Bitter Waters (29 page)

Ukiah slowed down and pulled behind the pickup truck as the minivan passed it and then the U-Haul truck.

There were three men in the pickup's cab. As Ukiah watched, the front passenger turned and Ukiah recognized him. It was Hash. The large man eyed the dog crate with a worried frown, leaving Ukiah to wonder how well they had the crate secured. Was Hash worried that the crate would fly out of the back? Or had Kittanning's transformation unnerved him?

Whatever the cause of Hash's unease, he turned back facing front, satisfied for now. He said something to the driver, who turned at the comment, giving Ukiah a chance to see his profile. He was the blond Ice, lean and ripcord to Hash's bulk, but still something in the look he gave Hash, and the fact that he was driving, suggested that he was the alpha male of the two.

Ukiah would have to follow them, waiting for a chance to call for backup or grab Kittanning. Much as he wanted to get Kittanning to safety, he had to think of the machines; he couldn't lose track of the cult.

A sudden bolt of fear went through him as his perfect memory flashed the recall of his gas gauge, the red needle hovering over the red line. He didn't need to look to know he was riding on fumes. He probably wouldn't even make the next exit.

He had to stop them, here and now.

He'd left his gun hidden in the Cherokee. He had the bike and his body, neither one he wanted to use. He glanced up the road, beyond the pickup, trying to estimate how close they were to an exit and civilization.

The Pennsylvania turnpike seemed to have been built with the minimum of waste in mind. Between the left lane and a cement center barrier, there was only a foot clearance. The breakdown lane on the right was only wide enough for a single car, and lined by walls to keep the crumbling hillsides from sliding down and blocking the road. The rental truck up ahead was traveling too fast for its trailer, and it had picked up a dangerous shimmy, suggesting a timely accident.

Ukiah glanced back. The road behind them was clear of other cars. If he acted now, before he ran out of gas . . .

But could he live with himself if he killed an innocent driver?

He swung out to the white dashed divider line and looked ahead to the U-Haul's side mirror to see the driver's face. Almost as if she felt his gaze, Hutchinson's Christa, alias Socket, glanced into her mirror to look back at him.

“They came with a U-Haul truck,”
the guard at Iron Mountain said shortly before he was killed.
“Said they wanted stuff from storage.”

Ukiah growled, and gunned his motorcycle. He shot around the pickup truck, and wove back to the far right until he threaded the yellow line of the berm. If given warning, Socket could probably take him out without danger to her truck. But if he could get her to overreact, pure surprise might do what a game of chicken couldn't. He judged the wild swing of the trailer and then nailed his throttle to over a hundred. Ten seconds he raced along the trailer, and then the huge truck body that could flatten him without noticing. He needed to get clear fast, before the pickup could warn her.

Back axle. Passenger door. And then he was at the right bumper. He glanced back to make sure his back wheel was clear of her bumper and cut straight across the front of the truck.

It was almost perfect.

With a scream of brakes, Socket jerked the truck to the left, trying to avoid him as he suddenly appeared in front of her. The already fishtailing trailer jumped to the breakdown lane, dragging the back of the truck enough so the whole truck now slid sideways at him. The movement was a graceful slide until the trailer's edge kissed the retaining wall. Instantly it ricocheted off, twisting on its hitch. With a sound like a gunshot, the tire blew under the stress, and when the bare rim touched pavement, the pavement caught hold of the trailer, yanked it hard from the back of the truck, and set it hurling through stunning somersaults of obliteration. It was like watching a tornado focused on only one object, quickly becoming many objects as the trailer burst open and its contents shattered into pieces, all with their own trajectories.

The pickup's brake joined the scream of protest, suddenly silenced by a deep thud of metal against cement. Later, he would remember the plastic dog cage vaulting from the bed of the pickup and smashing open, freeing a wobbly Kittanning.

Truly almost perfect. Only at that moment, the last fumes of gas spent, his bike died under him. He could feel the heavy front end of the rental truck bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do. The truck was too wide to avoid. It smashed him to the ground, and he tumbled, a series of bone-breaking body-meets-unyielding-pavement impacts. His collarbone that had healed only the day before snapped along the still fragile knit.

Then there was silence and stillness. Then the click of toenails on pavement, and Kittanning was there, nosing into him, whimpering in distress.

“Oh, fuck!” a male voice said, a passenger in the rental truck he hadn't noticed.

“You okay, Parity?” Socket asked.

“Daddy?”
Kittanning licked at his fingers, whining in distress.

The pickup truck's passenger door opened, and Hash spilled out. The two cultists in the rental truck got out.

“Run, Kitt! Get away.”

Kittanning licked anxiously at his face.
“Daddy!”

Ukiah pushed at him, gasping as the move shot pain through him. “Run!”

Yipping, Kittanning darted away, stubby tail tucked between his legs.

Hash started after the puppy, but Ukiah lurched to his feet, and blocked the large man, growling.

“You! You're the Wolf Boy!” Hash shifted into a fighting stance.

Ukiah snarled at the man, willing Kittanning to keep running.

Hash tried to feint left and then go right, ducking around Ukiah after Kittanning. Even wounded Ukiah managed to shift back and punch him. Hash rolled with the blow so that Ukiah barely tagged him, but he still felt his skin break and blood smatter his knuckles. With a roar, Hash tackled him to the ground. They tumbled, and Ukiah gained the top, only to be smashed aside by the pickup's driver, Ice. Seconds later he was pinned and Socket shoved a revolver tight to his forehead.

“Hold still!” The revolver seemed huge in her small hands. “Or I'll splatter your brains all over the pavement.”

“Just pop him, Socket!” Hash shouted.

“He's the Wolf Boy!” Socket cried. “He's not one of them.”

“Who gives a flying fuck?”

The gun barrel pressed hard against Ukiah's temple, rocking with Socket's agitation. “Give it up, damn it!”

Ukiah couldn't get the leverage he needed to wriggle himself free, the broken shoulder only cracking more under the stress. If he let them kill him, he'd be completely helpless. He forced himself to relax. “Okay. Okay. You win.” Like it was a child's game.

“We should just shoot him anyway,” Parity muttered.

“Ice?” Hash turned to the pickup driver.

“Bind him, get him into the truck,” Ice said. “We'll let Core decide what to do with him. Dongle, get the cell phone and the GPS out of the Jimmy and go after the puppy. Someone will be back to fetch you in an hour or so. Stay out of sight of cops, but get the puppy back.”

The third cultist from the pickup truck scrambled over the guardrail and after Kittanning. Hash forced Ukiah to roll onto his stomach, face to the hot pavement, and then knelt on the center of Ukiah's back. He quickly bound Ukiah's arms with a thin strong wire, wrapping it tightly from wrist to nearly forearms in a web of steel. Ukiah's shoulder became an endless wave of blinding pain. With Ukiah secure, Socket moved off, tucking away her pistol.

“We're going back?” Hash hauled Ukiah to his feet and pushed him to the rental truck.

“Core needs to know what happened.” Ice unlocked the padlock on the gate, and he pushed it up to reveal that it was stacked haphazardly with boxes. “Clean out of the Jimmy,” he ordered the rest. “We're leaving it here.”

Hash and Socket moved quickly at the orders, well trained. Parity drifted, as if in a haze.

“Oh, shit!” Parity picked up something from the road. “One of the founts was on the trailer!” He turned the item in his hand and Ukiah recognized it as an Ae's shattered induction board.

“What?” Ice nearly shouted.

Socket brushed past them to climb into the back of the truck. “All of them were supposed to be on the truck!”

“Which one was it?” Ice asked.

“I don't know.” Parity eyed the shard.

Socket scrambled over the boxes, peering into the dark corners, swearing. After a moment she came to stand in the doorway. “There's only one in here.”

“Which one?” Ice asked.

“Huey,” Socket said.

A distant siren wailed at the edge of hearing range.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Parity asked again and again like a mantra. “What do we do?”

“Parity, shut up,” Ice said.

“But what do we do? We've lost the puppy. The Jimmy is screwed to hell. We've got . . .”

“Shut up!” Ice roared. “We take him and go! Before the cops come.” Ice pushed Ukiah in among the boxes. “Parity, you ride in the back.”

“Me?” the boy yelped.

“There's only room in the front for three.”

Parity didn't reply, nor did he move.

“I'll ride in back,” Socket said.

“Fine,” Ice snapped. “Stay out of range of his legs.”

Ice waited until Socket climbed in beside Ukiah, and then pulled down the gate, saying, “We're heading back to Eden.”

Pennsylvania Turnpike
Thursday, September 16, 2004

“That was a damn stupid move,” Socket said as the truck started up, jostling them roughly. With the gate closed, the back of the truck was dark as a cave. “You could have gotten us all killed.”

When Ukiah remained silent, Socket nudged Ukiah with a foot. “Wolf Boy? Wolf Boy!” She nudged Ukiah harder. “You've whacked your head a good one. You probably have a serious concussion. Going to sleep would be bad.”

Socket was worried about him.

“How do you know who I am?”

“Core showed me this newspaper article on Monday, about you saving the little boy in the sewer system,” Socket said. “ ‘Find him for me, Socket.' So I did. ‘Ukiah Oregon' pulls up hits on this little town in Oregon and a flood of stories about you finding missing hikers and lost children. It's wicked cool what you do. I had to filter the search like crazy to get the number of hits down to something manageable.” Had she weeded out all the stories about his death in June? He had made the front page of all the local newspapers, with headlines of “FBI Agent Saved, Rescuer Killed.” Did she know about the Pack? When the Dog Warriors kidnapped him, the story hadn't made the newspapers, but he had given the police a full report. “In an hour, I had verified your home address in Shadyside with a hack into the DMV.”

“So you sent a killer there to shoot me and take my baby boy?”

“Adam wasn't supposed to hurt you,” she snapped with anger. “He handled the others perfectly, just like Core said he would. He got greedy and that made him frightened and sloppy. Open the door to one vice and the rest will follow.” She trailed off to a whisper. “Core was so upset that Adam disobeyed him in so many ways; he was sure Adam had fallen.”

“So you chopped him up into pieces.” Flicking back over the evidence left at the farm, Ukiah realized that the cultists must have driven the extended cab pickup to the farm. Socket had been there; she had been the woman that carried Kittanning. Ukiah found Hash's footprint pressed in the plaster dust of the farmhouse, and Ice's scent lingering in the second floor. Ukiah guessed that Core would have made the third man, the possible wielder of the axe. Who had been the fourth? Parity? Dongle, who even now chased after Kittanning?

“We thought he'd fallen, but we were wrong. We did absolution and cleansed ourselves afterward.”

The pain made it hard to think. Fallen—as in made a Get? Sudden suspicion sent Ukiah searching back through his memories. Had he touched them all? Yes, he had made skin-to-skin contact with all of them during the brief tussle. No, none of them were Ontongard.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Bad Adam was only supposed to take Kittanning, not try his best to kill me? And you killed him for it. Trust me, if Goodman had tried taking my son without taking me down first, I would have ripped his throat out.”

“We don't know how the baby ended up with you, and it's a shame that you got so attached to him, but he's not your son, and he was never meant for you.”

“He's my son,” Ukiah stated firmly.

“Just because your father found you and adopted you as his son, it doesn't mean finding a child makes him yours.”

It hurt Ukiah's head to work through that statement. With only his public records to work with, the cult must have decided that Max was his adopted parent. They were equating
his finding of Kittanning at the airport to Mom Jo finding Ukiah in the woods, not realizing there was a blood relationship between Kittanning and himself.

The truck turned sharply and climbed, spilling Ukiah sideways onto his side. He groaned with pain, and for a moment wavered in and out of unconsciousness. The truck stopped and started up again, and as Ukiah struggled to stay aware, he realized they had exited the turnpike.

“You okay, Wolf Boy?” Socket asked.

“My name is Ukiah!” He wanted to sit up, but moving hurt too much.

“I'm Socket.”

“Socket isn't your real name.”

“Yes it is. The name our parents give us are just names they make up, usually before we're even born. But that's not who we are. Core says that when we choose screen names for ourselves, we're reaching in and finding an echo of our true names. Just like people didn't have words for computer stuff until the computers were created, we don't have the words for our true names, so we just use the echoes. Socket might not be what my parents called me, and what the government thinks my name is, but it's the closest to my real name that I've gotten.”

Ukiah grunted. Magic Boy could see the reasoning, but Ukiah didn't want to understand these madmen.

“Me using my birth name would be like you using Ukiah Oregon,” Socket added. “Ukiah Oregon is a town, not a boy raised by wolves.”

He snarled, furious at this woman, calmly denying him his own name.

“See, the wolf is your true nature.”

Ukiah tried shifting to take the stress on his shoulder, and hissed as a bolt of pain flared out of the shattered bone. “At least I don't chop my ‘friends' up in cold blood. I don't steal babies, torture them to death, and then throw them out in the trash.”

Socket had started to sputter out a defense, and then fell into shocked silence. Finally in a quiet, hurt tone, she said, “We didn't hurt the babies.” Did she even believe her own
words? “We only needed a little bit of blood to test them; a simple finger prick.”

“I've seen the FBI photos. Kimmie and Isaiah were tortured with burns all over their bodies and dropped in Dumpsters like so much garbage. Are they all dead, and we just haven't found all the bodies, or are the other two still alive?”

“They're dead? No! No, they can't be! They were supposed to go back home none the worse.” She seemed very rattled by the news. “God damn his soul to hell. Adam must have killed them. Core gave them to Adam to return, but he must have killed them for his own sick fun. He was a monster, even if he wasn't fallen. Core said God had brought them together and he would not lightly turn away God's tool.”

“Goodman wouldn't join the cult, would he? That's why he's Adam and not some silly computer name.”

“We're not a cult,” Socket snapped. “The word cult has lots of negative connotations to it. We're warriors of a religious order, like the Knights Templar; the ancient ones, not the modern ones—they're just a bunch of Shriners.”

“He wouldn't join.”

Socket was silent for several minutes, and then said quietly, “Adam had an attitude problem. He refused to attend Ice's kendo lessons, saying he learned whoop-ass in prison. Ice tried to get him to spar, and Adam waited until Ice turned away and hit him with a cue stick. Ice beat the shit out of him then, and Core nearly threw Adam out then for hurting Ice.”

“Why did Adam stay?”

“Adam stayed for the sex. He liked the Blissfire, and he liked hurting . . .” She fell abruptly silent.

“He forced you,” Ukiah guessed. Socket was, after all, exactly the fair hair, doe-eyed type that Goodman preferred. “Did he hurt you?”

There was a sound like a sob from Socket, and then a soft, hoarse, “No.” She cleared his throat and said, “Core wouldn't let him do everything he . . . Blissfire makes it all . . . feel . . . great . . . Core stopped him.”

As with Eve, Ukiah wasn't sure whether to pity Socket or be angry with her for staying in the situation.

“Adam wouldn't do the mental training either.” Socket
continued in a ragged voice. “We're God's warriors; our minds are our greatest weapon, and must be honed. Adam refused to do the purification ritual in the waterfall, or keep night vigils, or do the fasting.”

Ukiah was partially tempted to ridicule the training; Max had told him that cults used such tactics to brainwash their members. When Max talked about it, it seemed so clinically cruel. Yet now, Ukiah could remember times in his life that Magic Boy sought the spirits, fasting and keep vigils in the same manner. The difference was that when he stripped away all his defenses and opened himself, it was in solitude to receive God's touch; the cult used that time of defenselessness to their own ends, molding the person to their own needs, supplanting God.

A growl rose in his chest. “Why do you stay with them? They're just using you, keeping you ignorant. Is it sex? As long as Adam keeps away from you that is.”

“I'm making the world a safer place,” Socket said.

“By killing babies.”

“We didn't kill any babies!” Socket shouted. “Adam did! He was a monster only interested in serving his sexual appetite. We're saving the world. We put our lives on the line to fight the spawn of the devil! We're like Buffy the vampire slayer and the Scoobie gang. Evil walks among us in the guise of humans, and we're the only ones that know, that can stop them.”

“You've been killing vampires?”

“In a way. They're demons.” Whatever anger had been carrying her fled, and she mumbled, “You don't believe me. I didn't believe until Core took me to a slaying. I was horrified at first, but then I saw that Core was right, that the thing wasn't human, that all its pieces would come alive and try to escape.”

“If the demons look human, how can you tell you're not attacking a human by mistake?”

“Usually you can tell just by watching them walk, how they hold themselves, how they talk, that someone is a demon. Once you get good at spotting them, you can scan a
crowd and see them; they stand out like someone with a physical handicap.”

Full of memories of other bodies, the Gets moved with machine precision, lacking the fluid grace of the Pack who embraced their humanity.

Socket had paused, and now she continued, slower. “Actually, it's like a TV show where some magical device swaps everyone's body around, and the actors mimic how the other people play their characters, so Dick is now Jane, and Jane is Baby, and Baby is Dick. The first time it happens, someone has to explain it, but after that, you don't need explanations to see who is in which body.

“Once someone tells you to watch closely, you can see the demon inside. It's like there's only one demon, and we keep killing him again and again. They always react the same way and once you find a trap that works, it will keep on working until you're out of demons.”

They could recognize Hex no matter what body he infested! Ukiah suddenly realized that the cult would have many advantages over the Pack in fighting the Ontongard. Hidden by the masses, human hunters could approach the Gets without being noticed, pick their attack point and never mentally signal their intent to their victim.

“How many humans have you killed by mistake?”

“Adam was the only one,” Socket said. “And I'm not sure that was a mistake. He was evil still in human form.”

“Are you sure? Core didn't make any mistakes before he could recognize them in a crowd?”

“Core's been touched by God,” she said with full conviction. “God opened his eyes and made him to see, choosing him as His holy warrior.”

“How do you know that these are demons?” Ukiah pressed, hoping that they were only killing Ontongard; that the Pack had slipped their notice, and that innocent humans weren't dying in scores.

“In Luke twenty, Jesus says, ‘But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God.' ”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that angels and demons and nephilim can return from the dead.”

“So you kill them like Adam, cut them up?”

“Yes, and burn them quickly, before they can re-form and come back.”

“How do you know you're not killing angels along with the demons?”

She laughed. “If you could see how ugly these things are, you would know. It's like all sense of God's beauty is blasted out of them.”

Yes, that was an apt description of Ontongard. “And no one has noticed scores of dead bodies lying around?”

“One of our burn sites had been found. That's why we left New England. Between Ice and Hash, though, it will never be linked back to us.”

Hutchinson had recognized Adam's death as similar to other murders; he had linked the Temple to the burn sites. Had he worried that Socket had been one of the dead, or one of the killers?

Thinking of the agent's reaction, Ukiah remembered how Hutchinson found the farm, and Indigo's discovery that other surveillance systems had been compromised. “You spy on the demons?”

“How else can we know where and when to get them alone? They're stronger and faster than humans. You need to set an ambush and take them out in one shot, and then box them before the separate parts can escape.”

 

The truck had been pausing at random points, red lights and stop signs, but this time it stopped and the engine went quiet. Outside the truck, a man called out a surprised but pleased welcome of “That was fast! We haven't even started a second load.”