Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (22 page)
Read Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) Online
Authors: David Coy
Tags: #dystopian, #space, #series, #contagion, #infections, #fiction, #alien, #science fiction, #space opera, #outbreak
I’ve had it with this shit.
“Sonofabitch bastard . . . come
off you fuck . . .”
She worked it around, swearing
through clenched teeth. She worked and pulled until it came away with a pinch
and a slight tearing sound. She looked at the flat underside with its little
feeding mechanism showing, then she put it under her foot and hammered it into
the soft soil with her heel of her boot.
“Oooo, you . . . prick . . .”
Mirror trembling, she looked at
the wound on her neck. The bastard had left a little brownish and sunken patch
with a dark red center. She squeezed it, producing a drop of pink liquid. There
was some swelling, but it didn’t look too serious. It might have been if she
hadn’t found it when she did. If she didn’t get back to the clinic to treat it,
she’d be dead anyway.
Hunger and thirst gnawed with a sudden
and uncommon ferocity. She looked around for a grape vine to pillage. There
were none in the vicinity. Breakfast would have to wait.
She moved up to the ravine and
studied it. Extending the entire length of the ravine, a light mist hung like a
soft, white sheet just over the treetops. Something flew through the mist,
cutting a swirling swath, then vanished. This was as good a place to descend as
any.
She started down the slope
sideways, keeping her leading leg down and out far. She hoped the incline on
the opposite side of the ravine was no steeper.
By the time she reached the
bottom, she was soaked through with sweat, her usual condition during the day.
There was a stream about two meters
wide in the bottom of the ravine. The water moved rapidly, gurgling quietly
around the large polished stones that littered the streambed. The water looked
crystal clean; and when she touched it, it was cool. She scooped a sample of it
in her hand and examined it for weird particulates or wriggling any-things. She
didn’t see anything, so she tried it two or three more times, holding the
little puddle up close to her face and scowling at it.
She wanted to drink it in great
mouthfuls, to stick her head right in the stream and suck, her thirst was so
great.
Completely satisfied that nothing
visible contaminated the water, she sampled it again, just to be sure.
Raising the water up to her
mouth, she lapped it with the tip of her tongue. It was the sweetest water
she’d ever tasted.
She knelt down and drank a whole
scoop, feeling its cool wetness run off her chin and down her neck. Unable to
contain herself, she stuck her face in the stream and sucked, indulging the
very fantasy of the moment before. She washed her face and spewed and blew
water until another, even better idea struck her. She stood up and stripped out
of her clothes and boots. Taking a look around, as if she might get caught, she
stepped naked into the stream. Feeling her way over the moss-covered rocks with
her feet, she headed downstream until she found a deep channel and slowly,
deliberately, sat down.
She splashed water over herself,
feeling the coolness wash the sweat and grime, and a little of the last two’s
trauma away. Feet downstream, she lay in the hollow of the streambed and let
the water flow over her hair and face. The flow of water lifted her slightly
and threatened to wash her away, but she anchored her feet and lay there,
luxuriating in cool freshness, until the water began to chill her. She stood
and moved to the bank, trying her best to keep her feet out of the mud.
Using her hands, she stripped the
water from her arms and legs. When she took a swipe at her left calf, her hand
slid over something stuck there—something cool, soft and long. She thought it
was a water-softened twig or seedpod until she turned her leg and looked at it.
“You bastard . . . goddamn
you too!”
The leech was long and the color
of wet wheat. Its tapered tail was flattened, paddle-like and curled and twisted
slowly. Its head bloomed out into a round sucker, fused to the smooth skin of
her leg. She reached down, worked her fingers up close to the head, pinched
and pulled. It came off easier than she thought it would, leaving a pale hickey
and a thin trail of blood. She flung the leech into the foliage and heard its
rubbery texture smack and spin against leaf and vine.
“Fuck
this place . . .”
She rinsed the wound off and
tried to forget about the possibility of infection.
She thought about washing out her
clothes, but worried that they would never dry in the jungle’s humid
atmosphere. That’s all she needed
—
moldy
clothes and a strange rash on top of everything else. She settled for a good
shake before putting them back on.
The bath put an even sharper edge
to her appetite. There were various fruits and pods, both large and small
hanging from branches everywhere around the stream. She recognized most of
them; she’d been walking past them for two days, avoiding them as just another
risk. However, this time she saw none of her staple of grapes; and the time
seemed right to add some variety to her diet. She plucked a large, green
banana-shaped husk from a branch and using her knife, sawed it open lengthwise.
She spread it the rest of the way open with her fingers and sniffed the pulpy,
seedy contents. She wrinkled her nose. It smelled like dirty feet.
“Gad . . .”
With two fingers, she dropped the
foul-smelling pod and looked for something else.
One of the shorter fern-like
plants had what looked like nuts clustered in the fork of each branch. She
pried one out, and, tossing caution to the wind, bit into it, only to find a
rock-hard shell under the soft green covering. She chewed at the leathery piece
she’d bitten off. It was tough and persistent. She finally worked a taste out
of it bitter as alum. She spat it out.
“Shit.”
She put the nut down on a rock
near the stream and stomped on it with her boot. The nut broke easily, and she
squatted down to examine her prize. She poked around the fibrous contents and
found blackened rot and a single white grub about a centimeter long. She
realized that the nuts weren’t nuts but some kind of plant gall created by the
squirming larva in front of her. She brushed the mess into the water in
frustration.
At the water's edge, thick grass,
the tufts round and long, looked as if it had been grazed down, but not
recently. The grazed ends were browned and dried. She looked around for tracks
but couldn’t find any. She grabbed a bundle of the grass and pulled, thinking
it would break off. Instead, the bundle pulled up easily out of the muck and
revealed a cluster of mud-covered, pink bulbs like onions. She swirled the
bulbs in the water to clean them off, then bit into one. The flavor was mildly
sweet, the flesh firm and crisp. Ravenous, she gnawed one all the way up to the
green stem. Then she walked around aimlessly, waiting, letting her digestive
system decide if she’d been mortally poisoned
—
all the time eyeing the delicious onions
lying wet on the bank.
If I die, I die . . .
She ate them all, then a couple
more bunches besides. She ate until she felt full.
Washed and fed, she walked
upstream a ways, found an opportune spot to cross and started up the other
side of the ravine.
By the time she reached the top,
the sun was high, turning the jungle into a sauna.
“You
gotta get to the doctor, Mike,” Bruce said. “That don’t look so good.”
Mike was scared. He’d heard about
Del Geary. Now he had the same disease. He could barely move his feet, and they
hurt something awful.
“You heard Eddie,” Mike said, his
voice strained with a child’s fear. “The doctor’s gone. She’s missing.”
“Should I call Joan, then?”
“Yeah,” Mike said cautiously.
“Maybe she’ll know what to do.”
It took Joan less than a minute
to make it to Mike’s shelter. When she saw his condition, her first impulse was
to put her arms around him and hold him. A hug was no substitute for treatment.
She sat on the bed and felt his forehead, letting her eyes drift around the
neat, clean, cheap bedroom.
Bruce leaned against the doorjamb
with one of his nubby fingers in his mouth and a look of utter cluelessness on
his face. These were just kids; two kids living in a crappy pre-fabricated
shelter on a hostile planet, trying to understand—trying to live. She could see
herself in them twenty-five years ago. But she wasn’t as naive now; she could
make some sense of it all.
It didn’t make it any easier to
swallow.
She had signed her first sub when
she was ten, the legal age. The job was off-world and her parents had spent the
last few weeks getting her ready to go; preparing to cut the cord that bound
them all with kisses and kind, sympathetic smiles only parents can muster. Joan
had been having hideous nightmares for weeks. To soothe her, her parents had given
her a party, complete with the best cake they could afford. Even her older
brother Frank had come down from the plains of Alaska for the day to help
celebrate. But it wasn’t really a celebration. Everyone cried, and the cheap
cake was inedible. Her father broke down and sobbed.
Some things stick. Her brother
told her something that stuck that day; something that stuck like gum to the
sole of her shoe, an unwanted attachment that would forever impede her walk
through life. He didn’t say it to hurt her; he said it just so she could
understand the hard truth of it.
“You’re not a little girl
anymore,” he’d said. “You’re a slave like everybody else.”
The night of the party, Joan
dreamed she died and saw her own body in a casket made of cheap, pink cake.
When they dropped the casket in the ground, it fell to pieces with the sound of
soft wood breaking.
“Am I going to die?” Mike asked
her.
“Not if I can help it,” she said.
“Bruce, go find Rachel Sanders, she’s in the lab next to the clinic. She’s
probably still asleep. Wake her up if you have to. Go now.”
Bruce was glad to be told what to
do next. He ran down the hall and out the door.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“All right as long as I don’t try
to walk.”
She smiled.
“Hurts, huh?”
“Yeah.”
She put her hand back on his
forehead.
“How did you get this, I wonder?”
Mike swallowed, and Joan saw the
look in his face. It was an odd little look; one with something to say
underneath it.
“Is there something about all
this I should know?”
Mike took a deep breath and did
what his father would have done: he told the truth. Fighting back tears, he
told her about the barrels and the cave and the locator. He told her about the
drugs—and he told her about Eddie.
When Mike was finished, she
patted the back of his hand. It was moist with sweat.
So that was it.
She hadn’t entirely trusted Eddie
Silk. It was a feeling about him she’d had from the start. Eddie was just a
little too quick with a slippery smile. Well, he’d just been busted down to
nothing for his little escapade. Joan knew just what do to with little
bastards like him.
She ran cool water over a cloth,
and wiped Mike’s face.
Just late yesterday afternoon,
Eddie had come running into her office to tell her he thought one of the
laborers, Del Geary, was dead. Joan had reluctantly gone with Eddie and the
security guard only to find Geary just as Eddie had described. They’d taken the
body to the clinic and put it in the morgue as Rachel had suggested. The
Health and Safety rep would have to do the report—if she ever showed up. Joan
had seen the deaths of many contract workers over the years. But this one with
the grossly swollen feet, like odd waxed fruit at the end of those skinny legs
had shaken her to the bone.
Now this. One of her best kids,
her good and honest kid, was sick with the thing that killed Del Geary.
Rachel showed up in the door, her
short hair sleep-smashed to the side of her head.
“Knock, knock,” she said with
quiet cheer.
“Hi,” Mike said.