Species (37 page)

Silence.

Finally, Dan spoke. “I think you got her, Press.”

Press peered into the hole, trying to wave aside the stink of the burning napalm. “We’ve got to make sure.”

“You mean we’ve got to go
in
there?” Laura looked doubtfully at the burrow, bright patches of its sides still blazing.

“Most of it’ll burn out in another thirty seconds,” Press said. He began digging at the loose dirt on the upper sides of the depression, shoving handfuls of it down the sides in an effort to smother the rest of the flames. He threw Laura and Dan a glance over his shoulder. “Just try not to get any on your hands, because it clings. Laura, you watch your hair.”

When he decided it was safe enough, Press went in face-first, the Afterburner light leading the way. The other two followed, lights bobbing and fingers searching for purchase in the rubble. “God,” Laura muttered, more to herself than the others. “Isn’t this ever going to be
over?”

“Almost,” Press called back, making her jerk. “We—aw, damn it.”

“What’s the matter?” Dan asked from a few feet behind Laura’s shoes. “Are you okay? Press?”

“There’s a definite draft flowing through here.” His voice was filled with frustration. “I think we’re out of luck again—she’s escaped.”

“Where does it go?” She was trapped between Dan and Press and all Laura’s light would let her see in the inky tunnel was Press’s rear end and the wet bottoms of his shoes.

“I’m not sur—oh,
man.”
His voice faded for a moment, then came back. “Wait’ll you see
this.”

As they fought their way free of Sil’s latest passageway, the surface on which Laura and Dan crawled unexpectedly ended. They tumbled forward, then slid about a yard before coming to a sprawling stop. “Where are we?” Laura demanded. She found her balance and stood, then her jaw dropped. “Jesus Christ! Where did
this
come from?”

The three of them were standing in a huge, subterranean cavern.

41

T
he small rocky outcrop on the far side of the cave was a good place to birth her offspring. She knew the group still hunted her and Sil felt lucky to have found the hidden spot so quickly; her child would draw its first breath and be on its feet long before their puny efforts let them make the first guess at her whereabouts. The stalactites and stalagmites everywhere in the cavern did a fabulous job of distorting and magnifying sound, making their clumsy movements around the rocks and strange pools of oily tar dotting the ground indistinguishable from her own. Her ledge was high up the wall nearest their left, almost completely in the shadows and invisible from the ground. While she
had
put a little distance between herself and the burrow entrance, the fools chasing her would think she had fled across the span of the cave to its farthest depths and wouldn’t bother to look so close to the tunnel she had made. Adding to the airy noises filling the enormous space were the rats and the blind albino lizards scuttling among the boulders.

Her face twisted in agony and her breathing doubled, then tripled as the child within her swelled in size. Arching backward until she was bent almost in two, her mouth opened in a voiceless wail as the skin between her breasts lightened and stretched as far as it could, then split. The bones of her rib cage gleamed and then her sternum shifted, the bone matter melting to form interlocking pieces that began to push apart, one by one, to expose the pulsing birth canal beneath.

With a low, tortured grunt, the muscles of the birth channel contracted, then expelled the boychild from her body with a rush of translucent pink fluid. Chest heaving, she felt the infant roll down the side of her body and pull itself away from her. Her lightless surroundings did nothing to hinder her, and she could see him clearly—covered with birthing blood and fluid, he was perfectly formed, an exquisite example of a human child but possessed with her superior abilities at concealment and survival. Right now he would be afraid of her and want to hide, and that was good; he would also be a hungry, instinctive killer and dangerous to her in her weakened state. He was a born predator and Sil knew she could leave the boy without worry, knowing he could fend for himself while she healed in safety for a short while.

Without looking back, Sil scurried off into the darkness.

“I
ncredible,” Laura breathed. “I never thought I’d see someplace like this in person. Look over there.” She pointed at the closest of half a dozen inky ponds across the rock-strewn ground stretching before them. “It could be oil, or it could tar—like the La Brea Tar Pits. Who knows what’s in these pools.”

“Then we’d better be careful not to get stuck in them,” Dan said with unaccustomed cynicism. He looked anything but happy to be in the midst of the immense cave. “Or we’ll end up like those saber-toothed tiger fossils you see in the museums.”

“What was that?” Press brought his flashlight beam around and aimed it toward a noise somewhere to his right. The light caught a flash of eyes reflecting in its glare; a rat chittered angrily and ran behind a huge stalagmite banded in multicolored red and cream.

“Just a rat,” Laura said. “I wish we could count on that being all that’s down here.” She aimed her Afterburner into the distance and watched its strong beam dissipate into nothing. Nevertheless, when Press moved off to start searching, she and Dan followed.

“This is a lost cause,” Press said with a scowl after only a few minutes. They had made a vaguely elliptical search, stopping at its three-quarter mark. “This place goes on forever—probably under the whole fucking city.”

Dan timidly shone his light behind a particularly large boulder, revealing nothing but more rubble and a few fleeing lizards. “She could be anywhere in here,” he agreed. “Or nowhere. Maybe there’s a way to the surface that we haven’t found.”

“You two stay here,” Press said. “I’m going to go back and check the burrow opening to make sure she didn’t return to the sewer behind our backs.”

“How would you know if she did?” Laura asked incredulously.

“By the soil pattern,” he explained. “Her body will leave tracks in the dirt just like a tire. I’ll be back in two minutes. Stay
put,
you understand? I don’t want anybody getting lost in here, and as long as your lights are together, they’ll be strong enough so that I’ll be able to find my way back to you.” Light bobbing, Press strode off in the direction from which they’d come; it seemed only seconds before his footfalls faded to faint whispers.

“Great,” Laura said. “Our hero makes tracks for the horizon and leaves his two sidekicks to wait it out.” She bounced the base of her Afterburner nervously against her thigh.

Dan’s gaze skittered along the darkness outside their small circle of light, then stopped. He could sense the feelings of something out there, up the sliding wall of soil to his left. Whatever it was, it definitely
wasn’t
Sil. Instead, Dan caught flashes of softness, unfocused intelligence, hunger . . . and fear of the unknown. After a moment’s hesitation he began to scale the loosely packed slope.

“Dan, what are you doing?” Laura’s voice rose a notch; he caught a spark of fear in the rising volume. “Come back here!”

“It’s okay,” he called back. “I’m not scared—just wait there. I’ll be right back.”

“Yea, well,” he heard her mutter, “I think that’s what Press said, too. Jesus, I can’t believe you guys are leaving me standing here by myself. What a
crock.”

“I’ll be right back,” Dan repeated. Almost to the top, he hesitated when he heard something squeal, followed by a nearly inaudible crunching sound. When nothing else happened, he grasped the jutting outcrop of a stone ledge and pulled himself upright. He could see Laura’s light swinging back and forth far below, like a night-light in an abyss. Balancing carefully on his toes, Dan could just see over another ledge, this one barely at eye level. This was where the feelings were coming from, deep and forceful in his head and heart, impossible to ignore. When he stretched to his full height and peered over, he let out a cry.

Naked and cringing, a little boy—a
baby
—crawled backward on the ledge and stared at him in terror.

“Don’t be afraid,” Dan said soothingly. “I won’t hurt you.” He wanted to pull himself up, but there was no way—nothing within reach offered a place for him to put his feet or hands.

“Dan?” Laura called. She sounded very far away. “Dan, what are you doing? Where are you?”

From farther in the distance, Press’s worried, echoing voice joined hers. “Laura, are you guys okay?”

“Laura, I’m fine,” Dan yelled down. “There’s a baby boy up here!” He turned his face back toward the trembling child. The infant watched him with wide, frightened eyes, the skin of his face and body mottled with pinkish stains that looked like diluted rust. “I’ll be right back,” he said calmly to the child. “Don’t go anywhere, and we’ll get you out of here.” Leaving his flamethrower on the ledge on which he was standing so he could have both hands free, Dan began to move cautiously to the side, searching for another way up the rest of the incline.

“There’s a
what?”
Something in Laura’s voice had changed, but Dan couldn’t think about that right now; he had to concentrate on finding a way to get to the boy. “I’m going to climb up a different way,” he shouted. “I can’t get to him from here!”

“Dan, don’t do
anything!”
The light far down the slope flickered and went out, then Dan heard a slapping sound. “You don’t know what—damn it all to
hell!
My light’s dead!”

“Just stay there, Laura. I’ll be back for you in a minute, I promise.” Crawling carefully along the incline, Dan finally found a set of indentations in the rocky dirt, deep enough to use as a sort of staircase. Pulling himself onto the higher ledge, he crawled back toward the baby, letting his Afterburner’s beam cut a swathe of light along the ground in front of him. He could still feel the child, the emotions of hunger stronger now, and tempered by intense curiosity. Whose child was this, and how had he come to be in this godforsaken underground cave?

Almost there. He could hear the baby cooing at something, then he caught another of those odd, crunching sounds. When he found the final handhold and levered himself over, the child was bent over something, its back to him. The air in this place was cool and damp, much too extreme for an infant, and Dan pulled off his jacket. He would wrap it around the baby so it could build up some warmth, then figure out a way to get it dow—

The boy turned and Dan froze. A few minutes ago he had barely been older than a newborn, hardly able to crawl, but the child who swiveled to face him now stood upright with no trouble. He cocked his head quizzically in Dan’s direction, as if trying to make the connection that Dan and the man who had appeared on the other side of the ledge were one and the same. Paralyzed in the act of offering his jacket, Dan saw everything that the strain of peeking over the ledge before hadn’t allowed: the reddish color streaking the boy’s skin wasn’t rust but washes of blood—birthing blood—and the heavier scarlet stain around his mouth had come from the headless rat still clutched in his tiny fingers.

“N-nice little b-boy,” Dan said shakily as the child dropped the rat and began to toddle toward him. “N-no—you s-stay there, n-now, okay?” Dan backed up as far as he could and felt the edge of the rock outcropping at his heels, the cooler wash of the updraft from the cavern floor many yards below. He dropped to his knees, never taking his eyes from the boy’s, and felt desperately for a handhold among the rubble so he could lower himself. His light swayed wildly across the narrow span of the ledge, flicking over the toddler’s face and making the chubby-cheeked face pull into a strange and unexplainable shape. Just a few more feet—

The child was still more than two feet away when it lunged.

Dan cried out as a horribly barbed tongue the color of dirty amber shot out of the boy’s mouth and swiped at him. He felt the fabric of his shirt tear at shoulder level and a hot spot of pain spread across his arm and neck, making him lose whatever precarious grip he’d maintained on the rocks. He had one breathless moment of weightlessness, then he hit the slope headfirst, hard enough to make him see a flash of bright white that he thought for a millisecond was just his flashlight. Then he heard pebbles rolling somewhere else in the darkness and realized he’d lost the Afterburner in the fall, disjointedly remembered reading somewhere that the light you saw in a bad fall was your brain slamming against the inside of your skull.