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

picked up the laundry basket she used for that purpose. It was plastic and
split on two sides but it had just enough capacity and strength for the job.
Tom Moon had tried to con her out of it once and she’d told him she’d rather
suck a goon’s dick than give it up to him. He thought it was funny. She’d meant
it.
    The faces in the grocery changed all the time. Sometimes there
were fewer than the time before and she always figured the missing ones had
been killed or used for something other than incubation. She’d seen some of the
other chambers and the unspeakable horror that went with them.
    Soon, a new face or two would find its way to the grocery with the
same questions; the same pathetic, pleading questions, sometimes in broken
English, for which no answers were possible.
    Fill up.
Just grab some food. I don’t know any more than you do. Just fucking eat.
    In fact though, Mary had gathered quite a bit of information since
she’d been taken. But she kept it to herself. She wasn’t really sure why except
that most of what she knew was useless, really, and none of it brought her any
closer to getting home. The exchange of information between humans where the
need and the desire to know was so high could take place with cold efficiency.
But Mary knew it didn’t do a new captive any good to tell them what you knew.
That just sent them farther into shock. The vernacular that she’d taken such
pains to develop was alien to a new captive, too, and she wasn’t entirely
comfortable sharing it with the others somehow. Some of the words were goofy or
weird, even to her, and she kept those definitions to herself. You could learn
a new vernacular through osmosis, but not Mary’s, simply because she never used
it around anyone else. She decided after about a month that she’d just keep
what she’d gathered to herself completely. The long and short of it
    was that
Mary’s particular news was just too grisly to tell and there wasn’t a damn
thing to do about it anyway.
    It was odd to her how she had learned to turn her back on the
suffering of others like that. She’d never have considered such a thing when
she was alive. She was dead now after all. Nothing could suffer like she had for as long
as she had and still be alive, surely to god.
    She didn’t think she could stand another cycle. But she knew what
they did to those who were so sick and used up they couldn’t stand. Those poor
souls were dragged down to another level of Hell. She’d seen all the faces
change in the months she’d been here. She’d outlasted them all except Fred and
of course, Tom Moon.
    God, she thought , what a sickening achievement that is.
    Mary looked up and saw a new face in the grocery. The woman was
standing in the tube with her hair still dripping wet. It was her first cycle,
Mary knew. You could always tell. She stumbled out of the tube with really
ill-fitting clothes on and no shoes. That was a mistake almost everybody made
the first time; no shoes. Most people would rather go barefoot than put on
someone else’s shoes. The floor in the ship was just tacky enough to drive you
nuts after a few days of walking on it. It pulled on your feet like taffy and
would literally strip the skin off in time.
    The woman was still in shock but she hadn’t folded. If you folded
up, they’d feed you to the ship, they might anyway but going into total
shutdown got you a one-way trip down a feed hole.
    Total
confusion, Mary thought . She
feels like a bastard calf at a roundup.
    Mary studied her a moment more. She would have found her attractive
in another life.
    “You’d better get some of this. You have to eat,” Mary said to
her. It was longest bit of genuine advice she’d given anyone in months.
    The woman was dazed and had some difficulty locating the voice because
several people were looking at her at the same
    time. Mary thought at first that she couldn’t understand English,
but she was trying to find the speaker, all right. When the