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

her viewing angle improved and the details of it gave way to the light,
she tightened the grip on the heavy spanner in her right hand and felt her
mouth going dry.
    The creature had been oddly familiar to her, and when she was at a
right angle to it, and enough of its form was showing, the fact of it occurred
to her like a bird tweet over the pounding din of her fear. The thing was a
construction, it was a living thing that had been fabricated somehow, like the
tractor.
    Godamned motherfucking
things! Godamned things! she thought , wringing water from her hair.
    The need to do something was at the core of all mechanical things. You could
tell what a thing did if you just looked at it. If you could touch it and move
it, even better; but the interconnect of parts was always logical, and
eventually these told you what force went where and what did what. The creature
had not had a Frankenstein’s monster look about it, with its kludgey, sewed on
parts and fat stitches. Quite the contrary. To an untrained observer, the
creature would have looked perfectly organic and natural, if not horrible. To
Mary’s experienced eyes, the key had been visible in the relationships of the
components and a slight lack of smoothness to the transitions one to the next. The relationships
had been sound, but the whole had lacked unity and polish. Unlike some
inherited flaws in an otherwise perfect representative of a dog breed, these
flaws couldn’t be accounted for naturally and had to be the result of a
trade-off or compromise in the mind of the builder. Although she couldn’t put
her finger on it exactly at the time, she had been certain the monster in front
of her possessed some of those kinds of flaws.
    Things!
    The thought that the thing had been physically modified for a
purpose had pushed her terror even higher. If she was looking at a made thing, who or what was the
maker?
    Her instinct had been to get away, to flee. The strength in the
thing’s limbs told her it would be impossible to bolt past it without being
intercepted. As a test, she had feinted toward the door; and her fears were
confirmed when the two-hundred pound creature dropped down into a crouch and
moved almost in synch with her to head her off.
    Then the creature had opened a mouth full of sharp teeth, raised
its head and bayed. The sound wasn’t so much a bay but a long grunt. She began
to inch her way toward the door. With each step she took toward freedom, the
creature closed in, forcing her into an empty stall.
    She could see every detail and tried to find some weakness in its
anatomy she could exploit if given the chance. All she saw was virulent
strength.
    The creature’s gray skin was mottled and wet from the rain. The
head was connected to a long, strong neck and seemed to be much smaller than it
should have been. It didn’t look too bright, something like a sloth. There was
an overall froglike wetness; an amphibian-ness about it that went beyond the water
dripping from its limbs. In a crouch, the creature’s forelimbs or arms balanced
it forward and the stubby fingers remained flat on the ground. Its rear legs
remained tensed, and the small feet constantly searched for good traction in
the soft dirt of the barn’s floor. It seemed to be fighting some instinct to
pounce and tear her to shreds with those teeth in that terrible little head. It
continued to bay, and Mary remembered thinking that she wished to hell Jack
would hear this damned mutant or alien or whatever, get dressed and run to the
barn with his shotgun and shoot it. Just then, the creature snapped its head
toward the barn door and sprinted out it on all fours, raising divots of dirt
and clouds of dust as it went. Mary had never seen anything move as fast that
wasn’t made of steel and rubber. She thought at first Jack had somehow done as
she’d prayed, and the creature had sensed him and fled for its demonic life.
She smiled out of relief that it was gone and took a step or two toward the
open