary
screamed.

She started to plead again, and Mary placed her hand over her
mouth. Bailey screamed into the hand, wide eyed, for a long time. Her muffled scream
was lost to the darkness.

Phil wondered if killing her wasn’t the thing, the humane thing,
to do. He could kill them both and be done with it. The last thing he could do
as a human being would be to save these two from the unknown terror in this
chamber. It would be quick. With a mind of its own, his hand reached for his
belt and felt for the buckle. He got up on his knees and started to loosen it.

The seam tore open behind them and light poured in. Phil turned
and there in the seam was the silhouette of a single witch, somewhat larger
than he’d yet seen, aged, bent like an old tree root. Behind it were two goons.
The one in the rear was carrying what looked like large dark jars.

Phil snapped back around at the sound of Mary’s ear- piercing
scream.

There, just a few feet away was Gilbert, his arms out straight as
if pleading for help, his entire head and open mouth stuffed with tendrils from
the thing perched on his head. The lower part of his white body was wrapped
tight with grasping tendrils. The ones from the thing on his head slid in and
out of his mouth and ears, slowly, wetly. From the points of entry at his ears,
stains of dried blood ran down the length of his torso like thin snakes. The
light penetrated deeper into the chamber, and Phil could make out a dozen other
similar apparitions, some reduced to mere skeletons, some of them alien but not
like their captors. All were stiff like catatonics.

“Jesus . . .” Phil said.

It was as if she had put her foot down in a bear trap. Bailey let
out a deep howl of utter dread, a guttural bawl from some deep place unknown
even to herself.

“What are they?” Mary asked cautiously.

“Usssss .
. . ”
Bailey said.
“Uhnnnnn”

Bailey was on her feet in a flash and sprinting toward the door.
When she got as far as the witch, she scrunched up her arms to make herself
narrower and somehow fit through the space: a child’s maneuver. The alien
waddled awkwardly aside. The lead goon gave no ground and stopped her with an
outstretched arm. Phil could see in the light from the tube that it was the
heavily tattooed goon Gilbert had used as insurance when he came to claim the
phone. Bailey struggled against the massive arm in her panic, pumping her legs
against the goon’s enormous strength. The goon let her struggle for a second then
tossed her back into the chamber like a doll. She sprawled on the floor and
covered her head with her arms, trying to make them swallow her up. She wailed
in fear like an animal.

“Leave us alone, you bastards!” Mary yelled at the top of her
lungs.
“Just leave us alone!”