Species II

by Yvonne Navarro

  And how very easily they were . . .

  Deceived.

  The fifth-floor corridor of the Watergate was deserted when Patrick stepped out of the elevator. It hadn’t been difficult to elude the crowds and his family—Melissa had proven the biggest challenge, but even she had believed him when he’d pleaded a headache because of the stress and the crowd. Another little speech about how people didn’t understand the pressure he was under, all the expectations, et cetera, and her bewilderment had changed to concern. She’d wanted to ride home with him and stay with him, all night if necessary, but Patrick wasn’t ready for that just yet.

  He had other things to attend to tonight.

  He strode down the hallway, checked once again to make sure none of those annoying reporters had followed him, then knocked on the door of the Lincoln Room.

  “It’s open.”

  Patrick twisted the doorknob and stepped inside, then took the “Do Not Disturb” tag and hung it on the outside knob. When he closed the door behind, he made sure to flip the double bolt.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  We? Three steps took him past the door to the bathroom and into the main area of the suite. Sprawled atop the king-sized bed were two women, each stunningly beautiful and clad only in nearly matching silk lingerie. The sexy young woman he’d almost taken behind the stage in the ballroom inclined her head toward the dark-haired newcomer lying next to her, then reached over and ran her hand slowly up the woman’s thigh. Her fingers slid beneath the line of fabric at the hip joint, and her companion shuddered. “I’d like you to meet my sister,” the brown-eyed woman purred. “We share everything.”

  America’s Number-One Astronaut smiled and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Pulse rate is twenty percent below human and her temperature is stable.” The young biologist—the name BREA was embroidered across the pocket of her lab coat—made a face at her coworker. “This certainly isn’t the most exciting part of my career.”

  “What do you expect?” retorted Vikki, the second biologist on shift. “She’s watching the Yankees and the Orioles.” She made a few notations on her clipboard, then peered at the monitoring console again. “With that in mind, she ought to be asleep. Don’t you think she looks a little restless?”

  “She’s an idiot,” returned Brea. “She’s got the remote—if she’s that bored, she ought to change the channel instead of just sitting there and staring at it. Not exactly the exciting Movie of the Week. That game is about as much fun as watching grass grow—or us watching her watch the game.”

  Vikki sighed and snapped the clipboard shut as Brea settled at a terminal and began keyboarding the latest round of data into the computer. She leaned her chin on her fist and stared down at the alien woman in the habitat, who in turn gazed at the television screen and seemed completely engrossed in the utterly boring drone of the baseball announcer. None of the electrodes taped to the life-form’s body were registering anything interesting, so there was absolutely nothing for Vikki to do right now. She’d gone through a lot of bullshit and background investigations to get the clearance needed to work on this project with Dr. Baker, but somehow she’d thought that research on an alien would be a lot more scintillating. A few toxin experiments took place now and then, but most of what everyone did here in the laboratory seemed to be just . . . look.

  “I should’ve gone into oceanography,” Vikki said glumly.

  But right now, there was nothing to be done but sit and wait for her time to be over.

  Sated for the moment, Patrick rolled off the first woman—he vaguely remembered her telling him her name down on the main floor, but that piece of information was gone now, as was any notion that he might have once been faithful to Melissa. Faithful—what was that, anyway? The concept no longer made any sense to him. Something in his body had changed and now demanded not only that he mate, but that he do so as often as possible and with as many different partners as he could find. Once he spilled himself into a woman, some dark, newborn instinct told him he could never do so again.

  “Oh, my God,” breathed the woman. She quivered next to him, as if she could still feel the power of his lovemaking inside her. “You really are a hero.”

  Her dark-haired sister came over and curled herself next to Patrick, her hands roaming at will across his muscled chest and stomach, then farther down. “Hey,” she said coyly. “I think it’s my turn now.”

  Patrick grinned, his first conquest already dismissed. He turned on the bedspread and pinned the young woman down, feeling the firm globes of her breasts against his chest, the curve of her belly, the heat between her thighs as they parted. Already he was hard again, completely ready. God, he felt great.

  “Yeah, baby,” he said with a satisfied smile. “It’s your turn, all right.”

  She licked his ear in response and pressed herself tighter against him. “You’ve got a dangerously gorgeous body, Mr. Astronaut.”

  Patrick’s smile widened. “And it’s got something really, really good for you.”

  Lindsey closed the door to the bathroom behind her while she cleaned up. She could hear Patrick Ross rocking on the bed with Claudia, who wasn’t really her sister at all but her best friend. She and Claudia went all the way back to college, when they’d done this same type of thing a time or two, usually on a dare with each other and involving the most unreachable of the hierarchy on the faculty. And just like the almighty Patrick Ross, every damned man the girls had set eyes on had fallen victim to their charms, been used and ultimately—just like Patrick Ross would be—used up.

  She checked her face in the mirror—flushed, of course. My goodness, but that man could move! She pursed her lips, then broke into a smile when she heard Claudia practically screeching. That silly girl, the whole dorm had always known when she made orgasm. What the hell, Lindsey thought and turned to open the bathroom door. No one ever said I couldn’t join in—

  A nasty wave of nausea spiraled through her belly and up her throat. Lindsey grabbed for the sink, fighting not to retch as sweat popped out on her forehead and across her upper lip. What the hell was this—some kind of food poisoning? It had to be that; what else could make her want to throw up so badly, spin the room on her, and send a knife-twist of pain through her gut like this?

  She groaned and leaned over the sink, closing her eyes in anticipation. But nothing would come up; her ears were ringing with the sounds of Claudia’s cries, the noise all mixed up and distorted in her head until it sounded like Claudia was screaming and Patrick was roaring at her. God, couldn’t they just shut up? Didn’t they know she was sick in here, damn it?

  Something cold touched the skin of her naked belly and Lindsey forced her eyes open and looked down, trying to see, trying to function around the urge to vomit that was pulsing through her. The sight that met her eyes would have made her scream had she been able to draw enough air into her lungs.

  The “something” that had touched her was the sink, and actually it was her belly that had touched it, not the other way around. Her stomach was huge and distended, belly button thrust out by the pressure of whatever was inside her and making her gut bloat further by the second. Lindsey sucked in air, then gagged and stumbled backward against the wall as a tremendous pain knifed through her abdomen, circling around and under her rib cage to finally twist deep within the center of her pelvis, all the way to her groin. The floor came up hard to meet her as she slid down the wall, the knobs of her spine grinding along the tile edges, leaving tiny spots of blood from scrapes she never felt.

  Lindsey’s eyes bulged and all she could manage was a low groan as her stomach rippled, then ballooned out even farther. The scream she’d wanted so badly found its voice at last when the flesh along the grotesque mound that was once her stomach, stretched and split. The agony was unspeakable but she voiced it anyway, for as long and as loud as her shock-washed system would allow, never realizing that the sound was indistinguishable from the howls of her friend in the room
beyond and the wailing of the hellish infant to which she’d just given birth.

  She lived exactly five more seconds.

  Long enough to see the blood-covered brown creature, half human and half something she’d never imagined, reach up and pull itself free of the ruins of her body.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” Patrick demanded. His movement never faltered, despite the struggles of the woman beneath him. Something about him had suddenly freaked her out, a . . . movement of something along his back, the release of some new part of himself that he hadn’t known wanted to be freed. Now that it was, his partner had hold of it and was wailing like a terrified cat, while he worked his way toward his second climax of the evening. “I thought you said you liked my body!”

  Instead of answering, the delusional woman thought she could choke him, wrapping her puny hands around the corded muscles in his neck and trying to squeeze. “Let me up!” she screeched. “Get off of me, you fucking monster—Lindsey! Lindsey, help me!”

  Patrick just laughed and kept hammering at the woman’s body. “One . . . more . . . second,” he panted. “Just . . . one . . .”

  All that noise, and the woman jerked when she finally realized that her sister was doing her own screaming in the bathroom. She bucked savagely beneath him, clawing at his face, her body’s gyrations unwittingly bringing Patrick so very, very close—

  “Enough,” he snarled. He gripped her shoulders and pinned her arms in place, holding her down as a few more deep thrusts finally gave him his release. Patrick sighed deeply and rolled to the side, letting his rigid body relax as fully as he could, while the screams from the bathroom ceased abruptly and all that was left to hear was the quiet mewling of his already maturing son.

  “What’s that? Lindsey? Are you all right?” Her face twisted with hate, the woman with whom he’d just mated started to climb off the bed, then she froze. Her eyes widened in horror as she saw her unwanted lover’s new, freer form.

  When she would have screamed, Patrick clamped a hand over her mouth and held her thrashing body down on the bed.

  All he had to do was wait a few minutes.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Brea demanded. “Haven’t you been watching her?”

  “Of course I’ve been watching her!” Vikki snapped. “Why do you think I called you over here?”

  “Maybe it’s an equipment malfunction. How did it start?”

  “Beats me,” Vikki said. Her hands were a blur as she worked her way across the medical console, running spot checks and comparing figures. “The last I checked she was still watching that stupid ball game and playing with the baseball—maybe Ripken hit a home run or something. The next thing I know her pulse rate’s gone through the ceiling, her temperature’s up ten degrees—”

  “That would kill a human!”

  “Which she’s not,” Vikki reminded her coworker.

  “Look at her,” Brea said in awe. “She’s sweating like an ice cube in the sun, and—shit!”

  Something cracked loudly inside the habitat, and both biologists froze, expecting the worst. Across the facility’s floor, the half-dozen guards had their H&Ks instantly pointed toward Eve’s enclosure.

  Vikki’s gaze settled on something inside Eve’s glass walls, and she thumbed on the intercom to the main floor. “It’s all right,” she yelled into it. “It was just the baseball—it popped, that’s all.”

  “She broke it?” Brea asked incredulously as the nervous SWAT women below reshouldered their weapons. “Do you have any idea of how strong you have to be to do that?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Vikki said grimly. Her short bangs were plastered to her forehead and she was perspiring just as much as Eve. “All I want to do is get through the next few minutes without that thing breaking out—look at her electrocardiogram stats. She’s writhing around down there like she’s got a bad case of the hives. And she’s moaning.”

  “Maybe she’s sick,” Brea said. “I think we should call Dr. Baker.” Her voice had risen a notch, the situation already headed out of the realm of their expertise. “She’s got a pager on at all times. The number’s right here—”

  “Hold on a minute.” Vikki leaned forward and studied the screens across the Control console, then stared hard down at Eve’s glass home. “She’s stopped.”

  “Stopped what?”

  “Whatever she was doing. Look for yourself.”

  Down below, Eve sat tranquilly before the closing credits of the baseball broadcast—

  “Strike three! Batter out!”

  —while the remains of the baseball rolled away from her in a lopsided path.

  “Hi, honey. We’re headed home,” Patrick said with wicked glee as he sat behind the wheel of his black Mercedes SL. Such a dark and beautiful night it had turned out to be—moonless, with the stars blotted out by just the right amount of cloud cover. Perfect for cruising back to the old home state, as the state sign whipped past the window—

  Virginia is for Lovers!

  —just to prove it. It seemed like only a few minutes more and Patrick was turning into the immense circular driveway that led to his mother’s Georgia-style summer mansion. Just a few lights shone through the windows; this late at night, it would be only in the servants’ quarters that the minimal staff members would still be awake. His father might be here, of course, packing away another few belts of Old Grand-Dad bourbon, or if his tastes were running a little more expensive tonight, some brand of hundred-year-old Scotch—as if he hadn’t gotten enough at the banquet earlier. If he was here at all, the elder Ross’s indulgences would be taking place in the library at the southern end of the house. In the front where he was, Patrick could count on the centerpiece of the old summer estate, a massive American flag flying and flapping in the wind at full mast on the lawn, to mask any noise he made. When he pulled the Mercedes around to the side of the house, that good ol’ red, white, and blue covered every bit of sound he made getting out of the car and opening the back doors.

  It took only about five minutes to lead his two children, both sons, to the disused barn on the outer edge of the property. The boys could walk, but not very fast yet. At what looked like three years old, their legs were still too short to keep up with his longer stride. Patrick had no compulsion to carry them—they were quite capable of quick, strong movement on their own and all they needed from him was his protection for the first few days of their lives, just long enough to go through the helpless chrysalis stage before maturing into full adults.

  He couldn’t have asked for a better, more secluded place than his mother’s summer estate. The barn, three stories high with a loft, was nearly two hundred years old and hadn’t been used in decades. But it was still sturdy enough to give him a dependable place in which to house and conceal his children. There was even a hexagonal marking in cracked and peeling paint on one side, reminiscent of an earlier time in which the family had taken such simple precautions against unseen evil spirits. That kind of forethought was so powerful and worked so well—in fact, Patrick had picked up on it by retrieving the key for the barn’s oversized padlock yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t understood why at the time, but now of course it was obvious. The evil spirits notwithstanding, Patrick figured that nowadays he could probably keep out most of what he considered evil by simply making sure he remembered to relock the barn’s double doors when he left.

  The front of the barn loomed while around the trio there was nothing but silence—no sound at all, not even the night insects. Both of Patrick’s boys looked around with interest, taking in everything, learning at the astronomical rate that was so indicative of their superior species. But as with any species, some members would always be stronger, smarter, faster, than others of their own kind; before his brother could hone in on the nearly inaudible drone of the sleeping hornets’ nest across the top of the door, the firstborn boy had thrown back his head and snapped it down with a swipe of his barbed tongue. Faster than most men could think, the nest lay decim
ated on the ground at their feet.

  Proud and pleased, Patrick led his sons into the darkness of the barn and pulled the door shut behind them.

  10

  “It’s a beautiful day for a drive and this is certainly a pleasant-looking place,” Laura said at her first view of the grand old mansion. “Right out of Gone With the Wind. But I’m guessing we aren’t here on a social call . . . unless it’s to visit a friend of yours?”

  “Your sense of humor has always been tops,” Press said dryly. “Welcome to the Garberville Psychiatric Institute.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “The telephone records at Goddard indicate that Dr. Orinsky’s last call was made to this facility. To save a little time, I had the background of every patient here cross-checked, and only one guy came up with any connection to Orinsky. His name is Herman Cromwell—formerly Dr. Herman Cromwell—and it seems that he taught classes with Orinsky at Stanford.”

  Laura looked interested. “Really? Taught what?”

  Press’s answer made her forehead lift in surprise. “Microbiology.”

  She frowned and stared out the window, watching as they drew closer to the building. “From Stanford to here,” she mused. “That’s a pretty drastic change in career path. What the hell happened?”

  “Ah,” Press said. “That’s the really interesting part. Whatever brought the fine Dr. Cromwell here is classified government information.” As the car passed through the wrought-iron gates that marked the entrance to the grounds proper, the look he sent her was anything but comforting. “So classified, in fact, that no one on our team can get to it and tell us what it is.”