Species (5 page)

Sil turned away. Too many people encircled the cart, and the meat itself wasn’t in the open where she could run by and snatch at it. Dressed in a white coat and a paper hat with points at each end, the man who seemed to own the cart and the hot dogs was stationed next to it; the backs of the people in line were blocking Sil’s view, and she had no idea what was required to persuade the man to give her one. She wandered closer, trying to see, but the cart and the line were too close to the wall. She turned away; better to try something more in the open.

After a five-second scan of the interior of the train station Sil headed toward the snack shop at its other end, attracted by its brightly decorated window. She stopped outside the entrance and stared at the posters crowded on the surface of the glass, photographs of adults eating snacks and drinking sodas, all of which she assumed where available inside. Could she just walk in and take what she wanted? She looked back at the hot-dog cart and frowned; it seemed so, yet didn’t make sense, and she was already glaringly conspicuous. But she was so
hungry.
After a moment of hesitation, she decided to go in.

The snack shop was small, shaped like a long rectangle rather than a square. Sil’s gaze automatically went to a narrow counter at its far end, where she saw a couple of patrons sitting on stools covered with red vinyl. Behind the counter a teenager with acne-spotted cheeks and hair hanging in his eyes moved back and forth, serving milkshakes and ice-cream dishes with a bored expression on his face. Again Sil saw the pink fumes, this time drifting from the thick glass dishes scattered along the countertop. She turned away; the length of the room, with its only door at the front, made the far end of the shop seem too much like a trap. Staying close to the front seemed her best bet.

The first display she came across was immediately to the right inside the first of the three cramped aisles. The rows of beef jerky and chocolate-chip cookies
looked
edible, but they lacked the lovely pink fumes and smells that she associated with food. Perplexed, Sil gnawed on one fingernail, then touched one of the packets of jerky and made the connection—they were
wrapped,
that was all, covered by a false skin. If she broke through the covering, she would find the food. Satisfied, she tugged half a dozen packets of beef jerky free of their hook, then added as many of the wrapped cookies as she could hold in her other hand.

Now what? Unsure, Sil turned back toward the front of the snack shop and began to move toward the exit. As she stepped into the main area she almost collided with another person and stopped herself just short of instinctively lashing out.

“Sorry,” the other started to mumble. It was a boy her own age, trying to walk and tear open the waxy wrapping on a candy bar at the same time. He looked up from his task and his apology stuttered away as Sil gaped at him. She’d never seen anyone her own age before—he looked like a much younger version of Kyle, the sandy-haired lab assistant at the complex who had been her friend until his final treachery. Would this boy talk to her? Could she talk to him?

The boy’s lips parted, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he lifted the candy bar, something called a Butterfinger, to his mouth. He bit into it, chewing methodically as he scrutinized Sil and her raggedy clothes. His gaze slid to her naked feet, and he looked like he was going to speak when an adult woman touched him on the shoulder. If the woman saw Sil and the condition of her garments, she never acknowledged it.

“Don’t eat that until I pay for it,” she admonished gently. “Come on, let’s go.” The boy nodded and folded the excess wrapper over the bitten end of the Butterfinger bar, then followed his mother to the cash register. Sil got another peculiar look from him, then the boy’s mother kissed the top of his head as he turned his attention to the man at the checkout counter. Still puzzling over the affectionate ritual, Sil watched with rapt attention as the clerk tapped several keys on the register and a man in front of the woman and boy gave him three folded pieces of paper and some small pieces of round metal. After the clerk handed him a scrap of white paper, the guy left with a plastic bag filled with items—a bag of potato chips, a magazine, a few travel toiletries. Then it was the woman’s turn and Sil frowned, trying to watch the boy watch her at the same time as she tried to understand the procedure the woman was following. Rather than the green paper, she offered the clerk a small, colorful plastic card; the cashier accepted it, ran it through a small machine, punched more keys on the cash register, then handed it back—along with the bagged purchases. Whatever had transpired, it had given the boy the right to begin eating his candy bar again, and the Butterfinger was already half-gone before he and his mother stepped out of the snack shop.

“You going to buy those?”

Sil gasped at the sound of the clerk’s voice. She was standing right in front of him; without realizing it, she had drifted toward the checkout counter, her contemplation making her unwittingly follow the small line of customers.
Buy
them? It wasn’t difficult to figure out that this was a trading situation—if you wanted something in the store, you gave something in return. The problem was, Sil still didn’t grasp exactly
what.
Green paper, or plastic cards, yes—but where and how could she
get
those things?

The clerk started to say something else, then turned his head toward the entrance to the snack shop as a group of teenagers came in. Except for being loud, the four older boys seemed too close in age to most of her former lab technicians for Sil to pay them any mind, but the clerk’s attention sharpened visibly. While he was looking elsewhere Sil saw her chance; she dropped the packets of beef jerky and cookies on the counter and ran out, her fleet-footed dodge around the older boys making them whoop in admiration and cheer her on.

S
he found the boy and his mother again, this time standing with a trio of suitcases out on the train platform. Far enough away not to be noticed, she watched as the woman and her son each lifted a suitcase and a porter picked up the third to help them board a train. This train was different from the rust-stained boxcar that had sheltered Sil last night; each car was sleek and silver and had plenty of windows, and under all of them the word
AMTRAK
was painted in sprawling red-and-blue letters.

After the woman and boy disappeared into the train car, Sil watched the other boarding passengers thoughtfully. The train, she concluded, was leaving shortly, and with its impression of cleanliness and speed, was an infinitely better way to get somewhere,
anywhere,
as long as it wasn’t back to the laboratory. More porters were loading luggage here and there along the length of the train, and as the one nearest her struggled with a particularly heavy wooden chest, Sil snuck past and scooped an undersized blue suitcase from the jumble of bags at his back. She walked away as nonchalantly as she could, dreading the sound of his shout. It never came; relieved, she let her breath out—she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it—and boarded the train at a different car, following the mother and son. Half the train car away, she saw the woman and boy open a door and go into a sleeping compartment.

Following their example, Sil strolled down the narrow corridor, glanced around quickly, then slipped into the one next to them. There wasn’t much room inside, and what she did find was the antithesis of the environment back at the lab. Everything here was small and dark and varying shades of gray, from the iron-gray vinyl upholstery on the two facing seats to the silvery gray of the metal walls. There was another doorway, half the normal width, on the wall to the right of the window, and when Sil looked through it she found a tiny bathroom with a toilet, sink, and cramped shower stall. Outside the window and a few feet below her compartment, a middle-aged man holding a larger version of the suitcase Sil had stolen spoke animatedly with a conductor, who spread his hands and gestured at the empty platform, then shook his head. As she watched, the train jerked into motion and began to pull out of the station.

A full five minutes passed before Sil felt she could open the suitcase without fear that the train would suddenly stop and someone would start a car-by-car search. She didn’t know why, but for some reason she had expected to find clothes inside; instead she discovered a miniature portable television and several stacks of papers held together by rubber bands. The television called to mind the cameras mounted high on the walls of the laboratory at regular intervals, and she turned it on uncertainly, wondering if doing so would enable the men and women at the complex to see where she was. But the image that flickered on was reassuring; the fuzzy but luminously colored cartoon images fleeing across the four-inch screen couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the complex in the desert. She pushed a different button on the front and the image lost its color and changed to one of a man and woman kissing; they were dressed oddly, the man’s suit and the woman’s long, elaborate gown resembling nothing Sil had seen so far. She thought the dress, with its ruffled layers and multitude of bows sewn across the neckline, was pretty but not very practical. A poke at another button and the screen went dark; frowning, she pushed the same button again and the screen lit back up. On, off; it wasn’t that hard to figure out.

She set the little television on the other seat, then turned the small suitcase upside down and let the papers fall in a heap on the floor, nearly slipping in the debris when an announcement over the loudspeaker made her jump.

“Attention, all passengers. The dining car will be closed en route to Las Vegas, but will reopen after the train departs from the Las Vegas station. All new passengers please have your tickets ready for the conductors. Thank you.”

Dining car? Dining meant food, and Sil picked up the empty suitcase and peered out of the compartment. All of the doors to the occupied compartments were shut and the corridor was dim and quiet, the silence disturbed only by an occasional muffled voice from behind the thin walls. Both ends of the car had aluminum-sheathed openings, but the one toward the front of the train had a sign showing an arrow with a floating knife and fork above it. The other, presumably, led to more sleeping cars.

The dining car was the next one over, and Sil was relieved to find it deserted. It was a lot brighter in here, bigger windows shedding a generous amount of sunlight on the crisp white tablecloths topped with glass salt-and-pepper shakers and white porcelain boxes holding tricolored packets of sweetener. She breathed deeply of the earlier aromas that still hung in the air, a not unpleasant mix of scorched coffee, eggs and overused griddle grease. But when Sil checked, the area behind the counter and cash register was empty. Frustrated, she saw a drawer beneath the cash register and tried to pull it out. When she found it locked, she yanked on it, hard; the front cracked, then splintered open to reveal five compartments, each containing small, neat stacks of the green paper she’d seen people trading for food in the train station—money. She emptied the cash drawer, stuffing its contents into the one front pocket of the hobo’s pants that didn’t have a hole.

On her way out from behind the counter, Sil spotted another door, one that led to something other than another train car. She tried the doorknob and it turned. What she found inside brought the first big smile to her face since before yesterday’s terrible experience at the complex. Food—and lots of it. The storeroom for the dining services was stuffed from floor to ceiling with oversized cans and boxes bearing generic black-and-white labels.

Overwhelmed, instead of tearing into one of the boxes, Sil pulled on the handle of the big refrigerator that was the first object inside the room. What she found was far more suitable than the dry goods on the wall shelves: plastic jugs of cold milk, boxes of raw hamburger patties and uncooked french fries, cartons of fruit juice and plastic cups of flavored pudding. She loaded up her bag with as much as would fit, trying her best to keep quiet and almost blowing everything by dropping a gallon of milk when a conductor unexpectedly passed through the dining car. Her only warning was a whistling sound the man was making with his mouth, a continuous birdlike trilling that Sil found appealing and annoying at the same time.

When the conductor was gone and the suitcase was full, she eased out of the storeroom and headed back to her compartment. The bag was full and cumbersome, though she didn’t find it all that heavy. The train, however, seemed to be passing over a particularly rough stretch of track, and she wasn’t accustomed to carrying something so badly out of balance. Struggling to get the bag through the doors of the connecting car as the train lurched, Sil froze when a man’s hand reached past her and grabbed the handle of the suitcase.

“Let me help you with that.” The whistling conductor, not whistling now, smiled affably at her. His friendly brown eyes crinkled around the edges as he gestured at the narrow corridor with his free hand. “You lead, little lady. I’ll carry the heavy stuff.”