Species (26 page)

“Well,” Stephen said, “we got closer this time.”

“Closer?”
Fitch’s voice rose until he was almost squeaking. “What do you think this is—a kid’s
game?
Is that what I’m supposed to tell the National Security Council when they ask for results? That we’re
closer?”

Stephen spread his hands helplessly. “Sorry, Doc. Just trying to think positive.”

“I don’t need positive thinking.” Fitch was practically yelling now, punctuating his words by thrusting two stiffened fingers into the palm of one hand. “I need you people to use your expertise and
find
this woman.”

“Creature,” Laura said mildly. “She’s not a woman.”

Fitch whirled to face her. “Whatever she is, she shouldn’t be running free!”

“Hey, Fitch.” Press’s voice was icy.
“You
created her, and
you
lost her. It’s your fuckup that the rest of us are trying to fix, so before you quit screaming for the night, be sure to find a mirror and include your own reflection.”

“That’s very clever, Lennox,” Fitch said bitterly, but he made a visible effort to calm himself before continuing. “Can anyone speculate about what her next move will be?”

“I found this on the living-room table.” Dan held out a Polaroid print and everybody gathered around to study it. “Do you think it’s her?”

“Maybe—I think so. But I doubt we’ll get any more off this than we did the motel video. They’re just too small in the print.” Press shook his head.

“It’s a pity Carey wasn’t a better photographer,” Fitch said as he took the photo from Dan. He opened the door to the van and held the picture close to his eyes under the faint glow of the vehicle’s overhead light. “The way he positioned the camera must have made it take a light reading off the patio light behind Sil rather than the area beyond the fence. Everything in the front of the shot is too dark—you can barely see their faces. It’s as useless as everything else we have so far.” His shoulders slumped. “Climb in,” he said morosely. “We’re taking off.”

“Where’re we going?” Dan asked as he levered himself into the backseat.

“We’re all beat,” Fitch replied. He turned the ignition key and waited for Stephen and Dan to get settled and snap their seat belts into place. “Press, you and Laura meet us back at the Biltmore. We’ll go over what we have, shower up, maybe grab a bite before sacking out. We need to clear our heads and start fresh.” He gazed blankly out the windshield. “We’ve got to come up with something, we’ve
got
to. As of right now, we have no idea where she is.”

“Dr. Fitch?” Robert Minjha strode to the driver’s side window, disconnecting a call on a handheld telephone. “I just got the report on Carey and the water in the hot tub. There’s no evidence of ejaculation.”

Laura looked up in surprise. “So Sil hasn’t managed to mate yet.”

Dan smiled a little. “I think we interrupted her.”

“Well, I guess we did!” Fitch said sarcastically. “Come
on,
for crying out loud—give me something I can
use,
will you?”

“And what flashes of intelligence have you come up with lately,
Dr.
Fitch?” Press asked testily.

Fitch ignored him. “Let’s head back,” he said again. “We’ll get some rest and tomorrow night we’ll go back and stake out the ID.”

“You’ve got to be joking.” Press’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s not stupid, you know. She isn’t going to repeat herself.”

“I agree with Press.” Stephen leaned forward on the front seat of the van, his elbows resting on the dashboard. “I doubt she’ll go back there—the place yielded a poor specimen. Everything we know about her says she learns exceptionally quickly. Her skills at selecting a mate will have progressed significantly by now.”

Fitch looked exasperated. “Look,” he explained, “she’s been in Los Angeles for three days. She may not have been successful at the ID, but it is what she knows. Can any of you do better?” He waited pointedly for a few moments, but no one responded. “I didn’t think so. Besides, I’d rather we try the ID again tomorrow night than spend the evening sitting around the computers at the Biltmore reminiscing about how close we were and waiting for some elusive ‘break.’ ”

By way of good-bye, the doctor started the van’s engine and put it in gear. As he pulled out of Carey’s driveway Press saw Dan waving from the open rear window. He held up the Polaroid and returned the gesture. “Good detective work, kid!” he called as the vehicle made the turn out of the driveway and went out of sight on the main road. Hell, Press thought dourly, the photograph was the only thing left at the house that meant anything.

Of course, he wouldn’t want to say that to John Carey’s family tomorrow morning.

31

B
y the time the search helicopter passed overhead, Sil was already set for transportation.

She made her move in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour Liquor Mart at the corner of Sunset and Fairfax, across from the Directors Guild of America Building she’d admired before. The Liquor Mart was ringed with lush vegetation and fairly crowded, a lot nicer than the ratty places by her motel in Hollywood. Sil was in a hurry but not foolish, and she waited until a woman in her late twenties who looked Sil’s own size parked a car on the end and went inside. When she came out about ten minutes later with a small paper bag of groceries, Sil was ready.

No one else was around their cars when Sil sprang. The woman had the driver’s door open and was leaning inside to swing the paper bag and her pocketbook over onto the passenger side, and Sil took advantage of her victim’s off-balance stance to shove her bodily across the front seat. Checking the lot quickly to make sure no one had seen, Sil reached inside the car and sank the fingers of one hand into the driver’s thick, shoulder-length hair. Sliding her other hand under the struggling woman’s thighs, Sil lifted her clear of the driver’s seat and middle console and swung her over to the passenger side of the car like a stuffed toy.

“Give me your clothes,” Sil commanded without letting go of her handful of brown hair.

“Who are you?” the woman wailed. “What do you want?”

“I just told you,” Sil repeated impatiently. “Your
clothes.
Hurry up—and be
quiet.”

“No!” The woman tried to pull free and when that didn’t work, she took a swing at Sil and began clawing at the hand buried in her hair. Easily dodging the weak punch, Sil was acutely aware that she was stark naked, streaked with dirt and wet leaves, and sitting behind the wheel of another person’s vehicle. Any moment could bring disaster, and she decided that babying the owner of this small taupe-colored Mazda 323 was a risk she could no longer afford. Instead of struggling further, Sil bounced the woman’s forehead hard on the dashboard. When her prisoner went limp, Sil hurriedly pulled the woman’s sweater off her and put it on, then jostled her unconscious victim onto the floorboard.

This car, Sil discovered, was different from Robbie’s orange Puma. With one less pedal and a gearshift that remained stationary unless you wanted to go in the opposite direction, it was a simpler machine to learn and required little effort to drive. She preferred being naked and feeling the night air against her thighs and back, but it wasn’t possible; loath to do it, she nonetheless pulled around to the back of the building and took the woman’s blue jeans, socks and pair of purple-and-white Nikes that weren’t quite big enough. Still senseless, the driver never felt a thing as Sil tied her hands and feet with a length of rope she found in the back, then thrust her under the overhanging shelf of the hatchback. Finally, Sil dumped the contents from the grocery bag, crushed it into a tight ball, and shoved it in the woman’s mouth.

Guiding the Mazda carefully back to the front lot of the market, Sil reparked the car in a different spot facing Sunset Boulevard, angled slightly in the direction of John Carey’s house. She reasoned that the people who were looking for her, including the doctor from the complex, would opt for Sunset to get to the expressway rather than the more crowded Hollywood Boulevard. Although the woman who owned the car came to after a while, her muffled thumps from the rear of the Mazda were easy for Sil to ignore as she sat, waiting, her gaze fixed solidly on the street.

While she waited Sil thought about the brown-haired man who had braved the darkness without hesitation to come after her. In her mind’s eye, she remembered the way his sculpted profile had looked, silhouetted against a backdrop of leaves and night sky. Broad-shouldered, audacious and confident, fearless even though he had no idea what his opponent could or couldn’t do.

A child by him would be strong and cunning, a supreme hunter. The thought of mating with him made her blood race. After all, nothing was impossible, right? What had that woman at the ID told her before Sil had eliminated her?

All’s fair in love and war.

32

“N
inety-nine percent of our genes are useless now,” Laura told Press as she drove. She thought it was kind of amusing that he’d taken off his shoes and stuck both stockinged feet out the window, like a carefree teenager. “They are, however, a dictionary of what’s been useful on this planet throughout time.”

“For everything?” Press asked curiously. “Not just for humans?”

“You got it. Genes carry instructions for all sorts of things. The gills of a fish, for instance, or the webbed feet of a frog.”

“But we don’t have those things,” Press said, holding on as Laura took a curve to the right at a brisk pace. She was determined not to lose sight of Fitch’s van on the roadway in front of them. “Christ, that man drives as erratically as he thinks.”

She shrugged, never taking her eyes off the street or the van ahead. “Fitch is a dreamer, that’s all. But it
is
too bad he didn’t invest more time in a solid blueprint before going ahead with the physical part of his project. If he had, maybe we’d be studying his creation—working
with
it, instead of hunting it down.”

“Yeah,” Press said as he pulled his feet in and groped around the floorboard for his shoes, “back to the hunting down part. You were talking about gills and frog feet.”

“Those instructions are still in our genes,” Laura told him. “They’re just turned off. Now it’s junk from the past, silent and primitive history. We’ve seen so many things in Sil, so much
power.
Maybe the instructions from the alien part of her DNA has given her the ability to turn all those things on and off at will. If that’s the case, she could access our entire genetic history.”

“What are you saying?” Press asked slowly. “That we could be fighting the entire animal kingdom?”

Laura stole a glance at him. “Worse. In theory, she could have things in her bodily makeup that never developed in us, or perhaps did but are now extinct. Attributes we don’t even know about.” She drove in silence for a moment, then continued, her voice low. Her face was expressionless in the green backwash of the sedan’s dash lights. “Here’s something you can appreciate in your line of work, Press. Instead of some weird space creature, think of Sil as an object, a
tool.
She’d make an excellent biological weapon if something out there thought humankind was nothing more than a galactic weed that should be eradicated before it spreads throughout the universe.”

Press stared at her, unnerved. “So what you’re supposing is that she’s the cure and we’re the disease.”

“I’m not supposing anything,” Laura replied. “Only speculating.”

“Jesus,” Press muttered. “Human weeds. Now there’s a happy thought.” He rubbed the back of his neck, then focused on the car’s on-line computer, still powered up and ready. “Let’s tackle a cheerier subject,” he suggested as he began tapping keys on the console.

“Like what?” She glanced sideways at him.

“Like . . .
you.”
Not an accomplished typist, it took him three tries to get
SEARCH: BAKER, LAURA
[
DR.
] spelled properly at the C:\ prompt. Three seconds of *
PLEASE WAIT
*, then Press was rewarded with
BAKER, LAURA
[
DR.
]:
17 WILDWOOD DRIVE/SIMI VALLEY.
He read the data aloud to her and smiled. “Simi Valley . . . nice out there?”