Species (4 page)

4

S
he was floating, weightless, spinning slowly in warm fluid. Water? No, something thicker, more secure, like amniotic fluid in a mother’s womb. Drifting without care, sinking slowly toward an untroubled abyss as sight suddenly returned to reveal the barest shimmer of light from far away, the surrounding liquid not black but pale amber. Breathing steadily and heavily, there was a firmness to the sound that suggested stability and size, predator not prey. Shifting, the effort of movement sent graceful tentacles to ripple at the sides of her limited field of vision. A jellyfish passed without pausing at the sight of her, an ancient and beautiful coelenterate, like a multicolored man-of-war gliding undisturbed through its domain. She concentrated then, the passage of instructions along her neural pathways marked by sparkling biolights in her dim golden surroundings. There was a sensation of movement on her left side as something tiny drifted close, a fish lured by the swaying loveliness of her tentacles. Abrupt hunger as the fish nibbled tentatively, the instantaneous release of energy—CRACK!—and the fish jittered and died; the smallest mental command and her appetite was appeased—for now—as her luminous torso covered and consumed it.

A change in the atmosphere and her breathing accelerated twofold, then doubled again, spurred by the presence of something dark and sharp in the depths below, bigger, faster, infinitely more dangerous. She could see it all too clearly, its lean, arrow-shaped frame rushing through the murkiness, blind but aiming by sheer instinct, a deadly internal guidance system that would lead it right to her. She tried to spin, to flee, but she was too slow, grace and beauty exacting a deadly price in the lush golden environment. Sound then, growing, and louder than her own panicked breathing, the enormous reverberation of the creature’s charge as it hurtled toward her, the end of its chiseled head yawning wide, revealing hundreds of glimmering, needlelike teeth—

S
il came awake with a jerk, covered with sweat and blue eyes bulging with fright, before she remembered where she was—a boxcar on the train, one of the empty ones toward its back end. Her skin felt overheated from the nightmare, her breathing still heavy and fast. The steady vibrations through the matted straw beneath almost lulled her back to sleep, then an unidentified shape moved in the darkness, coming at her too quickly and with a moist, sliding sound alarmingly like the one moments ago in her dream. Sil’s eyes widened again in surprise as a man lunged at her, a hobo wearing a filthy, tattered jacket and grime-encrusted jeans. She hadn’t had much time to think about her nightmare, but she
had
learned a valuable lesson from it—if she didn’t move fast enough, she wouldn’t escape a predator. She jerked out of range as his nails snatched at her arm and she saw him grin, saw his nicotine-stained teeth yawn open and glimmer as gold fillings winked in the wildly flashing red-and-white lights of a crossroads warning signal. He lumbered forward and clutched at her again, mouth stretching wider; more glimpses of teeth and winks of light in a mouth that looked as dangerous as her dream creature’s. She scrambled away and her hand brushed something in the straw: a liquor bottle, the remnants of the hobo’s evening imbibing sloshing as it wobbled on its side with the movements of the train. But when Sil’s arm shot forward and she struck him in the chest, the bottle stayed where it was on the debris-strewn floor of the boxcar; she didn’t
need
a weapon.

The hobo made no noise as his body snapped backward and his face contorted in agony. He fell away from her almost gently, his weight settling into the small, uneven mounds of straw with hardly a sound. The dusty fingers of one hand twitched slightly, mindless electrical impulses, then he was still.

Heart jackhammering, Sil cowered in the corner of the car, as far away from her attacker as possible. Was he dead or would he leap at her again? She waited anxiously, ready to fight, feeling her double-time exhalations slowly return to normal as the minutes slipped by in the thundering darkness. But nothing about the hunched shaped moved, and as Sil’s fear seeped away and her nerves calmed, she noticed something odd rising from the slit of a side pocket in the man’s jacket, faint, enticing pink fumes that gave off a maddening smell. While she was sure the man was dead, she was still cautious as she crept forward and probed at the fabric with two fingers, primed to jump out of reach. Convinced at last, she tore eagerly at the dead man’s coat until she found the source of the appetizing vapors—a half-eaten hamburger inside a wad of aluminized paper. It wasn’t much; three, maybe four bites and it was gone, barely chewed before she swallowed.

Later Sil found the hobo’s ratty travel bag and went through it. She dug all the way to its grimy bottom, but there wasn’t any more food, and although she opened it and sniffed the contents inquisitively, the bottle of Mad Dog lying in the straw held no interest for her. She let it drop uncapped onto the lap of the dead drifter, where its contents emptied in steady burbles and diluted the drying puddle of blood surrounding his torso. Sil did find extra clothes, though, something to substitute for the flowered hospital gown that was all she’d ever been allowed to wear. They were oversized but not hard to figure out; she’d seen the same items on the technicians and guards who had continually come and gone during her short life. The workers around her had seemed to believe she could neither understand them nor think intelligently, so most of what she had learned so far had been on her own, by simple observation and deduction. The picture books had been simple but accurate, and she had a feeling those childish tools would be the ones upon which she relied the most heavily in the very near future. The ease with which she had escaped made her again wonder why Dr. Fitch had tried to destroy her; she believed now that it was because they—Dr. Fitch and the others she had met so far—were weaker than she. There was something else inside her that Dr. Fitch had not intentionally planned to give her, and whatever the mystery part was, it made her better and stronger . . .
dominant.

When the travel bag was emptied, Sil nearly had a complete outfit. No socks or shoes, but she would deal with that later. The squalid-looking cadaver could keep the ones on his feet right now; they smelled far too repellent to pull free of his body.

Dressed but still
very
hungry, Sil sat back and waited for the train to take her to an unknown destination.

5

T
he morning’s desert sun was red and bloody looking against the scrub-scattered horizon. Barely risen, its full girth not even clear of the skyline, its rays already coaxed dancing heat ripples from the surface of the earth, warping the shapes of the helicopters and trucks that fanned across the landscape.

Xavier Fitch stood between the set of twin silver train rails, his fists bunched at his sides. The only reason they were able to guess at Sil’s direction was the information, sent via a scrambled radio transmission, that a couple of freight trains had made their scheduled runs through here at about the same time as her escape.

“Those trains passed through here over two hours ago,” Fitch said thoughtfully. “She could have stayed on . . . or gotten off . . .
anywhere.”
Where was the girl now? Perhaps she’d been leaping onto a Utah-bound car even as that foolish search-and-destroy gunner in the Apache chopper had gotten all their hopes up by locking on a target with his chaingun, then pulverizing something in the brush that had turned out to be only a coyote. Fitch recalled the young man’s face and how it had turned scarlet when he’d had to report that he’d discharged several hundred .30mm rounds through his chaingun at a twenty-pound canid. He wondered what would have happened had the gunner’s target been authentic and found himself shying away from the thought.

The replacement aide assigned to Fitch was Robert Minjha. Dark-skinned and watchful, Robert was younger than Kyle Jacobson and ignorant of the more . . .
delicate
aspects of the project. Kyle had known everything about Sil, and it annoyed Xavier to be forced to pick and choose the bits of information he should feed his new assistant. Robert’s bright eyes took it all in and hinted that he understood more than what was said, but he didn’t question Fitch’s orders as much as Kyle had; Fitch thought he was as dull as the sand-colored landscape around them. This time, though, Robert did have a question.

“Is she that fast?”

Fitch hesitated before answering. He could lie, but it would be ludicrously obvious—after all, why else were they looking so far out in the desolate Mojave? All the aides had known about the project from its onset anyway; the current replacements simply hadn’t been able to get as close to it before the . . . accident.

“Yes,” he admitted softly. “She’s that fast.”

6

B
righam City, Utah reminded Sil, in the most tenuous way, of the complex in which she’d been born, and when the freight train had finally stopped in the rear of the train yard, she had been drawn in spite of herself to the busiest part of the station. Clean, bright, and filled with neatly dressed, freshly scrubbed people, even the travelers seemed to have left their road dirt behind, not daring to bring it into this tidy little metropolis. Sil knew there must have been other hobos in the surrounding boxcars; she had sensed a group of them only one car away, waited to see if their roady curiosity would lead them down the same trail as their now dead comrade. When no one else had come, she had eventually slipped into a fragmented sleep, troubled by broken bits of her previous nightmare.

She didn’t know where the hobos had gone this morning—perhaps they had stayed in the boxcars, waiting for the train to carry them to another town or larger city in which they could blend more naturally. Standing on the cleanly swept sidewalk next to the train station, Sil was a flagrant outsider amid the carefully tended pots of marigolds and petunias. Everything about the people milling past was different from anything she’d ever encountered—their clothes, the pleasant expressions on their faces, the way they smiled at each other. Looking down at the smudged and greasy pants and shirt she’d found in the hobo’s bag and at her bare feet, Sil realized her hands had started to shake. How long before someone in . .
. authority
began to question her? This was no dark and private boxcar speeding through the desert at night; retaliation and escape would not be so effortless in Brigham City at midmorning.

But it was so
fascinating.
Dozens of people hustled through the station carrying everything from shoulder bags and briefcases to overstuffed suitcases they could barely lift. Others stood in line to talk to a woman on the other side of a window above which was a sign labeled
TICKETS,
while yet another line had formed at a cart painted gaudy red and yellow with western-style wheels that were far larger than necessary. Her gaze sharpened as she focused on something inside an oversized glass box on top of the cart—hot dogs, turning and sizzling on a roaster and sending up familiar feathery fumes, their color a stronger, tantalizing pink that drifted above the cart like a beacon for the hunger twisting painfully in her belly.