by David Coy
The year 2006
Mary listened to the droning sound that came to her through the wet air and thought of her mother’s soft humming. She wanted her mother to be there now, to hold her and hum softly to her, to soothe her. She drifted toward her mother’s round arms and warm smile on the ghostly crest of that ugly sound.
Then the dread came. It crashed over her like a cold, brown wave and the memories of her mother’s soft touch were washed away. She was in the big chamber. The big chamber was where the droning sound was. The droning was the collective sound from others just like her, others not asleep yet not awake; others unable to move their limbs.
She could turn and lift her head and see and hear and smell. She could not talk, but she could make a deep sound, a groan, if she tried. When the pain came, the groan would be its outlet. The groan would be the dull steam her violated body would vent in its outrage.
She prayed for a miracle. She prayed that when she opened her eyes she would see big, blue sky and bright light. She pressed her eyes closed and prayed hard but when she looked, the chamber’s ceiling filled her vision. Its black, bubbly surface gave substance to the dread and when the cutting began, the ceiling’s gloom would stamp its dark print on her soul once more.
Mary turned her head slowly and saw the naked body of a young woman. Then she breathed the warm scent of perfume. The woman was new, and a splash of luscious scent had been captured with her. Mary could not speak, but if she could have spoken the result would have been the same. There was nothing to say to this newcomer, no comfort to be offered. There was no relief where none could exist.
Then her witch was there, its long head hovering, twisting and looking. She watched its quick hands move over her body with light, spider-like fluttering.
There was a motion under her skin, in her neck, deep in the muscles. It was a roiling little pressure she’d grown to know quite well. As the larvae fed on her tissues, it caused a single sharp note of pain that grew in volume second by unmerciful second. She heard the high-pitched hiss of the witch’s cutter and was relieved that the cutting was starting.
Mary began her retreat from the sound and the growing bite of the cutter and of the pain of the worm and joined her voice with the others.
dominant species
David Coy
Part One
natural selection
Dominant Species Volume One: Natural Selection
Copyright © 2007 by David Coy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher or the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. Contact the publisher for information on foreign rights.
Cover art by Ivaylo Nikolov.
For more information on this title, characters, and forthcoming books in this series, www.DominantSpeciesOnline.com This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1-4196-6377-1 EAN-13: 978-1-4196-6377-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007902031
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Nature is not human-hearted.
—Lao Tzu
1
I t was an odd little compulsion, this thing of making the coffee then not drinking it. That was the usual pattern. This time though, he’d actually poured the steaming brew into his insulated travel cup, stirred in creamer and sugar, capped it off and before starting out, perched it precariously on the passenger’s seat. Now stuck fast in the heavy traffic of the 405, he took a thankful drink of it.
All that rushing for nothing, he thought. That’s the way it is in Los Angeles. The traffic paces all. It is the great modulator of effort.
He’d marked time when he left Redondo Beach and by three PM, the traffic was tightening its strangle-hold on the basin’s major arteries. He crept through the San Fernando Valley, but when he reached the I-5 and 14 interchange, traffic had loosened up and he began to make time.
Soon he was on Route 12—two lanes of level desert highway, arrow-straight and empty for miles. He cruised peacefully across those barren flats, and the sun started toward the horizon in a gentle fall. He entered the foothills just in time to watch the early-evening sun turn the hillsides to a rich and warm brown.
Miles later, high in the hills, he stopped at a red clapboard-sided building called “Dwight’s Grocery.” It was the only store of any kind for miles. The inventory was basic, often downright spare but it was the only place to shop, and the proprietor, Darrel Wright, was the kind who wouldn’t bend to such nonsensical pressures as customer requests for anything other than what he had stocked for years. So the customers complained, Darrel resisted the complaints, and balance was perpetually maintained.
“I wish you’d get some kind of shopping carts, Darrel,” Phil said, depositing an armload of groceries and canned goods on the counter. The counter was covered with a scratched and yellowed plastic sheet. Under the cover were the miscellany of country barter—notes, business cards, stuff for sale. A crooked cardboard sign taped to the cash register read, “Sorry, no more credit,” in thin red ink.
“Nobody buys enough at one time to need 'em, ‘cept weekenders like you,” Darrel said. “Don’t have the capital anyways.” He picked up a can of peaches and turned it over and over looking for the price.
“One-nineteen,” Phil volunteered. “Damn highway robbery, too.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you had to sell it as infrequently as I do,” Darrel said. “I’ve had that can of peaches for six months at least.”
Phil didn’t doubt it. It would be impossible for anything fresh to exist here, even canned goods. The floor, the walls, the groceries on the shelves, every single thing in it had a stillness, an agedness to it. Put a fresh box of Cheerios on one of these shelves, Phil thought, and it would be stale before the day was out. It would pick up the staleness by osmosis.
“Got any Cheerios?” Phil asked, grinning.
“Nope. All out of Cheerios,” Darrel replied, dinking the price into the antique cash register.
Good, Phil thought.
Darrel aged here, too. Phil had bought candy from this very store and dropped his nickels for it into the same gnarled hands that now slowly packed the groceries into the paper bag. He’d spent many blazing hot summers in these foothills. Darrel’s store was the only source for cooling and energizing soda and candy during those gloriously bright days. Now nearly eighty, Darrel Wright had spent the greater part of his life behind this counter, counting change, passing the latest news and deflecting complaints. Like the items on the shelves, Darrel had taken on that stillness and the faint odor of the aged. His mind wasn’t as sharp, his vision even less so and rumor had it that Darrel’s mind was gone now and subject to delusions. Phil had no direct evidence of that. He’d listened to Darrel’s warnings, kidding and outright lies for so long he wasn’t sure he, of all people, would ever be able to tell the difference between one of Darrel’s bona fide delusions and one of his “stories.”
Darrel was the one who, in his younger days, put the fear of the woods and the mystery of the dark hills into preadolescent boys who’d come for candy. “Don’t you go over to Fitzsimmon’s—he’s got a damn gorilla locked up in his barn,” he’d said once.
That particular story had kept two dusty, sticky boys hovering and snooping around Fitzsimmon’s barn until dusk that day, hoping to find some clue to give bone to the body of fear and fascin
ation Dwight had conjured up out of their innocence.
“What do you know since I saw you last?” Phil asked, “and don’t lie to me.”
“Same old crap. Not much I guess,” Darrel replied. He held up a can of green beans for Phil to examine. “Is that a six or the letter b?”
“Six,” Phil said through a grin.
“Good. I need the money.”
He dinked the price into the cash register. “We did have some excitement here on Wednesday, though.”
“What was that?”
“Gloria North had some of her cattle stolen. You know who Gloria is.”
“She lives up on the ridge in that blue trailer there, don’t she?” Phil replied with his best local grammar.
“She says somebody stole ten heads of her cattle. Then she calls the sheriff, Bob Lynch. You know who Bob is.”
“You mean my uncle Bob Lynch? That sheriff?”
“Aw, hell—I forgot all about that,” Darrel said, his old voice genuinely apologetic. “Well, Bob goes up and can’t find any evidence at all that they were stoled. No horse tracks, no truck tracks. Nothin’.”
“Huh!” Phil said. “You don’t say.”
“That’s right. What do you make of that?” Darrel asked, leaning a little forward.
It was the last part that tipped Phil off. One of Darrel’s tales was on its way like some capricious leprechaun. The leaning forward helped a little, too. Phil was ready for anything.
“Aw, hell. They’ll come back. I doubt Gloria North keeps a very tight fence anyways,” Phil baited. “That’s gotta be it, don’t you think? Loose damn fence?”
Darrel leaned a little closer still. Phil did, too, just an imperceptible inch or so, just for emphasis.
“Yoo-foes,” Darrel said with clarity. “Yoo-foes took 'em.”
The remark didn’t stand a chance, really. He’d heard lots better, especially from Darrel. Phil licked his lips and settled his chops. In the first place, the source of it put it at an immediate disadvantage. And even if it had come from a complete stranger, and even if Phil had been, say, a cobbler, with not a wit of knowledge about the realms of the mind, he would have easily recognized it for what it was.
Phil responded out of reflex to the remark, and without hesitation. “No shit,” he said evenly, then waited for an upshot, a zinger, from Darrel that would nail it in.
Instead, Darrel said nothing. He fixed his gaze on Phil, pursed his lips and nodded his head with the certainty of it. Just when Phil thought Darrel would let it go with a grin and get back to the groceries, Darrel nodded again.
Then Phil saw it.
There is no way, Phil knew, to be sure of a lie when spoken. Short of the right specialized machinery, no device exists with which to measure it except experience. You listen to the speaker enough and you gain the experience required. Phil had an abundance of such experience with this speaker. Darrel had just spoken what he believed was the truth, and Phil could see it plainly in this old codger’s familiar and wizened eyes. Phil wished he had not seen it for he knew that Darrel’s mind, in believing its own fabrication, had crossed a river of no return. The mirthful mind that once delighted in hoodwinking Phil into any number of wondrous realities now stood mired in madness. This misguided belief about UFO’s would branch to other beliefs and those to others, and with each new belief Darrel’s mind would sink a little farther down. If Darrel was lucky, his descent would stop at some point before he died, but chances were he would sink completely. The mire would consume the clear, clever mind and leave a husk unrecognizable in the end. Years ago, Darrel’s tales and stories had fed Phil’s imagination like the candy he’d come to buy. Now Darrel was the innocent, believing his own stories and imaginings.
“UFO’s, huh?” Phil said finally. “Never have seen one.”
“Well you can hear them at night with little difficulty.”
“Aw, shit. Now, don’t you lie to me.” Phil swallowed hard and brushed invisible dust off the counter with a quick hand. He’d said it as if he were hearing the story thirty years ago and Darrel was again offering up to Phil’s young mind some mysterious sweet. Phil could have wept.
Darrel watched from the porch as Phil stuffed the bag of groceries into the truck. He leaned on the rail with both arms straight out and one leg bent the way very old men do. Phil wondered how Darrel managed to stay on his feet at all at his age.
“Watch your cigarette ends,” Darrel said. “It’s dry as tinder.”
“I gave 'em up long ago, Darrel,” Phil replied.
“That’s good. Boy scouts don’t smoke,” Darrel said to the
side.
“They do when they join the Marines.” Phil closed the back doors and got in behind the wheel.
Phil drove down to King Solomon’s Road and turned off into Haight Canyon. When the truck tires left the pavement and met the dirt road, Phil sighed with relief.
There are places, physical locations one can bond with forever. This was Phil’s place. In the 1800’s, the canyon had been the site of one of the most productive gold mines in Southern California. King Solomon’s mine had long since given up its last bit of gold but to Phil there were still riches here. They came in the form of the house-sized rocks, sculpted by wind and rain, and the primal, twisted forms of the scrub oak that dotted the brown hills. There was a wealth of bird life here and deer and fox and badger. At forty-six hundred feet of elevation at High Ridge, Phil’s name for that section of the canyon, the view through the crystalline air of the stars on a moonless night was worth all the gold ever taken from under them.
A single, twisting road came into the canyon from Havilah, a one-horse town built largely from the mine’s gold, what there was of it. The road wound its way like a snake and stopped twelve miles in at the edge of the Sequoia National Forest.
He drove along slowly as usual, savoring the drive.
He saw the thin tire tracks of the VW again, just one set, going up, so the trespassers were still in the canyon. He’d found the VW and the tent with his 10x binoculars from High Ridge last year about this time, despite the fact that the trespassers had tried to camouflage both with brush. He thought about stopping and introducing himself, but thought better of it. He didn’t mind an occasional camper or two, as long as they left no trash.
He’d purchased his high, rugged acreage fifteen years ago from his sister Edna. Edna and her husband, Ronny Dogget, had bought his section and theirs shortly after Phil’s and Edna’s father died. Collectively, they owned thirty percent of one of the most scenic and isolated areas in the region, thanks to a sizeable inheritance from their father.
On the way up, he drove right past Edna’s gate, deciding to visit on the way down Sunday. Ronny was under a lot of job-related stress, and he had a way of making Phil feel more than a little unwelcome half the time. The night promised to be perfect, so why chance a blemish? There were many perfect days and nights in this sheltered canyon, each of them precious to Phil.
He’d purchased the property on a lark, really. When his sister had first dragged him up to that end of the canyon in 1980 and stood him on the rough pad Ronny had cut on the top of one of the hilltops, it was dusk on a day much like today. The sun was setting over Breckenridge to the far west and Phil felt certain then that he had never seen such a view. Prior to that day, it had been years since he’d been in the area and maybe some earlier memory of the air or of the light itself ignited his passion for this land and its sweet scent of pine and sage. The most appealing thing about High Ridge was the fact that the nearest dwelling was his sister’s—four miles away. The only structure visible was the fire tower on Breckenridge and even that you couldn’t see without binoculars.
“I’ll give you a good deal on it. Then you can retire within ear shot of me,” Edna had said, laughing. Phil had the money and suddenly had the desire. While Ronny kicked dirt some yards away, the deal was made.
Phil had the perfect one-and-a-half story log house built on that very pad the following ye
ar. The design was straight out of a catalog, not a custom job, but the house was flawless to Phil in every respect. He had gone to great lengths to furnish it with just the right functional furniture. He had never regretted his purchase of this remote paradise.
He stopped where he saw the VW ‘s tire tracks going down into Duncan’s Draw and smiled at the way the car’s owner had attempted to hide them from view by brushing them out with pine branches. He’d swept away the tracks all right, but left conspicuous brush marks in the soft, dry dirt. Not only that, but he had managed to simulate the first and only total VW bus disappearance in the canyon by cutting the tracks like scissors where they turned off in the middle of the road.
When the groceries were put away and the hummingbird feeders filled, Phil had but one last chore before he’d drink a beer and smoke a cigar and watch the sun go down from his porch. He headed directly to the shed and got his weapon.
He pumped the handle of the garden sprayer several times to be sure he had good pressure, then pointed the nozzle at the thick trail of ants on the ground and pulled the trigger. The nozzle spit and sputtered then let out a solid stream of white insecticide.
“Die . . . ” Phil said as he wet them down. These weren’t your garden variety sugar ants, these fuckers would crawl up your jeans, bite and leave a blister. “Die.”
He walked along the porch rail wetting down the ants with diazinon. The chemical left its peculiar and unpleasant signature on the air. He was sure he had killed tens of thousands of ants from the same nest. He only wished he had a better, more efficient way to kill them. He wondered if one of those new microwave devices that cooked them in their nests, the ones termite exterminators used, would work on ants in the ground. Might be worth a try.
* * *
After the cutting and sealing up, they put you in a soaker. That’s what Mary called them. She had tried to give everything a name because then she could keep track better and maybe things wouldn’t be quite so horrible.