Alien Taste

  “I thought she was still alive when they were taking me out.”

  Max shook his head, patting Ukiah earnestly on the shoulder. “They body-bagged her minutes after that, Ukiah. It’s okay, kid. You had no choice. She called the game. Sudden death. It had to be you or her.”

  “What happens now? Will the police arrest me for killing her?”

  “She ginsu-knifed four people to death, kid, and started work on you. No one is going to blame you for anything.” Max snagged a chair and settled into it. “There will be an inquest after the coroner does an autopsy. The inquest will probably focus on why she went psycho—pinpoint if she was just a nutcase or if she was high on something.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Kid, I heard the crazy things she was saying over your link. She was completely psycho.”

  Ukiah tried to recall the conversation and found that there were huge gaps in his normally photographic memory. He remembered clearly the ride down in the Cherokee, the cat in the white Saab, but then the holes started. The investigation jerked and stuttered through his mind. Max telling him to take the .45. The first victim in the hall. The woman’s bedroom. Snippets from a film, spliced with darkness. His last memory before waking in the rain was the woman crouching in the shadows, madness glittering in her eyes.

  He knew there was more: she had wounded him; he had shot her. He had seen her wounds. He knew he had made them. He could still feel the recoil in his shoulder. The memory of it happening, however, was gone.

  “Do you still have a disc of it?”

  Max considered and nodded. “I was recording like usual. The disc is still in the deck.”

  “I need to see it.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You could bring your laptop computer and . . .”

  “No. No. No. Look, kid, two news trucks followed the ambulance to the hospital, and another pulled up minutes after we got here. I need to call your moms and warn them off. You have to sleep. Doctor’s order.”

  After the glucose drip finished, they moved him upstairs, tucked his personal effects into the closet, and started to explain the various room functions. He waved them sleepily away. He had visited Mom Lara when she was in Presby and knew its personal quirks. Alone at last, he closed his eyes and started his night rituals. He scanned and learned the noises of the hospital around him. Once they regressed to background static, he released the flood. The day’s events washed over him, every small noise, taste, smell, and sight, repressed until this quiet time. There was a lot of useless stuff stored there. The distant buzz of a tractor as he ate breakfast. The front page of the newspaper that Mom Lara was reading across the table. The news stories and commercials of Max’s news radio. The faint smell of the cat in the white Saab. The taste of earth and blood when he woke in the woods. He skimmed the junk and discarded it.

  What he wanted most, the memory of the woman, was gone. There were only clean-cut breaks where they had been, as if the woman had sliced them out when she cut him open. He growled softly in frustration. He riffled through the remaining memories of her house. Why had her room seemed so strange? He scanned the titles of her books, CD-ROMs, and music CDs. Her taste in music was much like his, but the books were mostly on advanced robot programming.

  Sighing, he flipped through the rest of the house, at least those memories that remained after his surgical memory loss. Only a handful survived. The full flood started again when he woke in the woods. A paramedic arrived to shoulder Kraynak aside, his deep masculine voice hovering only inches over Ukiah. Others moved in orbit around him: various members of the police force, the newly arrived Max, and seemingly the farthest ones out, the news reporters, kept at bay by the faint flutter of police tape. A half-dozen conversations pressed in at once, a jangled chorus that he had simply ignored at the time. He listened to it again, only vaguely interested in the discord.

  “Breathing is shallow and rapid. [Jo?] Get Forensics out here before it rains again. [It’s me, Max] {Going live in five.} [Ukiah’s been hurt.] {Four.} Blood pressure is low. {Three.} Make sure we don’t have any accomplices hiding in the bushes. {Two.} (So?) Appears to have a laceration near the left carotid artery. [No, I don’t know how badly.] {One.} (They’ve killed each other, for the time being.) Patient is currently conscious and applying pressure. [They’re taking him to the hospital now.] {I’m Paula Kiri with Channel Four News.} (What the hell is Hex up to? Why did he have two of his people kill each other?) [No, I don’t know which hospital yet. I’ll call you when I find out.] {I’m live in Oakland with an update of the multiple slayings.} (I’m not sure if he owns them both—I think the boy might be one of us.)”

  Ukiah frowned at the last statement. He was one of whose? The police? Who was talking? He untangled the conversation from the rest, using direction and volume to find both parts of the conversation.

  “So?” This an adult female, slightly breathless, as if she had just raced to the scene. Ukiah backtracked and caught her entrance. She had run almost silently up to the scene and stopped twenty or thirty feet off, in the darkness. The storm-whipped wind brought him the smell of her breath and musky scent, tainted slightly by car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and gin.

  “They’ve killed each other, for the time being.” A man stood beside the woman. He had been standing there from the moment Ukiah woke, silent, watching. A shiver went down Ukiah’s spine. Had the watcher been in the woods the whole time, somehow missed?

  “What the hell is Hex up to? Why did he have two of his people kill each other?” The woman shifted in surprise and there was the faint creak of leather. He caught the smell of large cured hide, like Max’s bomber jacket.

  “I’m not sure if he owns them both—I think the boy might be one of us.”

  There was a long silence that the other background noise threatened to wash into. He held it back, focusing tightly on the strange watchers in the wood.

  “You’re right,” the woman stated at last, breaking the silence. “He’s one of ours.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to get real close, but I don’t recognize him.”

  “I can sense him from here.” Another pause. During this one, Ukiah felt something, like a weak electrical current. It set the hair on the back of his neck on end. He flipped back and found that moments earlier, the same sensation had crawled over him. “I don’t know, he has the right smell, but something’s weird about him, Rennie.”

  “Everything is weird about this,” the man named Rennie answered. “You should hear what his name is.”

  His name? It was somehow frightening to think they might know his name. As the object of a police manhunt, it wouldn’t be totally surprising though.

  “His name? I heard them call him Ukiah.”

  “Oregon.” Rennie supplied his last. “Ukiah Oregon.”

  “Ukiah, Oregon?” Unlike most people, the woman obviously had heard of the town where Ukiah had been found. “Coyote will want to hear about this.”

  They moved off, not at a walk in the rain-slick night woods, but at an easy run that was as silent as it was quick.

  Ukiah scanned through the conversation again, wondering. Who were these people? Why were they watching silently in the dark? Who was Hex? How did he own Dr. Janet Haze? Ukiah found no answers in the short cryptic conversation. It was only as he started for the third time, from the very beginning, that he realized something amazing.

  The conversation hadn’t been in English.

  With his odd-photographic memory, he could recognize and name many languages: Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese. It wasn’t any of these. It had been so familiar to him that he had translated it unconsciously. Odder yet, he could find no instance when he had heard it spoken. The knowledge was there, deeply buried, lost but not forgotten.

  The only time in his life he could not recall with complete clarity was his early childhood. Who were his real parents? Where had they gone? How had he ended up running with the wolves? The answers had always been lost behind a veil of un
remembering darkness.

  He sat up in the hospital bed to stare out his window, across the dark landscape of Oakland to Schenley Park.

  They knew the town where he had been found. They spoke a language he knew from that dark forgetfulness. They claimed he was one of them.

  He had to go now, while the trail was fresh, and find these people.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday, June 16, 2004

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  Compared to his life among humans, his childhood with the wolf pack seemed like a time of dreams. He remembered no beginning, no mark of the years passing. Seasons flowed seamlessly into one another. He could pick out a memory, as one would pluck out a stone from the river, examine it, and throw it back to be lost among the other pebbles. Here was the forest fire that had nearly killed him. There was the white wolf that had hated him, and how he had killed it. Fleeing a wounded grizzly. Tricking a wolverine. Timeless perfect memories. Vaguely he could sort them out—which came first, what came later.

  He could not even guess how old he had been when he had first joined the wolves. An infant? A toddler? A teenager? He couldn’t count the winters and add to an answer. The seasons seemed endless, as if he had run with the wolves before time began.

  Time, for him, began when Mama Jo caught him in the humane wolf trap. It seemed as if his whole being had changed that winter night in the steel cage. Each day afterward became clearly marked and marched forward in step with the human calendar. Thirty-five days they stayed in Oregon as Mom Jo finished up her graduate studies. February 24 through March 6, they drove to Pittsburgh, a trip made agonizingly long due to his nonexistent communication skills, ignorance of the modern world, and lack of basic hygiene habits. He knew the dates of when he learned to dress himself, eat with a fork, and utter his first words.

  So his life was divided in half. January 20, 1996, and forward, he could recall everything in a stream of ordered minutes, ticked off by clocks, marked by calendars. Before then, though, remained a mystery. Where had he come from? Who was he? He longed to know, but there was never any true way of learning. Even if he returned to Oregon, there would be no insightful conversations with the wolves. Unlike Kipling’s Mowgli, he never truly communicated with the pack. They merely tolerated him and let him feed on the kill.

  If he wanted to know, if these people in Schenley Park truly recognized him, then he had to go to them.

  He eased the long IV needle out of his left wrist. He hadn’t been fully conscious when they put it in and was now amazed at the length. He gave it a grimace and dropped it into the bio-hazard box.

  The doctors had cut off his old blood-soaked clothes, dumping everything that had been in his pockets into a plastic bin. Luckily Max had brought his spare set of clothing from the Cherokee. He dressed quietly in the dark hospital room, filling his pockets again. Wireless phone. Coins. Swiss army knife. Wallet. Two lint-covered midget Tootsie rolls. Spare clip for the .45. The pistol itself, though, Max must have taken or hospital security had locked up. He shrugged at the temporary loss—he hated carrying the thing anyhow. Slipping out of the hospital proved to be easy; the halls were nearly empty at night.

  At a lope, he headed across Oakland to the park. Fifth Avenue was silent. Forbes Avenue was crowded with students standing in doorways and on the sidewalks; the street beyond was empty, dark, and quiet. He crossed over the bridge between the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University campus, up the steep hill to the Schenley Park Nature Center. The crime scene had been to the southeast, in an area that might not truly be part of the park proper, but some area too rocky to build on. Pittsburgh held thousands of such thickets—it wasn’t unusual to see wild turkeys or white-tail deer within a half-mile of downtown.

  He slowed, aware suddenly that he wasn’t armed and no one knew where he was.

  He crossed the ambulance tracks first, deep ruts ripped into the fresh mud. The service road that Max had found was no more than a wide, level path, not wide enough judging by the number of uprooted saplings. He followed the tracks and came to the trampled killing ground, littered with the wrappers of the drugs the EMS had given him, the Marlboro stubs from Kraynak, spent casings from his .45, countless footprints, and blood. So much blood.

  He could tell where the woman had lain, bleeding out her heart’s blood. It was as if she was still there. He could sense her as strongly as when she had stood before him, mad, desperate, and accusing.

  Just beyond her was the pool of blood from the slain policeman, but it was just spilt blood. No ghostlike impression remained.

  His own blood was eerily like the girl’s in that he could have found it with his eyes closed. He crouched beside the stain, wondering what it meant. Why was his blood like hers? Something small stirred on the ground, and with the rustle of tiny feet, it scurried up to his hand.

  With a surprised yelp, Ukiah jerked his hand away. The creature paused where his hand had rested, casting about for a scent. He peered hard to make the animal out of the dark woods floor. It was a field mouse, its fur darker than he had seen before. You’re jumping at mice now.

  Still, it was weird. Why didn’t it run away? As he crouched there, regarding the mouse, it ran up to his foot. It placed its tiny paws on his shoe and looked up and up at him. Small black eyes gazed into his own dark eyes.

  “You are one strange mouse.” He considered his choices: walk away or pick it up. Was picking it up safe? It could be sick; rabid animals, he had heard, were fearless. Rabies certainly would explain Dr. Janet Haze. The mouse’s coat was smooth and shiny, the sign of a healthy animal. No scent of sickness clung to it. Perhaps it was a pet, hand-cuddled and lost.

  In the end, he extended his hand and the mouse scurried into his palm. Holding it seemed the right thing to do. It certainly seemed comfortable with being held. He marveled for a moment at its size, his fingertip dwarfing its head, its forefeet thinner than a broom straw.

  The mouse had to have belonged to Janet Haze. She must have been carrying it in a pocket or even loose in her hand. When she was killed, it had gotten lost.

  “Why would anyone keep a mouse as a pet?” he asked it. The mouse was closely examining his hands for food. He tucked it into his breast pocket to see if it would ride there—it seemed content—and unwrapped one of his midget Tootsie rolls for it. The smell of chocolate made his mouth water, so he ate the other. Rather than littering, he folded the wrappers tight and slipped them into his pants pocket. He glanced about at the other bits of trash his near death had brought to the clearing, feeling vaguely guilty. The only things he had truly carried there himself were the .45’s spent casings, glittering in growing false dawn. He picked them out of the dead leaves and bloody mud. Just beyond the last one he found an odd cylinder of metal, about the length and thickness of a quality ballpoint pen, shoved almost to obscurity into the mud. Janet Haze had handled it in the last moments of her life, her blood staining its matte black finish. He puzzled over it and then slipped it into his pocket.

  Birds were beginning to wake. Hunching in their roosts, they started to call and shout at one another, establishing boundaries in case they were forgotten during the night. Ukiah winced. Max would be up soon, checking on him in the hospital. If he didn’t want to catch total hell, he’d better find what he had come for and get back.

  He oriented himself with where he had lain, then recalled the direction of the overheard conversation. He quickly found where the watchers had stood. It was a rocky point overlooking the clearing. He had to move through the thickest brush in the area to get there, and he was surprised at the ease with which they had come and gone through it. The man’s prints were partially obscured by the general trampling, but he had clearly circled Ukiah and Dr. Janet Haze once before the searchers found them, then moved to where he could watch without being spotted. The woman had run down the hill to join the man on the point.

  Ukiah paused to look up at the steep hill and thick brush. She had run straight to him, in the
dark, in the rain, without tripping, without calling out for directions. The hair on the back of his neck rose slightly. He ran his hand over it to lay it back down. They might know the park well and prearranged to meet here. They might have had night goggles on. There are lots of ways to explain it.

  He pretended he believed that.

  They both had worn boots, identical except for size. They had turned and run up the hill together, retracing the woman’s path down. He tracked them to the edge of the park. There, in the mud, were deep motorcycle tracks, clear of rain and thus made after he had wakened. He followed the trail of mud down the street until it was a ghost trail, catching it again only as they splashed through puddles, renewing the mud. They had gone toward Homestead, but eventually the tracks gave out.

  Ukiah hunched on the pavement, fingering the last drying remains of the motorcycle prints. Part of him thought about going on blindly, hoping to pick up the trail again. The other part of him had caught the rumble of a Hummer, recognized its motor as Max’s truck. Mom Jo laughingly called it Max’s GI Joe car, but Ukiah noticed that Max pulled it out of storage only when he was trying not to be afraid and upset. Ukiah wasn’t sure how a change in cars helped calm Max, but it did—he became bolder and louder, talking often of how the Marines kicked Iraqi butt. Maybe it made Max feel like he was still part of that larger, fiercer force that he had once stood with.

  Whatever the reason, if Max had the Hummer out and was looking for him, then Ukiah better stay put and be found. The Max in the Hummer was armed and jumpy, and he had a tongue that could scald milk.

  The Hummer leaped suddenly into view. It rushed up and slammed to a stop just short of where Ukiah was crouching in the road. Its squat shape and round headlights reminded Ukiah of a mean-tempered wolverine. The driver’s window slid down, exuding a wealth of information in odor. Max leaned out and regarded him with a strangely unreadable gaze. Somehow this was worse than the cross outburst Ukiah had been expecting.