Bitter Waters (7 page)

She thawed out of her shock. “Oh, I see, yes, there is a family resemblance. It's just that for a minute there—” She gave a shaky laugh. “All the kidnappings have made me skittish; you can't turn on the television without hearing someone talk about the children being snatched right out from under their guardians' noses. Good luck with the cantaloupe!”

“What's wrong?”
Ukiah demanded to know, telepathically.

“Nothing is wrong, Cub.”

“You're here just to see Kittanning?”
Ukiah asked, feeling like he was missing something.

“It's been nearly a hundred and fifty years since I gave up raising my son to fight the Ontongard,”
Rennie said.
“I'd rather not miss seeing my grandson grow up too.”

Over two hundred years ago, an Ontongard ship entered Sol's star system. If their invasion had gone as planned—following the same course as countless invasions prior—after a scout ship secured a landing site, the Ontongard would have landed en masse. Ukiah's father, Prime, though had been a mutated rebel among the Ontongard ranks, physically like them, but mentally an individual. Prime sabotaged the mother ship so it crashed on Mars, and then, as part of the crew of the scout ship, sabotaged it too. Only one Ontongard survived, Hex.

Hex, like all Ontongard, could grow himself by infecting humans with his alien genetics, spreading from the one body to countless others. Wounded and dying, Prime had no choice but to infect the first creatures he encountered, a wolf pack, and hope that one would survive to carry on his fight. Coyote was the only wolf that survived, and he went on to infect
humans with his wolf-tainted alien DNA, and thus the Pack came into being.

Rennie had been born human in 1834. He was the first human to survive Coyote's attempts to make a Get. He had abandoned his wife and infant son to carry on the war Prime started; the decision was based partially on the desperation level of their secret war, and partially on the desire to keep his all-too-human loved ones out of the cross fire. When the Pack found Ukiah, Prime's long-lost child, they decided to view him as their son; they were, after all, extensions of Prime. The same logic that made Kittanning Ukiah's son, also made the infant grandson to all of the Pack.

Despite looking only in his late twenties, Rennie was full of grandfatherly pride as he held Kittanning. “What a big boy! Someone is impatient to grow up!”

“That makes two of us,”
Ukiah thought.

Catching Ukiah's thought, Rennie laughed. “Like father, like son.” Then, because it suddenly struck Ukiah that his own impatience might be spurring Kittanning on, Rennie added, “It's Pack blood, Cub. It doesn't like being helpless. He'll slow down once he's up and running. Bear did.”

As if summoned by his name, Rennie's lieutenant, Bear Shadow, came around the corner pushing a cart. Unlike Rennie, who was in jeans and a muscle shirt, the Cheyenne warrior wore a full leather duster and smelled faintly of gunmetal. He had a hawk feather tied into his black braid and necklace of bear claws at his neck. “What did I do?”

“Grew up fast after the Ontongard reduced you back to infancy with that bomb,” Rennie told Bear. “We gathered what we could find of him that wasn't burnt to a crisp,” Rennie explained. “Getting the mice to merge wasn't difficult, but they chose to form a bear cub. We had to work to get them to convert to Little Bear, and then he wasn't happy until he was running on two legs, so he grew like crazy.”

Kittanning was staring at Rennie with fascination. Ukiah wasn't sure if it was just the novelty of being able to read the Pack leader's surface thoughts or if Kittanning was fastening onto the idea of growing up quickly.

“Don't give Kitt any ideas.” Ukiah shook the cantaloupe at
Rennie. “It's hard enough to explain my having a son, let alone why he's suddenly a toddler.”

Rennie laughed. “People expect babies to grow fast.”

“Not that fast,” Ukiah growled at him and sniffed the cantaloupe. It seemed ripe enough. He added it to his cart. Bear, he noticed, had picked up yams, pineapples, sweet onions, red peppers, and was now looking at the mushrooms. “Are you actually buying food?”

Normally the Pack ate at a long list of bars where they could get a decent meal and yet blend in with the other customers. They rotated through the list so that their visits appeared random. It was a necessity dictated by the lack of time for food shopping and cooking, the desire to travel light, and the need to stay one step ahead of both the Ontongard and the law. Bear's careful study of the mushrooms, though, indicated that they planned to eat the food instead of abandoning the full cart later.

“We've decided to have a cookout,” Rennie explained. “And do some howling at the moon.”

They paused at the bakery counter.

“Desserts?” Bear asked.

“Cheesecake.” Rennie patted Kittanning on the back as he eyed the selection. “Carrot cake. And Key lime pie.”

“Key lime,” Bear agreed happily.

They left Bear there, waiting his turn like a normal person. Hellena, alpha female for the Dog Warriors and Rennie's mate, stood in the next aisle, reading a can of baked beans' label. Like Rennie, she seemed devoid of weapons, leather pants too tight for anything concealed, her black lace camisole too skimpy to hide a weapon. Ukiah could smell gunmetal on her, an exotic perfume of forged steel, oil, and old powder. He wondered where she had it hidden.

There was something mind-boggling about the Dog Warriors food shopping. They were Pack. Protectors of the planet. FBI most wanted. Hardened killers. Elite soldiers. It didn't seem right for them to stand in the stark clean aisles of a supermarket and study nutrient guides on food packages. All much younger-looking than their sometimes hundred years of
age, they looked like art students stocking up for a tailgate party.

“Natural flavor,” Hellena said without looking up. “What do you suppose natural flavor is when it's an additive?”

“We can make beans from scratch.” Rennie picked up a large bag of loose dried beans. “Your beans are better than anything we've had out of a can.”

“I don't put chemicals into my beans and call it natural flavoring.” Hellena took the bag and put it in the cart. “I'll need to get bacon, onions, brown sugar, and the rest of the makings.”

She went off for the other ingredients.

Ukiah consulted his mother's list and added a bag of dried beans to his own cart. “Why are you having a cookout?”

“Because life is good,” Rennie said. “We're home safe from Oregon. Hex is an urn full of ash and we've made a sizable dent in his Gets. For once, we're on top and we've got our teeth in their throat.”

The cantaloupe woman wheeled past them as Rennie talked about teeth and throats with the baby on his shoulder. She gave Ukiah a look that indicated she thought he should retrieve his son from the scary man, family or not, and edged on by.

They moved on to the baby goods' aisle. The smell of baby powder perfumed the air from a thousand sources. They paused in the flood of baby sweetness.

“And this is what it's all about,” Rennie said, tracing a chubby baby smile on a diaper package. “Life, fresh and new, individual as snowflakes, innocent of yesteryear as it is of yesterday, free to be as good and noble as it chooses to be.” Rennie picked a bright rattle off the shelf, stripped it of its tag, and handed it to Kittanning, who crowed with delight. “And you're going to be a very good boy, aren't you?”

“Rennie!”

The Dog Warrior laughed. “We'll pay for it.”

Ukiah picked up a package of diapers, made sure they were the right size, and dropped it into his cart. “So we're winning this war finally? It sounds like it.”

“I'd like to think we are,” Rennie said. “The problem of
cutting the head off the hydra is finding the body before it grows new heads. We've lost the trail and all the Gets left seem to have gone into deep cover.”

“Where they can be making countless more.”

Rennie shrugged. “The odds have always been in our favor. For every thousand people they infect trying to make a Get, only one survives, and the big spike in the death rate tells us where they are. If they weren't so bloody hard to kill, we would have wiped them out by now.”

“But that's what they're most likely doing, isn't it? Infecting everyone they can get away with?”

“Perhaps.” Rennie sobered. “The Ontongard is one vast creature spread across trillions of bodies scattered through the universe. Try as it might to keep to one pattern, its knowledge base is uneven. What one Get might know from its host, another won't know until the information is shared via a mouse, and only after the source Get has recalled the information in order to store the knowledge in genetic memory instead of whatever the host uses for a brain.”

“Yeah.” Ukiah wasn't sure where Rennie was going with this line of reasoning.

“Well, each host has a different knowledge base, sometimes overlapping, sometimes totally unique. Hex and Prime had similar memories and abilities, but not identical. At some point, they have a common origin point, where their knowledge base merges, but it's impossible to tell how many generations back that might be. They were the same host race, but the creature that infected the hosts could have been one of a hundred thousand of the invading force.”

“So we don't know how Hex thinks.”

“We've got a lot of experience figuring him out, but no, we don't. And we're not dealing with Hex anymore, but one of his Gets, or even several of them. Because of their host memories, the Gets might go where Hex wouldn't have led.”

It was a sobering thought. Ukiah took hold of the cart to move on.

Kittanning squealed as they started out of the aisle,
“Beef and applesauce!”
And he whacked Rennie on the head with the rattle for emphasis.

“I think he wants us to get beef and applesauce,” Rennie said mildly, getting whacked again.

“Kitt!” Ukiah scolded, scanning the small jars. “The baby books say he shouldn't be eating beef yet.”

“He's a growing Pack baby,” Rennie said. “He could eat road kill and thrive.”

Father and infant both winced at that, and Ukiah said, “Let's just stick to beef and applesauce.” He collected four jars of each and put them into his cart. “What about the Ae? They weren't on the scout ship. If the Ontongard are losing the war, would a Get use the Ae when Hex hasn't after all these years?”

Rennie stilled. “The Ae weren't in the Armory?”

“It was empty.” He fell silent as a young mother came down the aisle, pushing an infant in her cart while trying to keep a toddler in line.
“I thought only about the guns; they were scattered all through the ship from Prime's running fight.”

“Completely stripped?”
Rennie growled, his thoughts running over the handful of more exotic weapons. Many simply rendered opponents helpless so they could be infected; once the battle moved to the cellular level, the Ontongard themselves were powerful weapons.
“By the time Coyote created me, as the first of the Pack, Hex had been reduced to knives and rifles.”

“You think if he had the Ae, he would have used them then?”

Rennie shook his head slowly.
“He knew about the ship on Mars; it had to be a powerful carrot. If he used the Ae, and killed off mankind, what would he use for Gets? Pigs? Squirrels? He needed intelligent tool users to save the rest of himself, between starting in Oregon and his reluctance to risk himself, it might have been a hundred years before he knew about monkeys.”

“Thank God,” Ukiah murmured.

Hellena came up, carrying an armful of baked bean ingredients. She looked back and forth between scowling Rennie and tense Ukiah. “Can you come tonight and eat dinner with us?”

“We'll be at McConnell's Mill,”
Rennie said.

McConnell's Mill was an old gristmill complete with waterwheel turned into a state park north of Pittsburgh, located in a gorge cut through bedrock by glacial runoff. It was a place of craggy outcrops, giant boulders, hidden niches, and green moss. A favorite haunt of the Pack, they were cautious, however, not to use it often; their secret war with the Ontongard had made them enemies with the human government. The Pack had ancient ties with the family that owned land beside it so that their camp actually fell on private land. A barn provided shelter and the surrounding farmland privacy, and thus they had all they needed.

“If you're howling way out there, why are you shopping here?”

“To extend you the invitation.”

“You could use the phone. Humans have had them for over a hundred years now.”

Rennie made a rude noise.
“And have known how to tap them for over fifty years. They are clever monkeys, you know.”
Annoyance mixed with pride in the statement.
“ Besides, this way I get to see my grandson.”

Rennie didn't state it, but Ukiah sensed that Rennie didn't expect him to bring the infant out for a late night in the cold autumn air, Pack blood or not.