Tainted Trail (29 page)

They stopped at the Chevron station just after six a.m. As the gas station attendant filled the cars, Max ducked into the convenience store to pick up traveling supplies.

Sam came to lean against Ukiah's door. “If Kraynak doesn't pay, are you guys going to be in a lurch?”

“A lurch?”

“Desperate for money.”

“Max has been paying for this out of his pocket. If Kraynak pays him back, Max will make out. If not . . .” Ukiah shrugged. “Max feels like he owes Kraynak for sticking with him during the rough times after his wife died.”

“I really hate to have to ask this, but you guys
can
afford to pay me to drive the car back, right? I'm not going to get to Pittsburgh and find everybody is dead broke after this.”

“We can pay you, no problem.” Ukiah wasn't sure how much money Max had. He had protested once over Max giving him half the company, which had assets totaling close to a million dollars. Max claimed that the company was nothing compared to Max's total worth.

“Good.” She looked over Ukiah's shoulder. “God, your father is just like a dog, here one moment, gone the next, then back again.”

Ukiah startled, thinking Sam meant Prime, and then remembered that they had introduced Rennie as his father. His so-called father pulled into the gas station, his mental hackles raised.

“What is it?”
Ukiah asked.

“Crow.”
Rennie pulled out his pistol, aiming out over the river.

Ukiah spun and looked. The black bird sat several hundred feet away, watching with beady black eyes.
“One of Quinn's?”

“Can't tell at this distance.”
Rennie pulled the trigger. The report shattered the early morning quiet.

Sam jumped in surprise. “Jesus Christ! What the hell?”

The crow exploded into a flurry of black feathers. It's
limp body, however, fell into the river. Both Ukiah and Rennie swore.

“Maybe it was just a bird,”
Ukiah thought.

“I'll go see if I can find one of the feathers.”
Rennie pulled out of the gas station and rode away.

“I don't know,” Sam sighed, watching Rennie go. “I don't think Max can pay me enough to live in the same state as him.”

 

Max had seen Rennie fire his pistol and then drive away. Ukiah wasn't sure what Max said to the clerk in the convenience store, or if this type of thing was common in Oregon, but whatever the reason, no police arrived to investigate the shooting. When Max came out, asking what Rennie had been shooting at, Ukiah tried to explain with facial expressions and gestures while Sam ranted about his lunatic father killing innocent birds.

 

When they pulled into the parking lot of St. Anthony's Hospital, Rennie drove up to join them.

“You
are
taking him with you, aren't you?” Sam asked.

“Sort of.” Max ducked the truth. At the airport, they planned to split up, Rennie going to fetch the Demon Curs. Max glanced into the car beside the Taurus. “I thought I recognized it. Tell Shaw that the FBI is here.”

Ukiah nodded and crossed to where Rennie was parking his motorcycle. “Did you find any feathers?”

“No,” Rennie said, which was bad. Alien feathers would transform and crawl away before Rennie found them.

“The Crown Vic is a federal car. There's no telling where and how many FBI agents are inside.”

Rennie frowned at the hospital. “Now is not the time I want to be messing with the FBI. When is your flight?”

Ukiah checked his watch. “In a little over an hour at seven-thirty. We're going have to hurry to make it.”

Rennie sighed. “I would like to see you onto the flight, but you've got your partner, and his love, and I've checked out the local FBI agents. They're human.” He started up the motorcycle, and it rumbled to life.
“I'm going to find Degas
and the Curs to let them know that there's Ontongard in Pendleton. Make sure you get on that plane, even if it's without Kraynak.”

“I will,”
Ukiah promised. He reached out and gripped Rennie's shoulder.
“Be careful.”

Rennie leaned over and crushed him in a bear hug.
“Go home to your lady of steel and your little one. Keep safe. It's good to finally have children to return home to.”

 

“What do we tell Kraynak?” Ukiah asked Max as Sam paused at the café for coffee. Except for the occasional nurse, the hospital seemed empty, the slightest noise echoing up the hard tile hallways.

“Well, we'll have to tell him something close to truth, we owe him that,” Max sighed. “Basically the same people that kidnapped the FBI agents in June also took Alicia. They injected her with the same virus that killed the agents.”

Hex experimented with an immunity-suppression drug to increase the chances of host survival. The result had been a slower transformation rate that drove the newly made Get, Janet Haze, mad. She had lost the remote key to the mother ship, which Hex needed to release the crew who Prime had locked into cryogenic sleep. Ukiah found the key without realizing its importance. Sure that the key had been recovered by a law enforcement agency, Hex had first raided the Pittsburgh police's evidence room. When that turned up nothing, he kidnapped FBI agents and tried to make them Gets so they could retrieve the key from wherever it was being stored.

The agents died without transforming. As the homicide detective assigned to the murder cases, Kraynak would know what Alicia had faced.

Max shook his head. “He's not going to want to go home until he has her body.”

“I can't believe this has happened.”

“We've known Alicia was probably dead since you were shot.”

“I know,” Ukiah whispered as Sam came out of the
coffee shop, still intent on stowing pocket change. “But this is worse than dead.”

 

They had gone to Kraynak's room to find him gone. The nurse at the station told him that he had been signed out already and taken by wheelchair to the first floor. The private investigators hurried to the emergency-room exit first, as they had just come from the main entrance. When Kraynak wasn't there, Sam headed them toward a little-used side exit.

They were still two hallways away from the exit, when Zoey's voice, sharp and thin, echoed from around the far corner.

“His heparin lock needs to be taken out. I'm sorry I didn't notice earlier. Let me call the nurse.”

“That won't be necessary.” A woman's voice, familiar but flat, emotionless.

“Alicia?” Max caught Sam's arm, pausing her, as he looked at Ukiah.

It seemed inconceivable that Alicia's body could ever produce such a cold sound, but Ukiah sniffed and caught her scent. Hers, but not hers. Stripped of all the perfumes of soap and deodorant, thick with sweat and dirt, tangled with the Ontongard.

Ukiah froze, torn between running away and charging forward. “It's a Get.”

“No, don't do that.” Zoey sounded horrified.

He charged.

“Ukiah!” Max hissed, and then started after him, calling to Sam, “Call 911. Get the police out here!”

Ukiah reached the end of the hall and turned the corner. Down the empty, dim hallway, three people were silhouetted against the bank of glass doors to the sun-baked parking lot.

Kraynak sat in a wheelchair, dressed in street clothes, looking battered and gray. All the bruises that were faded and forgotten on Ukiah remained vivid on Kraynak's face and bare arms.

Zoey tugged at the wheelchair handles as a woman pulled the bloody IV tube from Kraynak's arm. Zoey looked up as
Ukiah rounded the corner, and relief spilled across her face. “Uncle!”

Kraynak, already smiling, only brightened at Ukiah's appearance. “Ukiah, look who popped up out of nowhere!”

The woman straightened and looked at Ukiah with dead eyes. How could Kraynak mistake this thing for Alicia? The creatures governing her face twisted it almost unrecognizable with sudden feral excitement. After the raid on the Brody house, all of Alicia's stylish clothes were accounted for. The oversized shirt and jeans that the woman wore had none of Alicia's flair. Beside Zoey—in her clean, starched, bright, tortoise-blue scrubs—the woman was rumpled, gray and dowdy. Even the way she held her stolen body was wrong, void of Alicia's liveliness.

“Alicia” Ukiah said. But it wasn't Alicia any longer. “Hex.”

“I am Hex.” She acknowledged the name with Alicia's voice and Hex's hard cold stare. “And I know you now, dog child. You stink like your father's Gets, but you're a breeder.”

“We killed you in Pittsburgh,” Ukiah said, edging closer, trying to get between Alicia and the other two.

“Was that what happened?” Alicia said. “I wondered at the sudden silence. No matter. You killed a piece of me, but I'm much larger than you can imagine, dog child.”

Behind Ukiah, Max halted short of the corner, his gun coming out in a whisper of metal on leather.

Kraynak looked between Ukiah and Alicia/Hex, frowning at their stilted conversation. “What's going on?”

Ukiah nearly cried out a protest against Kraynak drawing attention back to Zoey and himself. Ukiah reached for his niece. “Zoey, come here.”

Alicia caught hold of Zoey. “No, no, no. I wondered why people in this area made such good Gets. Your mother was changed in some way after she carried you in her womb—mingling her blood with yours—wasn't she? She went on to have many children after you, didn't she? That's why this little one called you Uncle.”

“Let the girl go.” Ukiah could smell a gun on Alicia, the
sharpened steel of a knife, and even the tang of C4. He and Alicia could survive almost anything, but Zoey and Kraynak could not.

Alicia twisted Zoey in her hold, pulling the girl's head back until Zoey's neck corded with strain. “You want her safe? Then we all go outside, quietly. You come with me, and I'll let them go free.”

Ukiah caught the edge of a mental summons as Alicia called to Ontongard outside. He fought the urge to flee, pinned in place only by the pleading look in Zoey's eyes.

“Alicia!” Kraynak cried out, shocked.

Max stepped around the corner, gun leveled at Alicia. “No one is going anywhere.”

“Drop your weapon or I'll break her neck,” Alicia stated. “Trust me, I'm faster. Drop it.”

“Like hell I will,” Max growled. “I've seen how you keep your promises. I'd rather see the girl dead than your Get.”

“Don't hurt her!” Ukiah cried, trying to hold at bay the inevitable. “Max, get back, she's got backup coming.”

“So do we,” Max said.

But Alicia's was already arriving in the form of a green work van pulling up to the bank of glass doors. The driver was a tiny woman that could only be Vivian Brody. The van's side door slid open, revealing five men with shotguns aimed through the glass at Max. The beefy blond man in a rumpled, stained, gray uniform was clearly Matt Brody. One of the others was Dennis Quinn, looking weirdly stretched and thin, as if he hadn't absorbed back enough body mass to recreate the familiar form.

“Max, get down!” Ukiah shouted as he felt the Ontongard's communal intent.

A hundred things happened at once.

The Gets in the van fired, flame and pellets blossoming from the ends of the shotguns.

Max shouted at Kraynak, the most vulnerable in the hallway, his pistol kicking in his hand as he returned fire.

Kraynak flung himself out of the wheelchair, diving for the cover of an alcove holding a water fountain.

Sam reached out and jerked Max back around the corner
just as the shotguns filled the corridor with metal, glass, and noise.

Zoey struggled in Alicia's hold, trying to break free.

Ukiah dove to the floor at Alicia's feet, hoping to wrestle Zoey from her in this moment of mass confusion.

Alicia pulled a pistol in that moment, as the sheets of glass sprayed out on either side of her and Zoey, carried by the shotgun blasts, glittering in the morning sun like thrown diamonds. She pointed the pistol down at Ukiah's head, and pulled the trigger.

Ukiah had one moment of awareness, all filled with sound and pain and muzzle flash. Then he was dead.

The Mountains
Day of Shooting

The Wolf Boy came alive.

He was aware of a pain in his head from a small, neat hole in his temple, and a large, messy piece of his skull missing, and a tunnel through the gray mass between the two. Part of him wanted to sleep, reserving energy to heal. The rest recognized danger close at hand. He had to get up. He had to flee.

Normally his body shunted memories to his bloodstream, where they were encoded into his genes. While he had been dead, and his blood idle, his short-term memories had been purged as cells frantically dealt with mortal shock. So it seemed like black lightning had struck him. One moment he had been in the hallway of broken glass. Then, complete darkness flashed across his senses.

He woke sprawled halfway on a bare foam-rubber pad, the size of a toddler's bed, which lay on a old linoleum floor. A crack in the wall by his face let in air—mountain-thin, chilled, and scented with pine. A two-liter pop bottle sat by his shoulder, label peeled off, filled with sugar water. He sniffed it cautiously, and finding it innocent of poison, drank greedily. The carbohydrate intake barely touched the raging hunger in his stomach, brought on by the need to mend a badly damaged body. The sugar water would keep him alive, but he wouldn't heal.

A handcuff trapped his left hand; stainless steel looped
tight around his wrist, the other loop around a steel pole. He examined the pole and found that a hole had been hacked through the wood floor, a solo tube set down into the ground beneath the building, and the whole concreted into place. He searched for a loose nail or pin to pick the lock and failed. He gnawed desperately at the steel, at his wrist, and then finally broke the bones of his hand to collapse it down small enough to slip through the loop. He swallowed whimpers of pain—
they
were close, so very close.

The girl child of his mother's line whom he had come to love lay close.
They
crawled through her, changing her into one of them.
They
had started in her arm, and the flesh writhed as it converted. The change went up her neck, and flashed across her face.
They
were in her brain now, and she cried out as
they
established
their
dominance. He heard what she said, but couldn't understand the words any more. The head wound robbed him of that ability. He did know, however, that there was no saving her now, and he wanted to howl in misery.

The big male that he associated with friendship and safety was chained to another pole, sleeping. At the Wolf Boy's muffled sobs, the man startled awake and stared in amazement at the boy. He made a motion for the boy to come to him. The Wolf Boy could smell
them
inside of the man, under the veil of stale cigarette smoke and sour fear. He scuttled away from the man, growling. The door, though, was locked and solid. The only other exit was over the man's head, a dirty window showing a twilight sky, so he cautiously approached the man. The man spoke softly, not shouting for
them.

Once closer, the Wolf Boy could see that the man had fought and delayed the injection. The man's immune system waged a feverish war with the alien invader, but it wasn't a battle he could win. The boy felt deep guilt now—if he had trusted the big man with the truth about
them,
the man could have fought free long before being hopelessly ensnared. As it was, the man had been happy to see
her
and had gone willingly and unknowing to his own destruction. The boy flung himself into the effort of freeing the man.

The big man caught the boy's chin, eyed the wound on his temple, and then turned the boy's head to see the damage in the back. The man's voice became a low growl of anger while the Wolf Boy examined the man's restraining band of steel. The metal cuff pressed deep into the flesh, nearly cutting off blood to the hand. Even breaking the bones of the hand wouldn't free the man. While the other cuff rode up and down the pole freely, giving the man some range, the pole itself was solid in the floor and ceiling.

The man caught and stilled the boy, silenced his whimpers with a hard look. He spoke for several minutes, words that the boy couldn't understand but would always remember. The man stood, opened the window over his head and motioned for the boy to climb out, into the gloaming.

There was no way to save them, but it felt wrong to leave them behind.

The Mountains
Day After Shooting

The Wolf Boy was so cold and so very hungry. He kept moving. He drank water when he crossed streams. He ate meadow mushrooms, lichen hanging from pine branches, late-seasoned blue elderberries, and huckleberries found as he ran. He could keep moving on what he found to eat, but not enough to either stay warm or heal.

During the night he used the pattern of the now-nameless stars to head west. He was being followed. He could feel it. The sense of
they
splintered even as he left the cabin, and some followed. By
their
very nature, he could not tell how many followed, or in what form. By the same means he knew
they
pursed him,
they
tagged after him, blindly following the tenuous link of shared genetics. But
they
did not have the Pack's wolf instincts, nor his Wolf Boy experience and intelligence.
They
could not hunt what
they
could not see, and so the night cloaked the Wolf Boy, protecting him.

Then dawn came, and the hunt started in earnest. He heard the crows calling as they moved through the forest,
growing closer. He was drinking from a stream when the first one found him.

The black bird landed in a soft flutter of wings. They eyed each other: the Wolf Boy in terror, the bird in eager greed. The bird's eyes were all black—irisless—just like
His
had been when
He
tried to kill the Wolf Boy days and days ago, back home.

The similarity in his enemies' eyes triggered the boy to action. He snatched up a water-smoothed rock and flung it hard. He didn't expect to hit, and perhaps for that reason alone he did. The crow hesitated, expecting a miss, and the stone struck full on. Breastbone crushed and internal organs ruptured, it fell out of the tree.

Blind hunger made the Wolf Boy leap the distance separating them and snatch up the body. Hot fresh meat! He had it nearly to his mouth, when he remembered the man who nailed him to the wall. He flung the bird away from him in revulsion. He couldn't eat it—it wasn't really a bird. Regardless of what it was now, at one time, it was human.

The bird shuddered, cells trying to work around the damage. Growling, the Wolf Boy picked up the body again, and tore off the wings and legs from the bird, flinging them into the stream.
There! Be frogs! Be fish! Be minnows! Leave him alone!

A small brook trout he hadn't noticed came out of a shadowed overhang, heading for the bits of alien bird. The Wolf Boy's eyes went huge and he pounced, snagging up fish with skill learned in seventy years of running wild.

They
were getting close, so he ran, biting through the silvery scales of the fish to the delicious flesh below.

 

They
had him cornered.

He had been running down the hill, and suddenly there was a cliff. He caught hold of a tree to stop in time and hugged it tight, panting. Trees grew right up to the edge, screening the drop, digging roots into stone to lean branches out over dizzying space, disguising the actual lip. As best as he could judge, the cliff continued north and south for
wrinkled miles. At the foot of a cliff, a river ran through a course of massive rocks, shallow and clear.

Behind him, toward the rising sun, he could feel
them
strung out, growing close. Before him the sheer drop; it would take great physical strength that he didn't have to get safely down. If a fall killed him, he'd be captured for sure. Nor could he afford to injure himself further; he could barely keep up the current pace.

He paused, panting, trying to think like the man he knew himself to be. As he did, his hand operated without thought, turning over stones and fallen branches. Five pillbugs scattered under the third stone. He prodded them with a fingertip, making them curl into tight balls. He popped them into his mouth. They crunched as he chewed.

He felt
them,
but he didn't know how many or what forms
they
were in. If only crows pursued him, he could kill them easily enough. It brought to mind the earlier crow, and the Wolf Boy grinned in savage delight.

 

It
wasn't a crow.
It
was the big, blond lawman. Bullet holes peppered the heavily soiled deputy uniform, indicating that
it
had abandoned all pretenses of being human.
It
carried a shotgun, and the sight of the gun set the boy's chest spasming in perfect recall of being murdered by such a weapon.

The boy scrambled backward and away.
It
charged after him like an enraged bear as he ran parallel to the cliff, racing along the ridge. He sensed
them,
moving through the woods, making no efforts to cut him off. Why?
They
had him in an almost perfect trap.

It dawned on him that
they
didn't know the lay of the land. A plan came to him, based on an event that happened long ago, between him and a grizzly. He shunted the memory away, frightened that
it
would read his mind.

He veered east, racing down the hill, gathering speed, not thinking of what lay ahead.
It
turned and followed,
its
bulk and longer legs lending
it
speed, narrowing the gap between the boy and
it
.

And suddenly there was the cliff and the great empty space. He ran straight up to the edge and leapt . . .

. . . and caught a tree branch. He swung out farther into the void, and then up into the tree itself.

As he hoped, like the grizzly of long ago,
it
had been too intent on him.
It
realized too late that
it
was going to fall. Part of
it
reached for the tree trunk, and part of
it
leapt for the tree branch, and other parts tried to stop—but all of
it
failed and went sailing out into the air.
Its
howl of anger and fear ended abruptly with a wet, heavy thud on the rocks below.

Which only went to prove that there were some advantages to being a single individual.

The Wolf Boy swung back out of the tree and raced off.

The Mountains
Second Day After Shooting

He heard Max's whistle the next morning, after running all night without sensing
them.
The whistle went through him, piercing as an arrow. He jerked to a halt—torn between wanting to flee in mistrust of all living things, and wanting to go to the one he trusted completely.

In the end, he crept out of the woods and down to the forest road where a car sat. Max waited there, watching him come. Finally, his courage abandoned him; he crouched down, fifty feet from the car, and whimpered. Too scared to go forward, too afraid to run.

After a moment, Max made a show of stripping off his weapons and jacket. He pulled a package out of a bag, and opened it. The smell of roasted chicken spilled out of the package.

Then slowly, Max walked to him, chicken held out in peace offering. The Wolf Boy stalked cautiously closer, meeting him halfway, sniffing. The familiar, trusted scent, nothing alien added to it. The chicken cooked and cooled, the aluminum peeled back to show a brown, crispy skin.

The Wolf Boy crept nearer and put out a hand. Max crouched unmoving as the Wolf Boy's fingers pressed
lightly to the back of Max's hand. Finding him wholly Max, the boy snatched up the chicken, burying teeth into the tender cooked meat. His eyes closed in the pure bliss of taste. He growled softly as he tore off the meat, gnawed down to the bone and sucked on the joints. The chicken, which seemed so wondrously large, quickly became a pile of clean bones. He licked grease from the aluminum foil, whimpering in distress that his belly still seemed empty.

Max spoke quietly, and then finger-talked. “Come.”

The Wolf Boy sucked the grease from his fingers, and used them to speak. “Food?”

“Food.” Max reached out for the Wolf Boy's shoulder then dropped his hand as the boy shied away. “Follow.”

The rental car sat on the side of the dirt road, the driver's door hanging open, the tracking system quietly showing his position.

 

A second chicken, a fistful of candy bars, a jumbo jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a gallon of whole chocolate milk, and a pack of beef jerky later, the boy allowed himself to be coaxed into the backseat of the car to be covered up with a wool blanket. It was frightening, but Max was here. He slept to the rumble of tires on dirt road, car engine, and the comforting sound of Max's breathing.

The Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon
Friday, September 3, 2004

He was trapped. Try as he might, he couldn't get out! Trapped!

Ukiah jerked awake into darkness.

He was curled into a tight ball, the way he used to sleep, trying to copy the wolves' nose-to-flank slumber. He opened his eyes, a low growl rumbling in his chest, until he made out the steep roofline of Sam's loft bedroom in her little A-framed cabin. A dim light downstairs threw a pale halo on the ceiling beyond the loft's railing; one of the mismatched lamps by the angle.