Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) by David Coy Page B

like that, you prick. A woman just challenged your twisted ass to a fight.
    He
couldn’t leave just yet, because if he did so too quick it would show that he
was intimidated by her. His mouth was open just a little and he swallowed out
of fear but managed to keep his mouth open to try to hide it. Mary could see
his big, damn Adam’s apple work in a single big pump. He harrumphed just barely
loud enough that she could hear it, then turned and walked away.
    That’s right, you run, she thought. “‘And ‘F’ you,” she
said to his back.
    She moved
back over to Bailey and tightened the blanket around her shoulders.
    “Who is
that?” Bailey asked.
    “The enemy. Another one,”
Mary replied.
     
    *   *   *
     
    He could feel nothing.
    There was no way he could tell
how long he lay there, unmoving, under that brown light.
    Bones and tissue conduct
vibration as effortlessly as a tight string between two tin cans. After an
eternity of lying there in the soundlessness of the cell, he began to hear the
barely audible sound of the wasp’s grubs eating him alive. It started as a
rhythmic scratching noise down deep, and as the hours passed and the worms
grew, the sound got slightly louder. He could visualize the hundred or so sets
of mandibles working as they snipped through fat and strands of muscle tissue
like tiny scissors. The sound was now his personal and grisly white noise. It
had bleached his thoughts of all rationality for hour upon hour.
    They moved as they fed,
and he knew they were leaving a trail of by-products in their foul channels to
be dispersed and absorbed by his tissues. The growing infection from invading
bacteria would be enormous. He knew also that he was bleeding from a thousand
severed capillaries and small veins. Since he was still alive, he questioned
whether the grubs’ instincts warned them off the larger, critical arteries,
nerves and organs. Protein was what they sought, and they could find an
abundance of it by staying in muscle tissue alone.
    Clever
little sonsofbitches, he thought. Keep the food alive and fresh longer by not killing it too fast.
    He didn’t feel sick, but
he knew he had to be slowly dying. It was just a matter of time until the
toxins from the inevitable infection would overcome him. He was captive now to
their gruesome purpose, but he would escape them eventually. The surgical
grazing of the grubs, despite its terrible purpose, could not prevent his
certain escape from it by dying.
    For the millionth time, he
closed his eyes and shut out the sickly brown light of the cell.
    Of all
the bizarre ways to die one could imagine, he thought darkly, I’ve topped them all.
    A moment later, he felt an
itch on the end of his nose. That itch sent him into a new panic as surely as
if he’d been set aflame by it.
    I can
feel.
    There was
a sharp pain down deep in the back of his arm like the pinch of tweezers.
Another followed in his chest a quick breath later, and then another and
another in his legs, and then abdomen. He lifted his right arm just an inch or
two out of reflex to the pain and realized clearly that his motor ability, and
with it the perception of pain, was quickly returning.
    Before he could retreat
into deep shock, before he got anywhere near those hallowed gates, he felt the
collective mincing bites of a hundred cutting mandibles as they tore his
tissues and he watched his body, as if from afar, writhing in the pain of it.
He saw a pale gas-like smoke filling the chamber from a small vent next to the
light. He felt himself being jerked down almost violently into painless
unconsciousness. Deep blackness was his world, and he was sure must now be dead
and was thankful for it.
     
    *   *   *
     
    He
floated in black oblivion. Somewhere in the nothing, an impossibly small sphere
of substance grew to an impossibly large sphere of substance and back again,
time and time and time again with an ethereal rhythm.
    He rose
out of death slowly like a bubble through tar and was