Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (42 page)

She lifted her arms up slowly and wide like a marionette and
laughed hysterically. The water from the black nipples above rained down and
ran over her in quick, shifting rivulets like headless snakes.

“Come one, come all! See Bailey Hall! The amazing fucking sucker
woman!”

*
 
*
 
*

The thin edge of the razor sliced through Ned’s skin like butter.
As he drew the blade through, Phil felt his patient tense and vibrate as if
shocked. The incision filled with blood instantly. “Blot,” he said.

Mary reached over and blotted the blood from the wound. Before it
filled again, Phil ran the blade along it, deepening and lengthening it.

“Again.”

The third cut traversed the worm’s channel at a slight angle,
releasing a flow of dark liquid. The next cut split the channel open
longitudinally a few inches, and Phil got a glimpse of the white, rolled body
of the larva squirming in the channel.

“There it is. Blot.”

He picked up the sharpest of Mary’s little wire tools and held it
at the ready while Mary cleaned the incision one more time. As soon as she was
finished, he carefully impaled the worm with the wire and pried it out of the
channel. The worm squirmed around on the end of the wire in big arches, its mandibles
and short, sharp legs working madly. Phil crushed it under his foot. Its
squirting juices made a slight squeak sound that roiled Mary’s stomach.

They’d gathered a couple of gallons of water in pots and cups and
began to clean the wound by flushing it out. Once they’d gotten it as clean as
possible, Phil sutured the incision as best he could, then they rinsed the area
with the remaining water. Mary fashioned a pad and bandage out of the cleanest
cotton she’d been able to find.

Ned was left with a four-inch-long wound with ragged stitching, a
clumsy complement to the perfectly neat and straight scars from the aliens’
surgery.

Ned hadn’t made a sound through the whole operation.

“That’s about all we can do, my friend,” Phil said patting his
arm.

Mary wiped his face and neck with a clean, damp cloth.

“It feels better. Still hurts like hell, though.”

“Try to get some rest. Don’t move around too much. Mary or me will
bring you something to eat later.”

Standing in the tube, and out of earshot of Ned, Mary asked the
question.

“Do you think he’ll make it?”

Phil thought about it.

“Without an antibiotic, I’m not sure. There was a lot of infection
in there. You can’t get rid of it with water alone. We may have just slowed it
down.”

“Too bad we can’t go to the aliens for medical assistance,” she
said.

Phil shook his head. It was the ironic truth that if the aliens
had found Ned in his present condition, they wouldn’t bother to heal him;
they’d cut him up and use him for something else—use his parts.

“No
Hippocratic oath,” Phil said wryly. “That’s their goddamned problem.”

“Ours, too, it seems,” Mary added.

*
 
*
 
*

The suckers were easy to operate once she got the hang of it. It
was like wiggling her toes one at a time or forming her hand into a Vulcan
greeting; once you did it a time or two, it was cake. She could tighten them or
release them one at a time or in unison, and they were quite powerful if she
willed them to be. She could make them exude a thick, clear fluid in copious
amounts, which made them even more efficient, just by thinking about it. Doing
that left her with a profound thirst.

Gilbert was especially fond of what she was capable of doing with
her new anatomy, and she used them to quite literally, suck the next commitment
from him.

It hadn’t been easy, though. He was reluctant to let her wander
about unescorted because he was afraid she would get lost. At least that’s what
he told her at first. He was unaware, of course, that she had an unerring sense
of direction, even in the guts of an alien bio-vessel. In order to get her way
at last, she’d complained relentlessly of being “cooped-up.” She’d been
“cooped-up” long enough and didn’t want to be “cooped-up” any more. He’d
finally agreed and said he would arrange it with the alpha. He did on their
next meeting, but there were rules.

She could use the main tunnel only. The labs or the smaller tubes
leading to the rear section were out of bounds. “There are limits to my
influence,” he’d said. If she got caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, there
would be little he could do to protect her. “They don’t have the same respect
for life that we have,” he’d added solemnly.

Knowingly, Bailey nodded her head.

Over the next twelve hours, she wandered out and back three times,
staying out a little longer each time just to get him used to the idea. She was
amazed at how few of anything there was in the ship. It seemed largely empty.
The goons she did see on the last excursion, much to her surprise, walked right
by her as if she were invisible. She’d flattened herself against the tunnel
wall to let them pass and felt their enormity overwhelm her as they lumbered
by. She may as well have been the wall itself for the attention they paid to
her. The fact that they now ignored her pushed her confidence up and over the
required level to set her plan in motion.

The next time she went out, she’d take her usual complement of
notebook and maps, her watch, and down in the bottom of the little canvas bag
she carried—the cellular phone. Gilbert called it his “trophy” and treated it
like it really was one. He thought he’d stashed it away in secret, but she’d
seen him put it in one of the clothes boxes against the wall. All she had to do
was get it into the bag without his seeing it. She waited until he was napping
and did just that.

She didn’t want to set off any alarms in his head by finding her
gone when he awoke, so she waited until he was awake before she prepared to
leave. While she waited, she drank water until she thought she’d burst.

“Where are you going this time?” he asked groggily.

“For a walk. I want to walk.”

“I thought you did that.”

She sighed heavily to act perturbed. “You don’t just do it
once,”
she
grumped.

Gilbert sat up on the ledge and twisted until his torqued pelvis
aimed him at her. Not looking at her, he lifted his hand up to signal good-bye.
She started for the seam.

She had to pass within inches of him to get to the opener. Just as
she passed by, he reached out and grabbed hold of the canvas bag by the straps.

He held the bag for an eternity and then started to pull her down
to him by the straps. She watched the heavy weight of the phone come in contact
with the rubbery ledge then move toward his pale leg. If it touched him, he
might feel it.

He turned his little face toward her and pursed his lips. She
strained away from the dead flower of his mouth then relented and kissed him a
hard closed-mouth kiss. He let go then, and she came away with a broad smile on
her lovely face as if she’d just kissed a lover she was crazy about.

“See you later, my king.”

She pulled the bag smoothly away, watching the spidery hand trail
after it until it dropped completely off, landing with a limp plop on the
ledge.

She didn’t realize she was shaking until she closed the seam
behind her. She calmed herself and headed out.

Bailey knew something about the ship Gilbert didn’t. She knew
there was some symmetry to the pattern of tunnels and tubes that ran through
it. They weren’t random, although they seemed to on paper. The nerve bundle
added to the sense of order she’d discovered; it ran directly down that large
central tube, directly down the center of the ship, just like a spinal column,
although it sometimes ran down into the floor of the tube to God-knew-where.

The central tube ran the length of the vessel from where Gilbert
had shown it to her to the shuttle bay in what she now thought was the
ass-end
of the ship.

The tubes formed a series of interconnecting loops going out and
away from the central tube that carried the nerve bundle. Along the loops were
the chambers and holes that comprised the labs and other larger pockets,
including the chamber she shared with Gilbert. Each of the large loops off the
central tube branched out into smaller tubes and chambers. The tube housing
Phil was one of the smaller tubes away from the central one, on the far side of
it. As long as you knew which row, or ring of loops you were in, you could tell
about how far you were from the nerve bundle. The wider the tube, the closer it
was to the central nerve bundle. In short, as long as she traveled from smaller
to larger tubes, you’d eventually find the central tube.

It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded, since there were seams all
over the place, and there didn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to how
those
were
placed, except that the larger the tube, the fewer the seams. She’d yet to see
a seam in tubes the size of the one she was in. She was guessing that there
were no seams between Gilbert’s chamber and the shuttle bay as long as she
didn’t go too far out from the central tunnel. She was also guessing that if
she bounced from loop to loop, never changing tunnel sizes, she could travel
the entire length of the central tunnel without actually traveling in it.

The shuttle bay was at the far end of the central tunnel. When she
reached the shuttle bay she could traverse the midline of the ship and go over
to Phil’s side. The fact that Phil’s tube was much
higher
than the shuttle bay was a mystery, but the ship was full of those.
The small access tubes over the shuttle bay eventually looped back to Phil’s
tube.
 
She could travel that part with
her eyes closed. She checked her watch.
Perfect.

The only problem was that most of the areas she had to pass
through, including the shuttle bay, were off limits—and she’d never actually
traveled in those loops before—no one had.

“Fuck it,” she said, trotting along. “Fuck it. Fuck everything in
it—just fuck it.”

*
 
*
 
*

Ned woke up with a long, low groan and twisted his bulk around slowly.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Phil said.

“Is that what it is?” Ned replied painfully.

“Something like it,” Mary added. “Would you like to eat?”

“Sure.”

He sat up and ate some canned vegetables and most of a can of beef
barley soup. He still looked pale and felt clammy, and Phil saw that his
appetite was lackluster. He only ate a bite or two of one of the chocolate-chip
cookies Mary offered him. Ned normally would have eaten the whole bag of
chocolate-chip cookies.

“How are you feeling?” Phil asked.

“Better. Lots better,” he said and tried to smile.

Mary and Phil exchanged looks. It was apparent he wasn’t doing
well at all. Mary reached over and placed her hand on his forehead.

“A little warm,” she said to Phil as if Ned were asleep. “Not too
bad.”

“I guess I’ll live for a while yet, eh?”

“You bet,” Phil said.

“Yep,” Mary said.

They munched for a while longer, chewing slowly and in silence, as
if Ned’s lack of appetite had infected them all.

Looking at Mary and Ned sitting in the dim little alien cell,
eating out of cans and bags, suddenly took on an unreal quality for Phil. He
watched them eat and move and mindlessly read the words on the packaging and
stare and chew some more. He could hear each crackle of plastic and clink of
spoon against tin as if the sounds were coming from inside his skull. Behind
Mary’s head was the round arch of the cell’s opening and beyond that, the dark
wall of the alien tube they found themselves in. No nightmare he’d ever had was
more bizarre than the images and sounds that now entered his eyes and ears. He
realized then that he was merely seeing their situation for the first time as
it really was.