Species II (20 page)

Burgess only shrugged. “I’m not here for niceties, Dr. Baker. Let’s just get on with it.”

She could think of nothing to say in response to such a lack of feeling, so she focused on finding and slipping a binder from its place next to one of the computers. She could feel all three men watching her as she flipped through the pages, then she verified what she’d been thinking. “These creatures go through their first juvenile stage in less than two weeks,” she told them. “Then they enter the chrysalis stage—”

“Chrysalis stage?” Dennis interrupted. His face looked ashen, as though he’d absorbed just about all he could take. “You mean like a
. . .
butterfly?”

Laura didn’t respond right away, then she nodded. “I suppose you could make that comparison, since it
is
a cocoon phase. I think we’d all agree that what emerges isn’t nearly the same lovely work of nature that mankind is used to seeing. The problem is . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Press snapped to attention. “What?”

Laura looked over to Burgess, wanting to make sure the colonel was fully listening. She took a deep breath. “The problem is that this information is based on Sil and Eve, not on Patrick Ross’s offspring. We’ve already seen a massive deviation in the sense that the alien DNA literally
invaded
the cells of two human beings of its own volition. It’s clearly the stronger cellular material, and introduced in this manner, it functions entirely differently.”

Burgess glowered at her. “What are you try to tell us, Dr. Baker?”

“That we have absolutely no basis on which to assume that if—or maybe I should say
when
—the alien that Patrick Ross has become successfully breeds, it’s going to take two weeks for the offspring to reach maturity. We might be safe in predicting a chrysalis stage, but rate of changeover within that period might be only
hours.”

“Shit on a stick,” Press said crudely. “We’ve got to issue a public warning before this goes too far—”

Burgess’s voice cracked across the room. “What planet are you on, Lennox?” He yanked a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed at his eye. “If you think I’m going to allow you to start a full-scale panic, you’re crazier than I’ve always thought you were. Patrick Ross was—
is
—a national hero. The President’s approval ratings are through the roof right now because of his endorsement of the Mars exploration program, and he’ll go berserk if we publicly accuse Ross of murder.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about the President’s approval ratings!” Press yelled back. He looked ready to leap on top of the older man. “If you don’t use public communication to pull this man in right now—radio, television, APBs, and plastering his photograph all over everything—a lot more innocent people are going to die. And it’s going to be on your head besides.”

But Colonel Burgess’s return gaze was frosty. “No respect for the chain of command has always been a problem with you, Lennox. The most I can do on my end is to discreetly contact his father. I’ve already done that, and let me tell you—he was not at all pleased to discover that we’re looking for Patrick, especially when I chose not to disclose why—especially the part about the murders. He made it quite clear that Patrick has probably gone off by himself in an attempt to relax and get away from the constant crowds. As I recall, he specifically said he wasn’t his son’s ‘babysitter.’

“As for the rest of it, you have my orders—you will
not
involve the media in any way at all. Use whatever resources are necessary to bring Ross in, but do it without attracting any attention. Do I make myself clear?” He turned his back and headed toward the door.

“Colonel Burgess, wait.” Laura stepped in front of him, resisting the impulse to grab him by the collar and drive her facts home. “I don’t think you fully understand what we’re dealing with here. You’ve had access to the records, read all the files—this man is thinking like Sil did. He has a biological imperative to mate—instinctively, that’s his entire function. Sil was uneducated and a complete stranger to human ways, yet she managed to do just that
and
give birth before we were luckily able to stop her.”

Burgess’s face remained impassive. “Do you have a point here, or do you just like telling me things I already know?”

For a moment Laura couldn’t speak as all her thoughts went a sort of hazy red. “The point, you stuffed-up old
fool,
is that Patrick Ross knows everything about this world that Sil didn’t. He doesn’t have to learn to drive a car, count money, or
fit in.
He already knows how. We are running out of time to stop him—
if we’re not already too late.”

The colonel stepped around her and pulled open the door. “Then tell Lennox to earn his million and find the son of a bitch.”

Residents in the Washington-Maryland area are being warned by local law enforcement that a serial killer may be on the loose. Over the last few days, six victims, all female, have been found, ranging from two well-known young women who frequented the upper echelon of the Washington, D.C. social circuit to those the police termed as northwest-area prostitutes. The Medical Examiner’s Office reports that all of the bodies were horribly mutilated. There is apparently no motive for the killings and no connection between the victims. The police department is advising all women to take extra precautions until the killer is caught. Travel with a companion at all times and avoid areas where you might be alone. Above all, authorities are warning that you should proceed with extreme caution if you are approached by a stranger.

“H
ow much for a room?” Patrick asked the hotel clerk.

“Twenty an hour,” the guy grated, never taking his eyes from the television broadcast. The sound was on too loud but that was good; the man probably wouldn’t remember his voice.

Patrick glanced at the screen and recognized the photographs showing there as the two women from the Watergate Hotel the other night. He smiled, then put sixty dollars on the counter. The man’s gaze flicked to the money and he reached out a grimy hand and snatched it up; an instant later he slid a set of keys toward Patrick and his date.

The old elevator screeched as it rose. Patrick and the woman climbed out of it on the fifth floor. This place was as seedy as they came, but it made no difference to Patrick as long as the key he held in his hand—Room 505—would open the right room and give him the privacy he needed with this prostitute. The room itself was dingy and probably not very clean, but Patrick didn’t bother to turn on the lights. This woman was taller than average with platinum-blond hair billowing around a square-jawed face. Her lips were full and pouty and she smiled as she grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the bed. “You look like someone I’ve seen on television,” she said. “This ought to be real good.”

Her hand was hot around his, but it felt . . .
wrong.
Patrick stiffened and backed up before the hooker could wrap her tanned arms around him. “Hey,” she said, but her voice had lost an edge of confidence it’d had only moments before. “What’s wrong, honey?”

He studied her, trying to fathom what was missing here. He felt no desire to touch her, no imperative to breed with her. He didn’t even—

Patrick’s eyes narrowed but he smiled as he extended his hand to touch that gorgeous head of white-blond hair. She returned the smile, obviously relieved, and leaned toward him so he could stroke her hair; when she was close enough, Patrick twined his fingers in it, then gave it a good, hard yank.

It came off in his hands.

A wig—

—and suddenly all sorts of explanations and protests were coming from the mouth of the man who’d duped him into coming up here. “Hey, come on now. You’re a handsome guy, and ain’t I a good-looking piece? I mean, fun’s fun, right? I’m as good as any girl—better even.” The guy reached for the clasp on Patrick’s slacks. “Just let me show you. We’ll start right here, and I promise you’ll forget about the whole man/woman thing inside of ten seconds, okay? It’s all just fun, right?”

“Fun,” Patrick agreed as he, too, reached out.

He didn’t care about the sixty bucks, he thought as he slipped out the back entrance of the hotel less than two minutes later. But it was a damned shame to lose a good three hours’ worth of privacy in that hotel room.

“I
don’t like this,” Laura said. “And I don’t like not knowing what the hell it means.”

She was standing before the main monitoring system on the laboratory floor, staring across at the habitat and its occupant. Inside the glass-walled sleeping area, Eve was thrashing on her bed; her eyes were closed and she might or might not have been sleeping, but they couldn’t tell that from the equipment readouts. In fact, Laura thought they were lucky that the alien woman hadn’t unwittingly yanked every one of the electrodes off.

“See what I mean, Dr. Baker?” asked Brea. “It’s all in our reports. Every so often, all her signals go berserk. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration—even her temperature.”

“You know,” Vikki began. “Ah, never mind.”

“What?” Laura asked.

The younger woman’s cheeks turned pink. “Never mind. It’s probably a stupid idea—no basis in fact whatsoever.”

“Let’s hear it anyway. I’m open to anything right now.”

Vikki’s face turned even redder. “Well, the way she’s moving, kind of bucking like that. It’s . . . it’s almost like she’s dreaming about having an orgasm.”

Laura considered this for a moment, then frowned and turned back to watch Eve. She’d quieted in these last few seconds and her vitals, although still high, were slowly sinking back to normal. An orgasm?

Yeah, that’s exactly what it had looked like.

P
atrick watched the woman on the stage very carefully.

Another tall one—he seemed to prefer them that way, although he didn’t know why. This girl had long chestnut-colored hair, and the way she was tossing her head back and forth during her sexy dance around the silver pole in the center of the stage made him pretty sure it was all her own. Her outfit was gone as she stripped down to a red-satin G-string. Slender and lithe, the gal had generous breasts with big dark nipples, but Patrick wasn’t stupid; plenty of gays went for silicone implants nowadays. At least the fabric that dipped between the inviting vee of her legs was smooth and tight-fitting, but in this day and age, that didn’t mean anything either.

Just in case, Patrick leaned forward across the narrow bar that surrounded the round platform on which she danced. It wasn’t long before he caught her eye, and her gaze went quicker still to the hundred-dollar bill folded lengthwise in his fingers. He gestured with it and she did a slinky little triple-step that put her swaying hips only two feet from his face, twisting and turning like a snake to give him the best possible view of everything. He waited until her twisting had slowed and she was facing him, then reached forward and motioned with the money. She thrust out her pelvis obligingly and he slipped the hundred-dollar bill, along with his first two fingers, far down the front of the tiny piece of fabric she wore. She quivered and he pulled his hand away and looked up at her, feeling a hot surge of desire as she gazed at him and licked her lips, gave a little nod of her head that promised more when her dance was over.

No mistakes this time.

“S
pecial agents, huh?” The room clerk looked at Press and Laura with keen interest. “Since when does some fag hooker getting hisself offed warrant a visit from bigwigs like you?”

“I’d just like to know if you saw the guy he went upstairs with,” Press said with exaggerated patience.

The look the clerk gave him said clearly that he thought Press was an idiot for even asking. “They come and go.” His dirty fingernails tapped the counter and he gave them a nasty grin showing teeth coated with the residue of what was probably a week’s worth of meals. The T-shirt and jeans he wore surely hadn’t seen a washing machine in a month. “All day long. Know what I mean?”

“I think we can figure it out,” Laura said dryly and glanced at Press. “Let’s go. There’s absolutely nothing here that will tell us anything about him.” She shot a withering look at the desk clerk, who just returned it with a sneer. “We’re better off out in the field.”

She waited until they were outside the ratty little hotel before she exhaled and gripped Press’s arm. “We’ve got to find him, Press. We’ve
got
to. We have no idea what’s he’s doing, what the maturity rate of the offspring is if he’s already mated, nothing. Because Anne Sampas was a woman, we can’t even use what happened to her as a reliable model for what Patrick might be doing, and obviously we killed the offspring from that birth. For God’s sake, Ross could be fathering twins or triplets or worse.

“Press, every hour that passes could put us closer to it just being too damned
late.”

A
nother shallow grave in the darkness of the pasture beyond the old barn.

Patrick didn’t recall how many graves he’d dug back here—three or four, or perhaps it was ten—and he didn’t care. There were other graves, too, scattered around the property, but they and their numbers were also inconsequential. The only things that mattered were waiting for him in the barn right now. Beyond them was the soul-deep urge to mate, and beyond that . . .

Nothing.

He tamped the dirt in place with his foot, then picked up his flashlight and scanned the dense brush around him. After a minute, he found what he was looking for and held out his hand; the child, this one a girl, was already close to three human years old and she came to him eagerly, wanting nothing more in the world than to be close to her father and protector. When Patrick led her to the barn and took her inside, his daughter joined her brothers and sisters—nearly a dozen of them—in waiting for the next wondrous stage in their lives. He’d brought them plenty of food and water, made sure they wanted for nothing. Now it was just a matter of time. Meanwhile—

—the rest of the world awaited.