Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “We found his body.” It was hard to associate the mutated, agonized corpse we had found in the bunker with the dignified man I’d spoken to in the Museum only the day before. After he’d pitched in with his pet Agent, I hadn’t been his biggest fan… but I hadn’t wanted to kill him. “It was… difficult to recognize him, but there were cervine features that were unmistakable. Jenner was sure.”

  Talya closed her eyes for a moment, her brow furrowing. When she opened her eyes, they were dark and glistening. “He was a good man, Rex. I learned so much about history from him, not just Native history. He told me all about ancient Korea, he told me about all of these places he lived… but you know why I decided to join Jenner and Mason instead of the Fires?”

  I said nothing, and waited for her to continue.

  “It was the film,” she said. “The film that you and Zane found. After the argument at work, I realized that John and Michael were just talking about the law and themselves and our position within society that whole time. They weren’t talking about the fact that you and the Tigers had found a film of an adult man raping a child. And I know why they weren’t talking about it. Because it was Josie in the film.”

  “Josie? What do you mean?”

  Her cheeks flushed red with anger. “Because she’s not a Weeder. She’s just a normal human kid.”

  I recoiled inwardly. She was right. At the time, I hadn’t noticed, but now that she mentioned it…

  “That’s all they care about. Bringing new blood into their gangs, building their little army,” Talya continued. Her eyes were hot now, the intense gray and gold of uranium ore. “That’s why John was so nice to me all this time. He wanted me, because I’m a young Weeder. He wants the shifter kids. Ayashe cares about all of them, but she’s so tied up in her job that she ends up not doing anything for anyone. Jenner is the only one who doesn’t see Josie as being worth less than the others, and will do what’s right no matter what.”

  “You could be right,” I said, motioning her forward and starting to walk. “But for now, we should eat. And while we do that, you should tell me what you found on the computer.”

  “I haven’t gotten into the filelist yet. I was able to restore the deleted files, but everything on that computer is password locked. I’m going to go and get a password cracker from work today when I’m safe to drive.” Talya pushed her hair out of her face, and sat heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “I’ll call in sick. This is more important.”

  “A cracker? What on earth is that?” I had vague images of her inserting Goldfish crackers into the computer as some sort of bribe.

  “It’s a software program you use to break passwords. It basically keeps trying combinations at high speed until one of them works,” she replied. “At the office, some people… well, they lock themselves out of their terminals, or they change the password on a group document and don’t know how to change it back. I got Crack so that I could just solve the problem on-site instead of bothering my manager.”

  “Oh. They have something like that for safes, too.” I poured us both coffee, and put together sandwiches. “An auto-dialer. You attach it to the door, and it turns the dial back and forth until the safe opens.”

  “That sounds kind of old-fashioned,” she said. She still looked wan, but some of the color had returned to her face. “Kind of KGB-ish.”

  We ate in companionable silence. It was relaxing to spend time with another Russian-speaking person, even though we were descended from opposite ends of Eastern Europe: me from Ukraine, her from the far Western hinterlands of the Aleutian Islands. Neither of us felt compelled to arbitrarily smile or do anything except share food, tea and coffee while we each ruminated on the events of the night, which suited me just fine.

  Talya left after the meal, and went to check on Josie before leaving the club. I did the same, looking in on the little girl as she slept on, semi-comatose. There were signs of her having been awake. She was clean, for one thing, and there was a makeshift bedpan by the bed. The drip was disconnected. There was a Band-Aid over the bruise in her elbow.

  I wanted to sleep, but pride and duty kept me from bed. Instead, me, my cat and my books and went to work out whatever it was that ‘Soldier 557’ was trying to say with their name.

  Translating a number into text was far more difficult than turning a word or phrase into a number. The difficulty came about from two things: firstly, an entire phrase could be condensed into a string like ‘557’. The coded numbers could be added together and the resulting numbers used instead of a whole string of numerals. In addition to that, a two or three-word phrase, like ‘Glory to Satan’ could be distilled to, say, the number 939, but 939 had multiple possible translations. You could use it to say ‘Glory to Satan’, but 939 was also the number which could be disassembled to read ‘The Holy Spirit’. The translation relied on context.

  After an hour or so of spirited decoding, I had a shortlist of words and phrases. The standout was a single word, which had prickled at my intuition from the moment I’d worked out and etched the letters into the page with a pencil. ‘Glory’. In a stroke of what seemed like some kind of intentional, precognitive cruel humor, the number also translated to ‘Russian mafia’. But ‘Soldier Glory’ didn’t make much sense.

  I exhaled thinly, tapping my pencil against my bottom lip as my chest twinged and cramped. Concentrating on magical matters was not helped by the presence of the parasite. In any case, I didn’t think it was going to be much help in finding our murderer… not unless the ‘Russian Mafia’ translation was more than a case of my own amused bias. For one thing, we didn’t call it that, not unless we were talking to someone outside of the Organizatsiya – and when did that ever happen?

  But as I packed up, the doubt lingered, as did the instinctive resonance of the name Glory. Not a word… a name. I had a hunch, and even with my magic cut off at the root, I trusted my intuition. Whoever was signing off, they were signing off as Glory. Unfortunately, that meant I was out of things to show Jenner when they returned. The name didn’t belong to anybody we knew.

  At a loss, I went to tend to more mundane things. Dressing my wounds, then treating Binah’s burns. She’d had a couple days of antibiotics to take down her infections, so I spent a fruitful hour lancing, flushing and balming my familiar’s abscesses. She shivered in my lap, but she didn’t fight me, or even squirm. As I worked carefully, precisely, the jumble of details, names, incidences, deaths and clues turned around and around until, quite unconsciously, my brain fit the pieces together so smoothly and so perfectly that I stood up in alarm and sent Binah and my tray of surgical equipment to the floor.

  Lev. Sergei. Jana. The TVS symbol… all of it came together in a flash. We didn’t call our Organization the Russian Mafia… but outsiders did.

  Was it a sly joke? Or did they know that someone from the Bratva with esoteric knowledge and skill would eventually figure it out? As I stalked back and forth in the bedroom, fitfully rubbing my mouth and hair and wrist, months of conversation and clues aligned like the faces of a Rubik’s Cube.

  The leaders of the Tigers returned in the evening, tired and disheveled. The pall over the three of them was obvious. They had only found traces of Mason’s passing as a tiger: scents and disturbed brush. There was precious little else. They went to bed with no time or energy to talk. Jenner was blaring punk music out of one of the smaller rooms, but when I passed close her door, I could hear the sound of her cursing and crying underneath the mask of sound. She wasn’t the sort of person to accept an offer of counseling, and I wasn’t the kind of person who could offer it. The only thing that would console her was the return of her old man.

  Talya was back in the common room when I came out: same spot, different clothing. She was reading a book, waiting while the computer ground and ticked. I drew up to look over her shoulder, and was confronted by a maintenance screen which was scrolling through what appeared to be hundreds of words and numbers at rapid speed. “Good grief. What is that thing
doing?”

  “That’s the cracker.” She cleared her throat with a prim little ‘hem-hem’, and then jiggled the pointer around. “It’s been running for a couple of hours now, which means your doctor friend really knew how to make a secure password.”

  “He wasn’t my friend. Will it work?” I stepped back from it, suitably intimidated.

  She guffawed. “Of course it’ll work. It’s a program.”

  I squinted at it, watching the lights flicker. “The first time I turned it on, it made a horrible honking sound. I thought it was about to explode.”

  Talya covered her hand with her mouth for a moment, and then waved it as she struggled not to laugh.

  “What?”

  “That’s the floppy disk drive booting up,” she said, choking a little. “It’s meant to do that.”

  I sniffed. “I nearly put nine rounds into it. Pure reflex.”

  “You’ve never used a computer before?” She had swallowed down on her laughter, but her eyes were still overbright with mirth. Mirth at my expense.

  “No,” I replied. “I have a vague notion that you type on it like a typewriter and point at things with the pointer, but that’s about all.”

  “Pointer?” Her brow furrowed. “You mean the mouse?”

  “I mean the pointer.” I gestured at it. “Though I could be persuaded that the inside of it is run by mice running on wheels, given the noise it makes.”

  “No, that is the mouse.” She put a hand over it and jiggled it around on the pad, then picked it up and showed me the underside. There was a ball set in the middle of the casing. “See? It looks kind of like a mouse, with the wire as the tail.”

  I scowled. “Mice generally have their balls further to the rear.”

  Talya laughed, and the machine beeped loudly and suddenly. I jumped inside my skin, while she turned, suddenly sober and inquisitive. “Ooh, it’s a hit!”

  I leaned in while she navigated back to the colored navigation screen and began to click through assorted screens until she had access to a collection of folder icons. Talya chewed her lip as she began to open them into lists of what I assumed were filed documents, expanding the taxonomy in and out at dizzying speed.

  “Oh, here we are… wow, he had a modem and email and everything.” Talya used the clicker – the mouse – to scroll through a list of files. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  She clicked an icon, and then recoiled off the barstool with a scream, hands thrown up and over her eyes.

  Peter Kaminski was laid out like a gutted lamb in a slaughterhouse, head thrown back so that his face was partly out of frame, his blond hair matted with blood. His coltish frame and the hardness of his jaw were easily recognizable. All of the transplantable organs had been removed and were set aside in Styrofoam coolers around the body. They were all tagged, ready for transit.

  My nostrils shuddered as I took Talya’s place, gingerly using the mouse to close the file and open the next, and the next. Each one was uniquely horrific. There were only two more bodies – one of which showed the creation of Pig-Head in progress, one of which was vaguely identifiable as the limbs and torso of Goat-Head. My stomach lurched. The rest was pornography. Adult men and women, the missing children and others I didn’t recognize… and then men I did recognize by their tattoos. Ivanko. Kir. A huge man with rich brown skin and faded prison tattoos that I knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut, was my old friend Ovar. Then I was back to the photos of Peter Kaminski while he was still alive. In one picture, he was clearly drugged and being forced into compliance by a flabby masked man I knew without a doubt was Vanya. Some of these photographs dated from the beginning of the year, involving different children than the ones at Wolf Grove.

  Words from the past returned in a wave of remember smell and sensation. Yuri’s grating, poisonous words. “I know what Sergei sees in you. Same thing he sees in all the rest of us poor motherfuckers. Machine parts. Tiny, fragile, cheap machine parts.”

  Jana hadn’t been lying to me, and this was what I had never seen while I was stranded on my own conveyor belt in Sergei’s system. Now, I understood why he wanted to set up shop in Thailand. Now, I understood why the other men had always despised me for my chaste demeanor and regarded my chivalric relationship with Crina as second-rate. They were into what they thought of as ‘the good stuff’. They hadn’t asked me or told me because they’d known what my reaction would have been: two shots to the groin and one in the head for each of them.

  All emotion drained from my body and mind in an instant, leaving me clear and hard and cold. The cynic in me searched for Pastor Christopher and Aaron, but they were both absent from these pictures. Lily and Dru, however, were present in quite a number of them. The photos of them were far back in the file-list. The dates went well back for several years, and some of the pictures were worse than graphic. I didn’t have to guess at the fates of some of the children who had been ‘homed’.

  “Lily was a hyena shifter, wasn’t she?” My voice was stiff.

  “Yes. She-” Talya peered at the image I had on the screen, and turned away with a choking sob. “Oh my god. Why… why didn’t any of them ever say anything to us? We would have helped if we’d known!”

  How could I explain such a thing? Children were under the power of these adults. The structure of their laws and the degree of secrecy among shapeshifters, as I understood them, had Elders holding absolute authority over kids like these. Clarified behind a veil of practiced dissociation, I leaned and squinted at the photo of the hyena and the child she was mauling. Here and there, her body was stuck with what looked like spines of glass.

  Puzzled, I moved the pointer-mouse to the magnifying glass icon, and clicked it. As I’d hoped, the picture zoomed in, but it decreased the quality and I couldn’t really make out the shards anymore. “How would Falkovich get these pictures onto the computer?”

  “It’s… oh god… I’m sorry.” Talya gulped back tears, and came up beside me. Her hands were shaking as she navigated out of the folder and back through the hierarchy. “Th-These are p-pictures that this man was sent over Usenet and Telnet. It’s… like a newsletter where you can send letters to a computer over the phone.”

  “So other people were sending him these pictures?” Vanya had computers, I knew that much.

  “Or he was sending them to other people. They must have scanned them in and shared them. He has logs. I don’t know if I can bear to read them, Rex. I really don’t.”

  “Call Ayashe and tell Jenner.” I stood up and back, mind already on the job. “Tell them I have to go pay someone a visit.”

  “What? Where?” Talya dashed at her eyes and took a heavy seat.

  “Red Hook,” I said. “An office warehouse at the waterfront. Don’t worry about me – I just have to go and have a talk to someone who might know more about this.”

  “You really do know some bad people, don’t you?”

  I was already halfway to the door. “Not for much longer.”

  This time, I was not going to risk being unprepared. I bought eggs from the nearest bodega – a full dozen fertilized eggs – and on a leap of associative intuition, a carton of full-cream milk. Not including Falkovich’s house, the last time I’d been in a major firefight there’d been two Spooks and a demon so toxic that it made the scars on my arm ache to think of it. I could confirm now that DOGs were immune to bullets. Worse than that… they were nourished by them. And it had been hiding in a gun, seeping out like oil when Lev had pointed the weapon at me and fired.

  Much as I still didn’t want to rely on guns, lest a DOG emerge from them and kick my ass, this was a job that called for firearms. I had the Wardbreaker, my faithful old Commander, and my larger backup piece, a matte-black Glock 21. The Wardbreaker had never really been intended to be a frequent-fire workhorse: it carried nine .45 full-metal jackets and was meant to work in silence with its fixed magic. The Glock carried fifteen fragmentation rounds. It was noisy, short-range, and it left blow-out wou
nds that could fit a man’s fist. It was good for stopping people when they tried to run away.

  I wrapped the eggs individually in washcloths borrowed from the vanity, and loaded into a backpack and under my suit jacket. It was near midnight by the time I’d fixed myself up with loaded magazines, rope, wire, knives, styptic and bandages.

  I filled Binah’s food dish up like a little kibble mountain, and looked down at her with my hands on my hips. “Be good, girl. Don’t eat anything you shouldn’t. And don’t claw the curtains.”

  “Mrra-oww.” Binah looked back up at me, tail flicking.

  I turned and left her there. As I shut the door, she slipped out behind me, arching against my ankle.

  “No. In you go.” I tried to push her in with my shoe. By way of reply, Binah latched onto my leg, clawed her way up my body, and clung to my shoulder with claws. Decision made, I left Talya on the phone and reused the car I’d taken to Moris’s place. The likelihood of being pulled up in this particular old piece of junk was low, and the drive wasn’t really that far.

  There were a few places where I could reliably find Vanya, and I decided to go to the one where he spent the most time: the AEROMOR shipping yard. I’d never spent a huge amount of time with him before. Vanya ran his own Cell out of Red Hook and the bulk of my work was based in and around Brighton Beach and Queens. I knew he’d been brought into the Organizatsiya from Russia when I was a young boy. Back then, he’d been a stocky man with a beak nose and thinning brown hair. As an older man, he had morphed into a pasty, obese Jabba the Hutt clone who smacked his lips a lot, smoked imported East German cigarettes, had a thing for Orientalist decor and laughed whenever he spoke. He was a coward and a shrewd recruiter whose best skill was almost certainly his ability to manage people braver and more capable than himself. He’d hooked Vassily on coke and either masterminded or assisted in his physical and mental ruin. And he was a pedophile.

  The main entry to the shipping yards was an archway off Van Brunt Street, the run-down road closest to the waterfront. It was also the most obvious, and the most heavily guarded. Van Brunt turned a sharp corner into Degraw Street, an old docklane lined with crumbling Italian, Chinese and Russian sweatshop warehouses. It smelled like old seafood, and it was backed up with cars and small trucks along one side. I parked my little car down near the end of the street, and put Binah down on the passenger side seat. In the dim glare of the streetlights, she looked up at me expectantly.