“That won’t be necessary.” A woman’s voice, familiar but flat, emotionless.
“Alicia?” Max caught Sam’s arm, pausing her, as he looked at Ukiah.
It seemed inconceivable that Alicia’s body could ever produce such a cold sound, but Ukiah sniffed and caught her scent. Hers, but not hers. Stripped of all the perfumes of soap and deodorant, thick with sweat and dirt, tangled with the Ontongard.
Ukiah froze, torn between running away and charging forward. “It’s a Get.”
“No, don’t do that.” Zoey sounded horrified.
He charged.
“Ukiah!” Max hissed, and then started after him, calling to Sam, “Call 911. Get the police out here!”
Ukiah reached the end of the hall and turned the corner. Down the empty, dim hallway, three people were silhouetted against the bank of glass doors to the sun-baked parking lot.
Kraynak sat in a wheelchair, dressed in street clothes, looking battered and gray. All the bruises that were faded and forgotten on Ukiah remained vivid on Kraynak’s face and bare arms.
Zoey tugged at the wheelchair handles as a woman pulled the bloody IV tube from Kraynak’s arm. Zoey looked up as Ukiah rounded the corner, and relief spilled across her face. “Uncle!”
Kraynak, already smiling, only brightened at Ukiah’s appearance. “Ukiah, look who popped up out of nowhere!”
The woman straightened and looked at Ukiah with dead eyes. How could Kraynak mistake this thing for Alicia? The creatures governing her face twisted it almost unrecognizable with sudden feral excitement. After the raid on the Brody house, all of Alicia’s stylish clothes were accounted for. The oversized shirt and jeans that the woman wore had none of Alicia’s flair. Beside Zoey—in her clean, starched, bright, tortoise-blue scrubs—the woman was rumpled, gray and dowdy. Even the way she held her stolen body was wrong, void of Alicia’s liveliness.
“Alicia” Ukiah said. But it wasn’t Alicia any longer. “Hex.”
“I am Hex.” She acknowledged the name with Alicia’s voice and Hex’s hard cold stare. “And I know you now, dog child. You stink like your father’s Gets, but you’re a breeder.”
“We killed you in Pittsburgh,” Ukiah said, edging closer, trying to get between Alicia and the other two.
“Was that what happened?” Alicia said. “I wondered at the sudden silence. No matter. You killed a piece of me, but I’m much larger than you can imagine, dog child.”
Behind Ukiah, Max halted short of the corner, his gun coming out in a whisper of metal on leather.
Kraynak looked between Ukiah and Alicia/Hex, frowning at their stilted conversation. “What’s going on?”
Ukiah nearly cried out a protest against Kraynak drawing attention back to Zoey and himself. Ukiah reached for his niece. “Zoey, come here.”
Alicia caught hold of Zoey. “No, no, no. I wondered why people in this area made such good Gets. Your mother was changed in some way after she carried you in her womb—mingling her blood with yours—wasn’t she? She went on to have many children after you, didn’t she? That’s why this little one called you Uncle.”
“Let the girl go.” Ukiah could smell a gun on Alicia, the sharpened steel of a knife, and even the tang of C4. He and Alicia could survive almost anything, but Zoey and Kraynak could not.
Alicia twisted Zoey in her hold, pulling the girl’s head back until Zoey’s neck corded with strain. “You want her safe? Then we all go outside, quietly. You come with me, and I’ll let them go free.”
Ukiah caught the edge of a mental summons as Alicia called to Ontongard outside. He fought the urge to flee, pinned in place only by the pleading look in Zoey’s eyes.
“Alicia!” Kraynak cried out, shocked.
Max stepped around the corner, gun leveled at Alicia. “No one is going anywhere.”
“Drop your weapon or I’ll break her neck,” Alicia stated. “Trust me, I’m faster. Drop it.”
“Like hell I will,” Max growled. “I’ve seen how you keep your promises. I’d rather see the girl dead than your Get.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Ukiah cried, trying to hold at bay the inevitable. “Max, get back, she’s got backup coming.”
“So do we,” Max said.
But Alicia’s was already arriving in the form of a green work van pulling up to the bank of glass doors. The driver was a tiny woman that could only be Vivian Brody. The van’s side door slid open, revealing five men with shotguns aimed through the glass at Max. The beefy blond man in a rumpled, stained, gray uniform was clearly Matt Brody. One of the others was Dennis Quinn, looking weirdly stretched and thin, as if he hadn’t absorbed back enough body mass to recreate the familiar form.
“Max, get down!” Ukiah shouted as he felt the Ontongard’s communal intent.
A hundred things happened at once.
The Gets in the van fired, flame and pellets blossoming from the ends of the shotguns.
Max shouted at Kraynak, the most vulnerable in the hallway, his pistol kicking in his hand as he returned fire.
Kraynak flung himself out of the wheelchair, diving for the cover of an alcove holding a water fountain.
Sam reached out and jerked Max back around the corner just as the shotguns filled the corridor with metal, glass, and noise.
Zoey struggled in Alicia’s hold, trying to break free.
Ukiah dove to the floor at Alicia’s feet, hoping to wrestle Zoey from her in this moment of mass confusion.
Alicia pulled a pistol in that moment, as the sheets of glass sprayed out on either side of her and Zoey, carried by the shotgun blasts, glittering in the morning sun like thrown diamonds. She pointed the pistol down at Ukiah’s head, and pulled the trigger.
Ukiah had one moment of awareness, all filled with sound and pain and muzzle flash. Then he was dead.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Mountains
Day of Shooting
The Wolf Boy came alive.
He was aware of a pain in his head from a small, neat hole in his temple, and a large, messy piece of his skull missing, and a tunnel through the gray mass between the two. Part of him wanted to sleep, reserving energy to heal. The rest recognized danger close at hand. He had to get up. He had to flee.
Normally his body shunted memories to his bloodstream, where they were encoded into his genes. While he had been dead, and his blood idle, his short-term memories had been purged as cells frantically dealt with mortal shock. So it seemed like black lightning had struck him. One moment he had been in the hallway of broken glass. Then, complete darkness flashed across his senses.
He woke sprawled halfway on a bare foam-rubber pad, the size of a toddler’s bed, which lay on a old linoleum floor. A crack in the wall by his face let in air—mountain-thin, chilled, and scented with pine. A two-liter pop bottle sat by his shoulder, label peeled off, filled with sugar water. He sniffed it cautiously, and finding it innocent of poison, drank greedily. The carbohydrate intake barely touched the raging hunger in his stomach, brought on by the need to mend a badly damaged body. The sugar water would keep him alive, but he wouldn’t heal.
A handcuff trapped his left hand; stainless steel looped tight around his wrist, the other loop around a steel pole. He examined the pole and found that a hole had been hacked through the wood floor, a solo tube set down into the ground beneath the building, and the whole concreted into place. He searched for a loose nail or pin to pick the lock and failed. He gnawed desperately at the steel, at his wrist, and then finally broke the bones of his hand to collapse it down small enough to slip through the loop. He swallowed whimpers of pain—they were close, so very close.
The girl child of his mother’s line whom he had come to love lay close. They crawled through her, changing her into one of them. They had started in her arm, and the flesh writhed as it converted. The change went up her neck, and flashed across her face. They were in her brain now, and she cried out as they established their dominance. He heard what she said, but couldn’t understand the word
s any more. The head wound robbed him of that ability. He did know, however, that there was no saving her now, and he wanted to howl in misery.
The big male that he associated with friendship and safety was chained to another pole, sleeping. At the Wolf Boy’s muffled sobs, the man startled awake and stared in amazement at the boy. He made a motion for the boy to come to him. The Wolf Boy could smell them inside of the man, under the veil of stale cigarette smoke and sour fear. He scuttled away from the man, growling. The door, though, was locked and solid. The only other exit was over the man’s head, a dirty window showing a twilight sky, so he cautiously approached the man. The man spoke softly, not shouting for them.
Once closer, the Wolf Boy could see that the man had fought and delayed the injection. The man’s immune system waged a feverish war with the alien invader, but it wasn’t a battle he could win. The boy felt deep guilt now—if he had trusted the big man with the truth about them, the man could have fought free long before being hopelessly ensnared. As it was, the man had been happy to see her and had gone willingly and unknowing to his own destruction. The boy flung himself into the effort of freeing the man.
The big man caught the boy’s chin, eyed the wound on his temple, and then turned the boy’s head to see the damage in the back. The man’s voice became a low growl of anger while the Wolf Boy examined the man’s restraining band of steel. The metal cuff pressed deep into the flesh, nearly cutting off blood to the hand. Even breaking the bones of the hand wouldn’t free the man. While the other cuff rode up and down the pole freely, giving the man some range, the pole itself was solid in the floor and ceiling.
The man caught and stilled the boy, silenced his whimpers with a hard look. He spoke for several minutes, words that the boy couldn’t understand but would always remember. The man stood, opened the window over his head and motioned for the boy to climb out, into the gloaming.
There was no way to save them, but it felt wrong to leave them behind.
The Mountains
Day After Shooting
The Wolf Boy was so cold and so very hungry. He kept moving. He drank water when he crossed streams. He ate meadow mushrooms, lichen hanging from pine branches, late-seasoned blue elderberries, and huckleberries found as he ran. He could keep moving on what he found to eat, but not enough to either stay warm or heal.
During the night he used the pattern of the now-nameless stars to head west. He was being followed. He could feel it. The sense of they splintered even as he left the cabin, and some followed. By their very nature, he could not tell how many followed, or in what form. By the same means he knew they pursed him, they tagged after him, blindly following the tenuous link of shared genetics. But they did not have the Pack’s wolf instincts, nor his Wolf Boy experience and intelligence. They could not hunt what they could not see, and so the night cloaked the Wolf Boy, protecting him.
Then dawn came, and the hunt started in earnest. He heard the crows calling as they moved through the forest, growing closer. He was drinking from a stream when the first one found him.
The black bird landed in a soft flutter of wings. They eyed each other: the Wolf Boy in terror, the bird in eager greed. The bird’s eyes were all black—irisless—just like His had been when He tried to kill the Wolf Boy days and days ago, back home.
The similarity in his enemies’ eyes triggered the boy to action. He snatched up a water-smoothed rock and flung it hard. He didn’t expect to hit, and perhaps for that reason alone he did. The crow hesitated, expecting a miss, and the stone struck full on. Breastbone crushed and internal organs ruptured, it fell out of the tree.
Blind hunger made the Wolf Boy leap the distance separating them and snatch up the body. Hot fresh meat! He had it nearly to his mouth, when he remembered the man who nailed him to the wall. He flung the bird away from him in revulsion. He couldn’t eat it—it wasn’t really a bird. Regardless of what it was now, at one time, it was human.
The bird shuddered, cells trying to work around the damage. Growling, the Wolf Boy picked up the body again, and tore off the wings and legs from the bird, flinging them into the stream. There! Be frogs! Be fish! Be minnows! Leave him alone!
A small brook trout he hadn’t noticed came out of a shadowed overhang, heading for the bits of alien bird. The Wolf Boy’s eyes went huge and he pounced, snagging up fish with skill learned in seventy years of running wild.
They were getting close, so he ran, biting through the silvery scales of the fish to the delicious flesh below.
They had him cornered.
He had been running down the hill, and suddenly there was a cliff. He caught hold of a tree to stop in time and hugged it tight, panting. Trees grew right up to the edge, screening the drop, digging roots into stone to lean branches out over dizzying space, disguising the actual lip. As best as he could judge, the cliff continued north and south for wrinkled miles. At the foot of a cliff, a river ran through a course of massive rocks, shallow and clear.
Behind him, toward the rising sun, he could feel them strung out, growing close. Before him the sheer drop; it would take great physical strength that he didn’t have to get safely down. If a fall killed him, he’d be captured for sure. Nor could he afford to injure himself further; he could barely keep up the current pace.
He paused, panting, trying to think like the man he knew himself to be. As he did, his hand operated without thought, turning over stones and fallen branches. Five pillbugs scattered under the third stone. He prodded them with a fingertip, making them curl into tight balls. He popped them into his mouth. They crunched as he chewed.
He felt them, but he didn’t know how many or what forms they were in. If only crows pursued him, he could kill them easily enough. It brought to mind the earlier crow, and the Wolf Boy grinned in savage delight.
It wasn’t a crow. It was the big, blond lawman. Bullet holes peppered the heavily soiled deputy uniform, indicating that it had abandoned all pretenses of being human. It carried a shotgun, and the sight of the gun set the boy’s chest spasming in perfect recall of being murdered by such a weapon.
The boy scrambled backward and away. It charged after him like an enraged bear as he ran parallel to the cliff, racing along the ridge. He sensed them, moving through the woods, making no efforts to cut him off. Why? They had him in an almost perfect trap.
It dawned on him that they didn’t know the lay of the land. A plan came to him, based on an event that happened long ago, between him and a grizzly. He shunted the memory away, frightened that it would read his mind.
He veered east, racing down the hill, gathering speed, not thinking of what lay ahead. It turned and followed, its bulk and longer legs lending it speed, narrowing the gap between the boy and it.
And suddenly there was the cliff and the great empty space. He ran straight up to the edge and leapt . . .
. . . and caught a tree branch. He swung out farther into the void, and then up into the tree itself.
As he hoped, like the grizzly of long ago, it had been too intent on him. It realized too late that it was going to fall. Part of it reached for the tree trunk, and part of it leapt for the tree branch, and other parts tried to stop—but all of it failed and went sailing out into the air. Its howl of anger and fear ended abruptly with a wet, heavy thud on the rocks below.
Which only went to prove that there were some advantages to being a single individual.
The Wolf Boy swung back out of the tree and raced off.
The Mountains
Second Day After Shooting
He heard Max’s whistle the next morning, after running all night without sensing them. The whistle went through him, piercing as an arrow. He jerked to a halt—torn between wanting to flee in mistrust of all living things, and wanting to go to the one he trusted completely.
In the end, he crept out of the woods and down to the forest road where a car sat. Max waited there, watching him come. Finally, his courage abandoned him; he crouched down, fifty feet from the car, and whimpered. To
o scared to go forward, too afraid to run.
After a moment, Max made a show of stripping off his weapons and jacket. He pulled a package out of a bag, and opened it. The smell of roasted chicken spilled out of the package.
Then slowly, Max walked to him, chicken held out in peace offering. The Wolf Boy stalked cautiously closer, meeting him halfway, sniffing. The familiar, trusted scent, nothing alien added to it. The chicken cooked and cooled, the aluminum peeled back to show a brown, crispy skin.
The Wolf Boy crept nearer and put out a hand. Max crouched unmoving as the Wolf Boy’s fingers pressed lightly to the back of Max’s hand. Finding him wholly Max, the boy snatched up the chicken, burying teeth into the tender cooked meat. His eyes closed in the pure bliss of taste. He growled softly as he tore off the meat, gnawed down to the bone and sucked on the joints. The chicken, which seemed so wondrously large, quickly became a pile of clean bones. He licked grease from the aluminum foil, whimpering in distress that his belly still seemed empty.
Max spoke quietly, and then finger-talked. “Come.”
The Wolf Boy sucked the grease from his fingers, and used them to speak. “Food?”
“Food.” Max reached out for the Wolf Boy’s shoulder then dropped his hand as the boy shied away. “Follow.”
The rental car sat on the side of the dirt road, the driver’s door hanging open, the tracking system quietly showing his position.
A second chicken, a fistful of candy bars, a jumbo jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a gallon of whole chocolate milk, and a pack of beef jerky later, the boy allowed himself to be coaxed into the backseat of the car to be covered up with a wool blanket. It was frightening, but Max was here. He slept to the rumble of tires on dirt road, car engine, and the comforting sound of Max’s breathing.
The Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon
Friday, September 3, 2004
He was trapped. Try as he might, he couldn’t get out! Trapped!
Ukiah jerked awake into darkness.