He did a quick last sweep, bending down to run the light under the still-standing row of chairs. There he found the remote key. He picked it up, shaking his head. Max had to have thrown it under the chairs while they had wrestled him to the ground. The near cave darkness had cloaked the key from the Ontongard. Ukiah slipped it into his pocket, feeling like he had wasted too much time already.
He found Max’s blood trail and took off at a trot.
They had put Max in a ten-by-ten foot office converted into a cell. The Romex line had been diverted to put a light into the room The lock had been installed recently, the sawdust on the floor still smelling of cut wood. Max had bled on the floor, urinated in the corner, slept on one bare table. The room was now empty. The door leaned at a drunken angle, its hinges popped off but its dead bolt still locked. The dust layering the information desk beside the door had been disturbed; guns and the cured leather of holsters had been placed on the top and removed.
Where was Max?
Ukiah clung to the knowledge that the door had been forced from the inside. Max had probably escaped and, hopefully, had even recovered his weapons that had been stacked by the door. Ukiah searched the floor for a blood trail out, but Max had stopped bleeding. Taking out the flashlight, Ukiah swept the area. Across the wide hall, he noticed a sparkle of glass. He crossed the hall, keeping the light trained on the item until he saw it clearly.
He moaned in pain.
A hypodermic syringe gleamed on the dark carpeting. He didn’t want to touch it, learn its truths. He forced himself to pick it up. Max’s blood tipped the needle. He pulled out the plunger and ran the tip of his pinkie on the inside edge. The ghost impression of Ukiah’s blood coated the inside of the syringe. The Ontongard had found a human to make into Ukiah’s Get.
Ukiah clutched the syringe tightly until it shattered in his hand, driving tiny slivers of glass into his palm.
It was useless to deny it. The Ontongard had injected Max a full day ago. His Max was dead, gone, wiped clean and replaced with a copy of himself. Even if Max’s body was walking, his soul was gone.
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday, June 24, 2004
Moon Township, Pennsylvania
Ukiah sat, grief-stricken, bordering on forever. Max was dead. Ukiah couldn’t function, couldn’t think, could barely even breathe. He thought he knew grief, but this was too huge and awful for him to even see the edges of it. Eventually he realized that he had held a palmful of blood that had slowly changed into a mouse. Whiskers fine as spider legs tickled his fingers, searching for food. He numbly plucked out the shards of glass and reabsorbed the mouse.
What should he do? He had lost the race this time, lost it so badly he couldn’t find the finish line. What should he do?
He got to his feet. He would have to find his missing Get. Follow with your soul, Bear had told him. Ukiah closed his eyes and felt for the distant echo of himself. Forward and up, the shadow of his soul was impossible to miss.
Max made one mean Get.
Ukiah found the site of the first gunfight in Baggage Claim Area C. Max hadn’t been hit; none of his blood stained the floor. He had unloaded his SIG-Sauer P210 into three Gets from the cover of a half wall that separated Area C from Area B. The spent 9mm rounds glittered on the dark floor. The short wall was peppered with shotgun pellets from the Gets’ weapons. The Gets lay drained of blood and covered with anxious mice. The nine rounds from the Sauer were split evenly between the Gets. Max had reloaded, dropping the empty, expensive magazine on the ground in a clear indication of his mindset—he wasn’t worrying about coming back out of the terminal.
The single 9mm shells resting on the chests of the dead Gets indicated that Max used the new clip to fire a coup de grace square between their eyes while standing over them.
Ukiah judged that Max had killed the Gets within the hour. Only temporarily dead, it still would be a day or so before the Gets recovered from the damage Max had inflicted.
The gunfire must have summoned the second wave of Ontongard Gets. Max laid waste to them in Baggage Claim Area A. The Sauer one-third empty, Max had changed over to the Desert Eagle. Almost two dozen rounds of the spent .357 Magnum casings littered the floor, with two spent magazines dropped wastefully to the side. These Gets had also been finished off with a bullet between the eyes.
The last of the Gets had been solo, armed only with a knife. Why had it come alone after the others had been slaughtered? Max had emptied his shotgun into it, square into the chest. Ukiah winced at the pulverized flesh, his chest aching in sympathy. Why had Max killed this one so cruelly? It was unlike Max. It was even unlike Ukiah.
Ukiah played the flashlight over the dead body. Its memories skittered before the sweeping beam of light. It wore Nike shoes, blue jeans with torn-out knees, and a blue T-shirt, now torn to ribbons. Ribs gleamed white where flesh had been torn away. Ukiah shifted the light higher to see if Max had felt compelled to add the forehead shot. The light fell on the face, and all became clear.
It was one of Hex’s Gets wearing a Ukiah guise.
The likeness was perfect. It was the face he had seen in the mirror thousands of times, except this one was pallid and lax in death. He could see no flaws; nothing to say this wasn’t him.
Looking very closely, Ukiah could see that the hair was a shade too light in color. It wasn’t his glossy black, but a dark brown. It wasn’t something a normal person would notice in the dim light, pressed by enemies. Wearing his guise, Hex’s Get had come alone to gain Max’s trust and then knife him in the back.
What stupidity. Max would have known instantly that this was a fake. At least Ukiah thought he would. Ukiah hunched beside the disguised body and wondered. Max, even with new Pack senses, might have been fooled for several minutes. Time enough to be killed.
How close had the battle been? It depended on if Max had the Pack memories. Ukiah remembered how lost he had been just days ago, ignorant of the players and even of the game. Without the Pack memories, Max might not have realized there were any disguised Gets in the wings or how to tell them from the real thing.
Ukiah thought back to when he had woken up in the hotel. What had been his last genetically encoded memory? Max feeding him in his mother’s kitchen. Grief sudden and hard bent him over, and he smothered a howl of despair that ripped out of his Pack-tainted soul.
No, don’t think about it. Push it away. Think of what’s at hand. It was the only way he could function. He strove to focus on how the memory of that breakfast related to him receiving the Pack memory. It came after. That had been the morning after he had been so sick. So Max had Pack memory.
Ukiah hunched in the dark, covering his tear-burning eyes. Maybe he should just pull out and leave this to the Pack. They would blow it all to bits with joyful abandon.
No, Max was his Get. He had a responsibility, like a father to a son.
The lights had been set so that the frozen escalator was entirely in darkness. He crept up the uneven steps, making sure the next step was actually there before moving up. He had images of the Ontongard removing a middle section and him falling to a temporary death. Halfway up he tripped over another Get disguised as Ukiah. This one had a canister of the gas Rennie had used on him when the Pack kidnapped him. The Get had all nine rounds of the Desert Eagle emptied into it. It also was still slightly warm. He was getting closer.
Ukiah took the gas and hurried up the rest of the steps. The escalator took him up to ground level, opening onto the wide main hallway of the terminal. Signs indicated that straight ahead were the gates with their waiting areas, behind him was check-in, the ticket counters, and the main terminal entrance. Toward the gates, he could feel a single Pack life, scared and hurt. He started to trot. Sunlight filtered through the filthy windows lining the waiting areas. The light reached across the chair-strewn waiting areas to just touch the edge of the forty-foot-wide hallway. He kept to the edge, jogging in and out of the slants of light, each patch of darkness blacker still because of t
he sudden flashes of light.
There was the deep boom of a shotgun up ahead and Ukiah started to run. After a hundred feet he hit the reek of gunsmoke and fresh blood. It was the only warning he got before colliding suddenly with Max, standing in the darkness.
Ukiah rebounded off his partner into the sunlight, stunned that he almost missed Max in the dark. He reached out his senses, searching for Pack presence in Max. There was none. Max seemed to be totally and only Max. Ukiah almost wept in relief and happiness. “Max! You’re okay!”
Max backpedaled into the next slant of light, dismay open on his face, jerking up the shotgun to level at Ukiah’s chest. Dismay fled before anger. “Damn you murdering bastards!”
Ukiah’s hands went up in a show that they were innocent of weapons. If Max isn’t Pack, he can’t tell I’m the real Ukiah. This isn’t good.
Sprawled behind Max was a dead fake Ukiah. A shotgun fired at point-blank range had punched a hole in its chest. Ukiah winced, trying not to look at it. Definitely, not good.
“It doesn’t work!” Max growled through teeth clenched tight in rage. “I know you’re not him. Try anything, and God forgive me, I’ll shoot you like the others.”
Max was splattered with blood, and it was clear he had been dragged through hell. Three days of stubble darkened his face. His nose had been broken, and both his eyes were bruised deep purple out to the edge of their sockets, masking him into a large rabid raccoon. His short hair stood up and out in various patches. He had not changed his clothes since Ukiah saw him four days ago. The military starch was long gone. What was left of his clothing was torn, bloody, mold-stained, and drenched with fear-tainted sweat.
The shotgun had drifted upward and pointed at Ukiah’s face. He cringed at the double-barrel stare. “Say something,” Max shouted. “Don’t just stand there looking at me!”
Ukiah shrugged, not sure why Max wanted him to talk. It would be safer for Max just to shoot him, though it probably would be a hard thing for Max to do—even after the third time. “I don’t know what to say, Max. Coming back from the dead is hard enough to explain in a hundred words or less. Add a couple of bloodthirsty copies of myself into the mess and—” He motioned faint helplessness with his hands. “What can I say?”
“Say anything. I might believe you.”
And unbelievably, it sounded like he might. Was Max just sick of killing Ukiahs, and desperate for any reason not to do it again? Or had Ukiah triggered a gut feeling that the disguised Gets never reached? He stood dumbfounded, separated from Max by darkness. Finally, he found his voice.
“Max, if I could talk all day, you’d have no doubt. There are a billion words and phrases between us, but I don’t know which single one you’d believe right now. You’re just going to have to trust me, or shoot me—and all the others like me.”
Max stared at him, then motioned downward with the shotgun. “Get on your knees, hands behind your head, cross your legs.” As Ukiah complied, Max stepped behind him, bringing up the shotgun. Ukiah squeezed close his eyes, bracing for the shot. It would hurt, he told himself, only for an instant—and then he would heal.
Max took a long, shuddering breath, and ran a hand across Ukiah’s back. It puzzled Ukiah until he realized that Max had just swept his hand over the lettering of his tracking T-shirt Private Investigator, Bennett Detective Agency. “Why are you wearing this?”
It was a numb, unreadable question.
Ukiah floundered for an answer. Putting on the T-shirt had been some gut action he hadn’t thought out. “I don’t know. I missed you. I was so lost and alone. Maybe, wearing my tracking shirt was as close as I could get to having you with me.”
“Oh hell, get up.”
Ukiah got up slowly, unsure of what was coming next.
Max startled him by pulling him into a rough hug that went on and on. “You saw me and joy went across your face. There’s no other word for it. And I thought, ‘That was Ukiah’s true smile, his true eyes filled with happiness. This is Ukiah.’ But I knew it couldn’t be you. Oh kid, you were hard and cold when I got to Kittanning. You had to be one of the fakes, only better than the others.”
Ukiah laughed into Max’s shoulder with pure relief. “It’s me. It’s me.”
“The more you talked, the more I knew it had to be really you. You could never talk your way out of a paper bag. Oh kid, I missed you. Don’t you ever pull this dying shit on me again.”
Ukiah shook his head. “No, I don’t want to do that again.”
Max let him go, sobering. “I’m serious, Ukiah. I never want to see you lying dead again. It was like my wife all over again, only worse. I had months to brace myself to see her and it was awful.” He looked away, shaking his head.
It certainly was his Max. Ukiah caught his arm, flipped it palm up, and pushed the torn sleeve up to his elbow. An angry puncture mark scarred Max’s forearm. “Why aren’t you dead—or worse?”
Max laid a rough palm on Ukiah’s cheek. “Because the answer to the question ‘would you ever hurt me?’ is an emphatic no, not even on the viral level. They shot me full of your blood and left me to change. I thought I was dead, one way or another. Then, out of the wound crawled this black worm, thin as a hair and slimy. It had to be the weirdest, grossest thing that ever happened to me. I really just wanted to rip it out of me, but it was already coming out, and I was afraid I’d break it off inside me. It took forever for all of it to crawl out, and then it turned into this.” Max reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sickly runt of a mouse by the scruff of its neck. “Even the littlest part of you recognized me and refused to hurt me.”
Ukiah accepted back the memory with great relief. “Oh thank God. I didn’t think I could live with myself if they made you my Get.” He closed his hands about the mouse and reabsorbed it. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”
On the edge of his hearing, he suddenly caught a thin wail of misery. It was underscored by a weird, stabbing ghost pain. It was as if part of him was standing far away, lost, frightened, and hurt. The feeling pulled at him, a desperate needing. “What is that? Did you hear that?”
Max paused, listening intently. The wail came again and he nodded. “It sounds like someone in pain.”
They looked at each other, and knew that they couldn’t leave without finding the person. They moved down the corridor, counting up the gate numbers. The cry came infrequently but grew louder, clearer. It was the wail of a baby. Toward the end, Ukiah found himself all but running toward it, unable to resist the pull.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Max warned quietly behind him.
The corridor ended in a huge round room, an arc of departure gates. Just before the corridor opened into the sun-filled room there was a set of rest rooms. Ukiah followed the sound into the men’s room.
When he pushed open the door, a stench hit him, making him gag. Balanced on a row of sinks sat a battered Quaker Oil box. A newborn infant had been left naked inside, untended for a long period of time. The infant had fouled itself many times and the smell was overpowering. The baby boy shook its tiny fists and wailed with hunger. There were no baby supplies in sight: no bottles, clothes, blankets, cans of formula, or diapers. There was just the battered Quaker Oil box and the baby.
“Oh, poor thing,” Ukiah crooned, gathering the infant up, trying to ignore the mess. The baby quieted immediately, looking at him with huge black eyes. Coming from it was the pure oneness, the sense of “This is right” that Ukiah had felt dozens of times over the last few days, only from tiny little mice.
“Oh, God, no!”
Max spun from the door he had been guarding. “What is it?”
“This is me, Max. This baby is me.”
“What?”
“They took one of my memories, Max, and made a copy of me. This is me.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ on a donkey,” Max swore. “Well, regardless if it’s you or someone else, we can’t leave it here with these monsters. Clean him up a little and let’s get out of
here.”
Amazing, the sinks had running water. The Ontongard apparently had reconnected this rest room. Ukiah ran the water, hoping it would get warm, but it didn’t. “This is going to be cold, little one, but you need to be quiet, okay?”
The baby regarded him seriously and accepted the chilly bath with grace. There were no diaper sores that Ukiah had expected from such filth, until he remembered that this was a Pack baby. He took off his shirt and wrapped the now shivering child in it. Hunger came from the infant with alarming intensity.
“Max, do you have a candy bar or anything?”
“Ukiah, it’s a baby. They drink milk and maybe some cereal. You should know that after Cally.”
“It’s a Pack baby, Max. I think it will digest about anything you put into it.”
Max slipped out a Snicker’s bar and threw it across the room to Ukiah. “Well, he’s welcome to it. Watch he doesn’t choke on the nuts.”
Ukiah cut the candy bar up with his Swiss army knife, paring off the chocolate layer, and fed the slivers to the infant. Slowly the intense hunger abated.
Why, though, was he worrying about the baby? It had been just a splash of his blood three days ago. It was a mouse, just changed slightly, and larger. It was him, operated remotely. It was—a baby. He lifted it to his shoulder and it nuzzled into him. With a sigh of contentment, it fell into trusting sleep.
“Come on, kid, let’s get out of here. I hate to remind you, but if the Ontongard get hold of you, they can make hundreds of those babies.”
So they ran. Ahead came the sounds of gunfire. Sporadic at first, then building. Max caught Ukiah’s arm and they stopped.
Panting, Max glanced back the way they had come and toward the growing gunfight. “We don’t want to get in the middle of that.”