Tainted Trail (32 page)

“I'm what's left of his father,” Rennie murmured gently, tying a tourniquet to his arm. “His father was killed a long time ago by the one we fight. And if we didn't fight, then everything we love would be lost. Poets lingering over coffee, spinning words just for their beauty. The young women in their summer dresses, throwing you heated glances. Cats twining about your legs. Children's laughter. Even the simplest wildflower.”

Rennie stabbed the needle into his vein and filled the hypodermic with his ruby blood. “It's a hard thing, to kill and lie and steal when all you want to do is live a peaceful life. You go on, only by knowing that ruthless as you are, the enemy is completely soulless.”

“If his father is dead,” Jared said, frowning, “how can you be what's left?”

“By a simple injection.” Rennie caught Jared's arm, stabbed the bright gem into soft flesh and thumbed down the plunger. Jared jerked in Ukiah's hold. “Like that one.”

Jared staggered back, holding his arm, staring at the bleeding pinprick. “What did you do?”

“Something that needed to be done.” Rennie returned the hypodermic to its case. “You'll understand completely soon enough, and you'll know how sorry I am.”

Degas drifted into the light. “The trail is growing cold.”

“We're done here,” Rennie said.
“This place is fairly safe, but leave as soon as possible, and avoid Pendleton. Drive to Idaho and catch a plane there.”

No other words or action. The Pack melted into the night, dark forms moving quick and silent. Seconds later Jared and Ukiah stood alone in circle of light.

“What did they do to me?” Jared asked.

“They're making you one of them. You'll get extremely sick, and when—when you get better, you won't be just yourself any more.”

Jared stared at him, his jaw working. Finally he asked. “What's happened to my baby sister?”

Ukiah shook his head. “She—she's gone.”

“What do you mean by gone?” Jared asked quietly.

“Those that took her, did the same thing to her as the Pack has done to you, only it's worse. You received a mutation of the original. You'll keep some semblance of yourself, your hopes and desires. Everything Zoey was will be stamped out.”

“Matt Brody and his wife and Quinn?”

“Gone.” Ukiah glanced to the cabin as the door creaked open; Max and Sam came out cautiously. They must have watched everything through the windows, for Max looked as upset as Ukiah felt.

Jared blinked at Ukiah, stunned, looking younger than Ukiah remembered him ever seeming. Lost and scared. “There has to be something we can do to get Zoey back!”

Ukiah swallowed down the growls but couldn't stop pacing, his hackles raised. “No, there isn't! It will spread through her like a cancer, only like a cancer of the blood, and the flesh, and the bone. You can't cut it out. It goes through her, making her into itself, and then she
isn't
anymore!”

“If it's like cancer,” Sam said quietly, “quickly growing cells, can't we treat it with chemotherapy?”

“I don't know how that works,” Ukiah said. They had talked about chemotherapy for his Mom Lara, for her brain tumor. It proved to be unnecessary, and the doctor spoke of her recovery as miraculous. Ukiah suddenly wondered if his blood had anything to do with her healing.

Sam explained. “You give a patient a toxic drug that affects the fastest-growing cells, like the cancer or hair. It gives normal, healthy tissue a chance to grow after the bad cells have been killed.”

“I don't know if it would work,” Ukiah said. “Many poisons don't work on the Pack. Our cells are able to recognize and adapt to the danger poisons pose. All that would happen, I think, is that the human cells will die.”

“After two hundred years, I figure that the Pack has tried everything at least once, twice if it worked,” Max said. “What happens when a Pack infects an Ontongard? Not that I'm crazy about the idea, but at least Kraynak and Zoey would be alive and somewhat individuals.”

“The Pack tried once. It didn't work out,” Ukiah said.

“Why not?” Sam pressed.

Ukiah had sudden sympathy with Rennie, being at a loss to explain the complexities of Pack and Ontongard to him. No wonder Rennie just gave Ukiah his memories. “Normally the Pack passes memories off to one another in the form of mice.”

“Like what Rennie did with you?” Max asked.

“Yeah.” Ukiah winced, remembering the hostile mouse that Rennie gave to him in a coffee can. It hadn't been pleased with being handed off to a breeder.

Max guessed at an outcome. “So, if you injected an
Ontongard with Pack genetics, all that would happen is that the Ontongard would gain the Pack memories?”

“No. Not really,” Ukiah said. “Rennie's memories made me sick because they and my cells were hostile to one another. Somehow the two reached a compromise. While I was dead, and the Pack was looking for the remote key, Rennie and Hellena couldn't absorb my memories—they refused to be taken in. There usually has to be mutual agreement before memories can be added.”

“Couldn't Hex force a memory to cooperate?” Max asked, “Like he forced Kittanning to change from a mouse into a human infant?”

“He
what?
” Sam asked.

“It's a long story,” Max temporized. “I'll explain later.”

Ukiah considered the question. His gut reaction was that neither Hex nor his Gets would take a Pack mouse in, even if they could force it to merge. He fumbled for words to shape that instinctual feeling. “Hex probably would think it as too dangerous to consider. Prime wiped out the entire invasion force except for Hex. Prime registered on the Ontongard's senses as one of them. He managed to hide his individuality. Before we killed him, Hex was still bewildered by Prime and the Pack.”

Sam was trying to keep up with the conversation. “The Ontongard can recognize Pack now.”

“Recognize it, yes. Understand it, no. It's the Pack's experience that Hex's Gets will attack without hesitation, and fight to the death, regardless of the situation. Similarly, the Pack will attack and kill a Get—only they're willing to run away from a fight that they absolutely can't win. It's one of the reasons Pack have kept ahead of the Ontongard.”

“What do you mean?” Max repeated Ukiah's phrase back to him. “The Pack tried it and it didn't work out? They tried to infect an Ontongard? What happened?”

“I was getting back to that,” Ukiah said. “You sure you want to know?”

“Yes,” Sam said. Max and Jared nodded.

Ukiah covered his eyes with his hands. “The Pack figured one mouse is a lost cause; the Ontongard cells would attack
until it was gone.” So many of Rennie's memories were cursed blessings. Ukiah discovered ignorance was dangerous, but so much of Rennie's past was horrific. “Hex had taken over a little boy, only like six years old, and the Dog Warriors didn't want to destroy the child without trying to save it. They killed the child in order to weaken the Ontongard.”

Ukiah shuddered. The killing had to be brutal to be effective. Rennie loathed every second of it. “Then they injected a massive amount of Pack genetic material into the healing body. Several of the Dog Warriors donated blood.”

“The child died,” Max guessed.

“What survived wasn't a child, but a collection of animals, some Ontongard, some Pack. The boy's body just broke apart and fled in all directions. All the animals that were Pack returned to the blood donors, slightly diminished but unchanged. They hunted down the surviving Ontongard animals and killed them.”

Sam held up her hand, trying to halt the flow of information. “Prime was your father, and Hex was the leader of the Ontongard. But they are both dead, so Rennie is now your father and Alicia is now Hex.”

Ukiah and Max gazed at her, and then traded puzzled looks, helpless to explain better. “In very simple terms,” Ukiah admitted finally. “That's more or less it.”

“But you're special. How special?” Sam asked. “Can you change Ontongard into something else?”

“No!” Ukiah cried.

Max looked at him bleakly. “You told me that your blood has been transforming people and your moms' dogs without killing them or wiping out them out as individuals. You could counterinfect Kraynak and Zoey.”

“Make them my Get?” Ukiah jerked away from Max, shocked that his partner would even suggest it.

“While I'm glad I'm just me,” Max said, “if I had to be your Get or Hex's, I'd pick being yours. I know you don't like the idea, but if it's the only way to save them, maybe we should try it.”

“No, no, no!” Ukiah backed away, waving off any
possibility. “If I
can
make Gets—Max—exact cell copies! They would probably be breeders!”

“Maybe,” Max said. “The wolf dogs aren't. Your mother wasn't. Your blood changed them, but not into Gets or breeders.”

“But these are Ontongard Gets, Max!” Ukiah cried. “Think of someone like Hex, but set on spawning as many children as possible. They're brutal rapists of the worse kind: they use any force they need to take a female of the host race, no matter the age or willingness.”

“As your Get,” Max pressed, “they would mentally be like you, have your morals.”

“I'm a genetic mishmash from an alien mutant!” Ukiah warned. “My blood has done things unheard of by the Pack. My Gets could totally retain their own minds—but in this case, the hosts are already mentally Ontongard.

“Or your blood could restore their human mind,” Max said.

“Max, much as I love them, I can't risk it.” Ukiah shook his head. “Besides, the Pack would never let them, or me, live.”

“They're letting the wolf dogs live,” Max pointed out.

“That's different,” Ukiah protested. “That was an accident and they're not really Gets. Besides, I think only the Dog Warriors know. The Pack tolerates Kittanning because they know I didn't have a choice in his creation, and they're reasonably sure he'll grow up to be a good person. If I made a Get, they would probably decide I wasn't the person they thought I was—and kill me, Kittanning, and the Get.”

Sam seemed ready to scream from the hopelessness of the situation. “I can't believe that your people came on a spaceship with all that advanced technology, and there's no way to reverse this.”

“Why would they ever want to?” Ukiah asked. “Why would they want to unmake themselves?”

Max sighed. “Ukiah, there's no technology that could reverse the effects? No drug? No antibacterial, chemotherapy, retrovirus—anything?”

Ukiah opened his mouth to say no and then considered
harder. The ovipositor started as a weapon of war against the Ontongard. A race known as the Summ had welcomed the lesser-advanced Ontongard, confident that if a war became a matter of starship against starship, they would win. Only after a quarter of their race was dead or converted did they realize their danger. By then, telling friend from foe was impossible, and a racial cleansing would have needed to start at the heart of the Summ civilization. Recognizing that the war was truly being fought at the molecular level, the Summ worked feverishly to develop tools of genetic manipulations, only to have their lead scientists fall to the Ontongard and corrupt the technology to their use. “Well, part of the ovipositor did complex genetic manipulation. It would create a viable offspring between Ontongard and the native life, a child that could breed with the native stock and produce offspring that the Ontongard could easily infect.”

“So we can use this ovipositor to do genetic manipulation—like to design something that will get Zoey back,” Jared said.

Ukiah shrugged. “The ovipositor was on the ship, and Prime destroyed the ship.”

“Was this where your mother was taken?” Jared asked. “Up in the mountains? Buried in the ground?”

Ukiah stared at Jared in surprise for a minute before answering. “Yes.”

“It wasn't destroyed,” Jared said. “It was damaged. You went back once.”

“I did?” Two hundred years after puberty, and his voice could still crack. “You know this?”

“My great-grandfather Jay told me about it,” Jared said. “The two of you had gone up in the mountains when he was young. Your mother had told you about finding her way home, when you were very young. She gave very vivid landmarks. While she was alive, she wouldn't let you go there, and she lived for a very long, long time. But after she died, you and he looked for it.”

“And I found it?”

“Yes, you found it.”

Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon
Friday, September 3, 2004

Ukiah saw the excitement on Sam's and Jared's faces and winced.

Max, though, knew the truth. “Ukiah used to know where the ship was. He doesn't remember anymore.”

Ukiah said, “I lost the knowing when Magic Boy was murdered. I don't have any memories of living with your family.”

It hurt to see the excitement die out of Jared's face. Clearly, he felt betrayed and yet struggled to hide it. Worse, Jared had gone pale and trembling as Pack virus surged through him. Ukiah could feel the tendrils of it fighting Jared's defenses, finding ancient weaknesses created by the Kicking Deers' exposure to Ukiah's blood while Ukiah was in his mother's womb.

Ukiah scrambled to find some hope to offer Jared. The photographs had shown that Magic Boy had been chopped into many pieces. Hands severed from arms. Arms cut off at the shoulders. A nightmarish child's puzzle of body parts.

Some of Magic Boy definitely went on to form Ukiah. For his memory loss to be so drastic, he would have to start out as just a fraction of that whole. A leg, the headless torso, or perhaps just the arms changed, sometime, somehow, into Ukiah.

Which meant there had to be other parts, in some form or other. If he found one, he could conceivably recall the
location of the scout ship—but would he still be Ukiah afterward?

“Maybe if I can find some memories,” Ukiah offered weakly. Sam looked at him with confused, faint repulsion. “Exactly how do you
find
memories?”

Ukiah glanced to Max, who sighed and nodded agreement that the time had come to be completely upfront. “I'm not so much a person as a colony of cellular beings. If you cut off my hand, then my hand would reorganize itself into something that could survive. It would become a rat or a bird or a fish—and my body would grow a new hand to replace it.”

Sam shuddered. “Oh, I hope you're talking theory and not practical experience.”

“Theory,” Max said.

“Actually,” Ukiah reluctantly admitted, “maybe practical experience.”

“Magic Boy,” Jared hissed, his eyes unfocused as he made all the connections. “When Magic Boy was dismembered, all the severed pieces became animals and ran off. That's why his body vanished.”

“Yes,” Ukiah said.

Max understood the implications. “But there might be other parts of Magic Boy roaming around with his memories still genetically coded.”

Jared blinked back into focus, surprised. “You don't think all the parts reassembled in Ukiah?”

“And why do you need them?” Sam struggled to understand. “Don't you remember? And if you've forgotten, wouldn't have they?”

“It's possible I'm only a fraction of Magic Boy,” Ukiah fumbled for words. “I could be just his torso or one of his legs. There's no telling what I went through from the time he died to a time I clearly remember. I could have existed as two rabbits and a squirrel for a decade until they merged into something large enough to make a human child.”

Sam's hand slid up to cover her mouth, and from behind its protective screen, she whispered, “Oh, that's soooo weird.”

“When I became human, at that point, there's a change as
to how my memory is stored. Bird, squirrel, or fish—the piece of flesh was big enough to form an adult creature. When my cells decided to become human, they could probably have only formed a child—most likely there weren't enough of them to make an adult. And genetically, as a breeder, I have to grow to sexual maturity.”

“And like Kittanning,” Max applied what he knew to Ukiah, “your ‘old' memories were lost as you grew up.”

Ukiah nodded. “For Kittanning's sake, I'm glad how my father's mutation works out for us, but I wish I could have kept my memories of my mother and my family.”

“What kind of animals do we need to look for?” Jared asked, already turning to the task at hand.

Ukiah spread his hands helplessly and guessed. “Mice. Snakes. Gophers. Dogs. Cats.”

Sam stared at Ukiah, shaking her head. “I'm looking at you, and I just see a sweet kid. I can't believe what you're saying.”

“He is a good kid,” Max said. “Everyone has quirks. His are just weirder than most.”

Jared ignored everything but saving Zoey. “Are you sure these lost parts will remember?”

“No,” Ukiah admitted. “They've certainly lost some of Magic Boy's memories. How much depends on what's happened to that set of cells since the murder. The fewer changes and trauma, the more that piece will remember.”

“These alien cats and dogs,” Sam said slowly, obviously still struggling with the whole concept, “are they going to look just like other regular animals?”

Ukiah spread his hand helplessly. “They might be black. Certainly, they would be long-lived and nearly indestructible.”

“Little Slow Magic,” Jared said.

“What?” Ukiah said.

“He's a family pet.” Jared wiped sweat from his face with a trembling hand. “We've got pictures of him with my father as a baby. He's always seemed indestructible; he's lived through everything we've ever done to him, including accidentally running him over with a truck.”

“What the hell is he?” Max asked.

“A turtle.”

 

Jared vomited in the yard of the Kicking Deer farm. He had held out, growing sicker by the minute, until they arrived. The moment the Blazer stopped, he fought the door handle, tumbled out of the SUV, and threw up in the grass. After the first few wet upheavals emptied his stomach, he continued to dry heave, as if his body was trying to force out the alien invaders by any method possible.

Jared's mother and Cassidy were the only ones at the farm. They swung from being relieved at seeing Jared in one piece to alarm, as he lay sweating and weak on the lawn. Ukiah carried him into the house to a bedroom Jared abandoned along with boyhood. Fever heat poured from Jared, like he was transforming into a being made of flame instead of flesh. Already from his mind, Ukiah caught flashes of delirious thoughts, of rupturing to reveal a creature of the sun trapped beneath the sweat-slick skin.

“I'm sorry.” Ukiah tucked him into the twin bed, dusty from disuse. “I'm a coward. I shouldn't have let them to do this to you.”

“Could you have really stopped them?”

“I don't know. Trying would have been better than this.”

“Cub, how would your dying save Zoey?”

“It wouldn't have.” But at least he wouldn't have to listen to Rennie's words come from Jared's mouth.

 

Max waited for him in the dim, comfortable living room. “Jared's mother has gone for his grandfather; he's a medicine man of some sort. I've tried to explain something to Cassidy; I'm not sure how coherent it sounded, but she didn't ask a lot of questions. She and Sam are looking for the turtle now. Apparently they just let him wander around loose.”

Ukiah closed his eyes and
felt.
As he suspected, Little Slow Magic felt much like Kittanning, a distant echo of himself. There was a difference, a deeper resonance to the answering note. “He's out back.”

Max gave him a worried look. “Rennie's memory made you sicker than hell. You sure you're going to be okay?”

Ukiah wished he were better at lying; he was too scared to convincingly say, “I'll be fine.” ' Max knew him too well. Since leaving Sam's cabin, implications of absorbing Little Slow Magic slowly filtered in from Rennie's memories. “I don't know, Max. The Pack, they try not to share too many memories back and forth; apparently it makes it hard to keep track of who you really are.”

“You never said anything about Rennie's memories confusing you.”

“There's enough difference between us that I can tell where I stop and he begins. I
was
Magic Boy; when I take in Little Slow Magic, I might go back to being him.”

“Shit.” Max rubbed at the stubble on his face. “I don't think you should do this, kid. You're risking your whole identity on the hopes to find a hidden space ship intact enough to pull out a piece of technology that
might
help you save three people who will kill you on sight, if we could find them before the Pack reduces them to ash.”

For a moment he felt relief, forgiven by Max for refusing the danger. Then the memories crowded in. All the times they didn't warn Kraynak. Zoey's quick affectionate acceptance of him. Alicia in his arms, feeling safe.

Protect your people, that is what you were born to do.

Was this what the bear meant? The possibility helped calm the raging fear inside him. “I have to, Max.”

“Are you going to recognize what you need? Do you know how to make it work? How to modify it?”

“Yes, and soon Jared will too.”

 

Little Slow Magic was a large black turtle, and excited to see him. The turtle extended his leathery neck and bobbed his head in the closest thing to being rambunctious as he could get.

Because Sam and Cassidy had already been looking for the turtle, there were four pairs of expectant eyes watching Ukiah lift Little Slow Magic up, feeling that familiar shiver of joy welcome him. He never felt the need to hide taking
back a memory before; suddenly the act seemed too intimate to do before two virtual strangers.

“I think I'd like to do this in private.”

Tucking Little Slow Magic in the crook of his arm, he wandered off onto the prairie. When the house and barn were toy-sized in the distance, he sat down on the low grass. The turtle in his cupped hands, Ukiah waited with fear skittering around in his stomach like cold-footed mice.

And waited.

And waited.

It wasn't going to work. Unlike his other memories, there was no impatient want to merge. Ukiah sensed that Little Slow Magic was mildly lonely—part of a large, loving family and yet isolated by his very form. True, Little Slow Magic was happy to see him, but as a long-lost brother. The turtle had too long been an individual to consider himself only part of a whole.

Ukiah stared at the turtle in his hands, stumped. Rennie's mouse hadn't wanted to merge with him; the small crushable bundle of fur submitted only after he nearly killed it. Tearing the turtle into pieces would require a great deal of violence.

The happy burble from Little Slow Magic ended abruptly. Head, tail, and all four legs jerked suddenly into the shell, which snapped tightly shut.

Ukiah eyed the closed shell. Considering that Little Slow Magic was most likely supernaturally strong for a turtle—dealing with him just got even more difficult.

“I need you. Please. Help me.”

It was like throwing stones into a well, straining to hear if there was water at the dark, distant bottom.

“I don't want to hurt you. Zoey is in danger. I need you to help her.”

Ukiah focused on the girl, the bright smile, the dark eyes, the chin that cocked up in defiance. He remembered her then in the Ontongard shack, struggling to defy the viral alien within her.

“I need to save her.”

From the dark well of Little Slow Magic's mind, images of Zoey echoed back to him, only these from floor level.
Zoey's bare toes absently rubbing along his chin. Green, succulent lettuce while Zoey droned on about the injustice of being a woman. Toenails, ten for Zoey and twelve for Little Slow Magic, painted to match.

“We,”
came the impression, not words,
“will save her.”

What was Little Slow Magic pressed against Ukiah's palms, and then seeped into him, cautiously joining with him. He felt the genetic links move through him, rushing with his blood, like someone opened his veins and poured lava in. He gasped in surprise and took in a deep breath . . .

 

. . . panting air clearer and crisper than any he remembered breathing. He was young, a baby of two or three, but pleased that he'd gotten so far from his mother's watchful eye. He stood on the ridge that would someday house the Red Lion Hotel and the I-84 overpass. On the far ridge, unfarmed prairie stretched out as far as the eye could see, golden grass waving in the wind. Huts of tule-reed mats clustered in the river valley, racks of drying salmon promised a winter of plenty . . .

A jump, memory lost.

. . . The wind outside was howling against the tule mats, making them rattle. His family lounged around a fire on furs. Four boys tumbled together like puppies. He was the oldest, but still very young. Eight? Nine? The other three boys were seven, five, and three years old. A woman sat with an infant at her breast. A man sat watching them with contentment in his eyes.

“Tell us about the crow people, Mother,” one of the other boys cried.

“Yes, Kicking Deer,” said the man. “Tell us about the crow people.”

The woman breastfeeding the infant looked up, and he saw it was his mother. She was older than when Prime took her, a woman of her midtwenties, not of her midteens.