by Wen Spencer
Ukiah flicked them forward in time.
Prime was like them, but not. They seemed to have no identity other than the group self. It was as if he were immersed in the sea, their presence shifting all around him, trying to carry him away with their nearly antlike desires. Build here. Destroy here. Gather food. Distribute it. They had bodies like himself, and anywhere there was dirt, they also grew like plants and trees and moss. They were everything until the planet was one vast organism, and the single individuals weren't even antlike anymore, but merely cells in a body.
He drifted through the world, resisting the local urges, masking his thoughts, utterly alone on a planet utterly alive. Perhaps he would have joined with them if not, ironically enough, for the memories they infected him with. They remembered the planet as it had been, the millions of species, the billions of his mother's people. And in comparison, utter worldwide genocide was unpardonable.
Ukiah took another step forward in Prime's life.
They had been pond scum, and later stolen the forms of brilliant, creative creatures, and all the ranges of life between, creeping slowly across the universe. If they ever chose to go back, they could find their home world, but its location was now lost in indifference, caring no more than a seed for its pod after it'd been cast off.
And yet, they remained true to the strictures of life formed on that planet.
Mindless as a dafi plant, they built their seed ships in orbit until L5 bristled, waiting and waiting until the last ship was built. He would have suspected that they had a reluctance to separate, tearing away from the planet that was now virtually one of them, except he knew they held no such emotion. Verily, they had nearly no emotions at all.
The time to sail, though, was now at hand.
One by one, the great solar sails unfurled, and the ships began to peel away, each on a slightly different vector as the planet circled the star, like the white heads of dafi seeds, drifting out on the wind. At the great distance, the ugly ships were merely darkness trailing behind their glistening sails.
If he didn't know that they were death spores drifting toward another planet to kill, he would have found them beautiful . . .
He had failed. They were making a landing on a new planet to rape. A shimmering teardrop of a world, teeming with life, like so many worlds before . . .
Atticus recognized Earth, the North American continent under scant cloud cover. He recoiled. No, this couldn't be true. Ukiah was controlling what he saw. Maybe he was giving Atticus only the most damning of information. Besides, these weren't Ukiah's memories; they could be elaborate creations handed to Ukiah as real. How did they compare to the real thing? The Pack took what they wanted from him, so he must be able to do the same.
Let me see Oregon,he thought, and pushed his way into Ukiah's memory.
It was like falling into a deep well. There was a shallow layer of civilized confusion, and then a long silence of dappled forest. At the bottom, he found a toddler, naked, hungry, alone, and scared.
Where did you go?the child cried, and the voice was achingly familiar.
I don't know.He drew back, away from his failing. This wasn't what he wanted. There was nothing he could do about this. He couldn't even remember how he went from wolf protector to being a child just as lost and alone.
Nor did he want to dwell on those memories of being a feral child. He passed back through them, green leaves, white snow, and shaggy gray bodies. Thoughts so centered on the forest around him, the only horizon being the next meal, that they seemed barely human.
Finally he resurfaced.
The woman carefully pushed a piece of jerky through the cage bars." I know, I know, you don't like the cage." She seemed to be in her early twenties, dark eyed, dark haired, and athletic in build. The child listening to her didn't understand the low-crooned words, but was beginning to trust the speaker." But if I let you out, I'm afraid that you'll run away, so we're going to do this nice and slow and easy."
Another piece of jerky slipped between the cage bars." And we're not going to tell anyone about you. No, no, we're not going to let big, uncaring government with its Jerry Falwell ethics get ahold of you. I'm not going to let that happen to you, my little Mowgli. I'm going to keep you safe. . ."
And up through the days that followed as this woman, Ukiah's adopted mother, showed stunning patience, gaining the wild child's love and gentling him. A second woman merged into the memories, a beautiful sunny blonde, as strong and caring as the first.
" I did research on autistic and feral children. I think"— the blonde paused to accept a snuggling hug from the boy who was discovering the joys of physical affection—"the reason the radio and television bother him is he's suffering from sensory overload. You didn't say how cute he was."
" It was hard to tell under all the dirt and matted hair."
" Well, it's a good sign that he's showing affection."
" Thank you for saying yes, kitten; I know it wasn't fair to ask you to take on a teenage wolf boy."
Teenage wolf boy? Atticus jerked up out of the memories, to stare at Ukiah. "How old were you?"
"Thirteen."
Atticus suffered a sudden flash of guilt—he'd left the baby in the woods and it never found its way out. There's nothing I could have done differently,he told himself. But there were still disquieting echoes deep inside him, plans to search the woods, made and abandoned several times in the last twenty-five years. I knew there was someone I lost.
On the heels of that, he did the math. Thirteen? Ukiah's driver's license claimed he was twenty-one. That meant that Ukiah had been part of civilization for only eight years. No wonder he struck Ru as childlike.
"Food's coming," Ru warned Atticus, and they sat silently as the waiter unloaded his tray onto the table. Ru, though, watched Atticus closely. "Well?"
Atticus had to think back to the last spokenconversation, which seemed like a lifetime ago. Ah, yes, he was sneering at the idea of the Ontongard being bogeymen. "The Ontongard are complete monsters. The Pack is right to be doing whatever it takes to stop them."
Ukiah eyed his plantains and tasted them cautiously. "They're fried bananas?"
"More or less." Atticus swallowed down his unease along with a bit of the sweet fried fruit. Only eight years.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Boston Harbor Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Atticus and his team had just gotten Ukiah tucked into the extra bed in Kyle's room when there was a loud knock at the door.
Atticus stilled and focused. In his memory, he found Sumpter's familiar stride coming down the hall, and could now catch his scent. "Oh, shit. It's Sumpter. Other room."
Atticus went last, closing the connecting doors behind him. Sumpter was knocking a second time when he opened the hall door. "We're over here."
The problem with his and Ru's room was the king-sized bed. While he and Ru didn't lie about their relationship, they tried to keep it fairly low-key, which usually meant keeping Sumpter out of their bedroom. The bed made it a little too obvious to miss.
"Where have you been?" Sumpter shied from the bed as if it were a sex act, heading for the connecting doors.
"We had a lead on the cult," Atticus said, blocking him. "But it was blown to smithereens."
"Let's go in the other room and you can brief me."
Atticus sighed. Trying to keep Sumpter in the dark would only make him more hostile. "We have a civilian sleeping over there. My younger brother."
"What the hell are you thinking?" At least Sumpter stopped trying to flee the room. "What does he know?"
A lot more than I do."Everything."
"Everything? What you are and what we're doing here?"
It took Atticus a second to realize Sumpter meant he was DEA, not that Atticus was an alien. "The whole shebang."
"That's just fucking perfect," Sumpter snapped. "What were you thinking?"
"I think I'm doing my job. Don't come here half-assed,
without a clue about what the fuck is going on, and start raking me over the coals."
"If you bothered to keep me briefed, then I wouldn't be reaming you a new one. You didn't mention this when I saw you earlier today."
"That wasn't Atticus," Kyle said quietly. "That was Ukiah you talked to."
"Ukiah?" Sumpter asked.
"My brother," Atticus said.
Sumpter looked at them as if he thought they were lying and walked into the next room. Ukiah lay in quiet testament that they were telling the truth. "Well, I'll be damned. But why the hell did you bring him into the middle of this?"
"The cult kidnapped him," Ru volunteered, weaving truth and fiction. "They took his wallet and threw him overboard to drown. The Coast Guard picked him up while we were at the cult's hideout this afternoon. He has no money, no place else to go, and a lot he can tell us about the cult."
Sumpter gave Atticus a look that was both calculating and suspicious. Chances were, he was wondering if the entire case was a vendetta to wreak vengeance for Ukiah's kidnapping.
"Can you trust him to keep his mouth shut?" Sumpter finally asked.
"Yes," Atticus said.
"So where do we stand?"
***
They did more than dance around the truth. They dressed up half-truths and waltzed them past Sumpter to divert him from the things they were covering up. It proved useful, though, as it focused on what they knew without the distraction of all the weirdness.
"We know that the cult is using the drugs to fund their terrorist activities. We've heard rumors that they plan something large-scale aimed at the companies they've been wiretapping. Today's bombings were at the offices of six of those companies."
"Why them?"
"We don't know," Atticus lied. "We think it might have to do with a construction project that is common to all six companies."
"The cult thinks they're eeevil," Ru said, dancing closer to the truth.
"This was the island where the cult was hiding." Atticus gave Kyle the GPS coordinates. "It wasn't on Indigo's—Agent Zheng's—list of cult properties. We should find out who owns it; it might lead us to other sites. According to what they told my brother, their drug lab is somewhere in the immediate Boston area."
Kyle nodded and focused on the search. "I think I found it," he said after several minutes. "The same account that bought the island also purchased a warehouse and pays for the electric and such. It's in South Boston, just across the channel."
***
Ukiah woke alone. On the doors and the bathroom mirror, post-it notes commanded: Stay Put!!!Triple exclamation points and no clues as to where they'd gone or how long he should wait.
The thing about his perfect memory was that it didn't turn off while he slept. There, stored with the shifting shadows across his closed eyelids, he found their conversation with Sumpter. They talked about a warehouse in South Boston, planning to put it under surveillance, and what they would need to get warrants and enlist backup from the police to stage a raid.
They had taken Kyle's laptop—source of a nearly constant clicking of keys—and the maps they'd crinkled and rustled, but left behind a series of satellite photos printed onto plain paper. The grainy photos zeroed in on an untidy sprawl of warehouses and parking lots beside a dry dock and rimmed by water. While the address meant nothing to Ukiah, one of the photographs jogged recognition. The cult had a similar picture with a building circled in red and labeled VB6. When he saw it earlier, there wasn't enough in the photo to identify the location, but linked to the other photographs, now part of a whole, Ukiah could guess where the site lay.
And it wasn't where Atticus was heading .
***
Using the hotel phone, he called Indigo.
"Tell me that you're still safe with your brother," she commanded.
"Well, not quite." Ukiah explained the situation while he searched through his brother's luggage, looking for anything to use as a weapon. He found a twenty-dollar bill still tucked into the pants pockets of the jeans Atticus wore the day before, but nothing else of use.
"Either way, this is bad," Indigo said when he finished. "The coast guard found the Nautilusdrifting in the harbor. It appears that the Ontongard caught up with the cult. The boat is riddled with bullets and there's blood everywhere."
"Ice and the others?"
"We've got one John Doe—we think it's Boolean—and that's it."
"There were ten people on the Nautilus."
"There's no sign of them."
He sat on the end of Atticus's bed, stunned by the news. "When . . . when did it happen?"
"Around noon."
Ukiah glanced out the window at the rain-dark night. Hours ago. Any of the cultists taken alive by the Ontongard would have already been infected. Ice and the others were all gone.
Noon, though, would have given the cult time to set up Loo-ae. It could be somewhere even now, slowly filling the air with poison.
"I think I know where they intended to set up Loo-ae." He described the aerial photo and the street map. "Have the Dogs meet me there."
"Be careful. The Ontongard might already be there."
"I know. Tell the Dogs to hurry. I'd wait for them, but I'm not sure there's time."
***
He used Atticus's twenty-dollar bill to take a taxi to the empty corner of Fish Pier and Seaport Boulevard, a few blocks from the target building.
"Here?" The cabbie swept his hand to take in the deserted pier, the empty parking lots, and a tangle of highways disappearing into a tunnel entrance. Obviously an industrial area—there were no apartments or open businesses in sight.
Ukiah hushed him and scanned the surroundings for Ontongard. If he pushed, he could sense a small group of them distantly, moving invisibly in the darkness beyond. He pulled back into himself. Being only one person, he'd be harder to detect, but it was possible that the Ontongard would sense him if he continued to blindly reach out. "Yes, here."
"There's nothing here."
"Yeah, that's good." Ukiah handed forward the twenty, which the cabbie took warily. "Do you know what that building up there is?"
The cabbie gave it a quick glance. "It's one of the ventilation buildings for the Big Dig. They blow air down into the tunnels with big fans to keep the fumes from killing drivers. There's, like, ten of them, all over the city."
Big fans? Ukiah shuddered at the thought of Loo-ae tied to such things, distributing the airborne poison. He'd hoped the cult would have the machine in an enclosed space, where there was a slim hope of containing the viral biotoxin.
Ukiah paid the fare and slid out of the safety of the cab.
In Pittsburgh, there would have been hillsides and deep weeds anyplace that wasn't paved over, but here there was just a flat wasteland of cement and plowed earth. A storm wind was blowing off the black ocean, scouring up dusty ghosts of demolished buildings and roadways. Water slapped against stone, a restless murmur.
"You sure you've got the address right, kid?" The cabbie seemed suddenly friendlier, and Ukiah realized the man had thought Ukiah planned to rob him in this empty place.
"Yeah, this is the place. I'm meeting some friends here." Ukiah waved toward a dark boat moored to the pier. "They get off at midnight. Thanks!"
The cabbie eyed the boat and shrugged. He put the cab into gear and drove away, leaving Ukiah alone.
At least with the oncoming storm, the sky was cloaked and the shadows deep.
Avoiding the pools of light thrown by the overhead streetlights, Ukiah moved wolf-silent toward Ventilation Building Six. It was larger than he had expected—on the photo it had been a small square smudge beside a rectangle of water. In truth, it was built on a giant's scale, several stories high with truck-sized doors. Despite its utilitarian function, an effort had been made to make it pretty. The air shafts rising like chimneys from the roof had been stylized into wedges and tipped with something that gleamed with reflected light.
He sensed something wrong with the buildi
ng and stilled. He stood downwind, in a heavy flow of hot fumes, as if one huge engine were pouring out its exhaust, and caught the scent of blood. Stalking forward, smothering down a growl, he found a human-sized door ajar. Leads bypassed the security sensors in the door's sill, and just inside a night watchman was sprawled out dead—the source of the blood.
The cult was already in the building.
They'd left the guard's gun in its holster. Ukiah crept forward and slid it out.
At the slight noise, the prickle of Ontongard brushed over him.
"What are you doing here?" a voice asked, coming out of the darkness.
Ukiah recognized Ice's voice, though it sounded raspy and hoarse. He reached out and felt Ice, his scent mixed with sickness and Hex's reek. Parts of Ice were still human, but the rest pushed against Ukiah's senses like sandpaper. Ice was becoming a Get.
Ukiah growled low.
"What are you doing here?" Ice asked again. He staggered down the passage, hand on the wall, sweat pouring from him. "You haven't come to stop it?"
"You're infected."
"Yes." Ice licked his lips. "Evil is inside of me, crowding me out. I'm barely here. I'm barely me."
Ukiah could sense the Ontongard presence growing inside of Ice's body, a coil of hate. "I know."
"You must have power over the evil. I can feel how much he hates you. Can you save me?"
"No." There was a machine that could reverse the process, but it was on the West Coast; Ice would be a Get long before they could bring him to it. "Where is Hu-ae?"
"We sold it to John Daggit—the philistine—for access keys to this building." Ice dismissed Daggit with a wave of his hand. "He's making arrangements to move it and what's left of our inventory out of our warehouse on Summer Street. God rest his soul."
"He's dead?"