Species (18 page)

Neither of them moved. Five seconds went by, then ten. “All right,” Sil finally said. Her fingers had curled into claws and wouldn’t slacken; she hid them behind her back so he wouldn’t see. “Whatever you say.”

Robbie’s rigid expression relaxed and he closed the distance between them and put an arm around her. “That’s better,” he said. He was taller by a good four inches and had to tilt her face up to his for a kiss. “Come on, baby. Loosen up and have a little fun. I know what I’m doing—I’ll make you feel real good, I promise.”

His mouth closed over hers and his tongue pushed past her lips. Sil had to fight the urge to gag as that horrid, sickly fog enveloped her. After a moment she pushed the memory of the green mist aside and surrendered to the impulse of self-preservation rising inside her; closing her eyes, she let her tongue reach for his mouth as she enfolded him in her arms. A feeling, huge and dark and indefinable, rocketed through her body, making her spasm and clutch Robbie closer.

Robbie’s eyes bulged. He tried to scream and couldn’t as Sil’s tongue unfurled, filling his mouth and throat as he struggled desperately to get free. He couldn’t break her crushing embrace, so he punched her twice in the back of the head, the only part of her that he could reach. Useless—she didn’t even feel it, and before he could manage a third strike, Sil’s tongue burst from the back of his skull, spraying the rich, Persian-motif comforter with blood, gray matter and bits of dark-haired scalp. Robbie convulsed in her arms and went limp, and Sil found that when she let him go, only her bloody tongue, long and barbed on the end, held him upright.

An automatic push of will and it retracted, whipping back into her head and taking a good chunk of Robbie’s brains with it. His body toppled sideways and Sil leaned over him and spat out the filth in her mouth, retching violently as she tried to cleanse herself. Out of breath and splattered with his tainted blood, she stepped over the body and went into the bathroom, stripping gratefully before stepping into the sumptuous, glass-surrounded shower. A little experimenting with the knobs and she managed to enjoy a nice, hot shower to wash away Robbie’s repulsive touch.

20

“W
ell,” Laura said dryly, “if she hasn’t guessed we’re after her, I’m sure she knows now. Every house on that hill has a clear view of both Loma Vista and Carla. With this kind of equipment, anyone could see us coming for miles.” She swiveled on the front seat for a view out the rear window of the van. Seven army vehicles of various sizes chugged up the hill behind them; even with their lights on dim, the troop would be impossible to miss.

“There’s no other way,” Fitch said. He sounded like he was trying to talk with his jaw wired shut.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephen stated impassively. He was staring absently out the window. “She won’t be thinking about us right now anyway. Her behavior is clearly indicative of a desire to reproduce, to breed.”

“So tell us something we don’t already know.” Press looked moodily out the window.

“Don’t you think she’ll be here?” Interior lighting was minimal and Dan’s ebony face was nearly invisible from his seat in the midsection of the van. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“If she’s mated successfully,” Stephen murmured, “she could be long gone.”

“Mating doesn’t mean she’ll have a baby right away, does it?” Dan struggled to unsnap his seat belt, then scooted forward until he could lean between the two front bucket seats. The dashboard lights gave off a low, multicolored glow and Laura could see rivulets of perspiration sliding slowly down Dan’s forehead and temples. His fear-filled voice made it clear that it wasn’t the warm night or the unaccustomed humidity in the air making him sweat. “She’s half-human, so she’ll have to wait nine months like us, like a normal human woman, right?”

Laura didn’t answer right away. She could feel the others on the team waiting. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. From the far backseat, Press made a fake, sardonic sound that was supposed to pass for a cough but sounded more like the throat-clearing noise people used to politely inform you they know you are lying. It was unfortunate that he wasn’t directly behind her where she could smack him for being so damned insolent. “From what we’ve seen of her growth and the growth of the creature at the virus lab, probably . . . not.”

Dan sat back, speechless. Fitch’s voice cut through the sudden silence as he braked sharply and spun the wheel to the left through an entrance gate in a long, wrought-iron fence. “Everybody get ready. This is the driveway to the house.”

T
he house, Press soon discovered, looked like a standard A-frame from the front, but had its ass end propped on stilts buried deep in the side of the hill. Below was a sparkling, panoramic view of Hollywood Hills; to the northwest, the freeway was a vibrating ribbon of light in front of an exotically shimmering glow that could only be Universal City. Quite a view, Press thought sourly, and one good mud slide would make Mr. Robbie Nice Guy kiss this happy little homestead good-bye. In the meantime the stilts did serve a purpose by giving Press and the two Special Forces men following him a perfect place to shimmy up to the cantilevered deck. Once they were on top, all three crouched for a moment to get their bearings.

“Your move, Lennox,” the one closest to him whispered. “What’s your plan?”

“You go to the left, and you go to the right.” Press peered toward a sliding-glass door about four yards away. He pointed at it. “I’m in through there. You’ve been briefed on what the woman looks like. If you see her, shoot to kill. Let’s—”

“Dr. Fitch said to try to take her alive.” The second man was little beyond a black-on-black phantom a few feet away. The low light spilling onto the deck from the patio doors barely showed him carefully positioned on the rim of the deck. Nothing moved inside.

Yet.

“Fitch is a fool and not here doing the cleanup on his own dirty work,” Press hissed. “Try it and she’ll kill you before you can change your mind. Now
go!”
They melted into the night without further argument and Press crept to the door that looked out over the deck. Just for the hell of it, he gave it a try. More stupidity; it slid open easily, as if Press and his men were the only ones in the world who could shimmy up a rough wooden pole. He opened it only enough to slip through and close it behind him, pulling his SIG-Sauer P229 free of its holster before he was all the way into the living room.

Nice decorating, Press thought as he covered the length of the room in a running crouch. Wish I had that coffee table. He halted soundlessly at the juncture of a small hallway and another door. Because of the angle of the hall, he could see nothing past the doorjamb except another open door. It was well lit and he could hear the sound of the shower running all the way out here. Gun cocked and eyes fixed on the door that obviously led to the bathroom, Press glided around through the opening and almost stepped on the body of a man with half his head gone.

He barely stifled his yell of surprise and did a fast, quiet dance around the dead man’s limbs as he tried not to step on the arm and leg outflung toward the hall. Was Sil in there? Discarded in front of the bathroom door was a crumpled black brassiere, the kind with underwires and heavy fabric that faddish women were wearing as blouses these days. There was something oddly . . .
smeary
about it, and Press had to get practically on top of it to see the blood, soaked into the black fabric so heavily it was leaking out the other side.

Robbie apparently didn’t believe in air-conditioning, or maybe he’d intended to open the patio doors during the planned romp on the still-made bed. Between the sneaking around and the steam roiling out of the bathroom, Press could feel his shirt starting to cling to the center of his back. Despite the tension and warmth, his grip on the .357 SIG was still dry and his sight was steady, but his mind was giving him a snippy and utterly useless reminder that he’d never gotten around to switching his SIG-Sauer semiauto for the fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5SD4 he’d set aside back at the complex. If he got out of here alive tonight, he’d have one of Fitch’s nagging little aides go back and retrieve it for him . . .
if
this job wasn’t over by dawn.

With the water running like that, the air would never uncloud enough for him to get a clear view. “Fuck it,” Press muttered, and darted into the vapor-clogged bathroom. The sound of the shower was thunderous in his ears, hammering right along with his heart. Taking a deep, moisture-laden breath, Press leaped through the door, hit a vanity with a black-and-gold marble top, and brought his pistol up and ready to fire as he ricocheted into the glass-enclosed shower.

The
empty
glass-enclosed shower.

“Shit,” he said in a low voice. He yanked the .357 SIG away from the spray of water—long past being anything but lukewarm—and found the knob to cut off the pressure from the shower head; the ensuing silence gave him a ringing sound in his ears, like standing next to a dam when they cut the water flow. His shirt was soaked, his hair was plastered to his forehead . . . hell, even his shoes were squishing. To top it off, he could hear enough voices coming from the rest of the house to tell him that Sil was definitely not around.

It looked like he was going to have to ask for the fully automatic after all.

“T
his woman is a cold-blooded killer.” Press was talking
at
Xavier Fitch rather than to him. “She—”

“Is not a woman,” Laura reminded the group. “And you should stop thinking of her as such.”

“But you just said
her,”
Dan said in confusion.

“She
is
a female,” Laura explained, “but she’s not human because she was created with alien DNA. She uses our human form as a costume only, a camouflage to walk among us. She does not necessarily
think
like a human, at least not all the time.”

“Which makes her all the more dangerous,” Press cut in. He looked like he wanted to throttle Fitch. “One of those soldiers told me your orders were to take her alive. Are you out of your fucking mind? How many more people have to die because of your moronic experiment?”

Fitch didn’t look a bit intimidated, just preoccupied. “I don’t understand how any of this has to do with reproduction, or her desire to reproduce,” he said eventually, reaching to massage his temples. “First she kills a girl at the nightclub—a total stranger from what we’ve been able to ascertain. Then she finds a man and gets him to take her someplace private, and ends up murdering him, too.”

“I’d say she fits the classic definition of a psychopath,” Stephen said. “There’s nothing to inhibit her—no moral sense, no social structure—”

“She wasn’t exactly smothered with motherly love by Xavier,” Laura said caustically. “Nor did he teach her any manners.” She met his annoyed glance evenly.

“She’ll kill if she feels threatened or wants something,” Stephen continued. “Anyone who gets in her way is going down.”

Dr. Fitch frowned. “Gets in the way of what?”

“Of reproduction,” Laura said impatiently. “We talked about this earlier, when Stephen first mentioned it in the van. And he was correct—she’s in the mating part of her life cycle.”