Species II (18 page)

“Well, I’ve examined the torso and pelvic regions. There isn’t any sign of external alien incursion. All physiological changes occurred internally, from the cellular level out. Their biology clearly has a protective mechanism that avoids external detection, a very advanced ability to adapt to whatever surroundings it encounters. I’m not sure if it camouflaged itself behind her cells and made itself a part of them until it was . . . well, fertilized.”

He sounded both excited and exhausted, and in a way, Laura could understand that. All she had to do was remember back to the days when she’d first become involved in a project like this. And wasn’t it funny that the results had once again turned deadly? “There are obviously some fundamental differences in our species, Dr. Lundquist. Human cells place very definite limitations on what we can and cannot do; their physical makeup has an entirely different set of rules.

“It’s just so . . . fascinating.” He looked over at her, his face full of an enthusiasm that she just couldn’t share. Suddenly he glanced from her to the body of Anne Sampas, his expression changing to one of distress. “I-I’m sorry, Dr. Baker. I hope this, the, uh, victim—Dr. Sampas—wasn’t a friend of yours.”

Laura shook her head, thinking that perhaps there was some hope for this young man after all. “No,” she said softly. “I’d never met her.” She fell silent for a minute. “But a whole lot of people had, Dr. Lundquist. An entire country, as a matter of fact.” He nodded respectfully, and after a pause, Laura squared her shoulders and nodded too, ready to continue.

“All right,” Dr. Lundquist said. His voice was more matter-of-fact as he reached up to adjust the overhead microphone for recording, then snapped on a pair of disposable rubber gloves. “Let’s find out if there was any alteration to the cranial cavity.”

Laura braced herself—she’d always hated this part of an autopsy the most—as Dr. Lundquist first brushed the corpse’s hair forward, then lowered the bone saw to the midpoint of the skull. Even the sound—that high-pitched whirring, the grind of the saw cutting into human bone—she detested it. So much so that—

The body screamed.

No, not true—Anne Sampas was as dead as she’d been when they’d shrouded her body at her home and brought it here earlier this evening. Something else was . . .
wailing,
and between that and the scream of the bone saw and the terrified shrieks of Dr. Lundquist, Laura didn’t know who or what was making which noise.

As she grabbed for the vibrating saw in Lundquist’s hands she saw something hideous and black spew from Anne Sampas’s mouth. Long like an eel, the ribbon of flesh twisted and slid back down, then twisted again, all the time making that ear-rending, nightmarish noise. Some kind of alien afterbirth. The third time it lurched upward, Laura jabbed forward with all her might and met the slimy limb end to end with the bone saw.

Tarlike sludge and pieces of pulverized alien flesh flew everywhere, splattering Laura and Lundquist, the body, the walls and ceiling. Lundquist reeled away, retching, but Laura held her position, pressing her mouth shut and grinding away at the stuff bubbling from Anne Sampas’s mouth, grinding and

grinding and

grinding . . .

Until it was simply no more than dead, black slime melting down the walls of the M.E.’s laboratory.

“W
hy are you looking at me like that?” demanded Dennis. “Who were you just talking to?”

“No one important,” Press answered. But Dennis knew he was lying, could see it in the set of the man’s jaw and the way his eyes had narrowed when they focused on him.

“Relax, Mr. Gamble,” said one of the biology technicians moving around the lab. At least this one hadn’t jabbed him with a syringe. “It’ll be just a few more seconds and we’ll have everything we need to know.”

Dennis ignored the biologist and turned his attention to Colonel Burgess. “About Annie,” he said, “what was the cause of death?”

Burgess stared at him for a second. “We don’t know,” was all he would finally say.

Shit, Dennis thought. Another liar—this place is infested with them. “Come on, give me some information here—how did she die? She was my friend and I have a right to. know.” When Burgess just stared at him without answering, Dennis felt his fists curl up in frustration.

“The sequence is almost complete,” said the biology technician from her place at a computer console a few feet away.

Dennis glanced at her, then began to frown. “Wait a minute,” he said slowly. His eyes felt red and sore, itchy from exhaustion. Fury was making him sweat, making water collect along his forehead and under the arms of his shirt. “I think I get it now. I don’t know what happened to her, but I think I’ve figured out why you’re taking my blood. You fuckers think
I
did it—”

“Data retrieval is on line,” said the biologist.

To Dennis her voice sounded flat and dangerous, like some sort of automated assassin. That’s probably what all these men were, Lennox included—assassins. Well, they could jam their guns up their backsides if they thought Dennis Gamble was going down without a fight for something he didn’t do. “I did
not
kill Annie,” he snarled at the same time he sprang from the chair. He registered with a sort of detached, careless alarm that the guards in the room, every damned one of them, had instantly leveled their weapons at him. And what
were
those anyway? Not all the standard issue M-16s, but some kind of spray-nozzle rigged canisters that reminded him of flamethrowers. “I’m
leaving.”

“Halt,” ordered the guards’ leader. His finger was twitching against the trigger of a rifle rather than one of the spray canisters. “You freeze where you are or we’ll fire—”

“Now just hold on, Dennis,” Press said hastily. He held out a hand in an imploring gesture, planting himself bodily between Dennis and the guard. “If you’ll just stay calm—”

“I said I’m
leaving—”

“Wait! The computer says he’s normal,”
the technician suddenly blared. “He’s normal—there’s no sign of infection!”

For a single, endless moment, no one moved.

“Infected with
what!”
Dennis shrilled.

Press gestured at the guards and they lowered their weapons, sending him nervous, slightly ashamed smiles while Burgess, that rat-souled son of a bitch, had the balls to give him a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “Go on home, son,” he said. “Get some rest.”

“I told you—I am not your
son.
And I deserve some fucking answers!”

Burgess seemed unaffected by Dennis’s outburst. “You’ll have them in due time. We’ll be in touch.”

“ ‘We’ll be in touch,’ ”
Dennis sneered back at him. “That’s the best you can come up with after all this shit?” It was all he could do to keep from spitting on the military man looking impassively back at him. “How close did you come to killing me just now, you bastard?” Burgess didn’t reply and finally Dennis gave up, sent them all a disgusted look, and headed for the door on the other side of the laboratory.

“Hold on a second, Dennis,” Press said suddenly.

He turned back and glowered at the special agent. “What?”

Press’s gaze was calm and cool. “Do you have
any
idea where we can find Patrick Ross?”

Dennis hesitated, then said, “No.”

Press studied his fingers for a minute. “You’re a longtime friend of Patrick’s,” he said quietly. “And I know you wouldn’t want anything to happen to him. So if you hear from him, please—let us know.”

Dennis gave him a mistrustful look. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure I will. You’ll all be the
first.”
He stalked out, not believing or caring about the desperation he heard in Press Lennox’s next words to Burgess—

“We have to find Ross.”

Did he know where Patrick and Melissa were? You bet he did.

Was he going to tell those assholes?

In a fucking blue moon.

13

P
atrick stretched and smiled, feeling a pleasant shaft of sunlight creep through the part in the cabin’s curtains and cross his face. Warm and satisfied—God, he felt
great,
like he was on top of the world. It was a brand-new day. Even the political ambitions of his father didn’t bother him this morning, not here in the privacy of the family’s cabin in the mountains and lying next to the woman he loved. His smile widened and with his eyes still closed he reached out one arm, intent on pulling Melissa’s sleeping form closer to him.

Wet.

His eyelids flew open and he jerked upright as he saw her, or rather, what was
left
of her.

“Missy?” Her name came out of his throat as a painful rasp. “My God, did I . . .” Patrick’s voice trailed off as he tried to reconcile the memory of his sweet, beautiful Melissa, his high-school sweetheart and the woman who would’ve been his wife, with the silent, blood-drenched person lying beside him. What had happened? His last memory was of them making love, joined together and him hot and pleasurable inside her. He’d been climaxing, and she right along with him, and then—

Nothing.

Another blackout, another piece of his life gone that could not be explained. So many of those lately—twice the night of the NSEG fund-raising banquet, and that hadn’t even been the first. And each time waking at home or, like here, somewhere safe, knowing nothing about the lost hours except his own dark suspicions that he must have somehow done something unspeakable. And now, finally, the undeniable proof.

Patrick sobbed and lifted his dead fiancée into his arms. He rocked her for a while and stroked her hair, not caring about the blood and ragged flaps of flesh from the horrible, inexplicable hole in Melissa’s stomach, mindful only that she should have been warm and full of life and she wasn’t. Whatever had happened, it was most certainly of his own doing. After a time, his crying dried up. He just sat there, numb and disbelieving, without a clue about what to do now.

Staring into space and thinking only about old memories—so many good ones—Patrick almost missed it when something moved at the foot of the bed.

“Who’s there?” he demanded suddenly. He felt hot and feverish, and he hoped to God he was dying. Somehow he didn’t think he was going to be that lucky. The response to his voice was a ghastly, liquid-sounding cry that made Patrick’s eyes widen and clutch Missy’s body closer to him in a belated gesture of protection. He strained forward, trying to see—

—but couldn’t believe it when he did.

A
creature
of some kind was sitting on the floor down there, something brown and black with a multitude of soft, flailing limbs and a mewling, babyish wail. Something less than human but with the vague bone structure of an infant . . .

The child of his union with the lovely, dead Melissa.

“No!”
Patrick shrieked. He let go of Melissa’s body and flung himself out of bed, registering too late that he’d pushed her too roughly and now, adding to the horror of the thing that was hissing and trying to waddle toward him, the girl he’d loved his entire life was sliding off the bed like so much unwanted meat. It was too much—
way
too much—and the best that Patrick Ross, America’s greatest hero, could do in this moment of complete and utter madness was to scream and retreat to the cabin’s bathroom, and barricade himself inside.

I
t wasn’t so hard to deal with.

He climbed in the shower and watched the smears of Melissa’s blood on his skin melt away under an onslaught of soap and hot water. He washed his hair, scrubbed his nails, and after he’d toweled himself completely dry, brushed and flossed his teeth. Then he stepped out of the bathroom, stoically ignoring the gurgling noises coming from the gnarled baby-thing still on the floor at the foot of the bed. When he was fully dressed, he took a deep breath and went back to the bed, carefully averting his eyes as he covered Melissa with a clean sheet, wishing he’d moved a little faster when her blood soaked through the cotton before he could turn away. The crimson stain on the fabric reminded him of a crushed heart.

Then Patrick went across the room and looked for a long time at the object hanging above the fireplace before finally taking it down and inspecting it.

The shotgun had been his Grandfather Ross’s, a Browning Superposed over/under shotgun that had once literally helped put the food on the table. It was a little dusty but everything else about it looked, at least to Patrick’s unpracticed eye, in working condition. He knew where the shells were, and when he retrieved them from their corner in the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, he stood and watched the grisly creature watch him, fancied he could see it growing and changing even as each long minute passed, becoming more and more the human form behind which it would hide, as he himself had done.

When he was through looking at it, Patrick went out onto the porch and closed the door behind him, then sat down on the old creaking porch swing his father had put up when Patrick was just a boy. The sun was out, dappling the lush greenery of the trees around the cabin and the wildflower clusters that lined the fence that surrounded the property. He could hear birds singing somewhere out of sight, summer insects buzzing and doing whatever insects did in the cooler temperatures of mid-morning.