“Dr. Fitch?” Robert Minjha strode to the driver’s side window, disconnecting a call on a handheld telephone. “I just got the report on Carey and the water in the hot tub. There’s no evidence of ejaculation.”
Laura looked up in surprise. “So Sil hasn’t managed to mate yet.”
Dan smiled a little. “I think we interrupted her.”
“Well, I guess we did!” Fitch said sarcastically. “Come on, for crying out loud—give me something I can use, will you?”
“And what flashes of intelligence have you come up with lately, Dr. Fitch?” Press asked testily.
Fitch ignored him. “Let’s head back,” he said again. “We’ll get some rest and tomorrow night we’ll go back and stake out the ID.”
“You’ve got to be joking.” Press’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s not stupid, you know. She isn’t going to repeat herself.”
“I agree with Press.” Stephen leaned forward on the front seat of the van, his elbows resting on the dashboard. “I doubt she’ll go back there—the place yielded a poor specimen. Everything we know about her says she learns exceptionally quickly. Her skills at selecting a mate will have progressed significantly by now.”
Fitch looked exasperated. “Look,” he explained, “she’s been in Los Angeles for three days. She may not have been successful at the ID, but it is what she knows. Can any of you do better?” He waited pointedly for a few moments, but no one responded. “I didn’t think so. Besides, I’d rather we try the ID again tomorrow night than spend the evening sitting around the computers at the Biltmore reminiscing about how close we were and waiting for some elusive ‘break.’ ”
By way of good-bye, the doctor started the van’s engine and put it in gear. As he pulled out of Carey’s driveway Press saw Dan waving from the open rear window. He held up the Polaroid and returned the gesture. “Good detective work, kid!” he called as the vehicle made the turn out of the driveway and went out of sight on the main road. Hell, Press thought dourly, the photograph was the only thing left at the house that meant anything.
Of course, he wouldn’t want to say that to John Carey’s family tomorrow morning.
31
By the time the search helicopter passed overhead, Sil was already set for transportation.
She made her move in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour Liquor Mart at the corner of Sunset and Fairfax, across from the Directors Guild of America Building she’d admired before. The Liquor Mart was ringed with lush vegetation and fairly crowded, a lot nicer than the ratty places by her motel in Hollywood. Sil was in a hurry but not foolish, and she waited until a woman in her late twenties who looked Sil’s own size parked a car on the end and went inside. When she came out about ten minutes later with a small paper bag of groceries, Sil was ready.
No one else was around their cars when Sil sprang. The woman had the driver’s door open and was leaning inside to swing the paper bag and her pocketbook over onto the passenger side, and Sil took advantage of her victim’s off-balance stance to shove her bodily across the front seat. Checking the lot quickly to make sure no one had seen, Sil reached inside the car and sank the fingers of one hand into the driver’s thick, shoulder-length hair. Sliding her other hand under the struggling woman’s thighs, Sil lifted her clear of the driver’s seat and middle console and swung her over to the passenger side of the car like a stuffed toy.
“Give me your clothes,” Sil commanded without letting go of her handful of brown hair.
“Who are you?” the woman wailed. “What do you want?”
“I just told you,” Sil repeated impatiently. “Your clothes. Hurry up—and be quiet.”
“No!” The woman tried to pull free and when that didn’t work, she took a swing at Sil and began clawing at the hand buried in her hair. Easily dodging the weak punch, Sil was acutely aware that she was stark naked, streaked with dirt and wet leaves, and sitting behind the wheel of another person’s vehicle. Any moment could bring disaster, and she decided that babying the owner of this small taupe-colored Mazda 323 was a risk she could no longer afford. Instead of struggling further, Sil bounced the woman’s forehead hard on the dashboard. When her prisoner went limp, Sil hurriedly pulled the woman’s sweater off her and put it on, then jostled her unconscious victim onto the floorboard.
This car, Sil discovered, was different from Robbie’s orange Puma. With one less pedal and a gearshift that remained stationary unless you wanted to go in the opposite direction, it was a simpler machine to learn and required little effort to drive. She preferred being naked and feeling the night air against her thighs and back, but it wasn’t possible; loath to do it, she nonetheless pulled around to the back of the building and took the woman’s blue jeans, socks and pair of purple-and-white Nikes that weren’t quite big enough. Still senseless, the driver never felt a thing as Sil tied her hands and feet with a length of rope she found in the back, then thrust her under the overhanging shelf of the hatchback. Finally, Sil dumped the contents from the grocery bag, crushed it into a tight ball, and shoved it in the woman’s mouth.
Guiding the Mazda carefully back to the front lot of the market, Sil reparked the car in a different spot facing Sunset Boulevard, angled slightly in the direction of John Carey’s house. She reasoned that the people who were looking for her, including the doctor from the complex, would opt for Sunset to get to the expressway rather than the more crowded Hollywood Boulevard. Although the woman who owned the car came to after a while, her muffled thumps from the rear of the Mazda were easy for Sil to ignore as she sat, waiting, her gaze fixed solidly on the street.
While she waited Sil thought about the brown-haired man who had braved the darkness without hesitation to come after her. In her mind’s eye, she remembered the way his sculpted profile had looked, silhouetted against a backdrop of leaves and night sky. Broad-shouldered, audacious and confident, fearless even though he had no idea what his opponent could or couldn’t do.
A child by him would be strong and cunning, a supreme hunter. The thought of mating with him made her blood race. After all, nothing was impossible, right? What had that woman at the ID told her before Sil had eliminated her?
All’s fair in love and war.
32
“Ninety-nine percent of our genes are useless now,” Laura told Press as she drove. She thought it was kind of amusing that he’d taken off his shoes and stuck both stockinged feet out the window, like a carefree teenager. “They are, however, a dictionary of what’s been useful on this planet throughout time.”
“For everything?” Press asked curiously. “Not just for humans?”
“You got it. Genes carry instructions for all sorts of things. The gills of a fish, for instance, or the webbed feet of a frog.”
“But we don’t have those things,” Press said, holding on as Laura took a curve to the right at a brisk pace. She was determined not to lose sight of Fitch’s van on the roadway in front of them. “Christ, that man drives as erratically as he thinks.”
She shrugged, never taking her eyes off the street or the van ahead. “Fitch is a dreamer, that’s all. But it is too bad he didn’t invest more time in a solid blueprint before going ahead with the physical part of his project. If he had, maybe we’d be studying his creation—working with it, instead of hunting it down.”
“Yeah,” Press said as he pulled his feet in and groped around the floorboard for his shoes, “back to the hunting down part. You were talking about gills and frog feet.”
“Those instructions are still in our genes,” Laura told him. “They’re just turned off. Now it’s junk from the past, silent and primitive history. We’ve seen so many things in Sil, so much power. Maybe the instructions from the alien part of her DNA has given her the ability to turn all those things on and off at will. If that’s the case, she could access our entire genetic history.”
“What are you saying?” Press asked slowly. “That we could be fighting the entire animal kingdom?”
Laura stole a glance at hi
m. “Worse. In theory, she could have things in her bodily makeup that never developed in us, or perhaps did but are now extinct. Attributes we don’t even know about.” She drove in silence for a moment, then continued, her voice low. Her face was expressionless in the green backwash of the sedan’s dash lights. “Here’s something you can appreciate in your line of work, Press. Instead of some weird space creature, think of Sil as an object, a tool. She’d make an excellent biological weapon if something out there thought humankind was nothing more than a galactic weed that should be eradicated before it spreads throughout the universe.”
Press stared at her, unnerved. “So what you’re supposing is that she’s the cure and we’re the disease.”
“I’m not supposing anything,” Laura replied. “Only speculating.”
“Jesus,” Press muttered. “Human weeds. Now there’s a happy thought.” He rubbed the back of his neck, then focused on the car’s on-line computer, still powered up and ready. “Let’s tackle a cheerier subject,” he suggested as he began tapping keys on the console.
“Like what?” She glanced sideways at him.
“Like . . . you.” Not an accomplished typist, it took him three tries to get SEARCH: BAKER, LAURA [DR.] spelled properly at the C: prompt. Three seconds of *PLEASE WAIT*, then Press was rewarded with BAKER, LAURA [DR.]: 17 WILDWOOD DRIVE/SIMI VALLEY. He read the data aloud to her and smiled. “Simi Valley . . . nice out there?”
Laura smiled in return as she pulled into the drive-up of the Biltmore behind Fitch’s van and cut the engine. “I like it,” she said. She left the keys in the ignition for the valet and climbed out without looking at him. He barely heard her next sentence.
“You should check it out sometime.”
Although Dr. Fitch had already gone up to his suite, Dan and Stephen were waiting in the lobby when Laura and Press came in. “Anyone hungry?” Stephen asked with a bright-eyed look at Laura.
She couldn’t help but grin as from the corner of her eye she saw Press’s expression darken. “No thanks,” she said. “I’m too exhausted to do anything but sleep.”
“I’ll have something to eat with you,” Dan offered. “I’m starved. How about you, Press?”
“Not before bed,” he answered. “It’ll give me nightmares. I’ll hold out for bacon and eggs in the morning.” He nodded good night to the two men and walked toward the elevators with Laura. She pressed the call button, but when the car arrived, Press changed his mind about getting on. “You go ahead,” he told her. “I’m going to pick up a paper. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“ ’Night,” Laura said with a wave.
Press gave her a return salute just before the doors closed, then turned and made his way back through the lobby to the newsstand near the front doors. It was locked, but the first stacks of Times had already been delivered. Press dropped a couple of quarters on the second stack and a quick zip of his pocketknife got him the top paper from the pile closest to him.
The elevators were slow in the early hours of the morning, and he was already scanning page three by the time the LED floor indicator flashed back to 1 and the mirrored doors opened to admit him. Immersed in his newspaper, Press stepped into the empty car without looking up and pushed the button for his floor, not even noticing when the doors slid shut.
In the farthest corner of the Biltmore’s lobby, Sil watched with hungry eyes as the LED floor indicator winked its way to 9 and stopped.
33
The man with the dark hair and eyes opened the door to the hotel room as soon as she knocked, as if he had been waiting for her, as if he had known she would come to him. He stood to the side and signaled without faltering that she should come in, although she was sure she saw recognition in the penetrating gaze that swept her up and down. She could feel her desire for him radiating from her, almost visible in the air between them like heat waves shimmering above a car engine on a bright day. When she reached for him and cupped his face in her hands, he didn’t back away. He just stood there, looking at her, waiting, yet when she kissed him he seemed surprised. Suddenly afraid he would reject her like all the others, she stared at him and held out her hands pleadingly, her eyes wide and blue.
Then they were together on his bed, their naked forms already entwined in the act of love, him on the bottom, her on top and riding a crest of pleasure so powerful it shortened her breath and made her giddy. His body was hard and lean, charged with strength and maleness; she could feel him inside her, huge, stroking and filling her with heat with every sensual shift of his hips. When he closed his eyes, she thought he was going to come and she tensed with anticipation, her own blossoming orgasm making her moan. Still moving underneath her, he sat up without pulling out, wrapping his arms around her as he opened his eyes. As she stared into them, nose to nose, they were darker than she remembered, almost black. Shocked, she saw them change to a lighter color, then shift again, brown to blue to green to gray to nothing more than round, colorless orbs in his skull.
Whatever pleasure she’d felt was gone, driven away by fear. He smiled at her but the expression was . . . wrong somehow, elongated in the jaw and full of teeth that shouldn’t be there. She tried to pull away but couldn’t; his arms were wrapped tightly around her and they were overly extended, too, filled with far more might that she had ever known. She wanted to scream but no voice came out of her mouth when it opened. His body, still joined with hers, began to mutate in earnest, growing dozens of barbs and tentacles. Pulling out of shape, it lost its healthy flesh coloring in favor of a jellylike transparency that reminded her of the cooling grease in the pans below the hot dogs in the train station back in Utah. Vital parts throbbed within it, moving a faintly purplish fluid just below the skin surface with each pulse.
Horrified and struggling pointlessly, she could do nothing as the lover within her arms gripped her body and re-formed himself into a being much like the dark side of herself. As the spikes erupted from his chest and punctured her ribs and the softer organs beneath, even her shrieks were soundless.
Sil awoke at dawn with a stifled scream, her skin running with sweat and her eyes only inches away from a photograph on the nightstand. Encircled by a fancy plaster frame with painted tulips at its upper corner, the photo showed the woman Sil had abducted last night standing on the deck of a boat with her arms around a tall, slender man of indeterminate age. There was nothing sexual about the way the two clasped each other, no tilt of the head or flirtatious curve of either’s body. The woman’s name, Sil recalled, was Marlo Keegan; she’d learned that and the appropriate address by going through the purse on the front seat of the Mazda before leaving the Biltmore to come to this house. It was a small place, decorated with a lot of ruffled floral prints and pastel plaid fabric; lace curtains hung in front of bright white miniblinds and ceramic knickknacks crowded the furniture atop crocheted doilies. Very frilly and feminine, and for Sil, quite comfortable.
Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Sil rolled on her other side. The owner of the house, Marlo, was awake and staring at her. Her prisoner was still tied securely and Sil had found silver duct tape on a shelf by the back door when she’d dragged her victim inside. She’d used the tape to reinforce the bonds, finally twining a length of tape around Marlo’s ankle and her own to ensure that the woman could not free herself without waking her captor.
Sil regarded the Keegan woman impassively. “Who is the man in the photograph? Does he live here, too?”
“It’s m-my brother.” The answer was strained. “He lives in Dallas.”
Brother? Sil didn’t know what a brother was. Dallas, too, was a mystery, but not important enough to think about. She had other things on her mind. “Do you ever have nightmares?”
“Y-yes.” Marlo’s response was shaky. “I think I’m having one right now.”
Sil cocked her head, perplexed again, but decided not to pursue it. “I have them,” she said. “I think they tell me who I am.”
Marlo said nothing for a moment. Then: “Why
are you doing this to me?”
“To . . . save my life, I suppose.” Sil sat up on the bed and ripped apart the strand of duct tape running from her ankle to Marlo’s, then hugged her knees. The down comforter was soft and warm and she didn’t feel like getting off the bed yet. “I don’t know where I’m from, what I am, or what I’m doing here. Do you?”
“If you’re asking if I know who you are, the answer is no,” Marlo said cautiously. “And I don’t want to know.”
“Really?” Sil studied the bound woman. “Why do you think you’re here?”
“I don’t know!” Sil’s prisoner began to whimper. “Please, let me go—I won’t tell anyone. I won’t do anything to hurt you, I promise. Please—”
“Yes, you would.” Sil swung her legs off the bed and stood, jouncing the mattress. “You just don’t know it yet.”
Certain that Marlo wouldn’t escape, Sil left her to sob into a pillow and began to explore the small house. Most of the furniture was still fresh looking though not expensive, as if the house were a recent purchase that its proud new owner had tried to fill. An interesting place, and it made her wonder what Marlo Keegan did for a living and what she was like as a person—not that Sil would bother to find out.
The yellow-and-white kitchen was small and efficient, without the clutter of the other rooms. She found what she was looking for under the kitchen sink, thrown into a disused box with a bag of potting soil so old that the plastic sack was cracked in a half-dozen places. When she walked back into the bedroom, the woman on the bed cringed at the sight of the rusted pruning shears in Sil’s hand.
Species Page 17