by David Coy
“What in hell is this place?” he asked again.
At first he thought she was having another seizure, and he worried about being able to care for her himself if it were a bad one. As he watched her, he realized she was only breathing heavily, hyperventilating.
“Rachel, what is it?”
“I have to sit down . . . ” she said, sinking to the floor.
“Are you all right?”
“This place . . . this place . . . “
He squatted down next to her and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Awful? Is that the word you’re looking for?”
“No . . . not just awful . . . hideous, horrible . . . ”
“Good, we’re in sync on that. It looks like we’ve made the find of the century, as sick as it is. These are artifacts of some extinct, intelligent race, right? I mean, these things didn’t grow like that.”
“No. They didn’t grow like that,” she said thoughtfully.
She rose slowly to her feet and took another deep breath. Without a word, she started down the incline to the floor of the chamber. John straightened his pack and started down behind her.
Up close, the objects and structures and hanging devices were even more fearfully beautiful. Each one looked like a work of art—the art of Hell itself. The curves, edges, sweep and flow of each one held a particular horror that stabbed deep and twisted without touching them. The slick textures, pointed tips and gleaming edges seemed to probe and cut from a distance.
“God . . . ” he whispered. “Who could have made these things?”
“It’s a laboratory.”
“Whose?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Rachel reached up and slowly put her hand around one of the hanging instruments, then pulled it down to get a better look. The vine-like umbilical lengthened soundlessly and allowed the device to travel easily. The tool was much like a scimitar, but with a longer and more pointed tip. One edge of the blade seemed hollow; and when she looked closer, she could see a translucent, tube-like channel running along it. She felt around for an appropriate grip, one she thought might be right, then lay her finger along a smooth trough on the instrument’s flank. A thick stream of milky fluid dripped from the pointed tip.
“What the hell is that?” he asked. He was puzzled by the fact that she was terrified of the things one instant and seemed fascinated by them the next.
“It’s alive.”
“Alive? What do you mean, alive?” he asked, an emphatic mix of fear and puzzlement in his voice.
“They still work,” she said, almost trance-like, turning the tool over. “They’re alive and they work.”
They moved through the tangle of alien devices and equipment in slow motion as if ambling through a museum of twisted art. There were no signs of the designers of the technology. John thought that good fortune considering the nature of the tools and devices hanging there.
“What do you think happened to them?” John asked.
“I don’t know. If we look hard enough we may find out.”
There were several sub-chambers adjacent to the space at the far side, and Rachel headed into the closest one.
“Wait a second . . . ” John pleaded.
“What?”
“Where are you going?”
“We have to see.”
She went into one of the smaller chambers, and John followed after, sighing away all hope on her now empty promise of carnal pleasure. She seemed to know exactly where she was going. It was as if she were following some internal map clearly drawn in her subconscious. “How in Hell do you know where you’re going,” he asked.
“I’m guessing,” she said without turning.
The short tunnel emptied into a chamber perhaps twenty meters wide, round and dome-shaped. The light inside was particularly soft and the air cool. The walls of the chamber were covered with what looked like alien hieroglyphs starting at the floor and reaching across the ceiling like vines.
It took John a moment to realize what the objects on the flat protuberances were.
“Is that them?” he asked.
“I’d say so. What’s left of them.”
“Burial chamber?”
“I don’t know . . . “
Rachel walked up to the closest one and touched the shrunken and paper-dry skin. A piece of it flaked away in her hand. “It’s hard to tell what they looked like,” he said.
“I’m not sure they looked like much. The bones are frail and thin to begin with. They seem to lack bi-lateral symmetry—that is very strange. Head is irregular and somewhat pointed. These spines are odd. Cranium is large and irregular, too. Strange. They seem completely . . . ugly. Totally ugly . . . wicked and unnatural . . . ”
“I count about a hundred.”
“Seems about right.”
“I wonder what killed them.”
“Unknown.”
“Why so few?”
“This may not be all of them. Get some pictures then let’s check out the other chambers.”
“This place is starting to get under my skin really bad, Rachel.”
“Chicken?”
“Yeah. So? I feel like I’m looking at Hell and dead demons and shit.”
“Maybe you are.”
“That’s not funny. Besides, you’re twitchy, too. You said so.”
“Superstitious?”
“No. Just sensitive.”
“Sensitive? Well . . . ” she huffed.
“Shut up, Rachel. You’re pissing me off.”
“Pictures . . . ”
“I’ll get your goddamned pictures.”
He got out his camera and started to shoot. Rachel headed into an adjacent chamber. He had just framed a close-up of the head of one of the dead beings when Rachel’s scream went through his chest like a cold knife.
He was there in an instant, heart pounding and pistol drawn. The sight in the chamber stopped him like a punch to the head. “What in hell are they?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. Her voice was distant and weak. “I don’t know . . . ”
The figures were lined up in a neat row against the wall of the chamber. At first glance, they looked like some kind of alien sculpture. It took John a heartbeat to see that they were animate—or formerly animate—forms sitting, each lashed to its own pedestal. He didn’t bother to count them, but it felt like ten or fifteen.
It was the expressions of horror in the faces and in the postures of the figures that wrenched him. Each was stiff, twisted and agonized as if they’d been made out of wire and violently bent and forced from the inside into the tortured forms. Some of them were barely recognizable as anything that could have ever lived. The others, though alien, were at least identifiable as living, and perhaps formerly sentient beings.
A barely audible wet and slickering sound filled the space around them.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, with quiet urgency in his voice.
Rachel’s eyes were wide, and she was breathing fast again, on the brink of panic. John felt his hand tightening on the grip of his pistol. He was resisting the urge to pull the weapon and start shooting—shooting anything.
“We can’t leave,” she croaked. “We have to find out what they are.”
“Bullshit. I don’t care what they are. Let’s go.”
“We can’t . . . ”
“Forget it!”
“We can’t! We have to stay!”
John made a noise like a stallion’s grunt and turned in a tight circle of frustration. “This goddamned place is sick.”
“We have to stay. We have to help them.”
“Screw that!”
“We have to.”
“Why?”
“Because that one’s human.”
“What?”
She took a step closer to one and leaned in to get a better look, her face tight and drawn.
“Don’t touch it!” he warned.
She watched as the tendrils entering the figure�
�s mouth and nose slid in and out slowly, eel-like. Dark stains ran down the figure’s face and body from the points of entry. She traced the tendrils up to the globular body on the top of the figure’s head. “They all have these things attached to them.”
“What are they?” he asked.
“Parasites. Everything on this planet is parasitic.”
“You mean the goddamned thing is alive? That thing is still alive?” he asked, unable to comprehend what he was seeing or the words Rachel was saying.
“I think so.”
“Not for long . . . ” he said and drew his pistol.
“No!” she barked. “You can’t kill him.”
“He’ll be better off . . . ”
“No! Put the gun away!”
With another grunt, he holstered the weapon. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t either, but this person may know something about this thing we’re in and the beings who lived in it.”
“You’re gonna try to revive him, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re nuts . . . ”
“We have to try. We could learn from him.”
John just shook his head. Then something caught his eye.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That thing in the thing’s hand or whatever.”
She leaned over and took a close look. It took a moment to figure it out because she hadn’t seen many real, printed books except in museums. She was sure she had seen one very similar to this one on display as a child. The claw-like hand was clamped onto it so tightly that the surface seemed to have permanent indentations. She touched the cover with her finger and felt just a hint of remaining flexibility in it. If she could get it out of the figure’s hand, she was sure it would still be readable if she treated it gently.
“It’s a book,” she said.
“A book? What kind of book?”
“They called them holy bibles.”
DOMINANT SPECIES
Part Three
acquired traits
Dominant Species Volume Three: Acquired Traits
Copyright © 2007 by David Coy, All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher or the author, with the exception of brief quotes used in reviews. Contact the publisher for information on foreign rights.
Cover art by Ivaylo Nikolov.
For more information on this title, characters, and forthcoming books in this series, please visit www.DominantSpeciesOnline.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1-4196-6839-0 EAN-13: 978-1-4196-6839-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903580
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Minutes Later
1
“Bibles. I’ve heard of those,” he said, looking at it like it was a bug. “You can’t do anything for him. He’s barely alive.”
“If we could get that thing off his head, he might be okay. You never know. Donna might be able to do it. First, we have to cut these things off his legs. Give me your knife.”
John sighed and slipped his knife out of the scabbard. “I’ll do it,” he huffed. “Get out of the way.”
A few minutes later, they had the figure lying on the floor, arms and legs stiff and twisted, the book still clamped, almost fused, in its hand.
“Now what?” John said, wiping his hands on his pants as if he’d touched something dirty.
“We carry him back,” she said.
“I’m not carrying that goddamned thing anywhere.”
“Why not? He doesn’t weigh much.”
“It’s filthy! I don’t want to touch it any more than I already have!”
“Fine. I’ll do it,” she said working her arms under the frail figure.
“Yeah, you do that.”
Rachel shot him a look, and then hefted the figure up like a tall, thin child. “Lead the way,” she said.
Halfway back to their new, improvised living quarters, John relented and took the figure from her, scowling and vowing to burn his clothes when he got back to the shuttle.
When Donna saw the figure, her first impression was of some strange artwork. When John put it down, and she realized it wasn’t just an object, she felt her guts lurch in a spasm of disgust.
“What is it?” she asked, scowling.
“Who might be a better way to put it,” Rachel said.
“And what the fuck is that on his head?” Donna went on. Her scowl got deeper as she leaned in and looked at the bulbous thing attached to the figure’s head. “What the fuck is that? It’s got tentacles stuck his godamned ears . . . and his godamned nose! What the fuck?”
“Don’t know yet,” Rachel said. “We’ll have to find out.”
“Where did you find him?” Donna asked, puzzled. “How long has he been in there? Is he one of ours?”
“We don’t know any of that yet. We found him in one of the deeper chambers,” Rachel said, stripping off her pack. “There were others, other life forms in the chamber. But those weren’t human.”
“Huh!” Donna said. “This thing gets stranger by the day.”
“Yep,” Rachel said.
“There was what we think was a laboratory, too,” John said.
“A laboratory?” Donna said with a note of doubt.
“Yeah. Laboratory,” Rachel said. “Or something like one. I’ll have to go back and check it out some more.”
“I’m sure you will,” Donna said. “You’d think you were being paid to explore this thing. Never mind what you drag back in.”
Still scowling, Donna leaned in and considered the man’s head and the thing attached to it. She folded her arms in defense of it. “This is one very fucked up medical situation,” she said.
“Rachel likes him. Be careful,” John said, not trying to hide his sarcasm.
“I don’t like him. He needs help is all.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this thing on his head,” Donna said getting down even closer to look at it.
“I think it’s keeping him alive somehow,” Rachel said.
“Alive? You call that alive?” Donna asked, studying the form.
“If a thing’s not dead, it’s alive. It’s alive.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Donna wanted to know.
Rachel looked at John for support, but got only pursed lips and a downcast head in return. “Try to save him,” she said, still looking at the top of John’s head. “It’s a human being.”
Donna thought about it. She stepped back and studied the form from head to toe.
She had worked on patients with a wide range of unsavory, often disgusting, conditions, especially since landing on Verde, but this one was the worst by far. The skin was loose, shrunken and grayish. The limbs, stiff and tortured, were strange, and she got the distinct impression that one arm was longer than its mate. The tendrils running into the man’s head produced the worse kind of viscera-wrenching effect. This was the most hideous thing she’d ever seen, she was sure all the more so because the thing was, or had been, human. The thought of working on it turned her stomach. She drew a breath and thought about it some more, trying to find some reason to do it. By the time she’d let the air out, she had her answer.
She was a nurse. It was her job.
She squatted down and touched one of the rubbery tendrils running into the corner of the man’s mouth. When she took her hand away, she wiped and whisked her fingers together to cl
ean them and felt compelled to wash her hands several times.
“Let’s move him into the shuttle where the tools are,” she said.
A few minutes later, she was ready to work, gloves on and an assortment of glass and stainless steel implements in a tray, clean and waiting. Their polished cleanliness, in contrast to the man’s fetid condition, gave her at least bare comfort.
She rested her hands lightly on the figure’s shoulder and pressed. The flesh felt tough and dry but was loose and seemed to float over a layer of congealed material beneath.
“Odd,” she said.
“I’d say so,” John replied with a smirk.
“I might be able to dislodge the thing by making the host so noxious it wants to let go.”
“What if you put some current into it?” Rachel asked. “Just enough to irritate it.”
“That might work, but I’m afraid any more trauma to the victim might kill him.”
“He’d be better off,” John said.
Rachel gave him a look. “Shut up, John,” she said.
Donna didn’t know if the being could feel anything, but it was better to be safe than sorry. She filled a needle with painkiller and injected the contents into a vein she found in his arm. A moment later, she thought she heard just the slightest sigh from him, like a distant and gentle breath, so weak it was barely audible.
She inserted an IV into the same vein, taped it down, and started a flow of nutrients from a bottle. That done, she tightened her gloves over her interlocked fingers, and began.
The way she figured it, the direct approach was best.
She grasped one of the tendrils snaking into the man’s mouth and pulled gently. There was a moment when the eel-like organ seemed to cling tighter, but then it slipped down and out of the corner of the man’s mouth like a long, smooth rope, the very tip of it bristling with wire-like hair, vibrating and twitching. The entire length of it was covered with brownish fluid that seemed to lubricate it.
