Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (8 page)

“Perhaps.”

“No
perhaps. I show you my body, and you tell me about the aliens and how you got
here. That’s the deal.”

“I will
tell you something about the aliens.”

She took
a deep breath through her nose and studied the hideous thing in front of her.
She wasn’t in the least bit shy about her anatomy and had shown it to men
enough times to know how. But doing so now, as some ghastly trade with a freak
she couldn’t fathom gave her nausea. She’d rather have shown her naked body to
her ninety-year-old uncle Petros—gladly.

“Why are
you so interested in my body all of a sudden?”

No
answer.

But a
reason was growing deep inside her. She couldn’t define it exactly, but it was
there sure enough. Rachel could feel it as something evil. She wanted to vomit
it up and spit it out at him. She wanted to strangle him where he lay.

She stood
up and unzipped her suit from the neck down to her crotch. Staring straight
ahead, she pulled one then the other arm free of the sleeves and worked her
torso out of the top part. Then she slipped her hands inside at the waist and
squirmed her full hips first to the right then the left and let the suit fall
to her ankles. She reached behind and unclipped her bra, removed it and dropped
it in the chair behind her. Her panties were next. Unceremoniously, she ran her
thumbs along the inside and worked them down over her hips and down to her
ankles.

She stood
there naked, staring straight ahead. She could feel her heart beating in her
chest, not out of excitement, but out of anger and humiliation.

He just
stared. His eyes going from her head to her knees and back again. She could
almost feel them like an unbearable, ashen touch.

“Seen
enough?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Yes,” he
said finally.

“Good,”
she replied curtly.

She had
her clothes back on in no time.

She sat
back down and crossed her legs tight. Jacob went back to staring straight up,
the same self-satisfied, barely visible smile on his thin and crusty lips.

“Well?
Now it’s your turn,” she said matter-of-factly.

“The
aliens . . .” he started.

“Yes?”

“The
aliens came to earth in the year 2006. Perhaps sooner. I don’t know.”

“2006?”

“Yes. They
came and took many people. Kidnapped them.”

“Then
what? How did you get here?”

“They
must have brought me here.”

“How did
you stay alive for so long? Did it have something to do with the parasite
attached to you?”

“Yes.
They told me it could . . . could keep . . . keep me alive for a very long
time.”

“Umm . .
.”

“That’s
all I know.”

“Really?”

He stared
straight up. Rachel pursed her lips.

“I feel
like I’ve been cheated here, Jacob,” she said. “I feel like you’re holding back
on me.”

“I’ve . .
. told you everything I know,” he said gently.

“Have
you? What about the laboratory? What about that?”

“What
laboratory?”

“You
know, the one with all the really neat medical implements. Like the one that
scared the shit out of you the other day. No idea what any of that is, huh?”

“I don’t
remember,” he said kindly and closed his eyes.

“I see,”
she said.

She was
beginning to sound to herself like some incompetent Grand Inquisitor, and the
feeling didn’t sit well. She could have sat there and ground away at him with
questions for the next hour and was certain she wouldn’t have learned anything.
He was doing a good job of hiding it, whatever it was. On a conscious level,
she couldn’t understand why he’d want to hide a goddamned thing from her, but
her intuition told her he was doing just that, and it was something very
important—and threatening.

“Okay.
You think about it, and I’ll check back with you later,” she said, plainly
irritated. “Have a nice nap.”

She got
up and left. The feeling of his eyes still on her, like the touch of sticky bug
secretions, made her want to wash herself, over and over.

She went
to her space and started to organize her things. She was going back into the
structure again that morning to explore the antechambers adjacent to the lab.
On the bed, John, propped up on one elbow, watched her.

“How’s
your buddy?” he asked.

“I’m
going to the lab today,” she said, avoiding the question. “Do you want to come
with me?”

“Sure.
You want to take the punk along, too?” John had grown fond of Eddie.

“Sure. If
he wants to go. I don’t care.”

“He’s
really under your skin, isn’t he?”

“Who?
 
Eddie?”

“No,
what’s-his-name, Jacob—whatever.”

“Oh,
that. Yes, he does, if you really must know. Not that it’s any of your
business.”

“I wouldn’t
put it that way,” he said.

“Oh, how
would you put it?” she asked.

He had to
think about this. It
was
his business. He cared for her. She’d been acting so queer ever
since she dragged the freak back from the chamber. He’d known she had turned
strange ever since her encounter with the centipede. That he could
understand—poison in her system he could understand. But the effect this
skinny, wasted mutation was having on her was a real mystery.

“Well,”
he said carefully. “I’d say you’re nuts over this—if I thought I could get away
with it.”

“Fine,”
she said. “You said it. Now can we get off the subject? I’d really like to.”

He nodded
his head slowly. “Sure. I’d love to get off the subject. And go to the lab by
yourself, or take the kid. Whatever.”
 
He
turned over and covered himself with the blanket. “Okay, whatever,” she said.

“You
taking the kid?” he asked with an edge to his voice.

“Yeah,”
she spat back.

“Good,”
he said.

“Now,
please. Shut up about it,” she said as she stomped off.

* * *

Rachel was
too pissed off for company, even for that of mild-mannered Eddie, so she went
off without him. She wasn’t supposed to. It was one of their rules, but this
time she didn’t care.

Halfway
down the tunnel, she nearly turned around, went back and apologized, then
decided she’d do it later. He could wait. She hated what was happening to her.
She hated it and she didn’t understand it, which made her hate it even more.

The
aliens’ laboratory had become quite familiar to her. It was a vast open area
filled with a baffling array of bizarre and fascinating stuff.

Umbilical’s
attached most of the tools to the structure itself, and a mass of these lines
throughout the upper part of the chamber formed a thick web. Using a scope from
the floor, she’d viewed the junctures where they made contact and could make
out odd formations she presumed to be organs where some of the umbilicals
attached.

    
The technology puzzled and captivated her,
and most of the intense dread she’d originally felt about it all had
largely—but not entirely—dissipated. There were times, though, when an
especially horrific device gave her the absolute creeps, and she could do
nothing to control it. Familiarity reduced the number of those incidents with
each passing day. But today, being there alone, surrounded by the very
implements of one’s worst nightmares, was getting to her and she felt edgy and
alert. She’d learned from years of fieldwork to trust those feelings.

Today,
she was going to check out one of the sub-chambers at the far end of the lab.
It had held her attention for some time. From a distance, it looked smaller,
and unfortunately darker, than some of the others.

She took
a deep breath, shifted her pack, then went down the ramp and headed for the
opening on the far side.

As she
weaved her way through the jumble of benches and hanging instruments, the
ghastly atmosphere of the place began to fill her, and she felt as if she were
losing herself to the lab’s
space.
She felt that as she walked, the tools themselves were moving, not
her. When she turned, they turned with her, tracking her with their knife
blades and spiky tips. The thought began to grow that the lab itself was alive,
had a mind of its own, and operated not at the hands of some alien technician,
but of its own will. She began to see it as a living entity and the most alien
of all alien things in the universe. It had waited patiently for her to come to
it, willingly—exactly like a fly to the scent of a carnivorous flower. The
lab-thing had waited to get her alone. It had been waiting, waiting to get to
her and only her. The tools were waiting for her to get a little bit closer;
and when she did, they would grab her and wrap her tight, the cords would strap
her down to a bench, and then the tools would converge on her like spiders,
clamoring toward her across the web. When they reached her, they would tear her
and cut her and her screams would go unanswered.

By the
time she was halfway across, she had to stop to get her breath. She put her
invented fears behind her and leaned with both hands on one of the benches,
making physical contact with the thing she most feared. It was either that or
fall over. She was sure she was going to have a seizure at first and prepared
herself for it, but it never came. Where her hands made contact with the
surface, the stiff, rubbery texture gave just a little and revealed a hard
substrate underneath it, like bones under the flesh of something dead.

Everything,
every shape, sound and texture of the lab was evil to her. Even the scent, a
thick and musky fog permeated everything and added its own brand of olfactory
malevolence to the air.

This is
not a good day to be here, she thought. I should not have come alone.

She went
ahead and tried her best to tune out the fear.

Only when
she was through the lab’s hideous gauntlet, and the last of the grotesque
implements were behind her, did she sigh a deep sigh of relief.

The
opening to the chamber was indeed darker than the others, and not just the
result of some trick of light as she’d hoped. She’d brought a lamp with her
just in case. She dug the lamp out of her pack, switched it on and proceeded
inside. The lamp cut a thick swath of brightness to see by, but seemed to
accentuate the darkness somehow.

She
walked about twenty meters in before she saw the pit at the very end of the
tunnel. It formed a perfectly black hole where the tunnel terminated. She was
reluctant to approach it, and wished all the more that John, or even Eddie, had
come with her. In spite of her fear, her professional dignity kept her moving
slowly toward that black hollow.

She moved
to the very edge and shined the light down into the pit.

Bones.
Thousands of bones were there, clean and white as if the flesh had been eaten
from them by something—perhaps larva, worms or chemicals—and left spotless.

Rachel
had studied thousands of life forms, dead and alive, on several planets. She
knew each nuance of form and how the fickle nature of evolution could modify
form for its own purpose, often at random or seemingly without intent. But a
reason—a vindication—for the form was always hiding within the design, and the
beauty that was the result of perfect function always came through eventually.
The remains in the pit were so tangled and intertwined that it took her a
moment to discern one thing, one part, from another. Trained in the anatomy of
living things, she soon had several of the objects separated from the others in
her mind’s eye. What she saw made her sick.

There was
no evolution here. There was no natural beauty in that black hole. Here was
unnatural design crafted by the minds of beings, mad and twisted.

She
witnessed things joined at every juncture, things with two or three heads, or
hand-like appendages protruding from thighbones or backbones. When she got
better at discerning the shapes, she could see complete aliens beings fused
together like Siamese twins, but in completely unnatural ways, as if the
designer had been motivated by whimsy at making the monstrous combinations.
Some of the unions seemed to be clearly sexual or erotic in nature.