Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (16 page)

The thing
was human. At least the parts were human. The heads, bald and mottled, rolled
around on their necks as if the thing or things were semi-conscious. It looked
to be two or perhaps three bodies or parts of bodies fused into one. One of the
arms, attached at some point near a hip region, was flailing and slapping at
random. One of its multiple legs dragged a bent foot in the dirt as if trying
to stop or slow down. Another kicked at the air in slow motion.

He
couldn’t hear from that distance, but he could see that one of the heads was
trying to talk, the mouth working slowly, repetitively, like some dumb thing.
It was large and heavy, and the men were struggling with its weight, shifting
their hands from time to time to get a better grip. They stopped, finally, and
put it down. One of the men grinned and shook his wrists as if he’d been
carrying a sofa.

“What the
fuck is that?” Habershaw asked weakly.

The thing
tried to crawl away, the arms and legs pawing at the dirt slowly in hopeless,
opposite directions. One of the men put his foot down on a crawling arm to hold
it still. When they had rested, they picked it up and continued, lugging it
across the field, walking almost sideways now.

Habershaw
handed the scope to Lavachek. Lavachek shook his head, then took another look
through the scope.

“Where in
Hell did they find that goddamned thing?” Habershaw asked.

“Damned if
I know.”

Habershaw
leaned on the railing with a deep frown on his face and watched Lavachek watch.
He wasn’t very interested in seeing it anymore.

“What are
they doing now?” he asked Lavachek, then turned to look for himself.

Lavachek
shook his head. “Hang on,” he said.

The men
carried the thing to the very edge of the jungle.
 
Lavachek could see what looked like a pit dug
into the ground there. The pit was large, perhaps five meters square. The thing
seemed to sense the pit’s closeness and started to struggle even more
violently, its arms and legs waving or clawing at the ground.

The men
stood there for a second, swung the creature once and tried to heave it into
the pit. It went no distance at all. It fell hard on the edge of the pit with a
jolt Lavachek could almost feel. When it rolled in, Lavachek could swear he
heard it hit with a heavy thud and a sick groan.

One of
the men pulled a pistol out of its holster, aimed and fired down into the pit
three times. The shots went off silently in the scope, reaching their ears a
second later.

“They
killed it, didn’t they?” Habershaw asked, turned in the opposite direction.

“Yeah,
they killed it. Hey, uh, move back,” Lavachek said taking Habershaw by the arm.
“Move back inside.”

When they
were safely out of sight, Lavachek turned to Habershaw, his face ashen.

“I’ve
seen some strange bullshit over the years . . .” Lavachek began.

“But
nothing like that.”
 
Habershaw finished.
“That goddamned thing was human, I don’t care what you say.”

“More or
less human,” Lavachek replied.

They
stood there silently for a moment, staring at nothing. Habershaw shook his
head. Lavachek raised up on his toes and stretched his neck to peek over the
railing. “They’re going inside,” he said. “I don’t think they saw us.”

“Now
what?” Lavachek asked.

Habershaw
stared, his lips pursed. Thoughts were racing through his head. Some of them
ran face first into brick walls. Others hurled themselves off cliffs. None of
them survived long enough to give his confused mind any direction whatsoever.
“I have no idea,” he said

“Did they
find that goddamned thing in there?” Lavachek asked. “They must have, Bill. Or
no, maybe it was a Siamese twin thing that they brought with them. Yeah, that’s
got to be it. They must have brought the thing with them from Earth and
somebody, probably that Jacob fuck, decided to kill it. That’s got to be it,”
he said with his hands. “It was a mercy killing. That’s probably all it was.”

“Why in
hell didn’t they just kill it back at the settlement?” Habershaw asked. “Why drag
it out here to kill it? Why put the goddamned thing in a pit you could park a
truck in?” Lavachek thought it over. His thoughts were bumping and falling and
crashing like Habershaw’s. He craned up and took another peek at the ground
below.

“This is
bad.” he said.

“What is
it?” Habershaw said, craning up, too.

They
could see the two soldiers carrying another multi-limbed creature toward the
pit. This one hung limp and, still, perhaps already dead.

Lavachek looked
through the scope. He didn’t want to. “Another one?” Habershaw asked.

“And just
as ugly,” Lavachek replied. He put the scope down and moved toward the rear
wall. When he got to it, he leaned there for a second, then slid slowly down
onto his butt. “We’d better stay out of sight.”

Over the
next hour, they watched as the two men made over a dozen trips to the pit
carrying some appalling humanoid amalgam. Sometimes, they’d shoot into the pit
or wave the effort away with a tired hand. Fatigue and the morning’s hot, red
sun ultimately took its toll. Finally done, they lumbered back into the
structure a last time and did not come back out.

“This is
some very strange doings, Lavachek,” Habershaw said, peeking up over the rail.

“We
should tell somebody what the hell’s going on.”
 

“Who? Who
in Hell would we tell?” Habershaw blurted out, “and what in Hell would we tell
them? We don’t know what’s going on.”

Lavachek
shrugged.

“Right,”
Habershaw agreed. “I don’t know, either. I say we just go blind and deaf and go
about our business and forget about this. Those goons’ll kill us if we make any
trouble.”

Habershaw
rubbed his face with both hands. Bill Habershaw wasn’t one to ask the big
questions. One awoke each morning at the break of day, went to work and paid down
one’s debt. Life was simple—hard but simple. There were no questions to be
asked, the answers of which weren’t already known. You did your job, and the
big questions took care of themselves.

Until
now.

Now
this—this weird bullshit below. Something was far out of whack—torqued way over
and twisted farther than he could have ever imagined. This was the damnedest
thing he’d ever seen. It was probably the damnedest thing anyone had ever seen.

One group
had all the goods, and all the weapons, and all the food, and all the tools of
survival. Without those tools and without the power, the contractors were quite
literally, slaves. A new world had arrived far worse than any he could have
constructed in his worst nightmare.

And one
twisted bastard owned all of that—in fact, he owned the whole damned planet.

“Goddamned
bastard,” he said.

“I agree
with that.
 
They are indeed bastards.”

“No, I’m
talking about one in particular—Jacob. This whole damned thing is his doing.
And you can bet that whatever it is they’re doing inside, he’s got something to
do with it.”

He stood
up and leaned on the railing as if he were going to vault over it and charge
the fortress single-handedly.

“I’ve had
it,” Habershaw said. “We have to do something. This shit cannot go on. I have
no contract with the Sacred Bond or their goddamned Council. In fact, I’ve got
no contract at all.”

“We ain’t
got shit,” Lavachek said. “Without a contract, they’ve got it all.”

“All that
could change,” Habershaw said over his shoulder.

“How?”

“Because
right now they don’t have it.”

“Sure
they do.”

“No, they
don’t.”

“Who’s
got it?”

“Joan—every
piece of it—all neat and bundled up.”

He took
out his phone and called Joan’s office. She’d just be getting in, probably
pouring her first cup of coffee if she had the time.

8

P
eter knew something
about weapons. He had read a lot about them. His father had spent many years in
the military and when he passed away, he left Peter a sizable library on the
subject.

The
Council’s police had no shortage of weaponry. They’d been bringing their toys
down from the transport, without assistance from Joan, for the last few days.
Everybody knew they could slaughter them at will. They didn’t have to shove it
down their throats.

Stored in
the back of warehouse Number Two was an array of light- to medium-weight
projectile weapons, mostly multipurpose, rapid-fire rifles. There were some
shoulder-fired rockets, as well, and a container or two of mortars. There were
two e-beam weapons, but those had arrived in parts and needed special assembly.
Using focused microwave energy, e-beam guns were seething destruction on living
flesh and left most other material intact. They had been officially outlawed
for thirty years. It was no surprise that a band of hired renegades would have
a couple of the most terrible portable weapons ever devised at their disposal.

The real
prize was way in the back of Warehouse Three. Peter knew right where it was
because he saw them bring it in and stash it. They’d waited until night to
bring this one down. Peter had been working late and was shuffling some of the
lighter crates near the front of the warehouse when the crewman drove right
past him with the container perched on the front of the lift. Peter told her
about it right away.

At first
Joan was furious. But that was yesterday. Now she was glad the goddamned thing
was there. The reason was simple: she was going to steal it.
 

* * *

 
“Once you get your
hands on that thing, there’s no turning back,” Habershaw told her on the phone.
“When they find out it’s gone, they’ll kill every last one us to get it
back.”
 

“They’re
not going to know it’s gone,” she said confidently, “until it’s too late.”

“Explain,”
he said.

“I’m
moving everything in Three to the docks tomorrow. When I get about half of it
moved, I’ll open the rear doors where the bomb is and continue from that side.
If it comes up, I’ll tell them the lift traffic in front is too heavy and that
I’m doing it to split up the work. I’ll tell the guys to make sure they crash
some containers into each other—they do that anyway when they get rolling—just
to make the point. By the time the assholes catch on, I’ll have the bomb
stashed away somewhere else and a mountain of containers on the dock. If they
want it back, I’ll tell them the goddamned thing is buried in the stack and
that it’ll take hours to dig it out. I’ll dummy up a manifest that shows it in
the stack, something like that, and tell them not to worry about the goddamned
thing. Besides, I don’t think they want to draw too much attention to it. I’m
sure they thought they were bringing it down in secret. Secret from us, that
is. That’s why they’ve got it squirreled away like that. I’m sure the Council
knows about it.”

“What if
they stop you before you get it moved?”

“Then
I’ll give it back to them. Hell with ‘em. Nobody told me not to move it. It’s
my warehouse, right?”

“You’d
better hope they believe you.”
 
Habershaw
said.

“Fuck
‘em,” she replied.

“That
attitude will get you killed,” he said with sharp edges of both anger and worry
in his voice.

“Fuck
‘em,” she repeated.

“What if
they want you to dig it out? What if they want to see it?”

“Bill,
I’m gonna have so much goddamned activity around that dock and warehouse, they won’t
know what the hell is going on. I’ll get it back to them—it just won’t come
from the stack. Oh! whoops! Here it is! Damn! I thought it was in this pile of
shit. They’re not gonna watch that close anyway.”