Species

by Yvonne Navarro

  “It doesn’t matter,” Stephen stated impassively. He was staring absently out the window. “She won’t be thinking about us right now anyway. Her behavior is clearly indicative of a desire to reproduce, to breed.”

  “So tell us something we don’t already know.” Press looked moodily out the window.

  “Don’t you think she’ll be here?” Interior lighting was minimal and Dan’s ebony face was nearly invisible from his seat in the midsection of the van. “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “If she’s mated successfully,” Stephen murmured, “she could be long gone.”

  “Mating doesn’t mean she’ll have a baby right away, does it?” Dan struggled to unsnap his seat belt, then scooted forward until he could lean between the two front bucket seats. The dashboard lights gave off a low, multicolored glow and Laura could see rivulets of perspiration sliding slowly down Dan’s forehead and temples. His fear-filled voice made it clear that it wasn’t the warm night or the unaccustomed humidity in the air making him sweat. “She’s half-human, so she’ll have to wait nine months like us, like a normal human woman, right?”

  Laura didn’t answer right away. She could feel the others on the team waiting. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. From the far backseat, Press made a fake, sardonic sound that was supposed to pass for a cough but sounded more like the throat-clearing noise people used to politely inform you they know you are lying. It was unfortunate that he wasn’t directly behind her where she could smack him for being so damned insolent. “From what we’ve seen of her growth and the growth of the creature at the virus lab, probably . . . not.”

  Dan sat back, speechless. Fitch’s voice cut through the sudden silence as he braked sharply and spun the wheel to the left through an entrance gate in a long, wrought-iron fence. “Everybody get ready. This is the driveway to the house.”

  The house, Press soon discovered, looked like a standard A-frame from the front, but had its ass end propped on stilts buried deep in the side of the hill. Below was a sparkling, panoramic view of Hollywood Hills; to the northwest, the freeway was a vibrating ribbon of light in front of an exotically shimmering glow that could only be Universal City. Quite a view, Press thought sourly, and one good mud slide would make Mr. Robbie Nice Guy kiss this happy little homestead good-bye. In the meantime the stilts did serve a purpose by giving Press and the two Special Forces men following him a perfect place to shimmy up to the cantilevered deck. Once they were on top, all three crouched for a moment to get their bearings.

  “Your move, Lennox,” the one closest to him whispered. “What’s your plan?”

  “You go to the left, and you go to the right.” Press peered toward a sliding-glass door about four yards away. He pointed at it. “I’m in through there. You’ve been briefed on what the woman looks like. If you see her, shoot to kill. Let’s—”

  “Dr. Fitch said to try to take her alive.” The second man was little beyond a black-on-black phantom a few feet away. The low light spilling onto the deck from the patio doors barely showed him carefully positioned on the rim of the deck. Nothing moved inside.

  Yet.

  “Fitch is a fool and not here doing the cleanup on his own dirty work,” Press hissed. “Try it and she’ll kill you before you can change your mind. Now go!” They melted into the night without further argument and Press crept to the door that looked out over the deck. Just for the hell of it, he gave it a try. More stupidity; it slid open easily, as if Press and his men were the only ones in the world who could shimmy up a rough wooden pole. He opened it only enough to slip through and close it behind him, pulling his SIG-Sauer P229 free of its holster before he was all the way into the living room.

  Nice decorating, Press thought as he covered the length of the room in a running crouch. Wish I had that coffee table. He halted soundlessly at the juncture of a small hallway and another door. Because of the angle of the hall, he could see nothing past the doorjamb except another open door. It was well lit and he could hear the sound of the shower running all the way out here. Gun cocked and eyes fixed on the door that obviously led to the bathroom, Press glided around through the opening and almost stepped on the body of a man with half his head gone.

  He barely stifled his yell of surprise and did a fast, quiet dance around the dead man’s limbs as he tried not to step on the arm and leg outflung toward the hall. Was Sil in there? Discarded in front of the bathroom door was a crumpled black brassiere, the kind with underwires and heavy fabric that faddish women were wearing as blouses these days. There was something oddly . . . smeary about it, and Press had to get practically on top of it to see the blood, soaked into the black fabric so heavily it was leaking out the other side.

  Robbie apparently didn’t believe in air-conditioning, or maybe he’d intended to open the patio doors during the planned romp on the still-made bed. Between the sneaking around and the steam roiling out of the bathroom, Press could feel his shirt starting to cling to the center of his back. Despite the tension and warmth, his grip on the .357 SIG was still dry and his sight was steady, but his mind was giving him a snippy and utterly useless reminder that he’d never gotten around to switching his SIG-Sauer semiauto for the fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5SD4 he’d set aside back at the complex. If he got out of here alive tonight, he’d have one of Fitch’s nagging little aides go back and retrieve it for him . . . if this job wasn’t over by dawn.

  With the water running like that, the air would never uncloud enough for him to get a clear view. “Fuck it,” Press muttered, and darted into the vapor-clogged bathroom. The sound of the shower was thunderous in his ears, hammering right along with his heart. Taking a deep, moisture-laden breath, Press leaped through the door, hit a vanity with a black-and-gold marble top, and brought his pistol up and ready to fire as he ricocheted into the glass-enclosed shower.

  The empty glass-enclosed shower.

  “Shit,” he said in a low voice. He yanked the .357 SIG away from the spray of water—long past being anything but lukewarm—and found the knob to cut off the pressure from the shower head; the ensuing silence gave him a ringing sound in his ears, like standing next to a dam when they cut the water flow. His shirt was soaked, his hair was plastered to his forehead . . . hell, even his shoes were squishing. To top it off, he could hear enough voices coming from the rest of the house to tell him that Sil was definitely not around.

  It looked like he was going to have to ask for the fully automatic after all.

  “This woman is a cold-blooded killer.” Press was talking at Xavier Fitch rather than to him. “She—”

  “Is not a woman,” Laura reminded the group. “And you should stop thinking of her as such.”

  “But you just said her,” Dan said in confusion.

  “She is a female,” Laura explained, “but she’s not human because she was created with alien DNA. She uses our human form as a costume only, a camouflage to walk among us. She does not necessarily think like a human, at least not all the time.”

  “Which makes her all the more dangerous,” Press cut in. He looked like he wanted to throttle Fitch. “One of those soldiers told me your orders were to take her alive. Are you out of your fucking mind? How many more people have to die because of your moronic experiment?”

  Fitch didn’t look a bit intimidated, just preoccupied. “I don’t understand how any of this has to do with reproduction, or her desire to reproduce,” he said eventually, reaching to massage his temples. “First she kills a girl at the nightclub—a total stranger from what we’ve been able to ascertain. Then she finds a man and gets him to take her someplace private, and ends up murdering him, too.”

  “I’d say she fits the classic definition of a psychopath,” Stephen said. “There’s nothing to inhibit her—no moral sense, no social structure—”

  “She wasn’t exactly smothered with motherly love by Xavier,” Laura said caustically. “Nor did he teach her any manners.” She met his annoyed glance evenly.

  “She’ll kill if s
he feels threatened or wants something,” Stephen continued. “Anyone who gets in her way is going down.”

  Dr. Fitch frowned. “Gets in the way of what?”

  “Of reproduction,” Laura said impatiently. “We talked about this earlier, when Stephen first mentioned it in the van. And he was correct—she’s in the mating part of her life cycle.”

  Fitch pondered this for a moment. “I suppose you could be right,” he conceded. “But why kill that girl at the ID? What purpose did that serve?”

  Stephen opened his mouth, but Laura beat him to it. “Sexual rivalry,” she said. “The girl must have gotten in her way, stolen the attention of someone Sil was interested in. She invoked a sense of jealousy in Sil, plus she was an obstacle. Therefore, she was eliminated.”

  “Exactly,” Stephen agreed. “Again, she fits the classic definition of a psychopath—no inhibitions, moral sense or social structure. She’ll kill for any number of reasons. In response to feeling threatened, as a means to obtain something she desires, or just for convenience—if someone is in her way or is keeping her from accomplishing what she wants, she’ll cut them out of the picture. Simply touching her the wrong way could be enough to set her off.”

  “She’s certainly hard on the competition,” Press said with a raised eyebrow.

  “You’re saying that now she’s managed to mate?” Fitch asked. He looked repulsed and enthralled at the same time. And something else, too, that Laura found hard to define . . . proud, perhaps?

  Laura saw Press glance at the corpse on the bedroom floor, then shake his head. “No. Doesn’t look like a successful mating to me.”

  “How would you know that?” In spite of herself, Laura was fascinated by Press’s no-nonsense perceptions.

  “He’s still got his pants on,” Press said wryly.

  “The killing could have been afterward,” Laura suggested.

  “I doubt it,” Press replied. “Bed’s still made and the only piece of clothing our creature left behind was a blood-soaked bra.” He wandered over to the bathroom door and looked in, checking for anything that might have been missed in the previous excitement and now dissipated steam.

  “She must be very frustrated,” Dan said.

  “Aren’t we all,” Stephen said sourly.

  “Frustration can be the worst state of mind for anyone,” Dan continued, “especially someone socially unstable. Emotionally, it’s the root of all evil.”

  “That’s right on the money, Dan.” Stephen tried to grin, but the dead body on the floor made the smile sag before it reached the professor’s eyes. “We’re all frustrated in one way or another.”

  “Yeah, well, bully for us,” Fitch said uncharacteristically. “In the meantime let’s get back to Sil. If she didn’t mate with this guy, what was her problem? He was here, she was here, the moment was right. So what happened?”

  Stephen was at a loss. “I have no idea. Everything I know says she should have gone for it. It looks like they were even starting.”

  Laura chewed at her lower lip and studied Robbie’s body. “Maybe she rejected him. We can test him for hereditary diseases—bad heart, defective liver, something that would make him an unacceptable mate. She’s probably got sensory faculties far more advanced than ours—or far more basic, depending on how you look at it. Rats, for instance, can sense disease or genetic damage in potential mates.”

  “I think I found the problem,” Press said. He held up a syringe and an empty vial bearing a white label with blue-and-black lettering on it.

  Laura extended her hand and he dropped the vial onto her palm. “Novolin 70/30,” she read. “This is insulin. 70/30 is a combination of two human-derived types. Our man here was a diabetic; that would make him an unacceptable mate.” She handed the vial back to Press and he ducked into the bathroom; the resulting clink told her he’d tossed the glass vial and used syringe back into the wastebasket.

  “So why didn’t she just walk out?” Fitch asked, exasperated. “Why did she have to kill him?” Laura held out her hands in the standard “I have no idea” gesture.

  “Well,” Press mused, “it looks like he could have been between her and the door. Do you think he tried to stop her?”

  “Some men don’t like to be rejected,” Dan put in. “They tend to get insistent. Maybe he was one of those.”

  “Well, we’re not going to find her here,” Fitch said. He spoke rapidly to an aide waiting for instructions a few feet away, the second guy who’d joined them back at the freight train. “Dig into this guy’s history and find out what he drives, then put an APB on it, stat.”

  “It’s already been done,” McRamsey said. “He drives a Brazilian kit car called a Puma. The DMV records indicate it’s bright orange.”

  “I guess she’s not so docile and controllable, is she, Doc? What now?” Press had found another toothpick and shoved it between his lips. His hair had finally dried into an uneven bunch of dark, curly tufts, and he sounded absurdly like a cross between a thin-lipped Clint Eastwood and Bugs Bunny. “We could head back to the motel. I’ll bet you my next paycheck the clerk’s come up with the stuff Sil ‘didn’t’ leave behind.” He gave them all a dark, lazy grin.

  “That’s as good a place as any,” Fitch said. He looked questioningly at Laura.

  “I’m guessing as much as anyone else, Dr. Fitch,” she said. “We should examine the things she left behind anyway.” She shot a penetrating glance at Press. “If she did.”

  Press gave her a smile that was just short of insolent. “You wait and see, Dr. Baker.” He flicked the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other without touching it. “I think you’ll all he quite surprised at what we find.”

  21

  Sunset Boulevard at night was a riot of color and sound and never-slowing movement. The Puma was a nice sports car, a little two-seater with a black interior and top that contrasted nicely with the bright orange paint job. The top had been down when Robbie had last driven it, and Sil liked it down, liked the way the warm California wind picked up her hair and made it drift on the air currents rolling over the car. She sure hadn’t gotten that kind of freedom looking out from the glass box back at the complex.

  Traffic was heavy and the car was forced to slow until Sil had to work the clutch constantly—stop and go, stop and go. Prostitutes and cops were everywhere, everyone trying to look like they were someone, something else; johns toured the area, trying to invent new ways to elude the no-cruising ordinance that went into effect at ten P.M. Men looking for women, women looking for women—with all those people milling around, it was a wonder that Sil spotted the first plainclothes security man on the corner a block away from the motel. Dressed in slacks and a sport coat and sitting on a street bench eating popcorn while he browsed through a magazine, she couldn’t believe he didn’t realize he was ridiculously conspicuous amid the scantily clad women and leering men in muscleman T-shirts and shorts. More security guys dotted the sidewalk, but none of them noticed the Puma and Sil squeezed the car into the left lane of traffic and accelerated. When she saw a break in the oncoming cars, she jumped the red light with a left turn.

  She wound her way southwest through a number of smaller streets until she came to La Brea and followed it south, just because she liked the name. She recognized the expressway emblems from the television and decided she would keep going until she found the Santa Monica Freeway that the signs advertised, but when she reached the entrance ramp she was forced to detour around it. Wide-eyed when she saw the huge, twisted metal supports and cracked concrete, Sil cruised through the underpass of the massive structure and painstakingly mouthed the words on the signs: DETOUR—EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE—USE ADAMS BOULEVARD TO EXPOSITION—FOLLOW THE SIGNS. She still didn’t know what an earthquake was, but she’d just gotten a lesson in what it did.

  At last Sil was on the freeway, the night wind blowing in her hair as the automobile sped easily along. More signs flashed by, and one in particular intrigued her: PACIFIC OCEAN/SANTA MONICA PIER, 6 M
ILES, followed by an arrow in the direction in which she was driving. Robbie had mentioned this, and Sil still wondered about it. This ocean, did it have anything to do with an earthquake?

  She would drive there tonight, she decided. There was so much to see and learn, so much to do.

  Top on the list and much harder than she’d anticipated, was to find a mate.

  22

  The greasy clerk at the motel was gone, replaced by the night staffer, who was a no-nonsense middle-aged man who looked like he was an ex-marine and introduced himself as Raymond. He gave Press’s hand two hard pumps and ignored Fitch altogether as he produced a room key from the cash drawer and tossed it to Press. “Seven-B,” he said flatly. His face was bland but his eyes were small, dark pebbles, intelligent and sunk deep in his skull. “Henry—that’s the guy who was on shift when you folks were here—and me had a little talk about the stuff that was in there and how it oughta be back in the room when you folks returned.”

  Press nodded his thanks and didn’t insult the man by asking if that meant Sil’s belongings were there now. The motel was crawling with Special Operations men trying to look like nonchalant businessmen. Press thought they fit in about as well as a Scandinavian blonde at a seminar on African-American genealogy.

  Sil’s motel room was right on line with the rest of the place—small and slightly seedy, clean on a surface that masked years of poor-quality care and cheap cleaning materials. The curtains were drawn and the room’s only lamp wasn’t much help in the lighting department; it made the frayed, dark-colored bedspread look mostly black and didn’t even have enough output to fully illuminate the tiny closet. All of the things that Sil had apparently purchased with the cash from Angela Cardoza’s paycheck had been dumped in a pile on the double bed. Press and Stephen went through it, with Stephen marveling over the speed at which Sil seemed to be learning the technique of sexual attraction.