Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (7 page)

It was odd to her how she had learned to turn her back on the
suffering of others like that. She’d never have considered such a thing when
she was alive. She
was
dead now after all. Nothing could suffer like she had for as long
as she had and still be alive, surely to god.

She didn’t think she could stand another cycle. But she knew what
they did to those who were so sick and used up they couldn’t stand. Those poor
souls were dragged down to another level of Hell. She’d seen all the faces
change in the months she’d been here. She’d outlasted them all except Fred and
of course, Tom Moon.

God,
she thought
, what a sickening achievement that is.

Mary looked up and saw a new face in the grocery. The woman was
standing in the tube with her hair still dripping wet. It was her first cycle,
Mary knew. You could always tell. She stumbled out of the tube with really
ill-fitting clothes on and no shoes. That was a mistake almost everybody made
the first time; no shoes. Most people would rather go barefoot than put on
someone else’s shoes. The floor in the ship was just tacky enough to drive you
nuts after a few days of walking on it. It pulled on your feet like taffy and
would literally strip the skin off in time.

The woman was still in shock but she hadn’t folded. If you folded
up, they’d feed you to the ship, they might anyway but going into total
shutdown got you a one-way trip down a feed hole.

Total
confusion,
Mary thought
. She
feels like a bastard calf at a roundup.

Mary studied her a moment more. She would have found her attractive
in another life.

“You’d better get some of this. You have to eat,” Mary said to
her. It was longest bit of genuine advice she’d given anyone in months.

The woman was dazed and had some difficulty locating the voice because
several people were looking at her at the same

time. Mary thought at first that she couldn’t understand English,
but she was trying to find the speaker, all right. When the woman’s gaze fell
on Mary, she waved at her to make contact.

“Come on over,” Mary said.

That brief human contact made the woman start to cry and the look
was so totally pitiful it broke Mary’s heart. It was a good sign, actually. If
she could cry, she could still feel something. The woman just stood there with
her lips quivering. Mary saw a little girl there, just a little frightened
girl. Mary plucked a few more items up into her basket, then added a package of
Ding Dongs just for the woman. Chocolate could work miracles. She hefted the
basket up under her arm and started to walk over to her when Tom Moon came out
of the tube behind her like a tattered brown leaf and touched the new woman.
She shrank from the touch.

You didn’t like to be touched much after an extraction, especially
by a rat like Tom. Mary decided right then that she would adopt this one. Tom
had his beady sights on her; and that was enough. It was probably a mistake.
Nobody lasted, and it was best not to get too attached.

“Leave her alone, and go get yourself some candy or something,”
Mary said to Tom. “Go on. Split. I mean it.”

“You the only one allowed to have friends?” Tom said with a sneer.
“I got some friends, you know. Some you’d like to have as friends I bet.”

“Sure,” Mary said sarcastically.

She took the woman by the arm and pulled her gently away from him.
Come with me. Do you like chocolate, little girl?” Mary thought a little
perverse humor might get rid of the trembling lower lip if she got the joke,
but she didn’t get it and cried even more. “It’s okay. Come on.”

It wasn’t at all okay, and Mary knew it. Mary could see the fine
lines of new scar tissue on the woman’s neck just under the collar of her
shirt. At least she’d had sense enough not to pick a silk blouse.

The tube leading out of the grocery to the holes was dark like all
the tubes. There was just enough light from the few dim light organs along the
ceiling to keep you from stumbling into the rubbery walls.

When they had gone a ways in, the woman stopped cold in the tube
and turned to Mary.

“They cut me open,” she said plainly, unable to keep her lip from
trembling.

“I know,” Mary said.

The woman started shaking her head as if to deny the experience.
She shook her head and shook it. Her eyes rolled up in her head.

“I know,” Mary repeated. “I know.”

She
s
losing it,
Mary thought.
She put her free arm around the trembling woman and held her until she stopped
shaking. Several other captives walked past like zombies with their plastic
bags rattling against their legs. They saw Mary and the woman, all right, but
seemed not to.

They’re
smarter than me,
Mary thought.
A lot
smarter.

Mary wanted to move along. It wasn’t a good idea to just stand
around in a tube that the goons used for passage, too. The big bastards were
often unpredictable, and anytime a captive got in their way was a good time to
get hurt. Mary’s hole was at the very end of the tube, and they had some
distance to go. Mary wanted to eat and then sleep. Blessed sleep. In her
dreams, there was no pain. She pulled the woman gently along.

The woman had to be guided every step of the way. When they came
to the raised opening to her hole, Mary had to push her up into it. The holes
were where they lived and the only refuge from the horror. The holes weren’t
safe, but they were better than the rest of the ship.

The goons came to the opening to the holes and called them out
with a hissing whistle when they wanted to take them. The whistle noise sounded
to Mary like the way kids who can’t quite whistle whistled. The first time Mary
heard it, it was just a noise they made. After she knew it meant she was going
to be used, it became the prelude to her nightmares, and the silly little sound
itself took on dreadful weight. The whistling would start somewhere down the
tube, and Mary would know they were taking people. Her heart would race until
she thought it would burst when the sound started. Sometimes they’d pass by her
hole and stop at someone else’s and whistle them out, not her. Then sometimes
Gilbert would walk past and cast a sober, priestly look in at her to let her
know that
he
knew she was all right this time. He did that to everyone,
though, just to puff up his own importance. Sometimes he’d walk along and pare
his nails with the tiny little knife he’d found. Sometimes he would nod to her
in greeting and she was oddly encouraged by that. There wasn’t a lot in the way
of normal human decency in the ship so even the sanctimonious nod of greeting
from a hypocrite was strangely welcome if the timing was right.

On the times when she was passed over, she would hear the whimpering
pleas for it not to be them this time and she would fill with guilt. Sometimes
she would see Gilbert standing there not listening to the begging. Sometimes he
would seem to listen, then he’d tell them it would all be all right, but they
had to go along—or die. Then he’d give them some “God this” and “God that.”

She tried not to come out once when the goon stood there and
whistled to her. When she didn’t move, the goon came in after her. It didn’t
like doing that, and she could tell it was pissed and that she’d made a big
mistake. The goon could barely fit through the opening. It grabbed her by the
ankle with its enormous hand and pulled her out so roughly she thought it was
going to pull her leg off. Gilbert took the opportunity to lecture her in front
of the goons, even though they probably didn’t understand a word of it. He
told her that she was very lucky to be alive and that if she ever did that
again she wouldn’t live long enough to regret it. Useless stuff like that. But
that was the last time she didn’t move when a goon whistled for her.

There were about as many holes as there were people in this
section of the ship. She knew there were more people than just the ones along
this tube because she had seen them being pushed into the small stinging cells.
She had also seen many different faces in the big chamber where they did the
cutting and probing. She had once imagined that the ship was ten or fifteen
miles wide. She didn’t think it was, but had no way of knowing it wasn’t. It
was much bigger than this little section, though, she was sure of that.

Mary had a fairly comfortable hole as holes went. She had put a
little extra effort into the bed, which was the only meaningful accoutrement.
They were allowed access to the blankets and the abundance of sleeping bags in
the dump on a regular basis. It was always warm in the ship, and she couldn’t
stand the idea of sleeping in a sleeping bag because of it. But the idea of
being uncovered while she slept bothered her so she had a nice soft bed made of
several sleeping bags as a mattress and a light blanket over that. She’d seen a
pillow in one of the other holes once and had thought about copping it, but
couldn’t bring herself to, so she’d made do with yet another sleeping bag
rolled up as a pillow. There were other things in the dump, too, most of it
completely useless. Tents, pot and pans, lawn furniture, coolers, kitchen
stuff like silverware, and of course an abundance of can openers. There were
occasionally cigarettes and matches or lighters to stoke them up with, too.
That was a big plus. Sometimes, cigarettes would show up in the grocery, too.
She couldn’t understand why the hell they gave them cigarettes.

The dump was the only source of what human stuff they had. The really
curious thing was that it had all been carefully and strangely filtered by the
goons. The goons job, from what she could see, was number one, to catch them
and, two, to keep them fed and alive. She had once seen a garden hose in the
dump and wondered how they thought a godamned garden hose could help them stay
one wit more alive in this place. One of the few times she’d smiled since she
had been abducted was when she tried to think how she could fashion a weapon to
kill Tom Moon out of that garden hose.

Some of the other captives had dragged piles of the stuff back to
their holes as if just having it around them could somehow save them, or at
least remind them of who and what they were.

Clutter was clutter to Mary, even in this place. She had her bed
and her food basket and her can opener and her utensils, and her little
handmade tools. That was enough.

“What is this place?” the woman asked, looking around the small
chamber. Her voice sounded like an odd recording.

“This is my room.”

Until that moment, Mary had never referred to the hole as “her
room,” but that’s what it was. It was hers. No other humans tread here
uninvited. Nevermind that she’d never invited anyone in. The hole was a
possession as surely as the food basket.

Its dark, curved walls enclosed a space some twelve by twelve
feet. The floor was flatter than the walls, giving it an igloo feeling. The
single dim light organ in the center of the ceiling burned with its odd light
continually. She’d often wished there was some way to turn it on or off, but
that was impossible. The walls were the same dark, rubbery texture as the rest
of the ship. There was a single vent or port, about a foot wide, halfway up
one side that breathed warm, moist air into the chamber half the time and
sucked air out half the time. She had watched the smoke from her cigarettes
drift up and out that vent and be pushed away from it when it exhaled. The fact
that they always had air with enough oxygen in it baffled her, but a lot of
things about the place baffled her.

What little comfort she had, she got from the hole. It was her
womb. She had taken possession of it at the end of her first cycle. Dazed and
terrified beyond reason like this woman, she had crawled up into it when she
saw others, like rodents, doing the same. There was a single thin blanket and
some unopened cans of soup and lots of trash in the hole when she first moved
in. She had pushed all the junk into one spot on the floor, wrapped herself up
in the dirty blanket and, exhausted, slept a little. When she awoke, the empty
cans and wrappers were gone. Room service had cleaned them out of the hole.
Room service was a pair of goons that came through every couple of days and
removed anything that looked like trash. They used a long rake-like tool and
dragged out all the junk they could reach. They weren’t too choosy about what
was or wasn’t trash, but they seemed to know that stuff that was in a neat row
wasn’t trash and everything else was. Mary learned early to keep her

keepable stuff in neat rows.

So the
hole wasn’t completely uncomfortable, and it was, if not a home, her dark
sanctuary. They gave her this brown chamber and kept it clean and ventilated so
she could recover from the trauma they inflicted just so they could traumatize
her all over again.