Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (2 page)

“I’ll give you a good deal on it. Then you can retire within ear
shot of me,” Edna had said, laughing. Phil had the money and suddenly had the
desire. While Ronny kicked dirt some yards away, the deal was made.

Phil had the perfect one-and-a-half story log house built on that
very pad the following year. The design was straight out of a catalog, not a
custom job, but the house was flawless to Phil in every respect. He had gone to
great lengths to furnish it with just the right functional furniture. He had
never regretted his purchase of this remote paradise.

He stopped where he saw the VW ‘s tire tracks going down into
Duncan’s Draw and smiled at the way the car’s owner had attempted to hide them
from view by brushing them out with pine branches. He’d swept away the tracks
all right, but left conspicuous brush marks in the soft, dry dirt. Not only
that, but he had managed to simulate the first and only total VW bus
disappearance in the canyon by cutting the tracks like scissors where they
turned off in the middle of the road.

When the groceries were put away and the hummingbird feeders
filled, Phil had but one last chore before he’d drink a beer and smoke a cigar
and watch the sun go down from his porch. He headed directly to the shed and
got his weapon.

He pumped the handle of the garden sprayer several times to be
sure he had good pressure, then pointed the nozzle at the thick trail of ants
on the ground and pulled the trigger. The nozzle spit and sputtered then let
out a solid stream of white insecticide.

“Die . . . ” Phil said as he wet them down. These weren’t your
garden variety sugar ants, these fuckers would crawl up your jeans, bite and
leave a blister. “Die.”

He walked along the porch rail wetting down the ants with
diazinon. The chemical left its peculiar and unpleasant signature on the air.
He was sure he had killed tens of thousands of ants from the same nest. He only
wished he had a better, more efficient way to kill them. He wondered if one of
those new microwave devices that cooked them in their nests, the ones termite
exterminators used, would work on ants in the ground. Might be worth a try.

*
 
*
 
*

After the cutting and sealing up, they put you in a soaker. That’s
what Mary called them. She had tried to give everything a name because then she
could keep track better and maybe things wouldn’t be quite so horrible.

She’d worked as a mechanic in a steel mill in Detroit one summer
and it had a place called the soaking pits. They put huge ingots of steel down
in the soaking pits and put a huge thick cover over them and blasted them with
hot gas until they were soaked through with heat and red hot so they could roll
the ingots out into thin sheet steel. This place reminded her of that, only it
was a chamber filled with goo with a two-foot space of air above her head. It
was completely sealed with a black seam across the top and the only light came
from the dim little photosphere dangling like a pear up in one corner. She used
to stretch her toes down and try to touch bottom, but gave that up long ago.
The warm, translucent goo was up to her neck and the only thing that kept her
afloat was the rubbery tube that ran down her throat. Where the tube met her
mouth, fine tendrils ran out from it and encircled her head like roots. The
vine ran up and out through the seam. It was attached like a dozen others to a
huge bag-like organ in the ceiling of the chamber above.

She stared at the color, the dark, brownish black color of the walls
that was her world and wished for light. She wanted
bright sun and white light
on her skin.

She could feel a crawler on her right foot, then she felt another
and another. They were rising up out of the bottom of the soaker. Soon her legs
were covered with them. She had never seen one since they never left the goo.
Mary figured they were probably blind. Sometimes they bit.

Her first time in a soaker, after she had settled down from
thrashing with panic as they crawled over her, she gently closed down on one
with her thumb when it crawled out to the tip of a forefinger. She had felt its
resilient little body and judged that its size was about like a bean and she
could feel its strength as it squirmed. She had held it and rolled it in her
fingers and tried to picture what it looked like in her mind when it bit her.
She would have screamed if she could have. She brought up her trembling hand
and looked at the little scoop-like wound on her thumb that dripped blood back
into the goo and realized that the crawlers could eat her alive by the
thousands. That was the last time she ever tried to touch one. She remained
motionless, not even blinking, as the crawlers covered her. She could feel them
working, concentrating on the new incisions. She tried to ignore them as best
she could.

She’d endured this dozens of times and knew she would be out of
the soaker soon. The crawlers would drift away one at a time, the dark seam
would part with a sound like tearing meat and the vine would pull her up. She
would have to hold tight to the slippery vine to keep it from breaking her
neck, but it would drag her out and deposit her on the mushy, sticky floor.

Then the fine tendrils around her head would untangle and the tube
would slip up out of her gullet. She would retch as it did but that would be
the worst for a while. The soaker and the crawlers and the vine would leave her
body miraculously healed and restored, cleaned and polished. Only dozens of new
thin scars would remain as a testament of her ordeal. She would lay and weep
and perhaps sleep, then finally get up and walk through the warm dripping water
in the tube leading out of the chamber. On the way through the tube she would
wipe the thick fluid from her body and hair. She would pick up clothes in the
chamber at the other side. Sometimes she found the clothes she had on
yesterday, sometimes not. Any old shirt, some pants and some shoes that fit
would do here.

When the vine released her she forced herself up on her feet and
into the shower tube. She stood there in the tube’s rain and let the water wash
over her. She wiped goop from her arms and legs and watched it drift in
amorphous clumps along channels toward rat-hole-sized drains at irregular
intervals in the tube’s floor. She couldn’t begin to understand how they had
done that. Oh, the concept was familiar enough and she knew how she would have
accomplished the same thing with regular materials because she had done a lot
of building and plumbing. She stared blankly at the configuration and let the
water rain down on her from the nipples above. Like so much here, these drains
were unfathomable.

She let her mind drift and as always when she was in the rain of
the tube, she remembered her last night on Earth.

She had been watching “Marathon Man” on cable when Jack Delacroix
called her and asked her to come out to his place to fix a leaky joint on his
tractor’s hydraulic pump. “It’s an emergency!” he’d said. The place where the
break was “spurting fluid like a damned cut artery.” He couldn’t lift the
tiller and had to till a path through his beets getting back to the barn.

“Why didn’t you just leave it where it was?” Mary had asked.

She wouldn’t have objected much to a night time service call, but
Jack Delacroix’s place was miles from anywhere, it was nine at night and
raining like crazy. It’d take a half hour to get there, then another hour or so
to fix it so she’d be home by eleven, maybe twelve. She started to beg off, it
was raining like shit, but Jack said he had to get started again in the morning
if the rain let up. Jack was a regular customer and she was booked up through
Wednesday; and since Jack never complained much about paying extra, she said
she’d be there within an hour.

There was nothing in her life she regretted more than that single
commitment she’d made to Jack Delacroix.

She hated Jack Delacroix for his dumb-assed dependency on her.
Over the years she had fixed every piece of the asshole’s equipment, over and
over. She couldn’t understand how he could run a farm and be so asshole stupid
about the stuff he used to operate it.

She left for Jack’s at ten-thirty, deciding to watch the remainder
of her movie before she put her work clothes back on and headed out. So what if
she was late.

She honked her horn when she got close enough to his house for him
to hear it. She half hoped he was asleep. When he didn’t come out right away
she pulled her truck up close to his porch and honked again, real long. Well,
the sonofabitch had been asleep. Dressed in socks and a yellow house robe, he
poked his head out and hollered at her over the pounding rain, “You don’t need
me do you!”

“I’ll find it! Go back to sleep! I’ll leave your bill in the mail
box!” she yelled back.

She’d driven over to the barn and was amazed and disgusted at how
hard it was raining. When she pulled the truck into the barn, there sat the
tractor; its tiller stuck in the dirt. The dumb ass had tilled a path right
into the barn.

She couldn’t depend on the lights Jack had in his barn to see or
find a damn thing. She left the very ass-end of the truck outside so she could
keep the engine running then hit her top lights and flooded the tractor and the
barn with clear, white halogen light. Mary stepped out of the truck: and when
her feet touched the ground, she felt her hair stand straight up. Mary had been
in many Midwestern storms in her lifetime, and she had read and knew a lot
about lightning. She was sure what she felt was the ionized charge of lightning
about to strike the barn.

“Whoa . . . ” she’d said and had jumped back into the truck, pulling
her feet in as fast as she could. Insulated by the big truck’s tires, she
waited for the bolt to hit the lightning rod on the barn, but it never did. She
waited for a full ten minutes, finally dialing in a station on the radio just
to pass the time. She didn’t know how long she should wait, so she waited until
she couldn’t wait any more. Finally, she scooted around and gingerly placed her
left foot on the ground. She stepped out with her hands on her hips and walked
slowly around a little, testing for the energy that had just scared the shit
out of her.

She’d dismissed it as just a fluke of nature, one she’d remember
her whole life she figured, and walked over to the tractor.

Mary Pope was not squeamish or skitterish, or very fearful of
anything for that matter. She’d been a tomboy in her childhood, running harder
than the boys, hitting harder when she had to, and never, ever showing fear. It
was crazy Mary Pope who put the frog in her mouth headfirst; and while its legs
kicked for freedom, chased Tommy Cortner down the street when Tommy made the
tactical error of putting the frog down
her
shirt. Mary Pope was
capable of anything and the one no one screwed with. On the other hand, she
could be quite friendly and helpful, too. It was Mary, after all, who taught
the boys how to smoke.

Mary was strong and attractive. When the heat of puberty began to
ignite lust in the loins of the boys who once double-dared her, they saw her
shapely legs, lips and developing breasts as objects of adolescent desire.
Mary, unfortunately, was incapable of returning the adoration. Puberty was a
time of discovery, and Mary Pope discovered at that early, sexually innocent
age that the white, wet, feminine bodies, with which she shared the girl’s
shower filled her naughty fantasies and excited her budding libido far more
than those of the stringy boys.

Mary Pope was the best mechanic in Potts County; a legend in
fact, for her ability to fix the things that mattered—and in a rural community
like Trader, Wisconsin—anything mechanical mattered. She had started her
repair business when she was just eighteen, and her native ability around tools
and her friendly disposition soon gained her a reputation for excellent
service. She took night classes and day classes and vendor classes and worked
hard; and before she was twenty-five, she was the most well-liked and admired
mechanic in Trader. The community depended on her abilities, and Mary did her
level best to fill that need.

She hadn’t acquired the skill to fix and repair heavy machinery
without learning early to get in there and make the tool do what you wanted and
never mind about the busted knuckles and grease and dirt. Mary Pope, the
frog-eater, knew how to approach a dirty problem. It was her fearlessness that
allowed her to learn and get better and better.

That was then, when the world as she knew it existed.

There had been a puddle of hydraulic fluid about a yard wide right
under the pump, and she had followed a clear trail of the shiny liquid right up
to the split in the hose. She was sure she had the part; it was a fairly common
length for farm machinery. The seals might be a problem, but she probably had
those, too. She eyeballed the problem for the tools she’d need, and having made
that assessment, she started back to the truck. It was then that she heard the
sound.