Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  Much to his surprise, she woke up fully alert and renewed.

  “Gimme a smoke,” she said.

  Phil shook one out of his pack and lit it for her, then drew back a blanket and showed her the weapons.

  “Nice. Your kid make those?”

  “Funny.”

  Mary sniffed, then took a deep drag on the cigarette.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  That was a problem.

  * * *

  The new chamber Bailey shared with Gilbert was big and had several sub-chambers and other accoutrements: its own dripper, something like a small grotto, a small storage area, and the raised ledge all around the biggest chamber. It also had its own view port, an irregular window about the size of a garbage can lid in the floor of one of the sub-chambers.

  Bailey wanted to live. She wanted to be on the Earth again, to walk on it and feel it under her feet—to smell it. This time she could see California. There was some cloud cover and the angle wasn’t too good, but she could make out what she thought was a smooth and shiny little patch that should have been Lake Isabella. From there she looked south and found what she thought was the minute area that might have been Haight Canyon and wondered if her husband’s body was still down there. They’d been careful about not being seen when they went there to camp, so it was possible it was still there, rotting in the heat of the tent.

  Her anger boiled up again and she breathed deep to cool it.

  The chamber had its own seam; and when she heard it open she turned toward it, prepared to smile her best welcome home smile.

  It took her five full seconds to realize she was looking at Gilbert Keefer. She could tell because his Gilbert Keefer face was stuck on the front of the thing’s head like a too-small mask.

  She’d always known that the world was full of strange fruit, but she hadn’t realized until that moment just how strange some of that fruit could be.

  He must have given them a picture from a book in the dump as a model—like you’d carry a picture from a magazine to the hair stylist to copy a hair style.

  It was not a good cut.

  The color was right, and she guessed he’d forgotten to tell them not to make him marble white because he was. The legs were too big, not muscular big, just big—and the calves were disproportionately small. The chest was broad and flat with big round plates where the pectoral muscles should have been. The arms were short, and she swore that one was far shorter than the other.

  She’d seen pictures of Greek and Roman statues in those heavily muscled, relaxed poses. She’d studied art some and had taken a class on sculpture. She remembered about the relaxed S-shape that was a big deal with the sculptors at some point in time.

  It was that stance that did it; that was the tip off. Gilbert had had himself modified into a bizarre facsimile of a Greek statue. His intention was undoubtedly to get the spirit of the look, not the letter of it.

  He was standing there as if to be admired with a look of pride just barely evident. His head was cast to the side at an angle to help the overall look along, but Bailey saw him glance at her to measure her reaction.

  Bailey’s mouth dropped open. The thing that chilled her most was that he’d had it done not to instill revulsion, but to reduce it. He’d failed horribly.

  Standing there like a ghastly work of art, he waited for her to speak. While he waited, he swallowed with his mouth open. Bailey saw that horrible gesture and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  When he moved toward her, she could see that the right arm was in fact three or four inches longer than the left. His pelvis had also been modified, because he walked strangely, as if his customized physiology was trying to maintain that S-shape during locomotion. It produced the most hideous gait Bailey could imagine, something between a limp and a rolling twist that heightened the freakish look. Watching him move, she realized that the engineers had mistakenly converted the perspective; they’d interpreted the stance and the arm length literally from a two-dimensional picture. He still had his too-big aviator, tinted glasses on.

  She raised her hands to her face and screamed into them again.

  He moved to within touching distance and reached out and took hold of her wrists. His hands were the same narrow, long-fingered hands he’d had before, now attached to thicker wrists and forearms. The death-colored hands pulled hers down away from her face. When she realized that he had to twist his torso so that the shorter arm could reach her, her terror turned to cackling, hysterical laughter.

  “Don’t you know . . . one of your goddamned arms . . . is too short,” she laughed. “They fucked up . . . your arms . . .

  “Stop laughing,” the little face in the head said. “Stop laughing or I’ll kill you.”

  “Go ahead, you fucker,” she said laughing. “I don’t give a shit.” She tried to wrench her arms free, but couldn’t. “You fucking freak. You fucking . . . fucking . . . freak . . .”

  She stopped struggling then lifted her head and laughed loudly. The statue grabbed her hair and shook her head back and forth violently. The laugher changed to screams of pain, and she reached up and grabbed hold of his arms. The statue’s flesh was cooler than it should have been and was not quite substantial—as if he was wearing a water-filled covering—like some strange “statue suit” for Halloween night.

  He held her up by her hair and drew his face closer to hers. The aliens hadn’t remedied his rancid breath, and she closed her eyes and held her own breath against it.

  “Isn’t this what you . . . wanted?” he asked smoothly.

  Bailey kept her eyes and mouth clamped shut, blocking out the hideous vision and its scent.

  “Open your eyes.”

  He shook her head and issued a silent, open-mouthed protest. He continued to shake, and knowing it was useless to resist, she finally gave up and opened her eyes. Insulting him further wouldn’t help any, either. She looked into the sagging eyes in that white mask and made herself smile.

  “I like it,” she said as if she really did.

  Gilbert turned his head slowly away and stared placidly into space as if he’d just had his tummy rubbed. He wanted to believe it, to hear the words. Bailey was amazed and sickened.

  All I have to do, she thought, is say the words. It’s always the same.

  “I do, I like it—really,” she added sweetly.

  He let go of her wrists and put one wiry hand up her blouse. It found her left breast, clamped there and squeezed. The sensation made her whirl with nausea.

  They’d made him stronger by far, and she could sense it in his grip. There would be no slapping him away like a fly this time.

  “Take off your . . . clothes,” he said thickly.

  The thought of standing naked and awash in the freak’s lust was almost too much for her.

  “I’m really not in the mood, my king,” she said hopefully.

  He took up another gather of her hair and pulled it tight. He would have his way this time. He looked at her full mouth and was overcome with the lustful desire to suck it. He pulled her head close and kissed her.

  It felt like having her face pushed into something rotten. His mouth was wet with spit and splayed open like the thick petals of a stinking flower.

  When he tried to probe her mouth with his tongue, she could easily have mistaken it for a thin, weak worm.

  The tongue bumped into her clenched teeth time and again, trying to get inside her mouth and she resolved not to let the nasty thing in at all costs. He could fuck her, paw her, rub his hands over her tits and lick and fuck her ass, but he would have to break her jaw to get his nasty tongue in her mouth. That went for his dick, too. No way.

  She let him fumble with her clothes until he got them off. She kept her eyes open but didn’t see much as he panted and groped her and lay his cool, freak’s body on hers. She’d been raped before as a teen and knew he’d be finished soon. He’d pump her and paw her and roll her around and pump her some more until he came and then his lust wou
ld shut off as if from a faucet.

  What was it to get raped, anyway? she thought. I’ve been through worse things. Go ahead and fuck me, you bastard. You just wait.

  Gilbert Keefer penetrated her with a nearly inaudible grunt and joined the ethereal ranks of fantasy victims that Bailey Hall cut, burned, shot, beat and hanged in endless variety.

  Just wait.

  * * *

  He’d had her, rolled her around, pumped her and slobbered on her, all the while squeezing her with his spider hands and then, he’d fallen asleep. During the entire ordeal, she’d taken her mind and her senses and fled to her fantasy world, leaving her vacated body behind for his horrid pleasure.

  Her mind and her body re-united like gentle sisters. When they merged completely, and she was whole again, she could feel the statue’s warm, musky breath on her neck and her mind knew the disgust of it.

  She inched away from him and got up from the broad flat ledge that was the bed. She turned and looked down at the freakish thing that had just fucked her and felt her mouth pinch up in disgust. The too-small face was still slack-jawed, and in sleep, hung askew as if the loose jaw had come unhinged completely. Mouth open wide, the thing’s eyes twitched and it mouth-breathed through some unfathomable dream, she was sure, of unspeakable and nasty things.

  She was tempted to find something to kill him with; to bring to vivid fruition just one of those sweet fantasies she’d conjured while he fucked her. But she knew if she did, she’d be right back where she started from or worse. No, she would bend and adapt; she would accept even the unacceptable for now.

  She brought her finger to within a millimeter of one of his closed eyes and stiffened it like a dagger. Holding the finger in check, she played through the fantasy in her mind and felt the finger go into his eye socket. The warm fluid squirted and caressed her finger as she twisted it, formed it into a hook and pulled the eye from his head. “Just wait,” she whispered.

  She stepped into the dripper and let the lukewarm water rain down on her. She wiped her arms, face and legs with the water and felt the stuff he’d left on her come away like dirt and run down the drains. She indulged another of her vengeful, but somewhat less brutal fantasies while she squatted and relieved herself. “Sonofabitch . . . ” she muttered. She put the ugly thoughts of him aside and forced herself to think about what to do.

  She wished she knew more about science, or biology or physio-whatever.

  Gilbert had been given the run of the ship and could go wherever he wanted, even without the big bastard tailing along. There were seams Gilbert called security seams at key junctures, but they didn’t stop Gilbert. As long as Gilbert was with her, she could go, too. He’d showed her some parts of the ship as if he was giving her a tour of his workplace. He was very bright about such things, she discovered, and he wasted no time in letting her know just how bright he really was.

  Lo and behold, they’d run right into the shuttle bay on one such excursion. He’d told her all about that, too. She had a good silent laugh over that.

  It was the thing Gilbert called the nerve bundle that was really interesting. It was located in the widest tube she’d ever seen.

  “That’s its spinal column,” he’d said.

  “What’s spinal column?”

  “The ship’s . . . spinal column.”

  It was like a giant tangle of roots about three feet in diameter that ran along the floor of the tube then sank into it about fifty feet down from where they’d been. She couldn’t tell where it went from there. When they were there looking at it, she’d reached down and touched it, feeling the energy course along it, and Gilbert had a fit, yanking her hand off it like she was a kid reaching for a hot pan.

  “How do you know that’s what it is?” she’d asked.

  Gilbert just smiled, just barely smiled. He was so in love with his secrets.

  She knew when she saw it that it would be possible to cripple or kill the entire ship if she could damage that thing good enough. That convinced her. That ugly mass of alien rope, if damaged, would stop it all; would stop the pain; would stop the killing. She’d thought about sneaking down and hacking it in two, but she had no tools. They were careful not to allow anything big and sharp in the ship.

  She made notes about everything. Her blue notebook was her constant companion.

  She’d drawn the routes to each area from memory and was pretty sure she’d gotten them right. That took a lot of doing—some of the maps made a real jumble on the paper. From where she was, she could get to any part of the ship she knew about. She was fairly sure she could get back to the tube where Mary, Phil and Ned were, but she couldn’t go alone—not yet. If she got caught, she’d be fucked for good.

  Phil would know what to do to the nerve bundle if she could just tell him where it was and how to get to it. The problem was that Phil was in another part of the ship and getting to him wouldn’t be easy. She’d have to plan it out. First, she’d have to get Gilbert to pull some strings so she could wander around on her own.

  There was still the problem of opening the seams between here and there since she didn’t have enough physical mass to work the security openers alone. Some openers were easier to work, like the one that controlled the seam for their chamber. It only took one person to open, and Gilbert could open any seam, even the ones to the labs with a single touch. She didn’t understand just how, but they must have given him some special access privilege.

  She’d studied and studied her maps and thought she’d figured out an alternate route; one that would take her to the shuttle bay without having to open a single security seam. If she could get there and scale the wall to the little access tube, she could make her way to the back seam of Phil’s tube—all without being seen—maybe. Once she got there, it might be possible to make enough noise for someone to hear her and let her in. The walls were thick but not that thick and Mary’s cell was right there at the seam. It was a long shot—but worth it.

  The problem was the high wall in the shuttle bay. It was a simple physical obstruction, nothing fancy. It might as well have been Mount Everest.

  Think, damn you . . . how can I do it? How? Find a way, Bailey. Find a way.

  The answer came to her in the form of a bizarre image from the dark reaches of her fantasy mind. She smiled at first because it was so funny and weird, then she stared and focused and turned its strange form and weighed it and made her decision.

  Fuck it, I’ll do it. I’ll fucking do it.

  She’d do it for her dead husband Jim and for her sister and for her father and for all the other people she didn’t want to see die. She’d do it because she hated this ship and Gilbert and the alien things that hurt her so much it burned her very soul.

  Having made up her mind, she grinned. Then she lifted her head and let the water fall on her face. It felt just like a rainstorm in the dripper. The dark brown ceiling was covered with little black nipples that dripped the water. It was the strangest thing, but kinda cool, too. She wished she’d thought of it.

  * * *

  Using the few arrows they had left without tips, they practiced throwing and shooting them at paper targets. Ned was pretty good. At the end of the practice, he could hit a sheet of notebook paper fifteen feet away half the time. And Mary, a bigger surprise, hurled the darts with a savageness and accuracy that amazed them.

  You just never knew who could do what, Phil thought.

  Phil found it hard to hit the targets with the bow. The range was certainly better than throwing by hand, but his accuracy wasn’t too hot. It felt like just what it was to shoot, and he accepted its obvious shortcomings. He’d have to live with them.

  If Phil had had his way, he would have spent the next week improving the weapons, practicing, and learning to work as a team. He didn’t think they had a week.

  Later, when the hiss came at the opening, they looked at each other and asked, “who’s next?” without saying a word. Phil glanced over at the blanket that covered the weapons.

>   “Well, it ain’t Mary, she just got back,” Ned said. “How the fuck do they know who’s next, anyway? Fuck, it’s gotta be me. Right? Right? It’s my turn.”

  “I’m beginning to think it’s completely up to the discretion of the goons,” Phil said.

  “Ain’t that a bitch,” Ned said. “And I haven’t sucked up to a single one of them.”

  He got up and went to the opening and hopped down. He was right. It was his turn. The big prick pushed him down the tube like he was a sixty pound kid instead of a two hundred and fifty pound man.

  Phil leaned against the opening and watched them stop at another chamber down the tube. A small Asian woman climbed slowly down out of it and folded her arms nervously. Her hair was long and stringy. She was thin and pale—a perfect waif.

  Fucking bastards, Phil thought. Just go, lady.

  The goon nudged her, and Phil saw her face scrunch up into a cry. She just stood there crying silently with her arms folded like a frustrated child. Phil wanted to go down and hold her for a moment, to tell her it would be all right—even if it were a lie. The goon shoved her again. Reluctantly, she turned and walked toward the forward seam. She put her head down, and Phil could tell that she was still crying.

  Phil looked at the huge, retreating shape of the goon and felt his heart pound with the desire to reduce it to a bloody heap. He tried to calm himself by clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Losing Ned put their plans—what there was of them— back at least twelve hours, maybe more.

  “Now what?” Mary asked. She hadn’t meant to challenge him with it, but Phil was like a spring that was being wound tighter and tighter by the minute, and she didn’t want to wind him up any more if she could help it. She watched him working his fists: open, close, open, and close.