Tainted Trail (36 page)

The pain was indescribable.

Degas jerked free his hand, leaving his blade still buried in Ukiah's side as the Wolf Boy reeled in pain. He kicked Ukiah in the right knee, shattering it.

As Ukiah toppled, screaming in pain, Degas lunged forward, bowling him over and pinning him to the ground. As
the Wolf Boy struggled to free himself, Degas looked into his one good eye and laughed at his helplessness.

“I'm going to kill you and add you to that fire,” Degas whispered. “Then all those damn Gets you died for.”

The Wolf Boy snarled, lunging up the few inches between them that he could move, and bit down hard on Degas's jugular vein. Degas shouted in pain and tried to jerk away, but Ukiah clung to him, sinking his teeth deeper into the flesh as blood gushed into his mouth, nose, and eyes. Growling against the prickling metal-tasting flow, Ukiah shook his head, tearing free the mouthful of meat. Degas thrashed now, desperate to put pressure onto the gaping wound to stop the blood loss. They rolled on the ground as blood mixed with dirt into a mud base alive with Degas's cells, now individually fighting for survival. Ukiah spat away the meat before it could change inside his mouth. The blood he inadvertently swallowed churned in his stomach, seeking escape.

Finally Degas went limp. Ukiah rolled away and vomited up the contents of his stomach. Blood continued to gush from the wound, ribboning now into a long black snake. Ukiah crawled away, afraid it was poisonous and would exact revenge on him. Collin, he noticed, was being checked by Rennie.

“You know our laws,” Rennie growled. “A fight started by two, ends with two.”

“He's a damn breeder.”

“He's part of the Pack, and he's under my protection. You want to fight me?”

Collin eyed Rennie and then shook his head, backing out of arm's reach. “He won fairly enough.”

“What do you want done with Degas?” Rennie called to Ukiah, reminding him that he won the right to destroy Degas completely—add him onto the bonfire along with the Ontongard.

The thought sickened Ukiah. “Nothing! Let him heal back. I just want Alicia and the others.”

Collin relaxed slightly at the news. “Let him take the damn Gets and go.”

Kicking Deer Farm, Umatilla Indian Reservation
Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Ukiah blacked out totally and came to in a rocking pitch blackness. Only Max's presence beside him kept him from striking out in alarmed confusion.

“Easy,” Max murmured from out of the total darkness. “Mind your leg.”

Ukiah lifted his head, blinking. A bandage covered his gouged eye. His good eye had been covered when his head rested on Max's shoulder, blinding him completely. He could make out Jared driving now, Sam beside him. In the headlights, a hay barn was growing closer, a large, hunched shape in vast, flat emptiness.

Ukiah sat sidewise on the bench seat, his leg splinted at the knee and sticking straight out. A blood-soaked bandage covered the stab wound in his side, and all his various wounds still stung from liberal use of antiseptics. He could remember fighting Degas, but the aftermath was a confusion of pain, centering mostly on efforts to undo the damage Degas had done to him. Wavering in and out of consciousness, he trusted only Max completely, thus the current seating arrangements. “What happened?”

“You won,” Max said. “We've got what we came for, and then some.”

“You do remember what you were fighting about?” Jared asked without turning, a trace of a smile in his voice.

“These trips never make sense until a couple days
afterward,” Ukiah complained, turning his head to compensate for his missing eye. “That is if I'm lucky and get all my memories rounded back up.”

“I've got them.” Max indicated a bulging pocket that radiated faint anxiety.

The barn loomed huge in the twin highlights. Jared swung the truck in a slowing arc away from the barn, stopped, and then backed toward the great doors.

Out across the prairie, a string of headlights moved toward them.

“They followed us?” Ukiah squeaked as he sensed the Pack presence emanating from the oncoming vehicles, mostly motorcycles with a car or two mixed in.

Jared gave a slight laugh, turning off the truck's engine. “They're not going to put a breeder in a car with five Ontongard and let it drive away to play with parts of the ovipositor.”

“One could hope,” Max got out, taking away his warmth, saying, “Stay.” He returned a moment later with a bottle of warm Gatorade, a pack of beef jerky, six Snicker bars, and Rennie.

“Five Ontongard?” Ukiah asked after he gulped down the Gatorade.

“Quinn and a boy,” Max named the two additional Gets offhandedly, his focus on Rennie. “How soon before Degas heals up and comes after Ukiah again?”

“Ukiah won the right to see if this works.” Rennie stripped off Ukiah's bloody bandage and applied a fresh one. “And if Degas wants to deal with the cub again, it will still have to be a fair fight. Neither one will be up to that for a while.”

Max scowled. “Which is to say he'll come after him once he's sure he can win.”

“Perhaps,” Rennie admitted as he picked bugs out of the bandage for Ukiah to reabsorb. “But he'll be on my hunting ground then, and things will be different.”

Jared had gotten lights on in the barn and pushed the great doors open with a low rumble, flooding the night with the green scent of fresh-baled hay. The haylofts were
stacked high, but the main floor was clear, giving them a large private workspace.

“Here goes everything,” Max muttered, and went to lift the steel drums off the back of the truck.

They had no chance to mark the steel drums, and so they opened them on a luck of the draw. Zoey occupied the first drum—fully recovered and snapping. They quickly extended the stasis field over her. While she was completely immobile, they took a hair sample, weeded out a sample of human DNA, and ran it through the resequencer.

Or closer to the truth, Jared did. Ukiah found, to his distress, that in the finer details of working with resequencer and advance microbiology, he had holes in his memories.

“You're not full-grown yet, cub,” Jared said without taking his eyes off the monitor. “You can't get the snot beat of you time and time again, and not lose some of the memories that aren't yours.”

So Jared created their weapon of salvation.

Millennia before, the Summ had realized that the Ontongard's memory, its greatest strength, was also its weakness. Their cells didn't keep a record of what they experienced individually. If they did, a left foot cut off from the body would only know what feet commonly know: dirt, grass, carpet, socks, and shoes. Nor could a cell possibly handle that amount of raw data added to its genetic code.

Instead the cells shunt memories to the bloodstream. The information from the entire body is gathered in the blood to be encoded, and a condensed gestalt returns to be added to each cell's genetic memory. Each cell kept only a record of the full stimulus effect on the full body.

During that exchange, the Ontongard were vulnerable to a Trojan horse that slipped in and took over.

By returning the resequencer to its original function, Ukiah and Jared were able to fabricate a similarly condensed virus disguised as a memory package. Once accepted into the cell, the virus seized control of the memory handler. At that point, the Ontongard cell turned on itself, working to restructure itself into the human DNA blueprint recorded within the virus. The result would not be fully human—the
certain construction mechanisms would remain intact—but they would be hopefully harmless hybrids similar to what Ukiah's children might be.

The Ontongard, after all, were basically no smarter than pond scum. Their intelligence came from their host bodies, which didn't have the ability to control their individual cells. It had been the host's weakness, which the Ontongard first exploited and then circumvented by having the cell communicate on an individual level. Now the virus took advantage of the weakness, immediately muting the besieged cell so no defense could be raised against it.

They injected the virus into Zoey at major artery points, while Hex's helpless rage glittered in her eyes.

It was then they realized their first mistake.

“Wait, what do we do with her extra mice?” Sam asked. “We've got four of hers in the canning jars.”

“Oh, shit.” Max glanced back at the trucks where they left the jarred mice. “We shouldn't have kept them separate.”

“It's too late now, at least for Zoey,” Ukiah leaned wearily against a stack of hay bales, wishing he could crawl off to bed. “We've already treated her. Her mice might reinfect the cells that transitioned to human.”

Sam ran her hand through her short blond hair. “So how do we make the mice go back to being part of the body?”

“We destroy the mice,” Jared said quietly. “It will be mercy, not to remember being hunted down and killed so brutally.”

Ukiah nodded slowly in agreement. The Ontongard mice would flee rather than merge with the trapped body. “He's right. The mice will have to go.”

Max looked down at Zoey, held still on the table. “How long do we wait before we take the stasis field off her? We're going to need it to do Alicia and the others.”

“It's working quickly.” Ukiah could sense Zoey's growing panic as parts of her body became mute, seemingly dead to the rest of the body. “It will slow down as the number of Ontongard cells approaches zero. I'll need to monitor the
transformation. We might need to inject her multiple times to keep the process going.”

“You? You're barely standing on your own power,” Max said. “You should eat something more and go to bed.”

“I'll watch over Zoey,” Jared said.

Ukiah glanced across the barn at where Rennie shifted the next barrel into place beside the second stasis field generator.
Could he trust Rennie's Get with Zoey?

“Me, Jared, will do this,” Jared said. “I remember my baby sister, and I'm not going to let her go.”

So you want to see the new baby, eh, slow poke? Well, there. No nibbling on fingers, no matter how much they look like little worms. How do you suppose, slow poke, you can love someone on first sight? I picked her up, and I knew I'd die for her.

Jared caught the flash of memory and recognized the source. He peered into Ukiah's eyes as if expecting to see the ancient turtle looking back out. “Little Slow Magic?”

Ukiah felt inside him, small yet brilliant, Little Slow Magic's love for the boy he had watched grow into a good man. Jared's face creased with pain as the newly made Get felt the adoration.

“Oh, God,” Jared said, tears suddenly shimmering in his eyes.

“What's wrong?” Ukiah asked him.

Jared surprised Ukiah with a rough hug.
“I never knew how much that old turtle loved me before—and he's given himself to save Zoey.”

 

Alicia was last. All the damage Degas inflicted had healed, and she lay in her stasis field like a sleeping princess. Ukiah gazed at her with new eyes, feeling like he had somehow missed seeing the real her until it was too late. In his memory, he could find a thousand misunderstood words, glances, touches, and kindnesses. She had loved him and tried to let him know—and he had been blind to it all.

And with his new knowledge, he could look back to the Fourth of July picnic with only horror. He had been killed mid-June, and when he came back from the dead, he had
vanished into hiding; the picnic was his first public reappearance. Alicia came early to the picnic, hugged him tight with tears in her eyes, and asked to go up to the attic alone with him, saying she had something important to tell him. Something she should have told him long ago.

Indigo, however, had come out of the house with a screaming Kittanning. “He just woke up crying, honey. I can't get him settled.”

Ukiah took his son, settled him, and met Alicia's puzzled gaze. “Oh, Alicia, this is my girlfriend, Indigo, and this little guy is my son, Kittanning.”

If any of it had been done intentionally, it would have been unforgivable. Even in all innocence, it had been cruel. Open pain flashed across Alicia's face, and then was hidden away. The worst of it was there would be no way to repair the harm. He loved Alicia as a sister or a close friend, but nothing more than that. Hopefully, she would not think of him as her prince in shining armor—because he couldn't be that man for her.

 

They lost Quinn. The process swept through him, but what was left behind couldn't function as a whole. They could only theorize that his splintering down into crows had made some global change that the process couldn't fix. He lay inert, a collection of tissue refusing to function together.

Two of the Curs took the body to dispose of it.

Ukiah limped painfully to where Jared watched over the sleeping Zoey. “Now you.”

“Me?”

“We can make you human again. You've been changed the shortest time, and you haven't been hurt, so there's almost no risk.”

“Uncle, how can I know what these things are, and what they want, and what they're willing to do to succeed—and go back to not being able to see them when they're standing in front of me?”

“But—”

“How many people died while I thought Brody was still himself, that Quinn could be trusted?”

“You can't blame yourself. There was no way you could have known.”

“Because I was human then,” Jared said. “I became a cop to prevent murders like Magic Boy's. It was Ontongard that killed Magic Boy. This is what I need to be to stop them.”

“Jared! You can't stay this way. You don't know what it really means.”

Jared reached out and tapped Ukiah's nose—a greeting of old to Little Slow Magic. “Uncle, I'm enough Rennie to know what this decision means. I'm also Jared enough to make it freely.”

 

Zoey was fully recovered, not remembering anything that happened shortly after the kidnapping. She said she remembered being injected, of growing sick, and the beginning of odd dreams. Except for a tendency to jump at loud noises, and a slight, temporary clinginess, she seemed much her old self on every level that Ukiah could perceive.

Kraynak would be slower to recover. The Ontongard had not healed all the damage done to his body prior to his return to human. He took the ordeal stoically, talking about a long vacation once he got home.

The boy, Glenn, and Alicia both needed repeated treatments to overcome the Ontongard's hold on them. Even Degas, though, had to admit nothing seemed to remain of the alien taint. Grudgingly, he promised to leave the former Gets in peace.

Ukiah called Indigo with all the good news and for the first time, heard her weep with joy.

Pendleton, Oregon
Friday, September 10, 2004

They stayed until Friday for the sake of the recovering Kraynaks, and the Kicking Deers, who wanted Magic Boy to attend the roundup with the rest of the clan. Max made flight arrangements once more, buying tickets for Ukiah, Kraynak, Alicia, and himself. Rennie would travel with
them, but he made independent arrangements, leaving Max wondering aloud where the Pack got their cash.