Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (40 page)

23

They’d moved camp to the base of the organic monolith after their
first location, oceanside, had been overrun by a swarm of especially nasty bugs
that crawled up onto the beach one rainy night.

The monolith wouldn’t have been John’s preferred destination, but
Rachel had insisted, talking about it and whining until they relented. At the
monolith’s base, the jungle was thinner in places, providing some sense of
openness. That was a plus. Another advantage was the shallow stream that ran
around the base. The stream’s gentle motion hugged the structure’s curves and
polished it like granite where the touch was strongest. The base of the
structure itself was honeycombed with large caverns, remarkably smooth, clean
and bug-free. It was as if there were an invisible barrier that started just
inside the structure that somehow kept out the jungle’s denizens, large and
small, preserving and protecting the corpulent
and flowing, soft brown
walls and floors from intrusion. Rachel had even remarked that the structure
might give off some gas or chemical warning not to enter, which only the native
life forms could detect. The interior did have a crisp and peculiar scent that
was not altogether unpleasant. One of the caverns was large enough to drift the
shuttle into and hide it completely—and they’d done just that.

Rachel was drawn to the
massive thing like an insect to light and hadn’t stopped staring at it for
weeks. Her “spells,” as she called them, came over her regularly now, often
leaving her spent and narcoleptic until the next day. Each time it happened,
the event would be preceded by a prolonged period when the monolith would
consume her thoughts and vision. She was doing it now, studying it, just
looking
at it, as if she was in some
famous cathedral with art-covered walls and ceiling.

“Is this thing alive?”
John asked her.

“Not like we think of a
thing as being alive,” she replied idly, not taking her eyes off the walls.

A latticework of tunnels,
passages and chambers in the structure led from the largest cavern into the
structure’s interior. Rachel was determined to explore them.

“We need to go in farther.
See what’s there,” she said.

John didn’t share her
enthusiasm. The thing gave him the creeps. “Maybe at some point,” he said. “We
got other things to worry about, like staying alive.”

He watched her carefully,
ready to catch her when the first violent convulsions sent her to the floor.
This time, they didn’t come.

* * *

They’d found a few edible
items over the months—berries, nuts, Donna’s grapes, and a few crustaceans that
were palatable—but there was no substitute for ready-to-eat, packaged food. The
jungle’s raw fare was a poor replacement for what they called home
cooking—especially when there was so much of it available now.

It was Donna’s turn to go.
Rachel had gone the last time and John the time before that; now it was Donna’s
turn to play thief.

“See if you can find some
chocolate, too,” John said.

“Chocolate what?” Donna
asked.

“Chocolate anything. I'm
not picky.”

“Anything chocolate—if I
can find it,” she repeated for clarity. Then, in a crouch, she trotted off from
their staging point just a kilometer from the warehouses.

John didn’t think she’d
have a problem, but he always played it safe. He studied the huge complex from
right to left and back again, looking for signs of anything human. He could see
the tiny figure of a guard standing silently in shadow on the easternmost
section of the dock. No worry there. By the time Donna got to the warehouse
door, she’d be out of his line of sight.

Donna’s target was the new
warehouse building on the near side of the living complex. Inside it were food
and supplies stacked to the ceiling. It was an easy job to sneak in and steal
whatever was required, provided you could find it in the jumble. John wondered
why they bothered to sneak at all and often thought a better plan would be just
to mingle with the daytime throng and cop food and supplies in broad daylight.
Against the backdrop of the teeming mass of workers and moving material, they
could easily have been mistaken for background noise and maneuvered undetected.

The complex had grown so
fast he found himself shaking his head in disgust. Its rambling, irregular and
angular shape was a blight on the landscape. It looked to him as if in just a
few more months, the entire clearing would be completely covered with the
material and debris of human habitation. Against the western edge, the great
cloister rose ten stories high and several kilometers long, stretching, in a
rectangular and gleaming line, into the horizon. That was the home of The
Chosen—God’s People—the Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance.

He watched Donna’s
miniature form show briefly against the open door of the warehouse, then vanish
as the door closed.

* * *

Donna stood in the aisle
and thought briefly, surely, that she knew where she was going, but a moment’s
study of the shifting mountains of crates and containers caused her to revise
that notion. The warehouse was filling so quickly that landmarks from her last
visit, such as a distinctive container or arrangement of boxes, were now
obscured or moved altogether. She might as well have been in the warehouse for
the very first time.

The crates labeled
PERISHABLE, however, were generally a good bet. She headed toward a stack of
them on the next row over. She opened the nearest one and checked the contents.

Platters of packaged fish,
beef, chicken and lamb were stacked neatly in racks on the inside. She unslung
the sack and began to stuff it. Soon the bag was so heavy she had to put it on
the floor.

“That’s stealin’,” the
male voice behind her said. She almost jumped out of her skin and spun on the
sound.

“Who the hell are you?”
she asked, putting a note of indignation in her voice.

“A thief like you, I’d
say,” the figure in the shadows said, taking a step forward.

When the light was right,
she could see that it was a teenage boy, perhaps sixteen. He was dressed in
rags and looked as if he’d been in the jungle a long, long time. His face was
scarred, pockmarked and streaked with grime. His long hair was matted and
twisted into knots. He walked with a limp. One side of his face was swollen and
inflamed, as if he’d been bashed with a cudgel. Any swelling in this
environment was cause for alarm, medically speaking, and the nurse in her
instantly saw the danger.

“How long have you had
that?” she asked.

“Had what?”

“That thing on your face.”

He reached up and touched
it.

“This? I’ve had a bunch of
these. Things inside ‘em hatches out and I kill them. Not very good eatin’,” he
said and smiled. The place on the side of his head was so turgid from edema
that the smile seemed to go right around it, a thin road on a rough map.

“I’m a nurse. You should
let me help you with that.”

“A nurse, huh?”

“Yes.”

“What’s a nurse doin’
stealin’?”

“What’s a kid like you
doing looking like that? You get lost?”

“Nope.”

Donna considered him.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “You help me with some of this stuff, and I’ll
take care of the thing on your face. How’s that?”

She could have handled it
herself. It was his face she wanted to fix. She saw his eyes dip down at the
stuffed sack at her feet.

“This thing hurts
something awful,” he said. His voice for an instant revealed his age.

He was just a kid. Donna
had spent just a few nights in the green without shelter and knew how tough it
could be. This boy had lived who knew how long in the jungle. She had to admire
his courage, but he was in desperate need of medical attention as a result of
his living there. “Well?” she asked. “My friends are waiting. What do you say?”

She looked into his eyes
and saw a distrustful, injured animal. She wanted to reach out and touch him,
to rest her hand on his shoulder and soothe him.

“Okay,” he said in his
child’s voice. “I’ll help you if you help me.”

“You got a deal. Help me
fill this other sack.”

* * *

Together, they hauled the
sacks back to the staging area at jungle’s edge. John and Rachel were nowhere
to be seen, but Donna could almost feel the sights of John’s pistol trained on
the newcomer.

There was a noisy rustle,
and Rachel appeared in the center of it, sweeping branches out of the way.

“Hi!” Rachel cheerfully
greeted Donna. “Who’s your friend?”

Donna held out an open
hand in the boy’s direction. “I’m sorry . . .”

“Eddie,” he said. “Eddie
Silk.”

“Eddie, this is Rachel . .
. and somewhere around here is a big spooky guy named John . . . something . .
.”

As if summoned, John came
out of the jungle behind them, hand resting on the pistol’s grip. Donna
couldn’t see his face clearly, but she could still sense the caution in it.
Nowadays, he assumed no situation was entirely safe.

“What are you doing out
here?” John asked, hand on the pistol’s grip.

“Livin’. Tryin’ to live,
that is,” Eddie replied.

John looked over his
bedraggled condition with a scowl, then softened some.

“What are we gonna to do
with him?” he asked Donna.

“He needs medical
attention,” she said. “We’re going to help him.”

Donna’s voice had that
edge of certainty and will in it that short-circuited any argument as surely as
a copper switch. John didn’t like the idea much, but that didn’t matter. Donna
had made up her mind. He reached down for one of the heavy sacks. “Let’s get
out of here. Grab that other bag, kid.”

* * *

Donna had become very
proficient at field surgery, having dressed dozens of bites and other
jungle-related wounds since they’d gone into hiding. She fixed Eddie’s face as
promised, and gave him a complete physical. In the process, she cleaned and
dressed a number of other lacerations.

“What have you been using
for shelter,” she asked, applying a bandage.

“Anything I could find.
Barrels mostly.”

“You slept in barrels?”

“Yeah, and I found a
container in the dump that worked real good.”

Donna drew a breath.

“What are you doing living
in the jungle, Eddie? What happened to you?”

He looked away. It was
obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, and she was tempted to let it go, but
couldn’t quite do it.

“Tell me. What happened?”

When he lowered his eyes,
she saw the child in him, hiding just behind the clean bandages.

“I almost killed
somebody,” he said softly.

“Oh. You did?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“I see. How?”

“I didn’t do it with my
own hands, but I almost killed him just the same.”

Donna listened with
empathy and gently continued to wrap his wounds. The soft bandage contrasted
brightly against the boy’s dark skin.

“I sent him into the
jungle to get something—something I stoled—and he got infected from something
and almost died. Now he’s crippled.”