by Wen Spencer
The head of security came out of the smoke, coughing. “You! What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure. Someone swapped our stuff out and left bombs behind,” Ukiah said. “I don’t know who. I don’t know why. Rennie is hurt bad; I need to get him to a hospital.”
“Where’s Stewart?”
Ukiah squinted at him in confusion until he remembered that the guard with them had introduced himself as “Mark Stewart.” Ukiah looked back at the flames licking out of the chamber. “Oh, shit! He’s still in there!” He flashed back to the moment before the bomb went off. “He opened the crate and triggered the bomb. He took the blast full on.”
Most likely the poor man had died instantly.
“How did you get out?”
“My friend carried me out. He shielded me from the worst of it.” Ukiah motioned to Rennie. “I’ve got to get him to the hospital. I think he’s dying.”
The head of security looked at the heinously burned Rennie and swore.
“Let me take him to the hospital. I can get him there in the time it will take an ambulance just to get here.”
“Fine, fine, let me get you through the front gate.”
His mothers’ home was the nearest safe harbor. The house was empty and still. Ukiah carried Rennie up to his bathroom, put him into the empty tub, and then raided the kitchen. Judging by the food crowding the refrigerator in strange dishes, and the many human scents lingering in the house, Mom Jo’s large extended family had rallied to her side. On the kitchen table was last night’s Butler Eagle, the headline reading “Second Baby Found Dead: Local Baby Taken.” Pinned to the refrigerator by magnets was a MISSING flyer with Kittanning’s photograph. Beside it was a crayon drawing by Cally of an empty crib labeled in crudely copied letters “taken.”
He took the food upstairs and used it to coax Rennie back to consciousness.
“Where are we?” Rennie felt like a supernova of pain against Ukiah’s awareness, the burnt skin cells peeling off in sheets.
Ukiah tried to mentally distance himself from Rennie’s pain. “My parents’. Drink this.” “This” being a quart of orange juice, eight raw eggs, and a bottle of chocolate syrup mixed together. “Where are the Dogs?”
“What day is it? What the hell happened?” Rennie gulped the drink down hungrily.
“We found a nasty surprise at Iron Mountain.”
“Where?”
“I’ll explain later.” Ukiah gave up on trying to get information from Rennie. “We’re safe now.”
Rennie grunted and dropped the empty bottle over the edge of the tub. “More.”
They split Uncle Johnny’s homemade deer jerky, Aunt Kat’s egg salad, a package of kielbasa, and an apricot Jell-O and cream cheese salad donated by one cousin or other following the family’s traditional recipe. The last was solely a comfort food for Ukiah. Afterward, Ukiah cut away the wet burned clothes from Rennie, peeling off burned dead flesh with the cloth. Rennie’s back was a blistering, bleeding mass thick with splinters of ancient wood. Ukiah used tweezers to pick out the largest pieces of wood—Rennie’s body would eject the smaller pieces. When Ukiah had been healed back from being shot by Hex, he woke covered with the shotgun pellets.
When Ukiah had done all he could, he fed a jar of peanut butter to Rennie, exhausting his mom’s ready supply of protein. “That’s it. Go to sleep.”
“Are you safe?” Rennie’s thoughts were already clouded with sleep.
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
Ukiah sat on the tiled floor beside the bathtub, hurt and heartsick, watching Rennie sleep, ashen and deadly still. His mind, though, was locked on those last few moments, the guard alive and unharmed beside him, smelling of Old Spice cologne, standing near enough that Ukiah could sense the heat of his body.
And now he was dead.
They had been so focused on Kittanning that they blinded themselves to the danger. He should have called Max and Sam. He should have told Indigo about the trip to Iron Mountain. Maybe one of them could have guessed that the trap left wouldn’t ensnare, like he and Rennie thought it would, but simply kill.
“The ‘what ifs’ will drive you insane if you let them,” Max had always said, and Ukiah knew that it was never so very true as now. But an innocent man was dead, blasted away.
There was nothing he could do, and Kittanning was still missing.
He got up to change.
He stripped out of his damp clothes, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and rescued what was in the pockets of his wet slacks. His wallet was a soggy mass that he dropped onto his nightstand. His phone was dead, killed sometime between the bomb blast and the swim in the underground lake. He called Max on the house line.
Max answered, apparently reading the phone number on his display and leaping to a conclusion. “Is something wrong, Lara?”
“It’s me. I’ve got a mess,” Ukiah said and recounted what had happened at Iron Mountain.
“Iron Mountain?” Max swore. “Zlotnikov worked there. It was one of the first jobs he held down after dropping out of college.” He read dates off to Ukiah.
“That’s ten years ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, he was there when Hex’s Get picked up the remote key. Hex set up password codes instead of the photo IDs and such that they normally use out there. Zlotnikov could have heard the code ten years ago, and then five years later, given it to cult members dressed as Omega Pharmaceuticals employees to steal the machines and leave bombs.”
“If the cult is making Invisible Red, then it’s the cult that has Kittanning,” Max said. “And vice versa.”
“But where?”
“Damned if I know. If they’re from the area, though, they know it well. We’ve talked to half a dozen classmates already . . . oh, damn!”
“What?”
“William Harris. Billy!” Max snapped. “What’s Harris’s middle name? Robert?”
“Robert.” Sam’s voice was audible through the phone.
Max swore. “Hutchinson is somewhere in front of us on this. He’s talked to the same people we interviewed today. If the cult has the machines, we’re going to have fun getting to them before the federal government gets them.”
“Only if Hutchinson can find the cult before we do.”
“I’ll put Alicia, Chino, and Janey on this,” Max said. “One of his classmates might know where he is.”
Ukiah frowned, missing a link. “Zlotnikov? He’s dead.”
“Billy Bob!” Max said. “William Robert Harris—Billy Bob Harris—was the popular minister’s son that befriended Zlotnikov! According to the yearbook, his nickname in school was ‘Will,’ or ‘Iron Will,’ or ‘God’s Will.’ He was in a half-dozen clubs: war games, ROTC, first responders, computer club, and a prayer group. We made a quick stab at tracking him down earlier, but let it drop when we hit pay dirt on others that graduated with Zlotnikov.”
“Hutchinson knew Harris’s name when he came to the office.”
Max thought a moment and said, “That’s right. I forgot that.”
“Why did he miss the connection?”
“He might not have,” Max said. “He might not be sharing everything he knows.”
Ukiah heard his mom Lara’s Neon pull up, the slam of doors, and Cally’s high voice. “My mom just got home. I need to catch her before she finds Rennie.”
“Okay. Call me back when things are settled there. We’ll start looking for Harris.”
“Be careful,” Ukiah said. “If he’s Adam’s Billy Bob, he’s deadly.”
Cally was first through the kitchen door, slamming it open and squealing at the sight of him. She glanced quickly around the room and then rushed for the living room. Ukiah snagged her first, wincing as it pulled tight on the burned flesh of his back.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he said as she wriggled violently in his grasp.
Mom Lara came from the door, eyes hopeful. “Did you find him?”
“No,” he said. “Rennie’s been hurt
and I needed to take him someplace safe.”
Cally went still in his hold. “Kittanning isn’t here?”
“No, pumpkin, we haven’t been able to get him back yet,” Ukiah said. “One of my friends is upstairs in my bathtub. He’s hurt and needs you to be quiet. Can you do that?” He put her down. “Why don’t you go out and play? I need to talk to Mommy.”
Lara stood motionless as he approached her, arms wrapped tight around her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, rubbing a hand along her shoulder and back. When she nodded, he told her, in as few as possible sentences, about how the questioning of Alicia had led to the storage site, and the bombs left as a trap. Then, because she still seemed so distant, he said, “I’m sorry about bringing Rennie here. I don’t know if the offices are being watched, and he’s hurt too much to defend himself. He should be fine in a few hours, and we’ll leave then.”
Lara sobbed then and caught hold of him. “I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t. I could have been the strong mother, if you’d just be the little lost boy.”
“I’ve got my own little lost boy to be strong for,” he told her, which only made her cry more.
When Lara had calmed down enough to start lasagna for dinner, Ukiah returned to the attic to check on Rennie and changed into a dry T-shirt, underwear, and riding leathers. Sooner or later, Iron Mountain would check with Butler Memorial Hospital; once they learned Ukiah never arrived with Rennie, they’d probably report both men and the Cherokee to the police. Now was not the time Ukiah wanted to be answering difficult questions; he was going to switch vehicles to his motorcycle.
He was pleased to see that Rennie was recovering swiftly; the Pack leader would be back on his feet in a few hours. Unfortunately it left him without a backup. Picking up his jacket, he trotted back downstairs.
Max called him back just as he hit the last step. “Have you turned on the television?”
“No.” Ukiah carried the phone into his moms’ living room and turned on their modest set. It showed a helicopter view of smoke pouring out of the hillside of Iron Mountain. “The mine explosion on Channel Eleven?”
“It’s on all the local channels. They’re trying to decide if it’s a terrorist strike. Apparently there are lots of government and banking records stored in the mine.”
Ukiah flipped through the local stations, wincing at what he found. As Max claimed, reporters from the four or five major stations were speculating on which terrorist group could be responsible and why. He muted the sound and let the images continue to play. “Have you gotten a lead on Will Harris/Billy Bob, yet?”
“No one was at the manse, but one of the neighbors was home and we talked with her,” Max said. “She had the television on and that’s where we spotted the reports on Iron Mountain. Apparently, Billy was a middle-aged surprise for his parents; his father, the preacher, retired right after Billy graduated from high school, and his folks didn’t have the money to send him to college. He had some EMT training, so he joined an ambulance crew.”
“Did he work with anyone we know?”
“I’m not sure at the moment. The neighbor used little town connections: girlfriend’s second cousin’s in-laws. You know how it is—lots of interconnected relationships but rarely a full name. It sounds like Billy didn’t fit in well though, the rest of the crew seemed to think he was an arrogant little son of a bitch whose sloppiness was going to get him fired or thrown in prison. Then he suffered a mental breakdown and started to talk about seeing demons and angels. His parents were trying to get him diagnosed when he vanished and showed up in California, arrested for assault and battery.”
“Which is how he met Adam Goodman.”
“So it seems,” Max said. “The neighbor only knew that he came back to Pennsylvania, gathered up his old friends, and they moved to New England.”
“What’s in New England?”
“Who knows?” Max said. “But Hutchinson said they scrapped everything there and moved to Buffalo.”
Ukiah recalled the Buffalo power grid they found on the cult’s Web site. “Actually, that makes sense. The Ae need power. Usually you hook one of the portable generators up, like the ones we used in Oregon.”
“If they have the Ae and they have the power, why are they in Pittsburgh kidnapping kids?”
“Maybe they thought they needed to key the Ae to a breeder.”
“But Rennie said the one that makes Invisible Red is keyed already,” Max pointed out. “Besides, how would they know Kittanning is a breeder? If they knew that, wouldn’t they also know about you? Hell, how do they know about any of this stuff? I’ve seen Ontongard technology—how did Zlotnikov, a security guard with a high school diploma, figure out that they’re alien doomsday devices? We’re not talking honor roll student here.”
“I don’t think he did realize that the Ae are doomsday devices,” Ukiah said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been killed by it.”
“Oh, shit, that’s right. The Invisible Red wouldn’t hurt him until it cleaned out of his system. When the police jailed him, it set him up to be knocked off.” Max was silent for a moment, and then said, half to himself, “Zlotnikov knew enough to get one Ae to work, but how?”
Ukiah hoped that it was only one. “I don’t know.”
“Unless there’re instruction manuals you haven’t mentioned, this goes back to the Ontongard. We’ve used their machines only by wit of Pack memory.”
“But if Zlotnikov is dead, he wasn’t Ontongard.”
“So we keep saying,” Max said. “I hate to say this, but we might need to make sure that Zlotnikov was actually buried and not running around perfectly alive at the moment.”
“Good point,” Ukiah said. “Goodman is definitely dead, though.”
“And how,” Max agreed and sighed. “That’s all we’ve managed so far. We’re going to see if we can track down who all went to New England and if any of their families have heard from them, or know anything enlightening.”
“Okay.”
“Be careful,” Max said sternly and hung up.
Ukiah sat massaging his temples, trying to make sense out of the mess. He reviewed what he knew about the cult, from Hutchinson’s first mention to the Web site tied with what Max just reported.
Was Zlotnikov human or a Get? The dead security guard at Iron Mountain had said that someone accessed the machines, counter to what Alicia/Hex remembered. Also the thieves made an elaborate production out of moving the Ae, using Omega Pharmaceuticals “uniforms.” The Ontongard wouldn’t have bothered with such props. So it seemed likely Zlotnikov was solely human and at least partially responsible for the Ae’s theft.
Why the bombs though? Zlotnikov would have known that the Ae sat unchecked for fifty years. Why endanger so many human lives on a trap that might not be triggered for another fifty years?
Ukiah gazed at the muted television, still showing the smoke billowing out of the entrance of Iron Mountain. He picked up the remote and flipped through the local stations again: slices of the same disaster, seen from different angles.
The bombs weren’t a trap. They were a warning signal to the cult: their theft had been discovered.
Whatever the cult had planned surely now would change. With this, they knew they were being closed in on. They would move. They would dig in deeper, someplace new.
One thing he learned from running with the wolves, one had to kill a snake before it went underground.
Cally had been sitting on the front porch steps when he walked out of the house. He patted her on the head as he passed, deep in his own thinking. Mom Jo’s extended family might actually prove to be a good resource in finding William Harris, alias Billy Bob, alias Core, and his cult, the Temple of New Reason. Whereas he, Max, Indigo, and the Pack would all be outsiders stumbling over unfamiliar ground, Mom Jo’s family had a vast, old, and trusted network throughout the entire Butler County region. There might even be members of the cult related to Mom Jo that he didn’t know about, although he doubted it; othe
rwise Goodman’s attack probably would have come at the farm.
But he knew Mom Jo’s family well enough that they would respond best if Mom Jo organized the search rather than he or Mom Lara.
It was another twenty minutes before Mom Jo got home from the zoo, and his bike was nearly out of gas, so the best use of his time would to be to hit a local gas station.
As he backed his bike out of the wagon shed that served as the farm’s garage, he noticed that Cally had followed him, and watched him with big sad eyes.
“What’s wrong, Cally?”
“Kittanning is coming back. Right?”
“I hope so, honey.”
She burst into tears. “This is all my fault.”
“Pumpkin.” He leaned down to hug her. “How could it possibly be your fault?”
“I asked God to take Kittanning away, and he did!”
“What?”
“I’m the baby!” Cally wailed. “I thought we could go back to the way it used to be, but everyone just cries when they think I’m not listening. And I didn’t want him hurt, I just wanted him to go away, but those mean men have him, the ones that are killing all the babies, and it’s all my fault!”
“Hey, hey, God wouldn’t make Kittanning go away because you asked him to.”
“He wouldn’t?”
“Would Mom Lara or Mom Jo ever hurt someone just because you asked them to hurt them?”
“No.”
“If God is wise and powerful, why would he do something Mama or Mommy wouldn’t do because it was silly.”
She frowned, trying to fit the two worldviews together.
“God wouldn’t do it,” Ukiah said firmly. “This isn’t your fault.”
He rode to town with Cally on his mind. Guilt had taken root in her beyond what simple logic could pluck out. He supposed it was the nature of being raised within a faith. All Cally’s life she had been told that God would answer an earnest prayer, and now, beyond all reason, she thought he’d granted her selfish wish. She had heard Ukiah, understood, and yet, even as she acknowledged the wisdom of his words, she still believed in her too-generous God. Ukiah supposed it was the problem of all religions, that God was defined and thus limited by the worshiper; Cally had not foreseen the harm Kittanning’s disappearance would cause, and thus neither, she believed, could “her” God.