Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (14 page)

“Forget
the fact that it’s impossible to do to any of that— they can do it anyway. I
don’t know how they do it exactly, but I know they do it. They can do it so
well that you’d look at this new can-crusher thing and think it was a
can-crushoid crushoid- ius
or whatever—a real animal. They don’t just attach and sew the parts together,
they get them to grow together somehow, without the rejection, the
infection—any of that. They can manipulate flesh and bone and tendons and
nerves better than we can control wire and aluminum and wood and steel.”

Phil
didn’t doubt it. He’d seen many examples of it already, but hadn’t known
exactly what he was seeing. He wondered how long it had taken them to unravel
the human race and other species on Earth in order to break out and categorize
the components and materials. How many had died in those labs before the
inventory was known? How many more would die? Worse than that, how many were
still alive, or partially alive?

“Christ,”
Phil said.

“Yeah,”
Mary replied. “Strange, huh?”

“What are
the wasps for?” Phil asked. “I think they’re food, maybe they’re some kind of
delicacy, or the grubs must contain a drug they’re addicted to—something like
that. They’re making a hell of an investment in them whatever they’re for.”

“I think
they must be used for some part of the combining, the building process,” Mary
said. “Maybe the grubs contain a chemical that allows them to fuse the
components together or modify them—I don’t know. But you’re right about the
investment. Most of what goes on in the ship is related to those grubs.
There’s no telling how many they’ve harvested so far.” Bailey had listened
intensely to the whole exchange; and, even in this brown light, Mary could see
she had turned the color of early spring grass.

“They
make animals?” Bailey asked. “They made those big gray bear things?”

Mary
nodded her head. “Several different species went into those things—even
human—I’m sure of it.”

“What do
they want with us?” Bailey asked. She’d finished eating and had drawn her
knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms tight around them. It was a
curious reaction, Phil thought, how we make ourselves tighter and smaller when
we feel threatened.

“I’ve
given that a lot of thought,” Mary said. “I have no idea.”

“Not
enough information yet,” Phil said to Bailey.

“I like to
at least know why I’m being killed,” Bailey said into her knees. “What’s the
point? I think it’s important to know.”

Bailey,
in her guileless way, had posed a key question. They were doomed to die,
horribly in all likelihood. It probably made more sense to figure out a
painless way to commit suicide about now or how to euthanize the others.

Phil and
Mary exchanged looks. No, it wasn’t important— it was the only thing that
mattered.

Why am I
being killed?

The void
that question left was like a lens that magnified the horror.

“Then we have to find
out,” Phil said. “Besides, there’s no telling what we’ll find along the way.”

 
“The goons come through every twelve hours or
so,” Mary was saying, “and take from one to, say, four of us at a time. They
use the seam at the front end of the tube, always.”

Gilbert sat and listened
placidly, not letting his thoughts show. He let his gentle gaze drift to Phil.

Another
pagan,
Gilbert thought.
That’s
what he is and no amount of talking can change that. He’s just looking for a
way to save his own skin, like all pagans do. Desperate men do desperate
things. They only think of themselves.

Gilbert
had seen many such men. They always had the easy answers but the big answers
eluded them. It was the same for all godless men.

They
can’t fool me, or God,
he thought.

He was handsome, too. Most handsome men were
godless. If you were handsome, women were more likely to be attracted to you
and you would carry that burden of temptation around like a magnet pulling in
slut after slut without remorse. Sluts sucked the penises of handsome men. They
used red lipstick to cover the sores such filthy practices caused. He’d once
seen a garish slut in the mall in Toledo wearing all black with tight black
pants and loud makeup. Her black blouse was open, and he could see her white
skin. She had long black fingernails, too, and he saw the suck-sore on the
middle of her lower lip under the red lipstick. He followed her around the mall
from a safe distance, just to see if his theory was true. Sure enough, she met
up with a handsome, godless young man dressed in jeans and a black leather
jacket outside the Baskin Robbins, and they went off together. He watched her
slip her hand in the back pocket of his jeans to caress his bottom. They went
off together, he was sure, to suck the young godless man’s cock.

*
 
*
 
*

“So
they’ve never used the one we opened?” Phil asked.

“I’ve
never seen them use it.”

“How do
they know who to take?” Phil wanted to know.

The Canadian
spoke up. “They just seem to know,” he said. “They rotate us. It’s fairly
regular, but not exact.”

They had
assembled everyone who could speak English—and who still had the strength to
speak it, in Mary’s chamber. That was six out of twenty in the tube. Two
wouldn’t come at all, the Italian who said he wanted to be left alone, and the
cranky woman with the French accent who just stared at her when Mary told her
they were going to meet as a group. “A group of what?” she’d asked. Mary just
walked away from her.

That left
Tom Moon, Gilbert, Mary, Bailey, Phil and the Canadian, Ned Butler. It took
Mary no time at all to figure out that Phil had stolen Gilbert’s fire and
assumed a real leadership role. The ironic thing was that Gilbert had no fire
to begin with and you couldn’t steal what didn’t exist. They’d voted on it. Bailey
had voted for Phil because Mary had voted for him and Tom voted for him just
because.

Phil had
suggested that they share what they had with the group. Somewhere in the bits
and pieces, a pattern, a map existed. That map could lead anywhere, maybe home,
if they were lucky.

When Phil
asked for a volunteer, Bailey stepped up to be the scribe. They had several
coil-bound notebooks Ned had taken from the dump intending to keep a diary, but
never had. Bailey wasn’t very good at it, she’d said, but she would give it a
try. At first they didn’t have a pen or pencil, and Tom had looked over at
Gilbert who always carried one for making notes in the margins of his Bible.

He looked
right at the Bic pen in Gilbert’s shirt pocket and Gilbert stared back at him
and dared him to say anything. After Mary dug one up out of the bottom of her
laundry basket, Tom saw Gilbert angle the pen sideways down into his shirt
pocket to hide it. Tom thought it was funny and grinned like a school boy.

“We can
do some reconnoitering,” Phil said. “We now know how to open the seam at the
far end of the tunnel. I’ll volunteer for that. Who else wants to go?”

“Me,” Ned
said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Who
else?”

Gilbert
cleared his throat just a little before he spoke. The sound made Mary’s hackles
rise like a fight reflex. “Why does anybody else have to go? Isn’t two enough?”

“It seems
to take . . .” Phil started, but Mary cut him off.

“I’ll go.
Hell with it,” she said.

“How many
watches do we have?” Phil asked. “Hands up if you have one.”

“I’ve got
one,” Mary said and dug it out of the bottom of the laundry basket. She started
to put it on.

“I got
about thirty watches,” Tom Moon said with a smile of pride.

Mary
listened and shook her head in disbelief. Poor guy has a Jones for watches,
she thought.
Probably never had one until he got abducted by aliens.

Phil
nodded his head kindly at him. “Great. Can we borrow five of your watches,
Tom? The digital kind if you have them.”

“The kind
with numbers on them,” Mary added.

“I know
what kind. You want me to get ‘em now?”

“That
would be great.”

When Tom
got back, Phil took the assortment of cheap, multi-function watches and handed
them to Ned.

“Can you
synchronize these?”

“I think so.
I’ve owned about a dozen of the cheap bastards.”

A paltry
substitute for real communication, the synchronized time piece was the thread
that would co-ordinate effort and provide a timeline for every event worth
noting.

“Keep
track of the time. Every time something happens, note the time. Don’t lose your
watches.”

Ned was
busy with the first watch, trying to set it.

“What’s
the date?” he asked. “I’ve got three dates here.” They all thought about it and
looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Nobody was sure what the date was at
all.

“I
doesn’t matter,” Phil said. “June the fifteenth. Use that. That’ll work.”

Mary
looked at hers. “It’s the seventeenth.”

“And the
time?” Ned asked.

“Make it
twelve noon,” Mary said looking at her watch again.

Two days
lost,
Phil thought.
Two days
stolen.

“That’ll
work, too,” he said.