Tainted Trail (15 page)

Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon
Saturday, August 28, 2004

Ukiah woke when Sam slipped out of the bed, disturbing his background filter. He leaned over the edge of the bed, found his clothes, pulled out his phone, and called Max.

Max answered on the third ring. “Hey, kid, how are you?”

Ukiah considered himself as the shower turned on downstairs. “After the last few days, I kind of feel like a kite: thin sticks and paper held together with string.”

Max laughed, sounding tired.

“How's Kraynak?” Ukiah asked.

“They don't want him roaming the countryside, looking for Alicia.” Max said. “But they're making noises that all he needs is time to heal.”

“You still at the hospital?”

“No. They kicked me out around two. It took me a while, but I managed to find a motel with a room available. I signed in under my cover name.” Which meant Max was running in full paranoia mode. “Where are you?”

“Sam's house. It's about half an hour out of town, up in the mountains. She says she's taken a lot of effort to keep people from knowing where she lives.”

“Ah,
she says.
Finally, you're learning paranoia.”

“I have a good teacher.”

“You up to a full day's work?”

“Probably.”

“You dressed?”

“No. Sam just got out of the bed and it woke me. She's in the shower now.”

“So you'll need at least an hour to get into town.
The
bed? As in same bed as you?”

“It's a little house. I think your bedroom is bigger than this whole cabin.”

“No couch? No recliner?”

“No.”

“Big bed?”

“King-sized.”

“Good.” Max changed the subject. “Did you have a chance to look at Alicia's daily planner?”

“I flipped through it.”

“Great! I'm going to see if we can get rooms at the Red Lion again, or another real hotel. This motel is too open. I also need to deal with the rental-car people. They're not going to be happy with us, but shit happens. Hopefully they'll have a replacement car this morning.”

“Do you want to go with just one rental car? Sam has a Jeep, as well as the Harley.”

“Nah. I like having a car for each of us. We would have been sunk last night without the second car.”

Ukiah had to agree with that. “So, what's the plan?”

“Take your time getting back to Pendleton. I'll pick up a new rental car and check in on Kraynak. If you saw Alicia's daily planner, we can take a stab at recreating it. Maybe there was something in the planner that the kidnappers knew would lead us to them, which is why they took it.”

“It's worth a try.” Certainly his photographic memory would make it an easy task. He described Alicia's planner in detail. “I'm going to call Indigo, let her know what's going on.”

“That's a good idea. She might be able to give us a heads-up if the local office starts digging into our background.”

Ukiah winced at the idea.

Once Indigo learned of Ukiah's alien parentage, she had risked her career to protect him. She destroyed her copy of the tracking contract Max had drawn up for the FBI, and
erased all mentions of hiring Ukiah to find the missing FBI agent, Wil Trace, which ended with Ukiah's kidnapping by the Pack. She never documented the connection between the Pack and the Ontongard. She treated Dr. Janet Haze's fall into insanity, the coroner's murder, the burning of Haze's body, and the kidnapping of all the various FBI agents, herself included, as separate, unrelated, and mostly unsolved cases.

Ukiah was not sure how she explained her raids on the Ontongard dens and the eventual shoot-out at the airport. He knew, though, that she made no mention of the Mars Rover hijacking equipment, and the Pack reduced it to burnt rubble by the end of the same week

Indigo justified her actions by saying she couldn't blindly hand anyone the means to destroy Ukiah and his family's life. Still, it made Ukiah nervous. He didn't want to get her involved now unless they had to. “Why would the local FBI offices check into our background? We're the victims here.”

“Alicia's ring, a set of tire tracks, a few footprints, and your testimony is all they have on her kidnapping,” Max said. “If it had stayed at that, they might have dug into your background just out of lack of anything else to do. The only good thing about last night's fun and games is that the FBI now has well-described bad guys to find, and you've once again demonstrated that you're an innocent bystander with a hero streak. I want to keep moving, see if we can find anything else to preoccupy them.”

“Okay. I'll let Indigo know that they might be looking into us.”

“Call me back when you hit town and we'll go from there. Oh, and Ukiah, when you call Indigo, don't mention anything about
the
bed.”

“Why?”

“Trust me. Just don't.”

 

Indigo was at her family's restaurant, judging by the background chatter of Chinese and the whisper of Hawaiian music. He felt a moment of disorientation—he expected to
catch Indigo at work—then realized that it was Saturday, and she was doing her normal family breakfast.

“What happened yesterday?” Indigo asked. “You didn't call.”

“Alicia was definitely kidnapped,” Ukiah said. “Our rooms were ransacked, Kraynak was shot, and I was hit by a car.”

“I suppose this isn't such terrible news, then,” she said after a moment of stunned silence. “I just found out that Rennie flew out of Pittsburgh yesterday. He might be in town already.”

Ukiah sat up. “In town? You mean Pendleton?”

“He landed in Portland three
PM
yesterday.” She explained that Rennie had gotten as far as Portland before tripping airport security alarms. “Portland security lost him in the parking lot around four. It's two hundred miles between Portland and Pendleton. He could have gotten there last night.”

“I've been in hiding all night, healing up.” As Ukiah filled her in, he tried to feel the prickly Pack sense that would mean a Pack member was close. No Pack sense. What he did feel was uneasy.

Usually the Pack didn't travel alone, even in emergencies.

The nearest clan was the Demon Curs, controlled by Germain Degas. While complete strangers to Ukiah, they brought dark apprehensions rising in Rennie's memories. It would be surprising if Rennie wanted Degas and the Curs in Pendleton any more than Ukiah did.

But Ukiah couldn't imagine Rennie arriving unaccompanied. “Have you talked to Bear or Hellena?”

“No.”

“So you don't know what Rennie's plans are.”

Indigo's Chinese grandfather distracted her with a flow of English so heavily accented it sounded like Mandarin. “No, Gong Gong, they haven't found the girl yet,” Indigo answered her grandfather, and then guessed at Rennie's plans. “I'm assuming it's to provide you backup. It sounds like you need it, especially with Kraynak in the hospital.”

Indigo promised to keep them appraised of any new information, whether it be from the FBI or the Pack. They said their good-byes and hung up.

The question remained, though: Would Rennie be alone, or would he have Degas and the Demon Curs with him?

 

The mirror in the bathroom showed an older him.

It amazed him sometimes how long it took him to realize he wasn't human. Everyone around him grew older daily, constantly undergoing minuscule changes to their faces, their bodies, and their genetic code. He didn't. From age thirteen to eighteen, he probably aged only a handful of days in bumps and bruises and occasional dog bites from Mom Jo's half-breed wolves. His face had been seemingly unchanging as a photograph.

Then, the day after Crazy Joe Gary shot him through the chest, he startled himself in the bathroom mirror. No one else seemed to notice, but he barely recognized his own face. It frightened him then, not knowing why the sudden change. He knew now that he had aged months in a single day. In the scramble to heal his body, his cells made slight errors copying themselves. Mistakes that mirrored the human aging process. Mistakes that became part of his cellular genetic pattern. In June, even his moms noticed the sudden leap ahead, a year or more worth of damage dealt out in the course of a painful week.

Sam's mirror showed that he had aged again. Not much. Maybe no one else would notice. Very slowly, but just as surely as any human, he was growing older. He stood staring at his reflection, getting to know himself again.

Sam tapped on the door. “You decent?” She leaned in when he opened the door, and picked up her deodorant. “Forgot to put some of this on.”

As she reached the deodorant under her shirt to apply it to her underarms, she studied his bare shoulders and chest.

“So there's some truth to those Kicking Deer legends. Last night I was sure you were going to drop dead on me. Now, I'm not sure why I was so worried. Hell, you look like
you could do a Chippendale number without flashing so much as a bruise.” Ukiah shrugged, not sure how to respond.

She set the deodorant back onto the edge of the sink. “You're gay, right?”

He gave a bewildered shake of his head. “No.”

Several emotions flashed across her face before it settled on annoyance. “Ah, hell, just when you think you've got life all figured out, it hits you up the back of the head with a two by four.”

“Huh?”

“Well, do me a favor. Don't tell your partner that we slept in the same bed.”

“I already did.”

“Shit.” She turned and walked away, muttering. “Oh, well! He was from Pittsburgh anyhow.”

 

Ukiah drove them down out of the Blue Mountains and back to Pendleton. They planned to stop at the Red Lion so Sam could check on her Harley. If the motorcycle was drivable, they would drive separately to the Wildhorse Casino. Saturdays and Sundays, Sam explained, the casino's restaurant featured an all-you-can-eat breakfast brunch.

Ukiah scanned the oncoming traffic as he drove, trying to sense Rennie or any other Pack members.

“Jumpy?” Sam asked when she noticed.

“There's someone Max and I know coming out to act as backup. We're not sure when he's showing.”

“You're calling in another private investigator?”

“He's not a PI. H-h-he's sort of my father.”

Technically, all of the Pack could be considered his father. His true father was the alien Prime, a mutant of the Ontongard race. Wounded and desperate to check the Ontongard invasion of earth, Prime had injected his viral genetic material into a wolf pack. One wolf survived to become the Get known as Coyote. Driven by Prime's memories and desires, the wolf transformed into a man, living at first among the Native Americans. Later Coyote followed Hex toward the East Coast, creating the Pack to war with Hex's Gets.

At their base, the Pack duplicated Prime's mutated alien genetics. Through Coyote, though, they had a wolf taint—instincts to protect and nurture their only son. From their human shells, each held their own hopes and desires for children. Rennie had abandoned his newborn son to carry on Prime's fight; among the Pack, Ukiah counted him as his stronger protector.

“Sort of your father?” Sam echoed. “How does one have a sort of father?”

Ukiah wished he were better at lying. “He didn't know I existed until June—and things started out rocky between us.”

“He knocked up your mom and left her before she knew?”

Ukiah shook his head. If only it were so simple. His conception had been a delay tactic on Prime's part, to distract Hex while Prime programmed a self-destruct code into the already crashed mother ship. Prime knew that Hex would have to find and capture members of a suitable host race, create a half-breed child through complex gene manipulation, prepare a fertilized egg, and do the implantation. Not one to leave things to chance, Prime replaced Hex's stored genetic sample with his own mutated rebel material, and planted explosives in the room where Ukiah would have been born.

The Pack had memories of Ukiah being placed in his mother's womb. They assumed that the explosives had killed his mother long before he was born—effectively destroying him.

But something had gone wrong with Prime's plan.

“Oookay.” Sam broke the silence. “He didn't knock her up. She got his sperm sample off a sperm bank and was artificially inseminated.”

He glanced sharply at Sam, who beamed in response of his look.

“That's it,” she said, “isn't it?”

“Something like that,” he temporized. He supposed it was the closest analogy available. Like any child naturally conceived, he was genetic mix of his mother and father. The
ovipositor that handled his creation, however, had made him—as close as alien technology could—perfect.