Alien Taste (18 page)

“No,” he whispered in denial, shaking his head. He had assumed for so long that he was different because he was raised among wolves. But he couldn't deny the truth. People called his abilities “creepy” but what they meant was “inhuman.” There was no way a human could do everything that he did.

“What is it?” Indigo brought his focus back to her—to her beautiful worried human face.

If I'm not human, what am I?

“Ukiah?”

“I need to get out of here.” He scrambled to his feet, fighting the sudden urge to run.
There's no out-running yourself.
He needed time to think. No, he needed information. He needed to know what he was. “I need to find Rennie. I need to talk to him.”

“You're going to try and find the Pack?” She had to run to keep up with him as he sought the door. Behind them the police captain was calling to Indigo, reminding her that as the shooter she had forms to fill out and sign.

“I need to know what's going on.” He gave her a half-truth, hating himself for lying even that much to her. “In a room full of cops, with a dead FBI agent in his car trunk, all that man cared about was killing me—and I don't know why.”

“How do you know that the Pack won't hurt you? You said they almost killed you last time. What if they change their mind?”

“They won't. I'm one of them. I'm under their protection. They consider me a Pack cub.”
I'm one of their children.
He remembered Hellena's wistful protectiveness after the test and almost staggered as another truth hit him.
No, I'm their only child.

They reached their bikes. He pulled off his shirt to scrub away the last of the gore before pulling on his helmet.

“Ukiah, I don't understand.” Indigo was picking up her helmet.

“There's a war going on between the Pack and the Ontongard.” He threw his bloody shirt into a nearby trashcan and pulled on his jacket. “I don't know what they're fighting about, but I'm stuck in the middle. Already both sides have tried to take me out. Janet Haze and Wil Trace got caught up in it, and they're both dead. I can't stumble around without a clue. The Pack almost killed you and Max. There's a
dozen policemen in there wounded because of it. I've got too much to lose. I have to know what's going on.”

“I'm coming with you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You know I'm safe from the Pack, but you aren't.”

“I don't know you're safe until I see it for myself.”

He leaned forward and placed his hand on her cheek. “Trust me, Indigo. I will be careful.”

She kissed his palm and moved into his arms, holding him fiercely. “I guess this is what I get for not trying harder with the accountants.”

They kissed one last time and then she reluctantly stepped away.

“Be careful.” She controlled her face, but her eyes were sad.

“I will.”

 

He started moving and he couldn't stop. He rode directionless for a while, panic blinding him to everything but the need to run. He finally pulled off to the side of the road and sat hugging himself.

“Stop this!” he shouted at himself. “Stop. Just find the Pack, talk to them.”

Yeah, sure, just find the Pack.
The FBI and the police have been trying for years.

“You're a private investigator,” he told himself. “You know how to find people. You're the best tracker in the state. You can find them.”

Last known address was the place to start. He started up his motorcycle, walked in a tight turn, waited for a break in the traffic and pulled out. His directionless run had left him far east of Pittsburgh. He worked his way back to the Swissvale area. In fits and starts, he found his way to the warehouse.

He parked in the weedy parking lot. A yellow
piece of police tape fluttered on the door frame. The police had come and gone, and someone behind them. Curious neighbors? The Ontongard? Ukiah checked his pistol nervously, then stalked quietly to the dark warehouse. The door hung partially open. He put his back to the wall beside the door and pushed it open while still under hard cover as Max had trained him.

No one fired shots through the doorway. Nothing moved inside the vast darkness. He strained to hear and caught only the far-off tinny music of the merry-go-round at Kennywood. The smell of Pack hung thick as the kicked-up dust, laced with cigarette smoke. He noticed a fresh butt by the door, crouched, and picked it up. Kraynak's saliva tainted the end. He dropped the cigarette butt and eyed the door. Sweat slicked his pistol grip.

He took a deep breath, tightened his hold on his pistol, and stepped into the warehouse. Moonlight dappled the floor. He stalked through the dark, filtering out the hammering of his heart, his own footfalls, the rustle of his own clothing, and listened to the pure silence.

He hadn't noticed the night before, but rooms lined the far back of the warehouse. They had been offices at one time. The Pack apparently used them as living quarters. The windows looking over the river sparkled with a recent cleaning. The floors had been swept, scrubbed, and lived on. He uncovered traces of Pack hair, engine oil, and food. The Pack, it seemed, shared his passion for curried chicken. In the cracks of the wood flooring, he found an earring—a tiny gold dream catcher hoop. Traces of Hellena remained on the sharp stud part, a reminder of the Pack's odd genetic profile. He examined it once again and found what he had missed simply by not
understanding the clues—hidden under that surface layer of Hellena lay a core of alien genetics. Rennie had the identical alien soul, a different “human” veneer. It was the changing from human to alien that caused the odd fractures, the discontinuity. Janet Haze and those that killed Wil Trace, the Ontongard, had the same kind of jumbling, but they didn't match the Pack's.

“I know what Prime expected to crawl out of that girl's womb.” Rennie's words echoed in Ukiah's head again. “I've had nightmares about it since I joined the Pack.”

What kind of monster did they expect? Was it why he was the Pack's only child? Surely if the idea of producing children gave you nightmares, it would limit how many were born—but only one born to nearly a hundred men and women?

He cast about for more clues but found the place devoid of information. The Pack seemed to expect someone of his abilities to search the rooms. Many of the surfaces had been scrubbed with a sterilizing solution. Here and there, Ukiah caught disturbing traces of Ontongard. The enemy, it seemed, had searched for the Pack.

Out the back door of the warehouse, he found where the Pack had ridden off on their bikes the day before. The mud encased in the wheels took him three blocks down the rough pavement until the gang splintered, breaking into groups of twos and threes and heading out in different directions.

He trotted back to his bike, wondering why the Pack hadn't torched the warehouse to cover any possibilities of being followed. Perhaps, he decided, they planned to make use of it again when their enemies forgot about it. Would the Ontongard forget, he wondered, or did they share his perfect memory?

 

The door to Mike's garage was down with a closed sign hanging in one of the narrow slit windows. He knocked hard on the door anyhow, hoping he wouldn't have to waste time finding Mike first.

“I'm closed!” Mike bellowed from within.

“Mike! Mike, I need to talk to you!”

The large door rattled up noisily. Mike squinted at Ukiah through his mask of grease. “Wolf Boy?”

“Mike, I know you told me to stay far, far away from them, but I've got to find the Dog Warriors. It's important.”

“Forget it, Wolf Boy. They don't want to be found, so you're not going to find them. They got to stay one step ahead of the law. They don't establish habits. They don't have a normal hangout. They don't stay in one place for long. Bar owners in this part of the tri-states think of them as locusts. The Pack comes to a bar, hangs out for that night only, and then they're gone.”

“I need to find them.”

“Hell, Wolf Boy, they could be West Virginia, Ohio, or up in New York. They move around.”

He considered while Mike stood in the doorway, one hand up on the garage's rolling steel door. “So, you're saying that the only habit they have is that they go from one bar to the next, no order or pattern, and stay there until late.”

“Yup.”

“So, at this time of night, if I call the bar that they are at, then I'll catch them there.”

“If you know the bar. There's hundreds in the area.”

Ukiah sighed. “Thanks, Mike.”

Mike looked mystified. “You're welcome. You going home now?”

“No, back to the office. I've got phone calls to make.”

 

On the way back to the offices, Ukiah decided to concentrate on the Allegheny County bars. If the Pack and the Ontongard were locked in battle, and the Ontongard were working in and around the city, then the Pack probably wouldn't venture far.

Ukiah recalled Max's telephone calling list for small seedy bars in the local area code and started at A.

“Abby's!” The first number answered cheerfully.

“Are the Dog Warriors there tonight? Any of them?”

The voice gave a shout of laughter. “No, thank God! We haven't seen them in months.”

He tried the next phone number in his memory.

He found them at Café Loco. The voice that answered the phone was less than cheery.

“Yeah, they're here.”

“Can I talk to one? Rennie Shaw, if he's there, but any of them will do.”

He sat drumming his fingers as the voice shouted at Rennie to come answer the phone.

“Who's this?” Rennie growled through the phone a minute later.

“Rennie, this is Ukiah Oregon. You know—you kidnapped me the other day.”

“Of course I know you, cub,” Rennie snapped. “How did you know we were here?”

“I've been calling bars alphabetically to find you.”

“Ah, yes, process of elimination.” The tone of his voice lightened. “What do you want, cub?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“You're doing that, cub.”

“Face to face, Rennie.”

There was a moment of silence, except for the muted background noise. “What's wrong?”

“The police caught one of the Ontongard. I was there when they brought him in for booking. He tried to kill me—just like you said the Ontongard would.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Where is the Ontongard now?”

“Dead. The FBI agent with me shot him in the head.”

“Damn. He's at the morgue, no doubt.” The background noise became muffled as Rennie covered the mouthpiece. Ukiah could hear the Pack leader bark across the room. “Johnny, Ethan. There's a dead Ontongard at the county morgue.”

Oh, damn, Ukiah thought, what did I do now?

“Rennie! Rennie!”

The background noise returned to normal. “What is it, cub?”

“They're not going to hurt anyone, are they?”

“No, they're just going to make sure the Ontongard stays put.”

Ukiah wished he could believe Rennie. Still, if there was a repeat of Janet Haze, the Pack members would be there to take the brunt of the Ontongard retrieval of their dead.

“Rennie, I need to talk to you.”

“Okay, cub, I'll meet with you. Do you know McConnell's Mill?”

“Yes.” Ukiah had worked there one too many times. The first three times he found the missing person alive. His fourth case, and the most recent, he had dragged the tiny body of a four-year-old out of the dangerous undertow of the creek that ran through the park.

“Meet us across the gorge from the mill, down in among the rocks—in about two hours.”

He pictured the place. “Okay.”

“And, cub, please, no cops.”

“No cops,” he promised.

 

Max had explained once that the gorge at McConnell's Mill had been formed by a huge wall of ice moving through the area millions of years ago. The whole concept boggled Ukiah's mind. A wall of ice big enough to tumble house-sized boulders out in front of it?

But there it was, in the middle of gentle rolling hills, this gash cut through stone, lined with huge boulders. Paths meandered along both sides of the deceptively small stream. Picturesque cliffs and boulders provided dangerous scrambles and tempting fissure caves. Water-smoothed slick rocks gathered on the shore. In his last case, the little boy had been hopping from stone to stone. Ukiah had sat on the last stone the boy had safely landed on and watched the water flood over the spot where the creek had hidden the body.

Trying not to recall that day, Ukiah drove down to the bottom of the gorge, rumbled across the covered bridge, and up the steep road to the far side. There he found the Pack's bikes parked. He pulled his motorcycle in among theirs and killed the engine.