Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (Dominant Species Series)

by David Coy

  He didn’t see this tree stump until it was too late.

  He stomped the brakes just as he hit. The stump was so thick and strong that the truck literally bounced off it. The impact was more than sufficient to deploy the restraints, and the bags exploded from their holes with a sound like bombs.

  “Christ!”

  Habershaw was shaken but unhurt. He pushed the deflated bags out of the way and looked at the instrument panel. Not a single light shone in it. Expecting the worst, he reached for the on button and poked it once or twice. The worst was what he got—the truck was dead.

  “Now ain’t this a fine mess?” he muttered to himself.

  If I'm lucky, he thought, it's something simple— something I can fix.

  He got out of the truck and moved to the side hatches. The night was almost roaring with sound. It was so pervasive and loud that he wondered for a moment if someone could hear it from orbit.

  Being out on the dark, lonely road with all that alien life around him was making him jittery. Insects flew by him, crawled on him and banged into him. He looked at the jungle’s edge just ten meters away. He could almost feel its teeming life from where he was—as if the legs, tendrils, vines and claws that existed within it were reaching out for him. He knew he shouldn’t be out alone—especially on the outside of the truck.

  “This place is something else.” He spoke out loud to himself again, since no bugs seemed to listen.

  He lifted the motor’s access door and turned on the diagnostics. The system ran for a moment then returned the error message he needed. Brushing bugs out of the way, he looked at the diagram the system displayed. A length of cable blinked out at him in bright red. Using the diagram as a map, he found the cable and saw that it had been torn loose when the fire extinguisher flew off its mounting and whacked it on its way forward. He straightened the cable and plugged it back in, then replaced the fire extinguisher.

  He ran the diagnostic again to check the system. Another error came up. This time it made a reference to some controlling circuitry and a module with a name he didn’t recognize.

  “Aw, hell.”

  He punched the help button. The system told him to yank the damaged module and replace it with the spare. He reached over for the spare. He started to pull it out.

  Something hit his back like a club, knocking him into the panel door.

  He felt a compression, like a giant pinch across his back that burned like fire. He tried to turn, but couldn’t. His hand fell on the truck’s heavy service wrench just as he was jerked backwards through the air. He hit the ground a few meters away and found himself moving backwards, straight into the jungle.

  He reached over his shoulder and felt something big and tough and cool stuck solidly to his back. It hurt like hell. He extended his arm out and found a thick tendril or stem leading from it.

  He grabbed the stem with his strong left hand and pulled in just a little slack. Then he twisted and kicked with his legs and turned. He took another grab and twisted some more until the tendril was wrapped under his arm. Sliding on his hip and elbow, he could now see what it was. Just three meters away was the enormous head of the biggest bug he’d ever seen. The tendril was pulling him right into the center of jaws that opened sideways, waiting for him with a sharp and hideous larvae’s grin. The moonlight shone on its huge, humped back, covered with brown rolls of leathery material.

  He brought the spanner up over his head and whacked at the umbilical. It felt like hitting a thick rubber hose.

  Just as he reached that crushing maw, he rammed the spanner across the mouth parts and jammed it in tight. He felt the wrench go in solid and lock down as if it had been made for the space. There was even a final click as he stuffed in it.

  He felt whatever was attached to him let go and a flood of warmth ran across his back. Habershaw rolled away, and saw the umbilical snap into place up under the thing’s mandibles. The grub shook its head so fast and violently that Habershaw could feel the vibrations through the air as if they were coming from some bizarre buzzer. It stopped and started, stopped and started, like some strange machine and each time, Habershaw was afraid the spanner would come loose, knock against the horny mandibles on either side and fly out at a killing speed. He put his hands up to protect himself and backed away stumbling, watching the thing trying to dislodge that perfect, stainless steel wrench.

  “Have fun, you bastard,” he said. “I hope . . . I hope you choke on it.”

  He staggered back to the truck, replaced the module with the spare and managed to get the truck started. He knew he was bleeding pretty badly because he could feel his clothes soaked through down his back all the way to his seat. He didn’t think he would bleed to death because he didn’t think there were arteries in his back. He pressed himself tight against the seat to try to halt the bleeding. Soon he sensed that the warm spread of blood had stopped. He was sore all over.

  He checked his watch. He was way behind, but he wasn’t going to turn back now. He had to find Joan—he had to. She should have called. She always called.

  He arrived at the settlement just a little off schedule, having made up lost time on some stretches of road that were smoother than he remembered.

  The shelter was his first stop. The place looked abandoned and the door was swinging open.

  “This is bad,” he muttered to himself. “Very bad.”

  He didn’t see anyone lurking or watching the place. But there was no way of knowing what to expect once he left the meager sanctuary of the truck’s interior.

  He gave another look around and unlocked the doors.

  He walked up the steps and went inside. The shelter had been ransacked. Every cabinet and drawer had been opened; the contents strewn helter-skelter. Moonlight streamed in and left ragged, angry shadows from everything it touched. He worked his way down the hall, stepping over the stuff that littered it. The bedrooms had been trashed as well. When he looked into the main bedroom—the one he and Joan shared, his anger and frustration boiled over.

  “What the hell?” he moaned. “What is this?”

  He kicked his way back through the hallway and out the door. He got in the truck and sped toward to the boys’ shelter. They might know something. They usually knew a little about just about everything that happened.

  Ignoring the chime, he banged on the door. A moment later, a confused and frightened voice came from behind it. “You’ve been here already!”

  “Peter! Open up! It’s Bill Habershaw!”

  The door opened a crack. Habershaw pushed his way inside and closed the door behind him. Peter and Mike were standing there, half-dressed. They looked haggard and forlorn, like refugees. They were thinner than he remembered. For a moment, no one looked right at him.

  “Mike, where’s Joan?” he asked.

  Peter Ho looked at the floor. Mike just blinked and stared, speechless.

  “What’s happened?"

  “They, uh . . .” Mike began.

  “What?” he shouted, the tension in his body erupting.

  “They killed her, Mr. Habershaw,” Peter said. “The soldiers killed her.”

  It was Habershaw’s turn to blink. “What?” he asked in a much lower voice.

  “They killed her and took her away, and the people who were with her,” Mike said.

  “When?” Habershaw asked dimly, in shock.

  “Yesterday morning,” Peter said.

  “How?”

  Neither one wanted to answer. “They just killed her,” Mike said, finally.

  Joan was dead, but his worst fears were still alive. He had to know. He could scarcely form the words. “Did they . . . ?”

  “No. They . . . um . . . they shot her,” Peter said.

  Habershaw felt himself sink into the chair, but he hadn’t meant to do it. He bent over, and his face went into his hands. He didn’t want to cry; he just wanted to sit there. It was okay. He had known she was dead before he got there. He was faintly aware of a trickle of warmth running unde
r his clothes. As the blood ran toward his side and then down it, he thought of how meaningless the blood was and how he didn’t give a shit how much of it he lost anymore.

  “I’m sorry we're the ones to tell you, Mr. Habershaw,” Mike said, his own swollen face showing signs of recent grieving he hadn't let the other dock workers see.

  “What about the bomb?” he asked.

  Peter and Mike exchanged looks.

  “What bomb?” Mike asked.

  “Never mind,” Habershaw said. “Forget it. What people? What other people did you mean? Who was with her?” His voice sounded far away in his own head.

  “There was a guy named John,” Mike said.

  “One of the pilots,” Peter added.

  “Yeah. And the nurse lady, Donna, and also Eddie Silk,”

  Mike continued.

  “Eddie?” Habershaw asked weakly.

  “And the biologist lady, Rachel,” Peter said.

  “Yeah,” Mike confirmed.

  “Where did they take them?”

  “To the jail thing,” Peter said.

  “Which one?”

  “They took them to the one down below your place,” Mike offered.

  The information rolled off his back like the blood. He leaned back in the chair and winced. Then a numbness came over him, and the air around him felt thick and quiet and too still to be real.

  He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  When he woke up he was lying on the plastic sofa in the living room, and dim light was coming through the window. The idea that it was the dawn’s light sank in slowly like a rock dropped in mud. He wouldn’t make it back in time, but it didn’t matter if he did or didn’t. If he got caught being off his post, so be it. It just didn’t matter.

  When he rose, he felt wetness under him. He was sluggish and weak as if he hadn’t eaten in days. When he looked, he saw a mottled pattern of thickened blood on the plastic seat where he’d lain. He began to think he should have a look at the wound.

  He stumbled into the spare bedroom and stripped out of his clothes. The entire backside of his cottons was wet and heavy with blood. He turned the shower on a gentle spray and got in. He turned slowly and let the water hit his back. It hurt like hell, and he saw blood swirling pink around his feet. He felt dizzy. Using the walls of the shower as support, he moved and shifted, letting the water hit all of it. He wanted it clean when he looked at it.

  He stepped out of the shower, dried off as best he could, tied the bloody towel around his waist—then collapsed in a heap.

  Mike heard the noise and got up. He found Habershaw lying mostly face down, right in the bathroom doorway. On his back was an oval ring of about a dozen wounds. The flesh around them had been torn so badly that he could see white bone in some. Blood was seeping out of them and running all over the place.

  “Oh, no . . .” Peter said appearing at Mike’s side. “Maybe we should get a doctor.”

  “He don’t look so good.”

  “There ain’t no doctors left for us,” Mike said. “They all went to the coast.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yep.”

  Using the shelter’s first aid kit and all their ingenuity, Mike and Peter stopped the bleeding then dressed the wounds. Then they moved him to the bed and wrestled him up on it facedown. The bandages weren’t exactly neat, but they did the job.

  “That’ll have to hold him,” Mike said. “Come on, let’s go. We gotta get to work. He’ll be all right.”

  Mike thought about Peter’s question, and then looked at the bandages. He pressed down on a corner of one that had come loose a little. Bill Habershaw was like a father to him. He hoped he’d be all right—like he said—but he didn’t know for sure. You just never knew for sure, especially when it came to being sick or hurt. You couldn’t tell something like that in a million years. “It don’t matter,” Mike said. “It don’t matter at all.”

  A few hours later, Habershaw got up, ate, and then drank a gallon of water. Then, his back stinging and the bandages pulling at him, he made his way slowly to the truck and headed back to the rig.

  13

  Captivity didn’t sit well with Donna and she took every opportunity prod and dig at her captors, even with the virtually useless weapon of speech alone. “You’d think they could have flown us,” she said to the guard. “It would have been a lot faster, don’t you think?”

  “Keep your mouth shut,” the guard, a steely-eyed veteran named Mahoney said, “or I’ll put a gag in it.”

  “Just making conversation,” she said brightly at Rachel. “At least we know it can talk now.”

  Rachel pinched her eyes closed then opened one at John. She worried that Donna would antagonize the guards to the point where they would kill them on the spot. She could see Donna’s mood building up to the I-just-don’t-give-a-shit point real fast.

  John saw it, too. “Donna, relax,” he said.

  “I’m relaxed. He's the one who's not relaxed,” she said with a crooked grin.

  Christ. She never stops.

  “Shut up,” Mahoney said to her.

  They were in the back of a small troop transport, being moved from the settlement to the monolith. Hands secured behind their backs with restraints, they bumped along and tried to keep from falling out of their seats.

  Taken from jail in the early hours of dawn, they’d been put in the back of the vehicle with hardly a word from the guards. After a month of captivity without so much as a walk outside, the sudden and brief exposure to so much open space had been refreshing, in spite of the circumstances. The prisoners dawdled on the short walk to the transport and breathed in the morning air and asked their troubled questions. Contained in the back of the transport, Rachel felt the oppression of stiff walls around her once more. She looked over at Eddie, his head resting against the seat back, eyes closed, trying to sleep. From time to time, his eyes would pop partway open on a big bump, then close again. He didn’t appear very concerned, it seemed to her. Maybe he just didn’t give a shit either.

  “I have to urinate,” Donna said to the guard.

  “Piss your pants,” the big guard named Mahoney said. “We’re not stopping.”

  “Fine. If you want to smell my piss for the whole trip, I don’t mind.” She settled in her seat, lifted her head and closed her eyes. Rachel was sure she was going to do it.

  “Stop the truck!” Mahoney yelled forward.

  “Oh, God,” Rachel said. Now she’s done it.

  The vehicle stopped. Mahoney gave Donna a disgusted look, opened the doors and jumped out. Using his rifle, he waved her outside. She got up and jumped down into the morning light.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  “Please don’t kill her,” Rachel said, leaning forward. “She’s just mean. She can’t help it.”

  Donna chuckled into the air.

  “You people are like kids,” Mahoney said.

  He unlocked her cuffs and removed them. Rubbing her wrists, Donna walked a few meters away, unzipped then pulled her clothes down, squatted and peed. The guard looked away, but not too far.

  When she was finished, she came back, put her hands behind her back and obediently turned around to be handcuffed again.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it. Anybody else have to piss?” he said gruffly into the vehicle. “This is the first and last goddamned stop.”

  “I do sir, if you don’t mind,” Eddie said.

  “Get in there,” he said to Donna. “Get out, kid.”

  Eddie jumped down and turned around. The guard undid his cuffs and barked, “Hurry up!”

  Donna sat down across from Rachel, lips pursed and eyebrows raised—the very quintessence of victory.

  “Very funny. How was I supposed to know?” Rachel said, embarrassed. “He could have been thinking about shooting you.”

  “You wish,” Donna said.

  Eddie walked a few meters toward the jungle’s edge. He could tell by the way th
e plants had grown there—some of them with just their tops showing—that they’d stopped next to a ravine. He’d have to decide in the next few seconds. He kept walking until he was just a couple of meters from the road’s edge, pushing the distance with each step.

  “That’s far enough, kid,” the guard said.

  If he ran and zigzagged, he might make it. He unzipped his cottons and glanced over his shoulder. He could see the guard in his peripheral vision, but he couldn’t tell if the guard was looking directly at him or not. He wondered if he would be able to hear his pee hitting the ground, or rather, not hear it. If he was going to run for it, he’d have to do it now.

  He closed the zipper all the way up.

  Eddie bolted for the jungle. He lunged two steps right, then turned and took two left.

  “Stop, kid!”

  Eddie tore right again and launched himself out over the tops of the foliage. The ravine was steeper than he thought. He tumbled once cleanly through the air and thought he would hit ground, but he continued over another full turn as the branches and leaves slapped at him. He landed on his back in the soft dirt, but the impact still knocked the air out of his lungs. Gasping for air and with limbs flailing, he crashed down through the underbrush.

  Mixed with the sound of breaking stalks and thrashing leaves was the sound of gunfire.

  He rolled and slid. Then, suddenly at a point of even sharper descent, his feet caught on a thick root that flipped him and he started to tumble end over end. Finally, he slid to a stop. He could hear faint voices far above and listened for the sound of crashing brush that would signal the soldier’s pursuit. He kept very still, breathed shallowly and waited.

  Up on the road, Mahoney stood at the point where Eddie disappeared into the green and looked down into it. His partner, an athletic and lively solider, had trotted up and was standing with him. “What happened?” he asked.

  “The kid bolted—the dumbass kid bolted.”