Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

some slime on your face.”
    Tom found it with his fingers and wiped it from his face to his
pants leg. She was sure that in his former life, he’d made the habit of wiping
food there in the same way.
    “There, you happy now?” he grinned back.
    “No, but the slime’s off your face.”
    “How come you don’t like me? You don’t like me, do you?” he said,
sneering.
    “Not much.”
    “I bet if we was back on Earth, you’d like me just fine. I bet I could
make you like me.” A look of lasciviousness crossed his broad, thin mouth.
    Something inside her groaned. He was at least thirty years old,
and she was fairly certain he hadn’t been raised on Mars. She considered him
for a second, shaking her head in disbelief. Not only was he thinking about sex
in this place, he was thinking about it with her, Mary Pope, who had felt a
male’s stubble on her mouth—for the first and last time—at age thirteen.
    Mary smiled big and innocently and blinked. That was it. He was
plumb stupid. The wiry bastard was all wound up, like springs inside, with hate
and mean desire, and he capped it all off with stupidity. She wished she could
feel sorry for him. She’d seen lots like him drifting through Trader in the
fall and early winter, all wrapped up in ratty clothes and dirty caps with
cigarettes behind their ears. They’d stop in Trader long enough to panhandle
some money, eat and catch a lift westward. The musky fuckers could live for a
week on a couple of Twinkies and some pond water. She’d always known his kind
were capable of survival anywhere, and this particular drifter was absolute
proof of it. For all she knew, this might be the best, warmest place Tom Moon
had slept in for years.
    “I doubt it,” she said and headed toward the tube out of the
chamber. “Get those thoughts out of your little head,” she added over her
shoulder, “It ain’t healthy.”
    She could feel his close-set eyes on her butt as she walked out. Amazing, she
thought. She hoped he’d die right there where he sat. She stuffed the borrowed
shirt in her pants as she walked and guessed it was feeding time because she
was suddenly hungry.
    Maybe
there’ll be cigarettes today, she thought. I’m almost out.
     
    *   *   *
     
    The night was Phil’s favorite time on the mountain, moonless
nights especially. When there was no moon the stars shone their brightest and
God the number of them. Some ninety miles from any significant light source,
and conveniently shaded from stray light from L.A. by the Tehachapi Mountains
to the south, the undiluted view of the stars from High Ridge was incredible.
Phil was somewhat nearsighted, not to the point where he wore glasses all the
time, mind you, just enough to lose some of the heavenly detail he so enjoyed.
He got a kick out of going outside, looking skyward, slipping on his old horn
rims and seeing the stars and Milky Way pop into sharp focus.
    He walked some fifty feet from the cabin and its view-obscuring
trees, to a spot that gave him an unrestricted panorama.
    Just as he was about to slip his glasses on, his teeth started to
vibrate in his mouth. It was the damndest sensation. He thought at first it
must have been a rocket or jet engine test from Edwards Air Force Base
southeast of Mojave. The sound was almost omni-directional but as he turned his
head from side to side, he thought he could isolate it coming from somewhere up
the canyon to the north. The sound stopped as abruptly as it started. He waited
for a minute to see if it would start again, and it did. This time the sound
was louder and coming distinctly from the southern end of the canyon. The
southern sound stopped, too, and Phil dismissed it finally as some engine somewhere
or some aberrant event he didn’t understand.
    He slipped on his glasses and
stood on the rim of the pad gazing up.
    Look at them there stars, he thought.

 
    2
    Bailey and Jim Hall knew they were trespassing. Haight canyon was
private property, but it was also the