Species II

by Yvonne Navarro

  The shotgun had been his Grandfather Ross’s, a Browning Superposed over/under shotgun that had once literally helped put the food on the table. It was a little dusty but everything else about it looked, at least to Patrick’s unpracticed eye, in working condition. He knew where the shells were, and when he retrieved them from their corner in the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, he stood and watched the grisly creature watch him, fancied he could see it growing and changing even as each long minute passed, becoming more and more the human form behind which it would hide, as he himself had done.

  When he was through looking at it, Patrick went out onto the porch and closed the door behind him, then sat down on the old creaking porch swing his father had put up when Patrick was just a boy. The sun was out, dappling the lush greenery of the trees around the cabin and the wildflower clusters that lined the fence that surrounded the property. He could hear birds singing somewhere out of sight, summer insects buzzing and doing whatever insects did in the cooler temperatures of mid-morning.

  The baby-beast inside sort of reminded him of an insect.

  Patrick sighed and kicked absently at a loose board on the porch. No matter what was inside of him or what had been born because of him—that monstrosity in the cabin—he, the true Patrick Ross, was not a killer. The things he’d done were at the hand of something that had control over him—for God’s sake, he couldn’t even shoot that sniveling little blot of flesh that had destroyed Melissa with its birth. Yet there was no doubt in his mind that these things—the blackouts and the life-form in the bedroom and Melissa—would continue if he didn’t take charge of the situation. And Patrick Ross, by God, was a take-charge kind of guy.

  He turned the gun around and put both barrels in his mouth.

  Dennis would have rammed the fence if he’d realized what he was looking at when he stomped the brakes and ground his Explorer to a stop outside of Grandfather Ross’s mountain cabin.

  Instead, he climbed out and waved away the dust kicked up by the tires, wishing he hadn’t done that because now he’d have to get the Ford washed. He tried the gate but it was locked, one of those annoying little push-pull latches that for some reason, he—a man who could steer a spaceship, for crying out loud—always had to fight with. He was fumbling with it when he heard the familiar creaking of the porch swing; he’d sat on it countless times over the last five years and recognized the noise instantly, as he also recognized Patrick. His friend was sitting on the swing, and all Dennis could see of him was his back, and he was mildly surprised that Patrick hadn’t turned around when he’d heard the noise of the truck.

  “Hey, Patrick!” he yelled. “Wait’ll you hear what I had to go through last ni—”

  The blast of a gun tore apart the back of Patrick’s head.

  The noise blotted out everything—the birdsong in the trees, the myriad sounds of summer in the forest, Dennis’s own heartbeat. For a short span of forever he couldn’t make himself move or breathe, then—

  “Oh, shit—Patrick! Patrick, no, you didn’t—”

  —adrenaline slammed through him and he vaulted over the waist-high fence as though it was only two inches high. He made it to the porch so quickly that the swing and Patrick’s body were still swaying

  creak

  creak

  creak

  gently beneath the force of the blast. Beneath Patrick’s legs was the old Browning over/under, covered in blood and pieces of something that Dennis couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge.

  “God,” Dennis choked. Instinctively he reached a hand toward his friend, although he had no idea if he could actually bring himself to touch Patrick’s body. His fingers were only an inch from Patrick’s hair when Dennis finally understood what he was seeing and he yanked his hand away.

  Patrick’s head was . . . healing.

  “Impossible,” Dennis whispered. He backstepped once, then couldn’t stop himself from leaning forward and watching in unwilling fascination as the vast damage to his best friend’s head began to disappear beneath a frenzy of regeneration. Such a strange sight—the flesh-and-bone matter knitting together, the pink-gray brain morphing back like some kind of repulsive video game—

  Dennis ran.

  Thinking back on it later, he would remember seeing Patrick sit up on the porch swing and look straight at him, injury-free and oblivious to the blood soaking through his shirt and the pieces of what should have been his skull lying all over the porch—he’d somehow grown new flesh, not reused the old. Dennis thought he might have even said something to Patrick—

  “How?”

  —though he couldn’t recall for certain, but Patrick had looked right through him, hadn’t heard a word. No recognition, no acknowledgment, no . . . humanness, not quite plugged into the world yet.

  He went over the fence with a lot less grace than the first time, tumbling to the outside of it and landing hard on his hind end before clawing his way up and into the driver’s side of the Explorer. He churned road dust for a quarter-mile and the vehicle skidded from one side of the road to the other in his haste to get the hell out of there.

  But that was all right. He needed the dust; maybe concentrating on seeing through it would obscure something else . . . like the sight of his best friend coming back to life and staring right through him as though he hadn’t been there.

  There was one thing he’d seen that hadn’t healed in Patrick though, and no amount of spinning of tires or beating up dust or tears of regret would take the memory out of Dennis’s mind. He just couldn’t shake the impression of deadness that had remained in Patrick’s cold, cold blue eyes.

  The old Patrick Ross’s time had come and gone, and now the greatest and latest of American heroes was a changed being. Not quite a man anymore, but redefined, more. A healthy, excellent moving vessel for the life-form that now inhabited his body, and oh, what a body that was—a new, improved version that would carry the seed of a new species throughout this warm welcoming new planet. All the right memories were there, the language and human functions, but now they had merged with the skills and resources, the superiority, of something so much bigger and older . . . better educated.

  He was still Patrick Ross inside, oh yeah. Space explorer, astronaut, superb American citizen—he even liked himself once again. No more doubts about himself and what was happening to him, no more worries about trivial details like Melissa or Stupid NSEG fund-raisers. This Commander Patrick Ross was bigger and better, and he could conquer the world.

  All he needed was a few weeks.

  “Hey mister, you lookin’ for a date?”

  It was a dirty neighborhood in the northwest part of the city where the darkness was split by the gaudy, buzzing shine of multi-colored neon. Only a few blocks over were high-rent office buildings that housed men and women with six- and seven-figure incomes—D.C. was funny that way. The prostitute peering through the driver’s window was thin and pretty, painfully young. The main thing was that she was healthy, and the Mercedes SL drew her like it’d drawn all the others so far tonight:

  Like flies to sticky, deadly honey.

  14

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” Dennis Gamble said. “I don’t think I’m even describing what I saw very well—and you probably don’t believe me anyway.” He paused and looked at them helplessly. “But I knew this was something that . . . not just anyone should know. And because of Annie’s death, I just didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “You made the right decision,” Laura said soothingly. She offered him a glass of water, then watched as he drank gratefully. “And you’d be surprised at what we’ll believe.”

  “Why don’t you tell us again what happened?” Burgess asked from his spot over by the viewing window. Laura shot him a look—

  Be patient!

  —but he didn’t see it. His gaze was locked on the laboratory floor below, tracking every move the biology crew made as they tended to Eve and kept ongoing records of her vitals.

  Dennis, ho
wever, seemed to have lost any animosity he’d had toward the colonel. “It won’t be different this time,” he said. “I saw Patrick commit suicide, and the only way he could’ve done it was by sticking the business end of his grandfather’s shotgun in his mouth and squeezing the trigger. I was right there when the back of his head just . . . exploded. It was like when you drop a bottle on the floor and it shatters—his hair, blood, his b-brains—” For a second Dennis choked up, Laura offered the water glass again; this time, he waved it away and stubbornly kept going. “It went all over,” he finally continued.

  “But you say he’s alive now?” Press was standing to the side, his face dark and troubled. “With no wounds to show where he was injured—nothing?”

  Dennis shook his head and held on to the side of his chair like a man afraid he was going to fall off. “He was more than just injured. He was dead—the whole back of his skull was blown away.” He stopped and blinked for a second, as though trying to shake away the recollection. “God, I was so scared—who’s ever seen anything as crazy as that? It’s like he just sort of . . . grew another one.”

  “Well,” Laura said slowly, trying to be mindful of Dennis. “We’ve always known that the alien species had the ability to regenerate living tissue—”

  “This isn’t exactly a chameleon’s tail we’re talking about,” Press reminded her. “This is the brain of a man.”

  “But with the characteristics of an alien about which we know next to nothing. A species that is quite possibly billions of years old and could have developed a sort of nano-physiology that enables it to ‘think’ in some manner with virtually every cell in its body. Clearly it has successfully merged its DNA with that of its host—Patrick Ross—and can now control it in every respect. They’ve become one creation.”

  On his chair, Dennis Gamble lowered his face to his hands. “Aliens,” he said bitterly. “I still can’t believe it. I remember Annie warning Patrick about little green men when he went down to the surface of Mars. ‘Watch out for little green men,’ she said.” The astronaut laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “At the time, Patrick said they’d most likely be red. Guess he didn’t realize he’d be predicting the future.” He studied the floor, as if certain that the answers could be found somewhere on the sanitized white tiles. “If they knew there were aliens up there, why the fuck did they send us?”

  “The NSEG was warned,” Press said flatly. “They chose to ignore it.”

  “You’re way off base,” Burgess cut in harshly. “There was never any solid evidence to support that theory.”

  Laura stopped the argument with a pointed clearing of her throat. “Nevertheless, we believe there may have been hostile DNA in the soil samples that Patrick collected and brought back on board the Excursion.”

  Dennis raised his head. “You know,” he said after a few seconds’ lag, “I think something did happen up there. But I can’t remember exactly what—it’s like a bad dream that you don’t recall when you wake up. You know it was there, but now it’s just a . . . fading, terrible echo in your head. That’s what this was like.”

  Burgess pulled a tiny bottle of Visine from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. A quick flick of his wrist put a drop in his good eye. “I’m sure it was terrible,” he agreed in his tone, insufferably condescending. It was clear that he had heard, processed in his mind, and already dismissed Dennis Gamble’s tale. “The question is, how do we proceed from here?”

  Press rubbed his chin. “I’ve got surveillance agents on top of every possible place Ross might go. Maybe Dennis here can give us a few other leads.”

  “How long?” Burgess asked.

  Press shrugged. “It could take hours to find him,” he answered. Then, more ominously, “Or days.”

  Laura’s fingers tapped her clipboard nervously as she gazed at the three men. “That’s not good. If he’s reproducing, we have the potential for offspring—”

  “This son-of-a-bitching alien has control of a man who was just voted by People magazine as ‘America’s Sexiest Man Alive.’ ” Press snorted. “And we learned the alien mindset the last time we went through this—breeding is their main objective. I think we can assume he’s out there reproducing.”

  “Wait,” Dennis said. “I don’t understand—what I saw was frightening, sure. But he didn’t do anything—”

  “Oh, he’s done plenty,” Burgess said. “The bodies are piling up by the day.”

  “You’re saying Patrick is a murderer?” Dennis asked in disbelief.

  “Not Patrick,” Laura reminded him as gently as she could. “It’s what’s inside him—it controls him and makes him do things we all know he would never want to on his own.”

  “But who has he killed?”

  “The two we can prove so far include his fiancée and Dr. Ralph Orinsky,” said Colonel Burgess.

  “He killed Melissa?”

  An entire range of emotions played across Dennis Gamble’s face and Laura sent a dirty look toward Burgess. “How good of you to break the news so gently, Colonel.”

  Burgess only shrugged. “I’m not here for niceties, Dr. Baker. Let’s just get on with it.”

  She could think of nothing to say in response to such a lack of feeling, so she focused on finding and slipping a binder from its place next to one of the computers. She could feel all three men watching her as she flipped through the pages, then she verified what she’d been thinking. “These creatures go through their first juvenile stage in less than two weeks,” she told them. “Then they enter the chrysalis stage—”

  “Chrysalis stage?” Dennis interrupted. His face looked ashen, as though he’d absorbed just about all he could take. “You mean like a . . . butterfly?”

  Laura didn’t respond right away, then she nodded. “I suppose you could make that comparison, since it is a cocoon phase. I think we’d all agree that what emerges isn’t nearly the same lovely work of nature that mankind is used to seeing. The problem is . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Press snapped to attention. “What?”

  Laura looked over to Burgess, wanting to make sure the colonel was fully listening. She took a deep breath. “The problem is that this information is based on Sil and Eve, not on Patrick Ross’s offspring. We’ve already seen a massive deviation in the sense that the alien DNA literally invaded the cells of two human beings of its own volition. It’s clearly the stronger cellular material, and introduced in this manner, it functions entirely differently.”

  Burgess glowered at her. “What are you try to tell us, Dr. Baker?”

  “That we have absolutely no basis on which to assume that if—or maybe I should say when—the alien that Patrick Ross has become successfully breeds, it’s going to take two weeks for the offspring to reach maturity. We might be safe in predicting a chrysalis stage, but rate of changeover within that period might be only hours.”

  “Shit on a stick,” Press said crudely. “We’ve got to issue a public warning before this goes too far—”

  Burgess’s voice cracked across the room. “What planet are you on, Lennox?” He yanked a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed at his eye. “If you think I’m going to allow you to start a full-scale panic, you’re crazier than I’ve always thought you were. Patrick Ross was—is—a national hero. The President’s approval ratings are through the roof right now because of his endorsement of the Mars exploration program, and he’ll go berserk if we publicly accuse Ross of murder.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about the President’s approval ratings!” Press yelled back. He looked ready to leap on top of the older man. “If you don’t use public communication to pull this man in right now—radio, television, APBs, and plastering his photograph all over everything—a lot more innocent people are going to die. And it’s going to be on your head besides.”

  But Colonel Burgess’s return gaze was frosty. “No respect for the chain of command has always been a problem with you, Lennox. The most I can do on my end is to discreetly contact his fa
ther. I’ve already done that, and let me tell you—he was not at all pleased to discover that we’re looking for Patrick, especially when I chose not to disclose why—especially the part about the murders. He made it quite clear that Patrick has probably gone off by himself in an attempt to relax and get away from the constant crowds. As I recall, he specifically said he wasn’t his son’s ‘babysitter.’

  “As for the rest of it, you have my orders—you will not involve the media in any way at all. Use whatever resources are necessary to bring Ross in, but do it without attracting any attention. Do I make myself clear?” He turned his back and headed toward the door.

  “Colonel Burgess, wait.” Laura stepped in front of him, resisting the impulse to grab him by the collar and drive her facts home. “I don’t think you fully understand what we’re dealing with here. You’ve had access to the records, read all the files—this man is thinking like Sil did. He has a biological imperative to mate—instinctively, that’s his entire function. Sil was uneducated and a complete stranger to human ways, yet she managed to do just that and give birth before we were luckily able to stop her.”

  Burgess’s face remained impassive. “Do you have a point here, or do you just like telling me things I already know?”

  For a moment Laura couldn’t speak as all her thoughts went a sort of hazy red. “The point, you stuffed-up old fool, is that Patrick Ross knows everything about this world that Sil didn’t. He doesn’t have to learn to drive a car, count money, or fit in. He already knows how. We are running out of time to stop him—if we’re not already too late.”

  The colonel stepped around her and pulled open the door. “Then tell Lennox to earn his million and find the son of a bitch.”

  Residents in the Washington-Maryland area are being warned by local law enforcement that a serial killer may be on the loose. Over the last few days, six victims, all female, have been found, ranging from two well-known young women who frequented the upper echelon of the Washington, D.C. social circuit to those the police termed as northwest-area prostitutes. The Medical Examiner’s Office reports that all of the bodies were horribly mutilated. There is apparently no motive for the killings and no connection between the victims. The police department is advising all women to take extra precautions until the killer is caught. Travel with a companion at all times and avoid areas where you might be alone. Above all, authorities are warning that you should proceed with extreme caution if you are approached by a stranger.