Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  He felt a crawling tickle on the top of his right foot and brushed it off quickly with his left. It came right back the way a mosquito will pursue warm skin, then to his renewed horror, he felt another tickle then another. He began to panic as visions of waterborne parasites and other crawling evils filled his head, and he brushed them off his arms and legs as quickly as the resistance of the thick fluid would allow. As his panic rose, their number grew and blended into an indistinguishable crawling mass that covered his entire body. Fatigued and with no further will to resist, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the appetites of this teeming, alien horde.

  He was surprised when later, contrary to what he expected, the crawling swarm had not pieced him or burrowed under his skin by the thousands or eaten him alive, but began to drift away in great numbers.

  The seam above his head parted with a ripping sound and he realized for the first time that the fluid-filled cell he was in was a living structure. Hidden muscle had pulled the seam open as surely as it had held it closed.

  When the vine began to lift him up, he grabbed it firmly and held on tight with both hands to keep it from breaking his neck. It pulled him up and out of the warm fluid and deposited him onto the resilient floor of the chamber. No sooner had he touched down than the tendrils around his head let go and the vine slid up out of his throat. This caused him to gag then vomit out a great spurt of translucent brown fluid. A reflex to avoid the odious stuff spent his very last token of strength as he rolled slowly away from it.

  * * *

  “Have some corn,” Mary said. “It’s from my home state,” she added with a smile.

  Bailey took the open can from her and shook a big mouthful into her open maw. No sooner had she downed that one, that she followed it with another. Bailey didn’t talk much, and Mary figured she was still too dazed and confused to be thinking clear enough to form a complete sentence anyway. She was eating well enough, that was for sure. She’d just packed away half a pack of oatmeal cookies and a can of peas. Now the corn. Mary began to wonder if they’d have enough to last till the next feeding. If she had to borrow some from her neighbors, nobody’d mind.

  Bailey finished the corn and left a kernel of it on her chin. Mary reached over and brushed it off. Bailey followed up with a brush of her own hand just to be sure.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Want something else? We’ve got plenty.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Bailey stared at the wall for a moment and Mary could see her brow knit just a little and she knew Bailey was formulating those questions. She knew what the first one would be.

  “Where are we?” Bailey asked.

  Mary wished she’d had a dime for every time she’d heard it. She had the answer to that one, though, and knew from experience it was better to just show her than to tell her. Nothing took the place of the show in show and tell.

  “Come on.”

  She got up and led Bailey out of the hole and down the tube to another hole some twenty yards toward the grocery. The opening was higher up on the wall, and she had to lift herself up a little to get inside. Once in, she held a hand down to Bailey and hefted her up. She was surprised by the strength she felt in Bailey’s hands and arms as she clamored in.

  The chamber was smaller than Mary’s and was nearly round inside, so the floor was difficult to stand on straight. It was filled with clear light, and Bailey wasted no time in finding the source of it. She looked down through a thick irregular plate on the floor, seemingly feet thick, at the floating globe of Earth. The image was so big, she couldn’t see all of it from her vantage point.

  “Oh my heavens,” she whispered in awe.

  “Yeah. Well, that’s where we’re not.”

  “So this is some kind of space ship or something.”

  That’s it, Mary thought. Simple. Yet far from it.

  “How long has it been here, or how long have you been here?”

  “The first question is longer than six months, and the second is about six months, I think. Me and Gilbert, he’s the Bible banger you met earlier, and another guy named Tom Moon and my friend Fred have been in this tube the longest. Everybody else is either dead or in another part of the ship doing other duty.”

  “What do you mean, other duty?” Bailey asked with a sideways look.

  “Skip it. I’ll tell you later. Too much too soon and you’ll just freak out on me.”

  There, she’d said it.

  It was true and she’d told Bailey just what would happen if she knew the ship’s other horrors. There was a premium on sanity in the ship. If you could keep from going mad, you stood a much better chance of surviving longer. Gilbert had his Bible, Tom Moon had his mind of tough, dumb leather, and Mary—well, she had her own inner fortitude. It did no good to dwell on what happened in the other parts of the ship. She and others had seen things that just weren’t possible or imaginable, yet were horribly both. Sink too low, don’t get up when you’re called and you’d wind up there in those other parts of the ship yourself.

  “I’m freaked out now,” Bailey said.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of. We all are.”

  “Who are they anyway?”

  That was the one. That was the question that burned deepest. If we had that one, Mary thought, we might have something. We wouldn’t have much, but we’d have something.

  A name was more than just a name. If you attached a name to a thing, you knew the thing. In order for the name to make sense, and to be more than just a sound, you had to know something about the thing to begin with. They knew practically nothing about the beings in control and had assigned a purely visual moniker, a broad, unfortunately meaningless description.

  “We call them witches.”

  “Witches? Not Betazoid somethings.”

  “No. Witches. If you can think of a better name, let us know.”

  “I don’t want to think about them at all.”

  “Good policy.”

  Mary watched the slight smile grow on Bailey’s face as her gaze drifted inexorably back to the floating globe of Earth. She’d seen that look before. She’d even possessed it for a moment herself the first time Fred had brought her to this chamber. Why they were allowed to view their home planet was just another mystery.

  Then she watched the smile pale. Mary knew the feeling. It was like being shown a picture of your all time most favorite place in the world for the last time.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Tom Moon’s hole was just up ahead and Mary felt uneasy walking past it. She moved involuntarily in behind Bailey to get a foot or so away from it as she passed. Mary had no magical leanings, but she got an unmistakable sense of bad juju coming from that hole. It was so strong, she could almost see it pouring out like some mist. If she discovered somehow that Gilbert cornholed Moon in there while he read the Bible to him, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Sure enough, just as they passed by, she caught just a glimpse of Tom as he popped, ferret-like, out of the opening. Mary thought how annoying it was that the sonofabitch always came up on her from behind somehow, never to her front. As soon as she heard his little feet hit the floor, she turned to face him.

  “What?” she asked testily. “What’s up?”

  Mary knew Tom was thick and dim, but she didn’t think he was so dumb that he couldn’t detect the extreme intolerance his presence puffed out of others.

  He cocked his head and pursed his lips for a full two seconds before he spoke.

  She waited patiently.

  “What are you so antsy-pantsy about, anyways?” he asked.

  “I’ve got gas. What’s it to you?” She watched that shitty little smirk cross his face and she wanted to slap him as if he’d just shown her a mouthful of food.

  “Who’s your friend?” His glance bounced off Bailey’s breasts and landed like a turd on Mary. Bailey looked at Mary for direction, for some clue what to do. Mary figured she’d let her
decide on her own. She was a big girl.

  “Bailey Hall,” Bailey said finally.

  “Any relation to George?” the ferret smiled.

  “Who?” Bailey was confused again. She looked at Mary and knitted her brow.

  “You know, George Hall—the President.”

  Mary rolled her eyes and let Tom see it. Bailey tried to smile open-mouthed and brushed a strand of hair off her face.

  Poor Bailey, Mary thought. Not much in the sense-of-humor department right now.

  “George Hall, the President?” Mary chuckled. “Jeezus keee..ryst . . . ”

  Tom’s eyes dropped to the floor. “You think I’m stupid. You as much as just said so.” He glared at Mary. Tom’s left hand went into a fist.

  Bailey saw it. “Oh, jeez . . . ” she said and turned away from the blooming confrontation. She knew where this could go. She’d seen it happen before. Too much pride and a few wrong words could cause a fight real easy.

  Mary watched Bailey amble away.

  Hell with it, she thought. This is ridiculous. No sense getting this dumb asshole’s panties in a knot over nothing.

  She reached out and put her hand on Tom’s shoulder like they were true buds. The feel of wire and gristle under his clothes and his musky scent made her slightly ill.

  “Tom, I don’t think you’re stupid,” Mary said. This immediately softened Tom up. “It’s just that you caught me at a bad time—if you know what I mean.”

  She just patted his shoulder a time or two and walked away.

  For dinner, Mary opened cans of vegetable soup and they had that and bread as the main course. They drank the soup cold out of the can, and Bailey dipped her bread in it. Mary had a tube of Pringle’s potato chips she’d been saving for a while and she popped that open, too. They ate silently and while they ate Bailey would sometimes drift off right in the middle of chewing and stay gone for as much as a minute. She’d just stare with her mouth full of food, then come back into focus and start up chewing again.

  Mary understood perfectly.

  Worse than the obvious horror of being abducted by aliens was the fact that it was completely, utterly unexpected and unanticipated. It wasn’t unexpected in the same way you would not expect to get hit by a car, or not expect to fall down and break something, but so far removed from the realm of possibilities as to be singularly impossible.

  Sometimes it helped to talk it out. “How in the world could you ever imagine that you would ever wind up here in this place with these creatures controlling your life?” Mary said. “No matter how low you might sink, how sick you might get, how desperate you might become, you could always say that at least you hadn’t been grabbed by brain-sucking aliens. How could you be?”

  The answer was that you couldn’t be—ever.

  The more you thought about it, the more ridiculous it became. Then you drifted back into focus, and there it was—even far worse than you remembered it because it was real—wet, slimy, dark—and real.

  You’re eating white bread and cold soup out of the can in a living alien prison. Wake the fuck up.

  Bailey’s head dropped and she shook it to shake the reality out of it—to throw it up and kill it. She started to groan in a low monotone. Mary watched her fall slowly over and curl up into a tight shape and pull the blanket over her head. If it hadn’t been so damned horrible and pathetic, it might have been cute.

  I know, sweetheart. I know.

  * * *

  There was only one way out of the chamber, a tunnel about twenty feet long leading to another chamber beyond.

  Navigation is easy, Phil thought. You just go where there aren’t any walls.

  He walked toward the tunnel and with each step he felt the sticky, resilient floor tug at his feet. He watched the clear liquid dripping from the nipples covering the roof of the tunnel for a moment, then stuck his hand out cautiously into the rain to make sure it was really water and not acid.

  He stepped slowly into the tunnel, letting the lukewarm water rain down on him then began to wipe the thick fluid off his body. He felt somewhat refreshed after sleeping some on the floor. His body felt polished and clean under the thick fluid. He looked at the razor-straight, clean, thin scars on his chest, abdomen and limbs and wondered how the skills to produce such scars could ever become part of a species’ behavioral repertoire. The scars were completely healed and his first thought was that he had been unconscious for days, perhaps weeks after the procedure.

  He closed his eyes and remembered the nightmare he’d just had and how he’d lain there on the table and how the bloody, white grubs had looked when pinched tight in the alien tongs.

  It was a nightmare of course, a hideous, horrible nightmare. He smiled at how finely detailed the nightmare was.

  When he opened his eyes, the dark walls of the tunnel flushed the dream-feel from his mind and slapped him to clear awareness. The palpable shock of those vivid memories were like a blow from a heavy pipe that caused him to stagger until he caught his balance against the black walls.

  He let the water rain on him as if it could thin those evil memories or leach them out altogether.

  Slowly, surely, he regained his composure and wiped what was left of the fluid from his face and legs and watched it float away.

  He stood at the pile of clothes in the center of the chamber and considered it. What was the point? Clothing wasn’t just body covering to shield one from the elements, he knew. Clothing provided comfort and confidence, and furnished some measure of well-being to the wearer. It was almost always better and more comfortable than being completely naked, even if the ambient temperature was over seventy.

  He picked through the clothes; and after a minute or two, found his own shirt and jeans. Encouraged by that, he dug around some more and found one, then the other, of his pull-on boots.

  “Nobody much cares whose clothes you put on,” the weak voice behind him said.

  He turned around sharply and saw a man walking out of the wet tunnel behind him. The eyes in his head had that sunken hollow look that starvation victims have, although he looked well-fed enough. His body was a roadmap of scars, and Phil had a difficulty discerning just where the man had any more than a square inch of un-scarred skin on his body. He couldn’t imagine going through what he’d just gone through more than once, yet this person had obviously gone through it many times.

  “How long have you been here?” Phil asked. He tried to put enough compassion in his voice, but he really wanted answers and sounded impatient.

  “Months. Maybe. Feels like months,” the man said.

  Phil detected a hint of an accent in his voice, perhaps British or Australian. The man moved stiffly to the pile of clothes and looked down at it.

  Phil had seen the look and heard the voice before. It had that detached, flattened affect of a schizophrenic. The man was a walking dead—any meaningful, human emotion had been bled out of him.

  “Where, or what, is this place we’re in?” Phil asked.

  “Ship. Alien ship in orbit.”

  “How many humans on board.”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care,” he said and started sifting through the clothes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Fred something. Don’t matter.”

  “Where are the other people?”

  “Down the tube that way,” he said pointing. “In the holes, waitin’ to die.” He grinned stupidly and chillingly at Phil.

  This is hopeless, Phil thought. The poor son of a bitch is gone, beyond pain, beyond shock and beyond reason.

  “Can you take me to them. I need to talk to them.”

  Fred just looked blankly back at Phil. It was the blankest, deadest look he’d ever seen in a person who was still breathing.

  “Don’t want to. Just walk that way,” he said and pointed again. “I’m going take a nap here on these clothes.” With that, he sat down gently on the pile of shirts and slacks and sweatshirts and blouses, and fell slowly over.

  A mo
ment later he closed his eyes.

  Phil watched him for a minute more and knew he was looking at a man whose reference to a nap on a pile of clothes was probably his last pathetic utterance. He had completely lost the will to live.

  He thought about trying to get the man on his feet, but thought better of it since he wouldn’t have had a clue about what he should do with him or tell him if he had.

  4

  B uddy Davis pulled his 1976 Cadillac El Dorado off Interstate 75 at RR 312 in northern Tennessee just as the sun was going down. He had to piss and he didn’t want to wait until the next damn gas station. Besides, he had that other business to take care of, and he knew just the place for that. He looked over at Gail and she was asleep with a half drunk beer stuck between her legs. He reached over and snatched the beer from between her thighs and that woke her up.

  “Hey . . . that’s mine,” she said, rising out of her stupor.

  “Not any more,” he said and swilled it down with one long pull. Gail looked at his big ‘ol arm while he chugged down the beer and liked what she saw. At least she liked it now when he wasn’t using it to propel his big ‘ol fist at her head. His tattoos made him look dangerous, at least that’s what her girlfriend Peggy said.

  Peggy would like to get her hands on them tattoos and everything else, Gail thought.

  He flung the bottle out the window and floored the Cadillac down the gray two-lane. A cloud of dark smoke trailed after it.

  He charged up to a dirt road cut-off about a mile down, no more than two tire tracks going off into the woods, braked hard, and turned onto it.

  “Where we goin’?” Gail asked. She straightened herself in the seat and looked around. She spread her legs wide and stretched up onto the dash. The Cadillac rolled its length over the up-and-down road like a snake.

  “We shouldn’t be in here, Buddy. We don’t know whose property this is,” she said.

  “Shut up. I know what I’m a doin’.”

  Buddy looked over at her tits in the thin, stretchy top she had on, and nasty inspiration struck him like a wet tongue.