Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  “You know what I mean,” Donna said over her coffee mug. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine actually. I haven’t had a seizure in over a week, as you well know. I think I’m getting better, getting over them actually.”

  “Just checking,” Donna said.

  “Thanks for looking out for me. I’m fine.”

  “Exhaustion is one of your causal factors. You know that.”

  “I do. But there’s work to be done,” Rachel said. She dropped a pat of thanks on Donna’s shoulder as she left. “I’m fine. See you tomorrow.”

  Donna watched her walk toward home, her arms and legs swinging heavily. Just when Donna was wishing she wouldn’t walk so close to those hard metal tables and benches when she was so tired, Rachel pitched face-first onto the ground, her body twitching as if electrified.

  “Dammit!” Donna said. She hurried over to her and wrestled her vibrating form right side-up. Rachel’s eyes were closed tight and her usually generous mouth was drawn into a thin, tight line. Donna held her head on her lap and gently plucked leaves and dirt off her face. There wasn’t a lot to do but wait until it was over. This one wasn’t so bad. She’d seen worse

  * * *

  Tim Collins got into bed next to his big, smooth wife and pulled her close. When he did he felt the sore spot on his side flare up with a spate of heat. He winced and pressed gently on the bandage. It felt warm. He laid his hand on his wife’s thick waist, and although the thought of it made his interest rise, he reconsidered the wisdom of snuggling with her just now.

  Soon he slept. And as he did, deep in his primitive mid-brain hundreds of tiny organisms that had gathered there for just one purpose, released a cocktail of stimulating chemicals. Several others, variants of the first, with a much different destination in mind, and just now located in the vicinity of his testes, started their final journey.

  Just before Verde’s red dawn, Tim Collins awoke in heat, wanting to fuck and urinate at the same time. The latter sensation passed and was replaced with a slight burning, crawling sensation deep in his urethra. The sensation was not unpleasant and—combined with the powerful urge to rut that had come upon him—had transformed his wife’s legs, and the familiar spot far up between them, into a singular and burning passion. His arms and hands squeezed her and groped her, and soon he had muscled her into a position that would easily enable the conjugal union his raging libido demanded. She sprawled and mewed a short-lived and counterfeit objection, then suddenly, he was in her, pounding and pounding; the burning, tickling sensation in his urethra increasing with each thrust, driving him to thrust harder. He was dimly aware that he was sweating and that his wife was smiling up at him with a feral and lascivious smile. The desire to fuck was so strong and the strength of it so surreal that in a few moments he lost all contact with the real world and felt only the sexual act itself.

  “Oh, Timmmm… “ his wife crooned, “Fuck me!”

  Tim obliged and with his heart racing and his body slick with sweat, he pounded and pounded, a deep guttural groan accompanying his dis-rhythmic thrusting. With his wife’s big, smooth legs wrapped around him he pounded and pounded, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Driven ever forward by his desire, he felt the burning, tickling sensation suddenly increase a hundred-fold, and the sheer immensity of it nearly overpowered him. He opened his mouth in a silent scream of primal lust as the sensation became unbearable—and he came.

  With a long and sweaty gasp, Tim Collins flushed the squirming, wriggling larva out of his urethra and into his wife’s vagina with a series of strong contractions and a powerful gush of his own human semen.

  And with his heart racing out of control and his lungs pumping air, he rolled off his wet and admiring wife, and died.

  * * *

  “What do you mean, he’s dead?” Donna said into the phone.

  The round and weeping face at the other end of the line was inconsolable. “He just died,” Martha Collins said. “He just…after we…he just died there in bed.”

  “I’ll be over there in a few minutes,” Donna said. “Don’t move his body.”

  Donna hung up and called Rachel. “Hey, our Smith-infected guy died,” she told her. “I’m on my way over there now.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Rachel said. She pounded down what was left of her breakfast and headed out the door.

  When Donna arrived at the Collins’ shelter, Martha Collins was sitting on a chair in the living area, her big pink legs erupting in plump splendor from her house robe. Her face was swollen and pink, too; her eyes red from recent tears. Her thin hair was stuck in moist strands to her tear-streaked cheeks.

  “I take it he’s in the bedroom,” Donna said, as kindly as she could, given her overwhelming curiosity.

  Martha nodded her head a quick time or two and sniffed. “Yeah,” she said in a weak and barely audible voice. “He’s in there.”

  * * *

  Donna did a quick appraisal of the body, feeling for a pulse in his neck just to be sure his wife hadn’t reached a premature conclusion. “Huh…” she said to herself. “Dead as a doorknob.”

  She’d have to perform an autopsy to be sure about the cause of death. If she had to guess right then, a massive cardiac or cerebral event would be high on her list as likely suspects. But since she was on Verde’s Revenge, and her patient was a man who’d just had a half-kilo parasite removed from his side just over twelve hours ago, she wasn’t ruling out anything. She checked in his mouth and down his throat with a hand light for telltale signs of something nonhuman in those moist cavities. She lifted the bandage and looked for any change in or around the wound and could detect none. She started to puzzle over it. When he’d come to the clinic yesterday, his vital signs, including his blood pressure, were good—especially good—in spite of the stress he was under. When she’d scanned his heart, she found a perfectly normal, middle-aged heart beating slightly fast but with no arrhythmia or other abnormal operational characteristics. Those facts began to work on her, and she was soon inclined to the idea, if not convinced of it entirely, that a cardiac event was very unlikely. She scanned his naked body with the light.

  Giving in to an impulse she couldn’t resist, she got down on the floor and checked under the bed for anything crawling there that might be lethal. She saw nothing but a dusty sock and a dozen wadded-up balls of what she took as plastic wrappers from food bars.

  * * *

  Rachel sat down and leaned in toward Martha and put her hands together between her knees. “I’m so sorry,” she said, with genuine kindness.

  Martha dabbed her nose with a tissue and nodded her thanks. “He was a good man,” she said. “Basically.”

  “Did he give you any sign that anything was wrong?” Donna asked, walking in.

  “Yes,” Rachel said more gently. “What was he doing when he died?”

  “Ahem…” Donna said, trying to spare Martha the embarrassment. “They were making love at the time.”

  “I see,” Rachel said, in her most professional voice.

  “He was very amorous,” Martha said.

  “I see,” Rachel said, twisting her mouth in thought.

  “I’ve never seen him like that before,” Martha said sniffing and dabbing. “He was so excited. Like an animal.”

  Thinking, Rachel bit her lip. “Really?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Martha said. “He was fucking me like a…a…teenager,” she said, suddenly weeping again. “It was great.”

  Rachel and Donna exchanged looks.

  “So he died right after he…finished?” Rachel asked.

  “Yes,” Martha said and sniffed. “He just rolled over and died.”

  Rachel leaned back and looked at Donna. Donna rolled her head toward the bedroom for Rachel. “We’re going to look at the body some more now, Martha,” she said.

  “Okay,” Martha said, dabbing her eyes with the wad of tissue.

  * * *

  “So what do you think?” Rachel said looking do
wn at the naked dead man.

  “I say massive stroke. Aneurysm maybe, “Donna replied. “I’ll have to open his head to find out for sure.”

  “You checked him for creepers?” Rachel asked.

  “Yep. Nothing.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What are you thinking?” Donna asked.

  “The fact that he was so horny all of a sudden…that doesn’t precisely jive with being sedated hours before and having a big, fat parasite excised from your flank, now does it?”

  “Nope. What the horny business does jive with is good health, low stress and a feeling of well-being, generally speaking.”

  “Parasites are tricky,” Rachel said.

  “Don’t I know it?” Donna quipped.

  “Sometimes they have incredibly complex, even remarkable life cycles,” Rachel droned on, mulling it over.

  “Ya think? What’s that got to do with our dead guy?”

  Rachel thought about it. “I’m not certain yet. I’m working up a theory.”

  “Care to share it?” Donna asked.

  Rachel sucked a big breath through her nose and thought. “Sure. Let’s go outside.”

  They excused themselves and went out into Verde’s already-steaming air. Donna closed the door behind them. “Okay, what’s your theory?”

  “I think the parasite used Collins as an expendable vector,” Rachel said flatly.

  “Okay…” Donna said, trying to derive the upshot.

  “I think you need to check Mrs. Collins for a parasitic infection,” Rachel went on.

  Donna had already connected the dots, and she nodded her head. “Makes sense,” she said. “The parasite used Collins to get its eggs inside a female mammalian. Damn. Now that’s one you wouldn’t guess early. Are there any analogs in the knowledge base for that one?”

  “Nothing precisely like it that I know of. Many similar though,” Rachel said. “But it’s still just a theory until you can verify the presence of some stage of the life form inside Frau Collins.”

  They went back inside. Martha was now curled up in the chair, her plump form molded to the chair’s shape like a soft, pink and white sculpture. Donna sat down on the sofa next to her and leaned in with a sympathetic expression.

  “I know you have a lot to deal with right now, Martha, but I’d like to do some tests.”

  Martha’s lower lip trembled. She dabbed her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s dead already. God has him in His care now.”

  Donna and Rachel exchanged looks. “Not on him, Martha,” Donna said. “On you. I need to do some tests on you.”

  Martha looked confused. “Me? Why me?”

  “I just want to make sure that whatever killed your husband hasn’t somehow contaminated you.”

  Martha’s lip stopped trembling and her look changed from grief to stony concern. “You think that fucking thing that got on him somehow did something to me, infected me?”

  “Well, we don’t know,” Rachel chimed in. “We just want to be sure.”

  “That’s right,” Donna added. “We just want to make sure.”

  Martha studied both of them, a black cloud of fear coming over her. “Okay. You do your tests,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to die.” She started to get up out of her chair. “I have to go to the bathroom first.”

  “Uh, that’s not a good idea right now,” Donna said, exchanging looks with Rachel. “I’d rather you do that in the clinic. I’ll need the sample.”

  “Yep,” Rachel said. “Not a good idea. Need that sample.”

  Martha studied them. “Oh, my God,” she said, figuring it out. “You think that goddamned thing put….when Tim…when he…oh, fuck. Fuck me!” She started to get up out of the chair, her plump arms and legs squirming in a panic.

  “Don’t,” Donna said, easing her back into the chair. “It’s just a safety precaution, that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about now. Not yet.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, goddamn it!” Martha screamed. “You don’t have bugs in your woo woo!”

  * * *

  Rachel loved the soft purr of the shuttle’s motors. The easy drone merged with the panoramic view of the jungle below and washed away thoughts of the biological perils teeming just under its green surface. She curled in her seat, took a drink of coffee and let the view fill her.

  Before she arrived on the planet, she’d fallen in love with Verde’s Revenge sight unseen, and as she knew it would be, this fertile environment was a perfect match for her—and her love had grown.

  It is so beautiful. This planet is so beautiful. But so dangerous. So poisonous.

  The green seemed to stretch forever. The gently rolling terrain was only rarely punctuated by an upheaval of rock, those too, deeply cloaked in green.

  Surely there is nothing like it in the universe. Nothing this fertile, this rich and teeming. Nothing this—lethal.

  She believed that Verde’s Revenge had entered something akin to Earth’s Cambrian Explosion, an epoch when life had sprung up and crawled, scrambled and grown over itself in wet masses of limbs, claws and eggs. Verde’s Revenge seemed stuck in that period of fertile grandeur where species clamored and struggled and evolved and morphed to fit ever better into the competitive biosphere of the planet.

  She would never understand it fully. The systems, the relationships, the dependencies of one life form to the others, would be too deep, too wide and too complex for one person to fathom in a single lifetime. Perhaps in a few generations, should the colony survive, her own progeny might yet unravel Verde’s biological chaos. The most she could do was start the work. Just start it.

  She rested her hand on her womb and imagined she felt a motion there, a gentle twist of vulnerable life. The growing child within her seemed so impossibly fragile against the teeming threats just a few thousand meters below them. She imagined her daughter born and sitting on her lap on such an outing as this some two or three years from now, beaming with eager questions about the spooky green all around her. Rachel would frame her answers just so to dull the nightmares that would surely come. Don’t be afraid, she’d say. It’s life. Doing what life does.

  She looked up at the bright sky, filled with the deepest blue light.

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