Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (6 page)

3

He had been rendered nearsighted, and he tried to force his eyes
to focus past his arm, but failed. He could see the burr stuck in his forearm
clearly enough, but beyond that only darkness and some bright areas devoid of form
or meaning. The burr seemed important somehow, then he remembered the sound of
the weapon that delivered it—and it all came back with a gush. The burr had
lost its iridescence. It looked dead.

Fucking
thing will infect me,
he thought
. I need an antibiotic . . .

The effort to raise his arm tired him, and he let it drop. He felt
the rubbery surface of the material under him and tried to gauge what it was.
He could feel hardness under the resilient surface and got the impression that
it was rubber padding over something very dense and heavy that held him. He
could see large patches of light in regular rows above but could make out no
detail. He blinked and squinted and opened his eyes wide until he began to gain
some distance vision. Finally, he could make out the distinct parts in the
structures above. The lights were circular, organic, and striated radially like
the spokes on a wheel. They were arranged row-wise and were imbedded in a dark
brown ceiling with an irregular surface. The light was an odd color, not as
cold as florescent, but not quite as warm as tungsten, either. It wasn’t quite,
but somehow the light felt
brown.

He tried to move his legs, but the signals to do so didn’t quite
make it down and the most he could do was twitch them a little. He raised his
arm again and with concentration and the help of his left hand, he took hold of
one of the spines on the burr. When he pulled, the spine came right off
effortlessly. He plucked the remaining spines from it like pedals from an evil
flower, leaving a dull brown ball still stuck by the spines that had penetrated
his flesh. He took hold of the burr and pulled. The burr had the stiff,
leathery tough consistency of a dried apple. As he pulled, he brought up a
large tee-pee of skin with it. This stung, but he was determined to remove it.
He pulled harder and steadily until the spines began to slowly come out.

As he pulled the burr loose, he could see that the spines had
transformed into short roots. Blood red, they squirmed in coils like worms and
he could feel the wiry strength and urgency in them as they flailed against his
fingers. Disgusted, he dropped the burr on the floor. Thin trickles of blood
left red trails from the pincushion pattern on his arm.

Evil damned thing
, he
thought. He wished he’d had a raging open fire to throw it onto.

He removed the one in his chest the same way, but more painfully,
then tried to sit up. The effort exhausted him, and he put his head back down
and closed his eyes.

Live
capture,
he thought dimly
. So easy
. . .

Then, like a relapse of the flu, he suddenly felt his body growing
weak, and without warning he blinked out of consciousness.

He came to after what seemed like only seconds and began to
slowly flex his hands.

They’re
working better,
he thought.

He heard a sound to his right, a choking sound, and turned his
head toward it. He saw a human face, an Asian male with a thin black line of a
mustache. He was looking at Phil and was trying to speak. He was straining to
get something out and his face was twisted up like that of a severe stammerer
with a word stuck fast. His desperate eyes were fixed on Phil’s.

There was another sound, too. A high-pitched hiss filled the air.

It might have been the being’s color, perhaps, or the texture of
its skin, or the fact that his vision wasn’t quite one-hundred percent that
prevented him from seeing it at first.

The form was roughly humanoid, but the color was that of poor,
pale wood. Its texture was like that of wet, rough paper, wrinkled and overlaid
like papier mache. Protruding out of the skin at regular intervals were short
dark spines about the size of pencil points. All the spines pointed downward
like a sparse, hideous coat. The thing was smallish, perhaps five feet, and its
limbs were thin and weak, not frail as from starvation, but small by nature.
Its body was curved into a slight “S”-shape, and the head formed out into the
top serif; its hindquarters the lower. The thin legs supported it from the
middle. The overall impression was of a bent root with limbs. The hands, of
which he caught just glimpses in their speedy work, were long-fingered and
deft.

The device in its hand reminded Phil of nothing else but a small
circular saw. The nimble hands were working the device into and over the man’s
body with unfathomable purpose. He could see it clearly and the man’s blood was
sucked upward onto the hissing, spinning blade by its motion and ran off it in
rivulets. He looked at the man’s face and realized that the man wasn’t trying
to speak—he was trying to scream.

From the being’s head hung strands of sparse, dark hair that
contributed to the suggestion that it might be female. Its naked body was
streaked and soiled, and Phil was quite certain he had never seen such an
abomination of form in nature, art or elsewhere. Somewhere far back in the
thing’s evolution was the impetus to burrow or squirm in the foulest regions.
The lack of hard edges and the tapered head suggested none else, Phil was sure
of it. The spines were designed to keep it in those filthy places, to lodge it tight
or prevent its removal.

He looked down at the feet and seeing those long-toed appendages,
with dirty and twisted nails, caused an involuntary grunt of repugnance.

The thing spun around at the noise.

The movement was so rat-like, quick and malicious, that it froze
him instantly.

The eyes were close set and black like beads. Nearly absent was a
nose although the intent of the two small nostrils in its place was apparent
enough. The forehead was low, and the skin of the being’s face had the same,
paper-like texture as its body, but not quite as rough. The mouth was a
horizontal slit, lipless, slightly agape, and visible behind it were upper and
lower rows of small, pointed teeth.

It hunched over Phil’s body and stared him in the face with those
shark-like eyes, cocking its head back and forth and grimacing like a curious
chimp. Phil remained stock still. It studied the arm that had taken the burr,
getting down very near it. The cutting device hissed close to the arm. When the
creature touched Phil’s arm, some reflex jerked the arm back away from the
alien touch. The being moved with the speed of a lizard and dropped the cutting
device, leaving it dripping blood and dangling from its umbilical. It reached
with one hand and leaned down hard on Phil’s neck to hold him down. Phil tried
to struggle and managed to get his arms up under it to push it off. The thing
felt almost soft, the bones elastic and more like cartilage than bones. It was
surprisingly slippery despite the rough appearance of the skin. The spines were
sharp against his hand. The sensation of contact with the pliable bones under
the wet, loose skin set off a dark, grinding impulse to tear it to shreds with
his hands. All he could do was struggle lamely against it and absorb with each
movement more of its tactile repugnance through his hands.

Using its free hand, the being reached down and pulled from a slot
in the table what was unmistakably an injection device. It jabbed the business
end of the thing into Phil’s chest. A familiar warmth spread through him, and
his hands fell away from the creature’s scrawny flanks like rope.

*
 
*
 
*

Mary got to the grocery, as she called it, just in time. If she’d
let Tom Moon keep her any longer she’d have missed chow. She hoped the little prick
would show up late himself, but she knew better than that. That boy wanted his
Twinkies. You didn’t come late and get what was left, because if you got there
late, there wasn’t anything left.

There were about twenty or so other captives there when she got
there, milling around, waiting for the goons to come with food they could eat.
When the door bloomed open, a pair of goons moved in, each carrying two
enormous net sacks filled with food stuff. She guessed each one of those bags
weighed a hundred pounds and they were carrying them like purses.

Mary wondered why the goons were usually in pairs, rarely alone.
Maybe they were husband and wife or something, but damned if you could tell by
looking what the gender of the things were. Maybe they just worked the buddy
system for security. It didn’t matter—just one of them could kill you easily
enough.

The goons spilled the boxes out onto the floor like they were
feeding pigs, then left. Not even a grunt from them. That’s when it started,
just like always. God, she hated this. There was hardly ever any real fighting
over the food, although she had seen the little guys from Taipei or wherever,
punch and drag a woman until she let go of a half pack of
rice cakes
of all
things. She’d fought back the desire to jump in and help the woman, but didn’t
want any enemies either. She was just going in to help her anyway when the big
Canadian guy roughed up one of the Orientals and asked him how
he
liked it.

The worst part was that all the food was out on the floor and you
had to reach over and around all the other hands and sometimes two hands came
down on the same bag of chips and if one of you was nice, a hand would drift
over to a box of cookies or something else. It was the embarrassment of having
to reach and make claim to the food that she hated most. There was almost
always enough. They were very careful about making sure the incubators had
enough food.

The only food they ever got was packaged and ready to eat or
canned. There was never any food that needed to be cooked, even if there had
been a way to cook it. Almost everybody had a cardboard box or a noisy plastic
bag or two to put things in. Since the food came only once every two days or
so, you had to stock up while you could. She’d stopped by her hole on the way
and picked up the laundry basket she used for that purpose. It was plastic and
split on two sides but it had just enough capacity and strength for the job.
Tom Moon had tried to con her out of it once and she’d told him she’d rather
suck a goon’s dick than give it up to him. He thought it was funny. She’d meant
it.

The faces in the grocery changed all the time. Sometimes there
were fewer than the time before and she always figured the missing ones had
been killed or used for something other than incubation. She’d seen some of the
other chambers and the unspeakable horror that went with them.

Soon, a new face or two would find its way to the grocery with the
same questions; the same pathetic, pleading questions, sometimes in broken
English, for which no answers were possible.

Fill up.
Just grab some food. I don’t know any more than you do. Just fucking eat.

In fact though, Mary had gathered quite a bit of information since
she’d been taken. But she kept it to herself. She wasn’t really sure why except
that most of what she knew was useless, really, and none of it brought her any
closer to getting home. The exchange of information between humans where the
need and the desire to know was so high could take place with cold efficiency.
But Mary knew it didn’t do a new captive any good to tell them what you knew.
That just sent them farther into shock. The vernacular that she’d taken such
pains to develop was alien to a new captive, too, and she wasn’t entirely
comfortable sharing it with the others somehow. Some of the words were goofy or
weird, even to her, and she kept those definitions to herself. You could learn
a new vernacular through osmosis, but not Mary’s, simply because she never used
it around anyone else. She decided after about a month that she’d just keep
what she’d gathered to herself completely. The long and short of it

was that
Mary’s particular news was just too grisly to tell and there wasn’t a damn
thing to do about it anyway.