Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  “This Tom and the knife thing?”

  “Can you believe it,” Mary said. “ I watched the whole thing. I’d just given Tom a hug, if you can believe that, for handing over the phone. Gilbert just stabbed him in the neck when Tom had his back turned to him. I was surprised Tom didn’t kill him.”

  “I take it he didn’t die. How’s he doing?”

  “From what I could see, it wasn’t much of a wound. I took a look at it a few minutes later and it had stopped bleeding. It’s not serious I don’t think. He went into his hole. Gilbert’s in there with him. Go figure. I haven’t seen them since.”

  No telling what sparked that weird-assed event, he thought. There was a clinical description for Gilbert’s condition: he was nuts. That particular diagnosis didn’t help very much, however. Phil knew that Gilbert was so twisted in his thinking he never would shake off his unique and distorted world view. The first thing that came to mind about the attack on Tom was that it was a simple, vanilla-flavored homosexual rage ignited by Mary’s hug. It was hard to believe that Tom Moon could be the object of anyone’s desire, but you never knew.

  He took the pen out of the spiral binding and started making notes; dates, times, number of captives, the ship, the procedures, the larvae, the goons. He drew a little circle as a bullet next to each item. He intended to cover each one during the call, and as he did, he’d check it off.

  He stopped.

  Christ, he thought. She’ll be shocked as hell to hear my voice. Too shocked to listen. That’s the first problem. She must think I’m dead or kidnapped. Probably murdered. How am I going to break it to her that I’ve been abducted. How do you lead into that? It will sound exactly like I think it will. She’ll think some freakish psychosis has caused me to run away. As soon as I say I’ve been abducted by aliens, her mind will high-step for cover and it’ll take me a half hour or longer just to get her to come back, if I ever do. It would be a perfectly normal reaction. Just like in the movies. Cognitive dissonance at its best—or worst.

  Above the first bullet he added another and wrote “I am not psychotic. I am not on drugs. I am in control.” It sounded lame, especially the last, but the flat truth right up front, before he got underway with the bizarre and unlikely details might smooth the rough road he’d have to traverse. He read the words silently to himself several times to practice them—and perhaps just to convince himself that they were true.

  “There,” Mary said, holding up the phone and dish arrangement. “Try that.”

  Phil took it and held it up to his head. The foil fitting had been modified so that it fit more tightly.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’m ready.” He sat down and crossed his legs and put the open notebook in front of him. Mary pointed the antenna down at Earth.

  He thought about dialing the number at Linda’s house, but a hunch told him to dial the number at his instead. He entered the area code then the number, pressed the “Send” button and put the receiver gently to his head.

  Bailey twisted around and sat up to listen.

  * * *

  “It’s Phil. Just relax.”

  There was a sound like a squeak at the other end, and he could imagine the look on her face. He grinned broadly then cut it short. No fawning over each other.

  “What do I do?” Linda asked in an odd monotone.

  “Listen for now. Plenty of time for questions.”

  “God. I’m listening. Talk to me,” she said.

  “Get the tape recorder and the phone attachment out of my desk drawer. Figure out how to use it and attach it to the phone. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

  “Bye,” she said instantly and hung up the phone.

  She was at the desk rummaging through the drawers before she realized she could feel no pain. On her way back to the bedroom she heard little whining or groaning noise and it took her a quick step or two more to realize they were coming from her.

  She licked the suction cup on the microphone and stuck it to the receiver end of the phone. Nearly dry, it fell right off. She licked it again and pressed it hard until it stuck, then plugged the jack into the little tape recorder. When she checked and rewound the tape, she saw her hands begin to tremble. She steadied them on her knees, then checked the record function. That done, she put the tape recorder down neatly next to the phone, stood up and screamed a loud whoop!

  The emotion came like a swift river’s flow and her thoughts and questions swam in great numbers up through it. She sat on the edge of the bed with her back straight and her hands folded neatly on her lap and watched as from a distance as the thoughts and questions flowed past. From time to time, one or the other would make her smile.

  The phone didn’t get to ring once fully before she snatched it up off the hook.

  “I’m here,” she said pushing the record button on the tape recorder at the same time.

  “I’ll give you the overview of what’s happened first. That’ll answer a lot of your questions then it’ll be your turn. This is a cell phone. We only have a few hours talk time. Deal?”

  “Can I do one small one first?”

  “Go.”

  “Are you hurt, injured?”

  “No. Shut up now, okay?

  “Okay,” she said and felt relief rush over her.

  Phil looked down at his notes and considered the first bulleted item. He drew a breath.

  “I’m not crazy. I am not on drugs or . . . ” That was as far as he could get.

  Linda’s eyes welled up as if someone had turned her tear ducts on. Following the spirit of Phil’s instructions, but not the letter of it, she allowed herself to silently mouth the words “I know . . . ” through her tears.

  “Listen carefully,” he said. “I’m in control of my senses for the most part,” he began, then drew another breath. “I was attacked last Friday night by aliens and abducted.” He wanted to laugh.

  I was right. I’m always right, she thought with irony.

  “I know. I figured it out,” she said, breaking the law.

  Of course she did, Phil thought.

  That was a relief. He could cut right to the chase and let it all out now.

  “Good job,” he said.

  “Go. Talk,” she said, lips trembling.

  He spoke clearly and quickly. “We have no idea where they’re from. It doesn’t matter. They capture live specimens, mostly human. They have a number of paralytics—drugs—one is delivered with a weapon used by hunt teams. It fires a spiny burr about the size of a walnut. No distance, but very accurate. Their technology is biologically . . . based. They’re organic engineers, Linda. Their building materials and most of their tools are organically based.

  “The ship is huge, aircraft-carrier sized or bigger. The ship itself is an animal—mostly—that we believe is still alive. We’re in low orbit, but they keep the sun directly behind us at all times. Even with specialized equipment, you’d have a hard time spotting it with the sun as a backdrop.”

  Smart, Linda thought.

  Phil checked off a couple of items.

  “It’s a factory ship, Linda. They’re producing what we think is food. We play a part in it.”

  That sounded benign enough. The way Phil said it made it sound as if they were baking cupcakes and using humans to mix the batter. A bizarre image of Phil in a baker’s hat came to mind. His smiling face covered in flour, he waved at the Earth through the window of a white, egg-shaped spaceship. She brushed the silly image away impatiently.

  Don’t be stupid. Wait for the facts, she thought.

  Some things he couldn’t tell her. He told her about the farming process and some of the details, but he spared her the unbearable part about the labs and the hunch he had about the idea that nothing ever died here if the aliens chose not to kill it.

  As Phil continued, Linda re-built the story in her mind piece by piece and there was no cake batter or smiling faces in that dark and horrific image. When he was finished, the picture was incomplet
e, still just a sketch she had to fill in with details and color.

  “How many canisters of larva-things?” she asked.

  “Eight or nine thousand that we know of, maybe more.”

  “Are they dead? The things inside?”

  “I thought they were.”

  Phil described the incident with Pui Tamguma.

  “How many humans on board?”

  “Twenty in this tube. There may be more.”

  “The wasp-thing didn’t attack you or the women. It went right for the oriental . . . or . . . Asian or whatever?”

  Phil hadn’t exactly thought of it like that. Who knows why an alien wasp would do anything?

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right.”

  She was overloading. Linda’s skin crawled starting on her arms then down her back and legs. She swallowed.

  Linda questioned, and Phil answered. Finally, she ran out of questions.

  There was so much that had gone unsaid between them; and now it seemed to her that the chance to say anything that mattered to them had been lost completely, overpowered, drowned by what she’d just learned. It was all so horrible. It was so terribly unlikely, and horrible.

  Phil felt it too. The list of notes was a defense mechanism—a defense against the inevitable. The list in front of him with its checked off items was a dead and a meaningless thing.

  Linda started to cry.

  This is just Phil’s voice. He’s still dead and can never return. Soon even this link to the netherworld will fade and be lost forever.

  “I’ve loved you so much,” she said.

  “I love you, too, Linda.”

  Phil said it quietly and would have preferred some privacy about then. Mary and Bailey’s feminine sensibilities saw it and were kind. Bailey turned around and Mary slowly ambled over to the opening and leaned out.

  “I’ll miss you,” Linda could barely say.

  “I know.”

  “What should I tell your friends—and Edna?”

  “Don’t tell them anything. It’ll just spin all out of control worse than ever if you do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take care of High Ridge. Don’t let the sage grow up through the porch. Keep the ants down or they’ll be in the house. The damned things’ll take over if you let them.”

  “I will.”

  In the pause that followed Phil could feel Linda’s deep, trembling cry through the miles of space and the thick, tight hide of the alien starship as if she was there in his arms. He

  stared at the page of notes in front of him unable to say anything more. Finally, Linda asked the question as if it were a plea. “Who says good-bye first? Who, Phil?”

  Phil sat and stared then held his heart still and made his mouth say the words and the words came out thick and wooden.

  “We’re not ready for that yet,” he said. “We’ve got a few good calls left on these batteries.”

  In spite of her tears, some part of Linda’s mind had been working, processing without her knowledge. When the product of that computation was finally derived, the background processor passed it up to the foreground, and it took immediate precedence.

  She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist.

  “They’re a weapon, Phil. They’re gonna release those things on Earth to kill all the people—just the people.”

  9

  H e shook his head in a lame attempt to deny it. It was as if some racial fear of conquest had manifested, created this alien race and its weird, destructive technology. The match up was just too bizarre—and too perfect. Here was the amalgam of all the hideous demons of our imagination thrust into reality: the ship, the goons, the larvae, the surgery. But these things came from a place more solid than mere fearful imagination—they were distilled out of the universe of real, rational possibilities. They’d grown up out of the soil of nature’s relentless and towering plan; the plan that balances all, the plan that weighs and shifts power and prunes and plants and grows and kills in grotesque numbers by drought, by disease, by war—and now this.

  Phil handed the phone back to Mary and stood up then took a deep breath and walked over to the opening.

  “What?” Mary asked. “What is it?”

  Godamn, he thought. Food. I thought they were food. How stupid. Of course they’re not food. We’re the fucking food.

  He felt a knot tighten deep in his gut as the glue of logic cemented the pieces in place one at a time, perfectly.

  Phil had once read an article by a scientist who predicted that the first real contact with an advanced race from some distant corner of the universe would probably be our last. Conquest and malevolence, he’d said, was simply more natural and far more common than the desire to develop trading partners. Why trade for what you could easily take for free? If an alien race had the capability to get here, chances were very good they had the capability to destroy us. The fact was, he went on, that on finding us, they’d probably find a good number of reasons to want to destroy us—not the least of which was the bounty of the planet. It was an old motif. But it was grounded in many examples right here on our own planet: Cortez and the Incas and the Indian wars of the West being just two very small ones.

  Imagine that the space between inhabitable planets, he’d said, is suddenly easily traversed and thus meaningless. What remains are the interplanetary equivalents of countries populated by very, very unlike civilizations. What may have saved us so far, is the idea that the speed of light is absolute, making the possibility of interplanetary travel within those vast, insulating distances a thankful impossibility. Needless to say, such ideas run counter to much of the popular thinking of the last thirty years which portrayed alien races as either covert or overt benefactors to homo sapiens. The bottom line, he’d said, was that nature wasn’t cruel; it just wasn’t kind. Even Pollyanna could see it in her own garden if she looked between the leaves.

  Well, Phil thought. Here it is. What elegance in the method. What perfection! Breed strains of predatory wasps that prey on hosts within a narrow genetic bandwidth. That’s why the loose wasp in the tube ignored Mary, Bailey and me. One strain for the Asians, one for the Blacks, one for the Anglos, one for the Latinos. Set a million free in just the right places and within days you’d have billions.

  The death of millions of people within the first few days would put such a strain on the infrastructure that, in a week, there would be no way to deliver food, water or essential services to the remaining population—let alone muster a countermeasure against the plague. There would be no way to burn or bury the bodies fast enough and the larvae would hatch out by the billions. Phil could just imagine the trucks and other large vehicles jamming the freeways of Los Angeles and elsewhere, and the wasps removing forever the possibility of clearing them away. Such a swift strike would dull the sword of any defense and make it useless. “Run and hide!” would be the battle cry. The wasps would spread to outlying areas in search of more hosts, and in time would occupy each niche now occupied by man. In less than a season, those few lucky enough to survive would be driven underground living on what they could scavenge until, they, too, were attacked and succumbed to the wasp’s predation or were killed by secondary plagues of disease or other pestilence. It would just be a matter of time.

  It was likely that the wasps were bred—tuned genetically—so that there would be no crossover to other host species. And then the best part, oh, the best part of it all, was that the voracious little wasps would exterminate themselves as the food source dwindled. Having done their job, and unable to adapt to other chow, they would go the way of the carrier pigeon, and the dodo and Tyrannosaurus Rex, leaving the earth squeaky-clean of both humans and themselves as well.

  Poor Linda, he thought. Unlike the blessedly ignorant masses, she’ll have to carry the fear around with her in the coming weeks or months, perhaps make some plans for escape—to somewhere—maybe to High Ridge to slow, if not stop, the inevitable.

  Once he had it in his mind how to tell them, he tur
ned around and told Bailey to fetch Ned. When he had all three assembled, he began. When he was finished, they all sat down. It wouldn’t have been fair to say they actually prayed, but nobody said a word for an hour or more.

  * * *

  Bailey looked at Tom’s wound for the first time and made a face. “That doesn’t look so good,” she said. “It’s all infected-like.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Tom said weakly. “I guess he got me better than I figured.”

  Gilbert had moved out of the chamber and into the one used by Pui Tamguma and had been keeping a low profile since the attack on Tom. Mary figured that was just fine. She hopped up into the hole with a wet t-shirt in each hand and sat down next to Tom’s head. She folded one of the shirts into a compress and put it against his sweaty brow. Tom looked up at her with the wide-eyed innocence of the very ill. She took the other shirt, formed it into swabbing cloth and gently wiped his face and neck with it. She hated Gilbert for what he’d done and herself for mistreating this poor man.

  She looked at Tom, and her heart poured out to him.

  He was barely thirty years old, she guessed, but his face was cross-hatched with wrinkles, burned in deep, by what to him, was the inescapable and relentless sun. Through that thick, tough skin she could see a child underneath, a child not too bright and always a little behind—a child a little afraid.

  He’s burning up, she thought. The infection is right in his neck. He’ll be dead soon.

  Not that it really mattered much now. The way things were shaping up, they’d all be dead soon and so would all the rest of the people everywhere. All the fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and children of the world would soon be dead. What did the death of one more really mean against that backdrop?

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Not so good,” he said and closed his eyes.

  There was little left to say. Bailey looked at Mary and skewed her mouth sideways.

  After Mary had done what she could, she stood up and waved Bailey out of the chamber with her. Phil and Ned were standing outside in the tube. Mary thought that in spite of the alien environment, it all seemed just then a lot like being in a hospital. The feeling was the same.