Species (10 page)

“Are all dead,” Fitch said.

“So it—she—got away,” Laura said quietly.

“It,
and yes.” Fitch’s mouth turned down farther and Dan winced openly as the next footage gave the team a gruesome view of a twisted, blood-streaked corpse. “And yesterday morning the body of a transient was found in a boxcar on a siding near Salt Lake City. Preliminary DNA tests indicate the man was killed by our creature.”

“Nice kid,” Press remarked, pointing to the bottom part of the shot. “Look at the food wrapper next to the man’s body in the lower right of the screen. It’s on
top
of the puddle of blood—she slaughtered the guy, then stayed next to him and ate his food.”

“Not exactly a promising start to her tour of the country. Have you found any more bodies?” Stephen asked.

“Not yet.”

“You will,” Dan said unexpectedly. All eyes turned toward him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Her eyes are in front. That makes her a predator. Predators have their eyes in front so they can judge the distance to their prey.”

Press touched his own eyes thoughtfully, then frowned. “What about the dinosaurs, the ones who were meat eaters? They had eyes on the sides of their heads.”

“They don’t qualify for modern equations because they’ve been extinct for so long,” Laura answered when Dan looked stumped. “Besides, the dinosaurs were reptiles. In the modern world, Dan is mostly right.”

“And where did you pick up this information, Dan?” Professor Arden asked.

“I saw it on a documentary on the Discovery Channel,” Dan responded with a touch of pride. “I thought it was really interesting.”

“Why did you say he was ‘mostly’ right?” Press asked Laura.

“I think what Dan picked up from the program he watched was information on stereoscopic vision in the order of
carnivora,
a category of carnivorous mammals—a good portion of which has stereoscopic vision. There are, of course, predators in other orders—reptiles, rodents, and fish, for instance. Just as not all mammals with stereoscopic vision are predators, not all predators have front-facing eyes. Only those predators whose primary hunting sense is
vision
have front-facing eyes and stereoscopic vision; on the other hand, having both doesn’t automatically mean the animal is a predator. Primates, for example, are largely vegetarian, yet they are mostly associated with stereoscopic vision because they evolved in trees. Thus they needed stereoscopic vision for exceptional depth perception.”

“Stereoscopic vision?” Dan asked.

“The ability to see things in three dimensions,” Laura clarified. “Stereoscopic perception is possible because of binocular vision, or the ability to use the image seen by both eyes to result in a single view that appears to have three dimensions . . . which is where it ties into the program you watched, Dan. If one animal is incapable of accurately judging the distance to another, it cannot be a predator . . . because it could never catch its prey.”

The scenes playing on the computer monitor ended and they all blinked as the lights came on. Fitch turned to Press. “Mr. Lennox, as a nonscientist, are you at all clear on what’s happening?”

Press glowered at him from his slumped position on his chair, his face cold. “Oh, I think so,
Doctor
Fitch. In layman’s terms, you made a monster with a formula from outer space, it’s escaped and is going around killing people.” He fixed each of the others with a glance. “Now you want
us
to hunt it down and kill it.”

“You have quite a talent for simplicity, Mr. Lennox,” Fitch said peevishly.

“Thank you.”

Laura ran her hands through her hair in a gesture that seemed more disheartened than anxious. “There’s no way we can capture her and keep her alive to study further? I mean, she
is
half-human.”

There was a hushed moment as they all considered this. Dr. Fitch looked as though he wanted to agree but oddly, didn’t dare. After they’d all thought about the idea for a minute, Press stood, ready to leave. “Laura,” he said quietly, “I think this is strictly a search-and-destroy mission.” His gaze brushed Fitch then wandered to the floor, and he didn’t look back up.

“They’ve never asked me to find anyone they didn’t want killed.”

12

L
ooking at Union Station for the first time through a slit in the curtain, Sil could see that this was a world apart from Brigham City, Utah. In fact, she thought the population of that entire town could have been outnumbered just by the people milling about on the platforms here as they waited for trains to arrive and depart.

Before leaving the sleeping compartment and its decaying contents behind, Sil smoothed the front of her new conductor’s uniform and checked to make sure the fanny pack was adjusted properly—her hips were slightly narrower than A. Cardoza’s had been. Stepping off the train, she followed the rest of the disembarking passengers down a ramp to a tunnel that apparently led to the main station.

The main building was immense, nearly overwhelming. The elaborately adorned ceiling was so far overhead it was dizzying, and Sil tried to focus on the smaller things going on around her in an attempt to give her mind time to get used to the frantic pace: off to the side of her a little girl smiled and held tightly to her mother’s hand; just ahead a man in a plain, navy-blue suit and dark glasses headed purposefully toward her—

Sil tensed, waiting for a confrontation. It never came; instead, the man passed without comment and went up to the woman and daughter. They exchanged a few words and he flashed a small identification card, then steered them in the direction of a door marked
ADMINISTRATION.
For the first time Sil noticed more men, similarly dressed, herding a group of girls between the ages of eight and fourteen. Then it hit her and she felt a moment of triumph—these men
were
looking for her, but they thought she was still a child! She could walk right past them and they’d never be the wiser.

But she couldn’t relax. She sensed someone watching her and turned nonchalantly; a good twenty feet to her left was the boy from the snack bar in Brigham City. He recognized her—or thought he did—and was tracking her with wide, bewildered eyes. Tall and stunning in her new clothes, Sil gave him a confident return smile. As the boy’s mother grasped him by the hand and led him away, she did a smart spin on her heels and blended into the crowd hurrying down the hall to the main exit.

And, with a thousand other people, headed into the streets of Los Angeles.

“M
ay I help you, dear?”

Sil glanced up as she flipped through a rack of dresses. The woman who’d approached her was older but heavily made up, and Sil blinked at her spiked, burgundy-red hair and slick, flowing tunic with clashing swirls of purple and chartreuse. Off guard, she grabbed at the next hanger and offered it to the woman. “This one.”

The clerk read a tag on the neck of the dress, then looked at Sil. “I take it you’re buying this for someone else?” She gave Sil’s tall figure a quick appraisal. “It’s nowhere close to your size.”

Sil turned back to the rack and chose another. She held it up and raised an eyebrow.

The clerk shook her head, slipped Sil’s original pick back into place, and did the same with her second choice. “That won’t do either, I’m afraid. Come over here.” She motioned to a different section, then gave the younger woman another once-over. “You’re more likely to find something under size eight than in sixteen, dearie. Look.” She plucked a hanger from the rack and held it up. “This one’s just like the one you had.”

The pink satin was identical, and Sil had a moment of mystification until the concept of size slipped into place in her mind. She reached for the bridesmaid’s dress and the clerk put it into her hands, then guided her toward a curtained cubicle. “Go in there and try it on,” the woman advised. “This is a consignment shop, so all sales are final. You’ll need to be sure it fits before you leave with it.” When Sil hesitated, the clerk gave her a motherly prod. “Go on now, dearie. Don’t be shy—I’ll make sure no one walks in on you.”

In less then three minutes Sil was back at the counter, arrayed in good-quality pink satin. The dress was an off-the-shoulder style with a bodice that gathered snugly below her breasts and fit her exceptionally well. She’d buckled the conductor’s fanny pack around her waist again, this time with the pouch in front; now she dug into it and pulled out the wad of money stuffed inside. The clerk opened her mouth to speak, but Sil pushed all the bills across the counter and started to leave.

“Wait!”

Sil stopped and turned back. She stood, shoulders rigid, while the woman counted the money.

“You want to be more careful about your money, honey,” the clerk said kindly. “Most ladies don’t . . . ah,
wear
a bridesmaid’s dress out of the store.” This close, Sil could see that the woman’s eyelashes were unnaturally thick; she’d painted the lids and lashes with two different colors. The woman endured Sil’s inspection patiently. “Are you foreign?” she finally asked.

Sil cocked her head and considered this for a moment. “Yes,” she answered. The clerk handed her back several bills in change and Sil folded them and tucked them into the fanny pack.

“Do you speak much English?” the clerk asked.

“Yes,” Sil said. “I can talk.”

The older woman studied her silently for what seemed to Sil to be a very long time. At last the clerk sighed. “You want to be careful here, okay, dear?”

Sil nodded, her expression absolutely serious. “Yes,” she agreed, “I know. Be careful.”

S
il had been walking for most of the day, and now the rays of the late-afternoon sun topped the mountains and slanted over the peaks and valleys created by the buildings along the boulevard. Her senses were nearly burned out, overloaded with information and images, sounds and half-completed impressions. People were everywhere—too many to count, too many to understand. In the doorway she was passing was a man who made her think of the transient whose body she’d left in the railway car. Though the memory was fuzzy and fading more with each hour, she was certain that this person wore more clothes, layer upon layer—far too much for the warm climate. Instead of the semiprivacy and somewhat questionable safety of a moving boxcar, the man, whose face was deeply lined and grizzled, slept in the open next to a battered grocery cart piled with tattered-looking plastic bags.

As Sil passed him she jerked in surprise as another man, this one in a motorized wheelchair, sped by on the sidewalk. She gawked after him, then almost got pushed off the sidewalk as a door burst open in her path. A man and a woman spilled out, clutching each other and laughing amid the driving beat of heavy-metal music and the scent of liquor. His hands were all over his companion, but she didn’t seem to mind; with Sil only a few feet away, the woman spun the guy to face her and kissed him deeply on the mouth, her tongue darting past his lips. Sil watched, fascinated, as they embraced and leaned against the building, then she stepped around them and kept going.