Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

for something.
Bruce leaned over the seat to look out Eddie’s window. They didn’t see what
they were looking for, and Eddie turned down at the end and headed down the
side.
    “How can you tell which ones they are?” Mike
asked.
    “Our names. Our names are on the side,” Eddie
answered.
    “Really?”
    “Yep. Look. Right next to the door—those
little signs. See ‘em?”
    Mike had to look a little but found the neat
name tags right where Eddie said they were.
    “Here we go,” Eddie said and stopped the
truck at the two backmost shelters. Mike strained his eyes and saw his own name
under Bruce’s in bold black letters. He could scarcely believe it. Their
shelters were as neat and clean as any of them, maybe cleaner.
    “Home!”
    “Yeah!”
    “Closest ones to the jungle, though,” Peter
said.
    Eddie got out his ID badge and ran it through
the reader next to the door handle. There was a quiet click as he pulled the
door open.
    Bruce opened the door to the other shelter,
and Mike followed him in, the grin still trying to bust out of his face.
    “You want the front or back bedroom, Mike?”
    “I don’t know. You pick. I don’t care.”
    “Then I’ll take the front, if you don’t
mind.”
    “Sure. I don’t care.”
    Mike went back outside and retrieved his bag
from the back of the truck. He didn’t want to seem too excited by the whole
thing and stiffened his face as he walked back in past Bruce. He carried the
bag to his bedroom and put it down quietly and neatly next to the bed. The bed
was built into the wall, and there was a screened window right next to it half
way up. He slid the window open to get some air.
    The room was small but big enough for Mike.
There was a closet in one wall with built-in drawers and a sliding door. The
door had a big mirror on it. A clear window in the ceiling provided a skylight
about a meter square. He looked around for some way to open it but couldn’t
figure out how.
    The little bathroom was neat and laid out
with the sink and toilet on the same wall. When he turned on the light, it took
him a cold-sweated minute to realize that the noisy buzzing above his head was
a ventilating fan and not a big bug somewhere. Mike tried the hot water spigot
and washed down some dust and dirt in the sink. The water was very hot. Another
big mirror above the sink in the bath made the room seem much larger than it
was. His shower was also built-in, and he slid the door back and smiled at it.
He put a single, wrapped bar of soap he found on the shower floor in the tray
where it belonged. He tried the water in the shower, too, just to make sure it
worked okay.
    The mirrors were streaked and dirty, and
ground-in dirt covered the smooth floor. The wall areas around the light
switches and door slides were filthy with oily dirt. He could take care of all
that later.
    There was another closet adjacent to the
bathroom that had a sloppy stack of dull-white towels in it and some sheets and
another light blanket. Mike picked up one of the towels and smelled it. It had
a sweet, clean scent to it. He put it back and straightened the pile as best he
could.
    Heaven.
    First things first—and that was a shower. He
stripped out of his sweaty clothes, turned on the water, adjusted it until it
was just right—a little on the cool side—then stepped in. The feeling of
clean, cool water beating on his neck and back filled him with a feeling of
absolute luxury. He stood in the running water until it chilled him.
    He dried himself with a clean towel, then
hung it up neatly on the rack to dry. He started to sweat again almost
immediately and tried again to find a way to open the window above. When he
still couldn’t find a way to do it, he turned the fan back on in the bathroom.
If it was okay to do it, he figured he could leave it on all the time. He hoped
the towel would dry in the wet air.
    He had three sets of underclothing to his
name and three sets of cottons. He pulled his clean clothes out of the bag