—then began to fan across the pool toward Laura, still fighting to free herself from the tar’s sticky hold.
The interior of the subterranean cavern was suddenly filled with the red-and-blue glow of the fire. It looked like lighter fluid ignited on the surface of water, floating and licking at its own boundaries in an effort to speed itself farther along.
“Press!” Dan shouted. “The fire’s headed for Laura!”
But Press was already there, feet precariously close to the edge of the tar pool as he stretched himself over the beckoning liquid. The only thing that kept him from falling face-first into the filth was the woven strap of the Mossberg hooked around one of the hundreds of stalagmites jutting from the ground. “Come on, Laura,” he urged as he reached out, “grab my hand. You can do it—stretch.”
“I—I—got it!” With a jubilant cry, Laura’s hand slid up his wrist and locked. Grunting with exertion, Press hauled her out, feeling like he was pulling some precious treasure from an aeons-old burial place. He swung her around to dry land and she collapsed, trying to rub the black mess from her skin with one hand while still grasping the pistol grip of the flamethrower with the other.
Press let go of the shotgun and bent over her. “Are you all right?” he demanded.
“God,” Laura sputtered in reply, “now I know what a fly feels like on flypaper. That was awful.”
“Well, it’s over now—”
“Press, look out!”
Sil! Press twisted around, then jerked his body down in reflexive response to Laura’s shriek, but he wasn’t fast enough. Two soiled-looking tentacles shot forward and twined about him, dragging him away. He heard Laura yelling—“Get out of the way, get out of the way!”—in the background, vaguely registered her shrill instructions to get away from Sil so she could blast the creature with her flamethrower. A great idea if it weren’t for the sinewy limbs wrapped so viciously around him—and he didn’t have his own flamethrower as an option. He’d left that next to the stalagmite off of which his Mossberg 590 was still hanging. Great preparation . . . to die.
Fighting for his life in a macabre dance up the side of the cavern, he felt something bang against the side of his elbow as he shoved an arm between himself and the life-form—his Specwar knife. Spikes were thrusting their way from Sil’s rib cage, and Press was trying mightily to keep some distance between his chest and the creature’s torso to avoid being impaled. As he dodged the teeth snapping at his face, the fingers of Press’s right hand found the knife and pulled it free of the belt loop. When one of the two tentacles whipping around him came close enough, one good swipe of the high-tech military knife severed the appendage cleanly and caused enough pain to gain his release, giving him the chance to retreat farther up a wall of rock ledges to his left.
Sil roared in agony and floundered backward, the stump end of the tentacle spurting a nasty, gelatinous glop that was yellowish tinged with glistening clear streaks. Twisting, the creature nearly lost its balance, then charged at Press again, its movements filled with strength and much more agility across the outcroppings than Press’s. He slashed at the air in front of it, ducking away from the dozens of daggerlike protrusions that erupted from its body. If it got hold of him with its remaining tentacle and pulled him to it, he was dead; the sharp spikes of before were nothing compared with those jutting from its skin now, and Press had the flash impression that it bad only been playing with him then, like a cat toys with a mouse it doesn’t consider threatening. The amputation of her limb had changed all that; she wasn’t playing games anymore.
Sil slapped at him again, the backward motion of her tentacle leaving her upper torso wide open. Press saw his opportunity and went for it, darting forward to bury the Specwar knife deep in the center of her chest before momentum brought her limb back. Was her heart there? Did she even have one? He didn’t know the answer to either question, but he’d done something right, because the resulting scream from the life-form was like no sound he’d heard it make before. Long, incredibly loud, it was enough to disorient him for a second . . . enough time for Sil to launch herself and knock Press off his feet.
The battle had carried them farther up than Press realized, and the glow from the burning pool below was a madly swinging kaleidoscope of orange, yellow and red, splitting the blackness like a child’s flashlight covered with Halloween paper. Pinned beneath Sil’s weight, Press had just enough room to bring his leg up and under his own body in an instinctive maneuver to avoid her killing spikes; a tricky shift of balance, a bit of opportune leverage and the hardest push he could muster—
—and Sil went sailing into the empty space past the rock ledge and toward the pool of flaming sludge below.
But not before wrapping her remaining tentacle tightly around Press’s ankle.
The alien’s weight dragged him forward and Press clawed at the ground, frantically searching for a hold on the loose, pebble-strewn earth. His fingers dug deep grooves into the ground until the right hand scraped across a rock poking out of the soil. Press clung to it while one foot shook in midair and the other leg was pulled straight by the mass of the creature hanging on to it. He tried to kick at Sil with his free leg, but every jouncing movement made his hold loosen a little more. His endurance was running out, and to his horror Press saw that the tip of flesh beating the air where he’d hacked off the life-form’s tentacle was elongating, beginning a slow, spontaneous regeneration. Soon she would have full use of her limbs again, and then what the hell would he do?
Unanticipated warmth wrapped itself around Press’s wrists below his grip on the jutting boulder. His fingers spasmed and slipped beyond the point of no return, but when he opened his mouth to cry out, Dan and Laura were there, hands locked around his as they towed him back over the edge of the brink.
“No!” Press gasped. “You’ll pull it up, too!”
Dan’s face twisted with dread but he didn’t stop pulling on Press’s arm. With Laura dragging on the other one and Sil hanging from one leg, Press was starting to feel like a victim of the rack—or at least a little like a human rubber band. Everything hurt and he couldn’t stop the groan that escaped his lips as his thighs scraped the jagged lip of the ledge; suddenly he was over and pushing with his free leg, battering at Sil with his foot, but to no avail.
Amid the frenzy, Press caught the glimmer of something metallic shining on the ground—his combat knife. He reached for it but was too far away; still, Dan understood Press’s intent and leaned sideways without letting go of his friend, snaring the dropped weapon. Without being told, he scooted to the edge of the precipice and began to stab at the tentacle encircling Press’s ankle, oblivious to the yellow-gold fluid spurting from the wounds he was inflicting.
“Put some elbow in it!” Press screamed as the monstrosity hanging from his foot simultaneously scrabbled for purchase against the side of the rocks and tried to tug Press’s body sideways to avoid the bite of the blade. “Pull it across—it’ll cut!”
Dan abandoned his puncturing motion. With a single, swift slash he severed the alien’s remaining tentacle. Fluid geysered from the open wound, coating all three of them as the thing went into free fall, its tentacle slipping away from Press’s ankle like an untied piece of nylon rope.
As the Sil-creature, flailing uncontrollably, roared its final defiance and tore at the rocks on its fall toward the pool of tar below, Press righted himself and reached for the flamethrower on Laura’s back. She turned her body and twisted free of the straps as Press seized it and hurled it over the side of the ledge. It struck the alien and followed it down. Before they could look over, they heard a double splash, then—
KABLOOM!
The explosion rocked the subterranean cavern and sent pebbles and fist-sized boulders pelting the entire length of the cave’s drafty interior. Flaming jellied napalm and unidentifiable saffron-colored pieces of the creature splattered in every direction, and Dan yelped when a chunk of squishy yellow flesh nearly took his eye out and left a d
eep purple bruise in its wake.
And, finally, it was over.
Nothing moved within the cavern but the flames dying out across the bubbling pool . . . and a rat, scuttling into a dark crevice with a bit of severed tentacle.
Press drew a deep, relieved breath as he stared at the tar pit. “I could have been down there with her.” He glanced at Dan, gratitude etched in the dusty lines of his face. “Thanks, Dan. Again.”
Dan grinned at his two teammates, not even feeling the angry bruise below his eye anymore. “I think I like my new job,” he said proudly.
“It’s got lot of variety!”
42
“So, tell me,” Laura said. “How did you arrange this? Not many people can reserve a quarter-mile of ocean-front for an afternoon.”
She and Press were sitting on a stretch of incredibly clean beach. In front of them was the ocean, wide and sparkling like an endless bowl of diamonds below the Pacific sunset. While it was a public region of Las Tunas State Beach in Malibu, the area was strangely trash-free and empty—no cars, no litter, no vacationing couples with children fighting it out over whose turn it was to use the beach raft. Laura thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Press lifted his face, enjoying the faint sting of the sand carried on the breeze. “You know me. I’ve got connections.”
“Uh-uh. Speaking of connections, any with Dan?”
Press’s lips turned up in a small grin. “We keep in touch. Seems he was only tooting his horn when he made that crack about this being his new job, though.”
“Oh?”
Press leaned farther back on the beach chair and stretched lazily. “Yeah. He’s out of the special-project stuff entirely. Decided he could put those empath feelings to better use with abused children.”
Laura’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? And they let him go, just like that? That’s wonderful!”
Press shrugged. “What can they do? Make him feel something for them? I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t think he knows anything classified beyond this project anyway.”
Laura looked doubtful. “That seems awful easy.”
This time Press laughed. “Easy, nothing. You’d better believe they’ll watch that fellow for the rest of his life. He knows it, but it doesn’t bother him. Part of the reason he made a successful ‘change’ was that he went with the Department of Health and Human Services. Things would have been more . . . difficult had he tried to switch to a private employer.”
“So he still works for Uncle Sam,” Laura said wryly.
“Exactly.”
They drifted into silence for a while, then Press leaned forward and clasped his hands. “I guess I’m still wondering why,” he said. “They sent us what we needed to know to . . . I don’t know. Grow them, if that’s what you want to call it. Why would they go through all that trouble simply to destroy us?”
Laura gazed out over the water. “It boiled down to a fight over the most important thing in the world, Press.”
“What’s that?”
“Babies.”
Press looked at her oddly. “Babies? What do you mean?”
“Babies—whose babies, more specifically. Whether the next generation was going to be hers, or ours.”
Press looked at her thoughtfully, then pulled something from his pocket. When he held it up, Laura realized in amazement that it was the Polaroid shot taken of Sil and John Carey. “Hey,” she said, “how’d you get your hands on that?”
“I told you,” he said as he stared at it. “I’ve got connections.” He studied the photograph for a few moments. “Look at her,” he said quietly. “She was half us, half something else, a predator from so far away it was impossible to make a physical journey through space. You once suggested that we were weeds in the galaxy and she was the weed killer. I had automatically assumed it was to conquer us, take our planet or something like they do in the old science-fiction movies—but that doesn’t wash because of the travel distance involved in space. So maybe you weren’t that far off. Maybe we should be stopped before we spread.”
“Now there’s a cheerful thought for a lovely late afternoon at the beach,” Laura commented. When he didn’t say anything, she turned her face back to the ocean. “Which do you think was the predatory half?” she asked softly. “Her half, or ours?”
Laura almost didn’t hear his answer. “I don’t know.”
He looked up at her finally and she gave him a warm smile; after a second he couldn’t help but smile back. She wore a lacy camisole that made the skin of her face and arms appear smooth and peach-colored in the fading sunlight; he could smell tropical-flavored lip gloss that made her mouth exquisitely inviting. Her clear gaze was like a glittering mirror of the ocean. “What beautiful eyes you have,” he said, leaning toward her.
Still smiling, Laura’s lips brushed his, then moved closer for a full kiss. He barely understood the words she murmured against his mouth.
“And in front . . .”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YVONNE NAVARRO is a dark fantasy writer and illustrator who lives in a western suburb of Chicago. Her first short story appeared in The Horror Show in 1984, and since then her short fiction and illustrations have appeared in over forty professional anthologies and small press magazines. She has also authored a reference book called The First Name Reverse Dictionary for writers and parents-to-be. She has written one previous novel, AfterAge, for Bantam, and her next novel, deadrush, will be coming out in October of 1995.
ABOUT THE SCREENWRITER
DENNIS FELDMAN is a photographer and screenwriter. He is the author of “The Golden Child” and “Real Men,” which he also directed. He lives in Los Angeles.
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Preview
Titlepage
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
SPECIES
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
About the Author/Screenwriter
Species Page 25