Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (18 page)

“First of
all,” Donna said, someone’s given a hands-off order.
 
“They’re not allowed to hurt us . . . But
it’s one thing to take someone by force, and another thing to be freely offered
what it is you want anyway. Second of all, we may not have to go through with
it.”

“She’s
right,” John said. “You can distract the hell out of them if you do it right.
No problem.”

“You’re
speaking as a man of course,” Donna commented. “Well, yeah. I am,” he confessed
to the obvious.

“You
won’t have to suck them or fuck them either if it comes to it, sooo . . . you
don’t have a problem,” she said.

“Better
you than me,” John said, showing his impish grin.

Rachel
lowered her head. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said.

“Hey,”
Donna said ruefully, “maybe what he said about short guys is true.”

Nobody
laughed.

“Look,
all you have to do is distract the wary bastards,” John said. “That’s all.”

There was
a moment of silence as if someone had asked for a prayer.

“What are
we doing?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t
know,” Donna said numbly. “Trying to escape?”

* * *

On their
walks over the next few days, Rachel and Donna began to work on Katz and
Bukowski. Rachel made it a point to stay just a little in front of Bukowski and
to wear her tightest clothing. The poor bastard didn’t stand a chance when she
stretched, bent over or squatted down to look at something. She let him know she
was doing it on purpose, letting him have a good look at her full butt and
legs. By the end of the walk, it was all he could do to find his way back.

Donna
took a more direct approach and decided bold flirtation was her most effective
weapon. She never was very good at the oblique stuff; the longing looks and all
that. She’d always been very up front when it came to her wishes and sexual
desires. She just hoped she wouldn’t come off as being too direct—it had
happened in the past.

When she
thought the time was right, she ambled over toward Katz, just penetrating his
safety perimeter. She was fiddling with a twig and could suddenly feel sweat
between her fingers. She cleared her throat.

“I’m very
sexual, really,” she said to him frankly.

“Oh,
yeah?” Katz asked, completely neutral.

“Yes. I
love to fuck.”

“Nothing
like a good fuck,” he said as though unmoved.

“It’s
been a while for me. You know . . . John and Rachel are together. Eddie’s a
kid. That leaves me . . . you know?”

“Out in
the cold . . .”

“Yeah. Out
in the cold.”

“I bet
you get fucked a lot,” she said. “You’re very handsome.”

“Forget
it.”

“What? I
can’t talk about it?”

“I don’t
give a shit if you talk about it. But you’re wasting your time. Look. You get
away; I get Vilaroosed. I fuck you; I get Vilaroosed. You so much as catch a
cold, I get Vilaroosed.”

“So I’m
not worth it. Is that what you’re saying?”

“You know
what?” he said. “We all die. I always thought I’d die a, what you might call, a
violent death, probably shot through the head or blown to pieces. But being
tortured to death in some little cage by religious freaks doesn’t figure in my
grand vision of a meaningful exit. So it’s not that I wouldn’t do it under the
right conditions. I would. You’re not bad. But these ain’t the right conditions.
That’s about as nice as I can put it.”

His voice
still had that practiced wariness, a battle-worn caution woven through it like
tough cord. He was immune to sexual distractions. She’d bungled that approach
anyway. If anything, he was even more alert than before. Rachel’s words rang in
her ears.

What are we doing?

Donna
considered him. His nice little speech was the most she’d heard him say at one
time since they’d been captured. Surprisingly, it made some sense. The thing
behind the ragged uniform could think and talk some.

“I take
it you have no love for The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance either,” she
said, anxious to hear the answer—and change the subject. He didn’t answer right
away, and she was afraid his little diatribe was all she’d get from him for
today, this week or forever.

“We
follow orders,” he said plainly.

“So why
don’t you just kill them all—do us all a favor.”

He looked
at her like she was a complete ignoramus and shook his head. Then he drifted
away. He’d said too much already.

“Forget
it,” he said over his shoulder.

Well, at
least she’d opened him up a little, and he was talking. Maybe he’d relax in
time, maybe not completely, but perhaps enough for her to be able to whack him
senseless. Being tortured to death by religious freaks wasn’t her idea of a
meaningful exit, either.

 
“So now what am I supposed to do?” Rachel
asked later. “Am I supposed to kiss his ugly mug or what?”

This
clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Donna and Rachel had none of the femme fatale in
them—not a trace. It had been a stupid idea. They’d been grasping at straws of
the worst kind—stupid, weak, and poorly-thought-out ones.

It rained
the next day so there was no walk in the morning. By afternoon, the rain had
stopped, but the sky was still overcast, turning the early afternoon to green
dusk. They marched out and down the steps in single file as usual. Bukowski and
Katz aimed them at the jungle by flanking them from a short distance—what Donna
saw as a clobber-safe distance. When Rachel didn’t take the lead, out where
Bukowski could feast his eyes on her butt, he deliberately slowed down to a
crawl, forcing her and John ahead, with Rachel under his lecherous gaze.

When they
got to the jungle’s edge, the vines and leaves were still drenched and dripping
water. There were overhanging branches and torn fragments of trees all along
the perimeter that they had to duck under or walk around. Some of the plant
structures hung down over their path like huge, wet mops. Katz slowly closed
the distance on Bukowski as they walked. Then, timing it just right, he quickly
slung his rifle, waited until Bukowski was directly under a big cluster of
leaves and shook the branch real hard. Water poured out of the leaves and
rained down on Bukowski in a sudden artificial shower.

“Hey! Goddamnit!”
Bukowski yelled. Everybody laughed.

In order
to pull off that little trick, Katz had to move from the rear up to the front,
putting himself and Bukowski between John and Rachel on one side and Donna and
Eddie on the other. It was a simple, careless mistake, motivated by a
child-like urge to play a joke.

Stepping
backwards, Bukowski wiped his face on his sleeve, cursing and grinning at his
partner. Donna was no more than two meters behind Katz. She fixed John with an
urgent, wide-eyed look. John reached in his pocket, and keeping his hand
hidden behind Bukowski, stepped up and brought the sap down on his head with a
sound like a stick against a melon. Bukowski stiffened then tried to turn,
stumbling like a puppet. John whacked him again. Donna took one step closer to
Katz, and by the time he realized what was happening, stars exploded in his
head then shrank to spinning pinpoints. He heard the distant sound of the
second blow, and the stars went out with a blink.

“Now
what?” Rachel asked.

“C’mon.
Drag ‘em into the brush,” Donna said. She already had the rifle off Katz’s
shoulder and was tugging at his arms.

“Are they
dead?” Rachel asked in a small, distressed voice.

“I don’t care
if they are!” Donna said, her eye flaring bright. “Grab his feet, damnit!”

They
wrestled and dragged them a few meters into the underbrush, safely out of
sight. When Rachel saw the slick mass of hair and blood on Bukowski’s head, she
started to tremble.

“I don’t
think they’re dead, do you?” she asked no one. A sudden quiver grabbed at her
just under the ribs. “That wouldn’t have killed them, would it?”

“Rachel,
fuck ‘em!” Donna said in a rage. “I’ll kill them right now if you don’t stop
talking about it.”

The icy
look in Donna’s half brown, half blue eye caused Rachel to shiver. Thoughts
were coming to her like molasses. She managed to form the one that told her
Donna was capable of killing the men. It told her she’d shoot them right here,
just so there would be no questions later.

Rachel
suddenly saw herself aiming a rifle at Bukowski’s head. When she tried to pull
the trigger, her finger wouldn’t move. Then the gun turned into the big yellow
and brown diamond-backed rattlesnake she saw on a field trip to the Mojave
Desert as a child. She could feel its cool strength in her hands as it
thrashed. It twisted around like lightning and buried its fangs in her upper
arm.

Without
warning, Rachel’s eyes began to flutter, and she felt an all-too-familiar
twitching in her throat and bowels. A sense of un-reality filled the air around
her head.

“You’re a
peculiar blend of deep compassion and raging violence,” Rachel said clearly to
Donna.

“What?”
Donna asked and blinked.

“You’re .
. .”

“Shit.
Not now. John . . . take care of Rachel while I tie these bastards up,” Donna
said.

Rachel
went stiff and fell backwards into John’s arms. He lowered her convulsing form
down to the wet grass and ferns, letting her head rest on his lap. It was a
mild one, but it would turn her into a trembling liability for the next few
minutes at least. Eddie never knew what to do when this happened. He stood
there with his hands tucked in his armpits and watched John keep her from
hurting herself.

By the
time her seizure had run its course, Donna had the two men tightly bound with
their belts and gagged with pieces of their shirts torn off, stuffed and tied
into their mouths. Katz eyes rolled aimlessly under half-open lids. Bukowski
looked dead. Donna checked for a pulse in his neck.

“They’re both
alive,” she said. “Too bad for them. How’s she doing?”

“She’s
done. She’s sleeping,” Eddie said.

“Wake her
up. Let’s get moving.”

John
patted her cheek and rubbed her arms until she awakened. A moment later, they
had her groggy form supported between them, heading toward the open air.

“We . . .
can’t leave them . . . there,” Rachel said. “They’ll die tonight . . . bugs
will eat them . . . alive.”

“Watch
me,” Donna said.

“Noooo!”
Rachel said, thrashing free of their grip. “We can’t . . . do that! We can’t
leave them like that!” She stumbled backwards, almost falling down.

Donna
glared at her, but Rachel was still too out of it for the look to have any
effect. All Rachel could feel was sympathy for those helpless men as darkness
and crawling, biting life approached.

“We have
to take them with us,” Rachel said. “We have to take them back to the jail and
lock them inside.”

“The
jail’s a good kilometer back,” Donna said. “Someone could see us marching two
tied up guards . . . no, I don’t think so. If you like, I’ll kill them right
now; then you won’t have to worry. How’s that?” She unslung one of the rifles
and fumbled with the mechanism, unsure how to use it.

“Do you
know how to use this?” she asked John. “Yeah . . .” John replied reluctantly.
“I can use it.”

“Show me
. . .”

“No!”
Rachel barked. “You can’t kill them!” She lunged at the rifle and tried to take
it from her. Donna swung it easily out of the way. Rachel stumbled past and
fell face-first into the wet undergrowth. John and Donna exchanged a brief
worried look. Rachel wobbled back up to her feet. When she tried to turn
around, her feet tangled in the plant growth, and she lost her balance again.
Arms waving and hands clutching, she fell backwards. John stepped in and caught
her.

“Lemme
go!” she said twisting and turning. “Let go of me!”

“All
right!” Donna said. “You win! We take them back! But we’ll have to wait until
dark. How’s that? We sit right here, waiting for the bugs, then we take them
back to the jail and drop them off.”