Iron Mountain
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Ukiah’s full panic dropped to only partial terror when Rennie groaned softly in pain. The fact that he didn’t have to smuggle a dead body out of the high-security facility helped relieve some of his fear. Ukiah slogged ashore as the Iron Mountain’s fire team dealt with the fire with surprising efficiency. Black smoke coiled around the ceiling, and the great roaring fan beside the lake had reversed, sucking out the smoke.
An employee spotted him and shouted, “We’ve got wounded here!”
“I’m fine, but my friend is hurt.” Ukiah dodged the man’s effort to stop him and carried Rennie to the Cherokee. “I need to take him to the hospital.”
“We’ll call for an ambulance,” the employee said.
Ukiah juggled Rennie’s limp body to get the Cherokee’s passenger door open. “No, no, it will be faster if I take him. I think he’s dying.”
The head of security came out of the smoke, coughing. “You! What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure. Someone swapped our stuff out and left bombs behind,” Ukiah said. “I don’t know who. I don’t know why. Rennie is hurt bad; I need to get him to a hospital.”
“Where’s Stewart?”
Ukiah squinted at him in confusion until he remembered that the guard with them had introduced himself as “Mark Stewart.” Ukiah looked back at the flames licking out of the chamber. “Oh, shit! He’s still in there!” He flashed back to the moment before the bomb went off. “He opened the crate and triggered the bomb. He took the blast full on.”
Most likely the poor man had died instantly.
“How did you get out?”
“My friend carried me out. He shielded me from the worst of it.” Ukiah motioned to Rennie. “I’ve got to get him to the hospital. I think he’s dying.”
The head of security looked at the heinously burned Rennie and swore.
“Let me take him to the hospital. I can get him there in the time it will take an ambulance just to get here.”
“Fine, fine, let me get you through the front gate.”
His mothers’ home was the nearest safe harbor. The house was empty and still. Ukiah carried Rennie up to his bathroom, put him into the empty tub, and then raided the kitchen. Judging by the food crowding the refrigerator in strange dishes, and the many human scents lingering in the house, Mom Jo’s large extended family had rallied to her side. On the kitchen table was last night’s Butler Eagle, the headline reading “Second Baby Found Dead: Local Baby Taken.” Pinned to the refrigerator by magnets was a MISSING flyer with Kittanning’s photograph. Beside it was a crayon drawing by Cally of an empty crib labeled in crudely copied letters “taken.”
He took the food upstairs and used it to coax Rennie back to consciousness.
“Where are we?” Rennie felt like a supernova of pain against Ukiah’s awareness, the burnt skin cells peeling off in sheets.
Ukiah tried to mentally distance himself from Rennie’s pain. “My parents’. Drink this.” “This” being a quart of orange juice, eight raw eggs, and a bottle of chocolate syrup mixed together. “Where are the Dogs?”
“What day is it? What the hell happened?” Rennie gulped the drink down hungrily.
“We found a nasty surprise at Iron Mountain.”
“Where?”
“I’ll explain later.” Ukiah gave up on trying to get information from Rennie. “We’re safe now.”
Rennie grunted and dropped the empty bottle over the edge of the tub. “More.”
They split Uncle Johnny’s homemade deer jerky, Aunt Kat’s egg salad, a package of kielbasa, and an apricot Jell-O and cream cheese salad donated by one cousin or other following the family’s traditional recipe. The last was solely a comfort food for Ukiah. Afterward, Ukiah cut away the wet burned clothes from Rennie, peeling off burned dead flesh with the cloth. Rennie’s back was a blistering, bleeding mass thick with splinters of ancient wood. Ukiah used tweezers to pick out the largest pieces of wood—Rennie’s body would eject the smaller pieces. When Ukiah had been healed back from being shot by Hex, he woke covered with the shotgun pellets.
When Ukiah had done all he could, he fed a jar of peanut butter to Rennie, exhausting his mom’s ready supply of protein. “That’s it. Go to sleep.”
“Are you safe?” Rennie’s thoughts were already clouded with sleep.
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
Ukiah sat on the tiled floor beside the bathtub, hurt and heartsick, watching Rennie sleep, ashen and deadly still. His mind, though, was locked on those last few moments, the guard alive and unharmed beside him, smelling of Old Spice cologne, standing near enough that Ukiah could sense the heat of his body.
And now he was dead.
They had been so focused on Kittanning that they blinded themselves to the danger. He should have called Max and Sam. He should have told Indigo about the trip to Iron Mountain. Maybe one of them could have guessed that the trap left wouldn’t ensnare, like he and Rennie thought it would, but simply kill.
“The ‘what ifs’ will drive you insane if you let them,” Max had always said, and Ukiah knew that it was never so very true as now. But an innocent man was dead, blasted away.
There was nothing he could do, and Kittanning was still missing.
He got up to change.
He stripped out of his damp clothes, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and rescued what was in the pockets of his wet slacks. His wallet was a soggy mass that he dropped onto his nightstand. His phone was dead, killed sometime between the bomb blast and the swim in the underground lake. He called Max on the house line.
Max answered, apparently reading the phone number on his display and leaping to a conclusion. “Is something wrong, Lara?”
“It’s me. I’ve got a mess,” Ukiah said and recounted what had happened at Iron Mountain.
“Iron Mountain?” Max swore. “Zlotnikov worked there. It was one of the first jobs he held down after dropping out of college.” He read dates off to Ukiah.
“That’s ten years ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, he was there when Hex’s Get picked up the remote key. Hex set up password codes instead of the photo IDs and such that they normally use out there. Zlotnikov could have heard the code ten years ago, and then five years later, given it to cult members dressed as Omega Pharmaceuticals employees to steal the machines and leave bombs.”
“If the cult is making Invisible Red, then it’s the cult that has Kittanning,” Max said. “And vice versa.”
“But where?”
“Damned if I know. If they’re from the area, though, they know it well. We’ve talked to half a dozen classmates already . . . oh, damn!”
“What?”
“William Harris. Billy!” Max snapped. “What’s Harris’s middle name? Robert?”
“Robert.” Sam’s voice was audible through the phone.
Max swore. “Hutchinson is somewhere in front of us on this. He’s talked to the same people we interviewed today. If the cult has the machines, we’re going to have fun getting to them before the federal government gets them.”
“Only if Hutchinson can find the cult before we do.”
“I’ll put Alicia, Chino, and Janey on this,” Max said. “One of his classmates might know where he is.”
Ukiah frowned, missing a link. “Zlotnikov? He’s dead.”
“Billy Bob!” Max said. “William Robert Harris—Billy Bob Harris—was the popular minister’s son that befriended Zlotnikov! According to the yearbook, his nickname in school was ‘Will,’ or ‘Iron Will,’ or ‘God’s Will.’ He was in a half-dozen clubs: war games, ROTC, first responders, computer club, and a prayer group. We made a quick stab at tracking him down earlier, but let it drop when we hit pay dirt on others that graduated with Zlotnikov.”
“Hutchinson knew Harris’s name when he came to the office.”
Max thought a moment and said, “That’s right. I forgot that.”
“Why did he miss the connection?”
“He might not have,” Max said. “He might not be sharing everything he knows.”
Ukiah heard his mom Lara’s Neon pull up, the slam of doors, and Cally’s high voice. “My mom just got home. I need to catch her before she finds Rennie.”
“Okay. Call me back when things are settled there. We’ll start looking for Harris.”
“Be careful,” Ukiah said. “If he’s Adam’s Billy Bob, he’s deadly.”
Cally was first through the kitchen door, slamming it open and squealing at the sight of him. She glanced quickly around the room and then rushed for the living room. Ukiah snagged her first, wincing as it pulled tight on the burned flesh of his back.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he said as she wriggled violently in his grasp.
Mom Lara came from the door, eyes hopeful. “Did you find him?”
“No,” he said. “Rennie’s been hurt and I needed to take him someplace safe.”
Cally went still in his hold. “Kittanning isn’t here?”
“No, pumpkin, we haven’t been able to get him back yet,” Ukiah said. “One of my friends is upstairs in my bathtub. He’s hurt and needs you to be quiet. Can you do that?” He put her down. “Why don’t you go out and play? I need to talk to Mommy.”
Lara stood motionless as he approached her, arms wrapped tight around her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, rubbing a hand along her shoulder and back. When she nodded, he told her, in as few as possible sentences, about how the questioning of Alicia had led to the storage site, and the bombs left as a trap. Then, because she still seemed so distant, he said, “I’m sorry about bringing Rennie here. I don’t know if the offices are being watched, and he’s hurt too much to defend himself. He should be fine in a few hours, and we’ll leave then.”
Lara sobbed then and caught hold of him. “I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t. I could have been the strong mother, if you’d just be the little lost boy.”
“I’ve got my own little lost boy to be strong for,” he told her, which only made her cry more.
When Lara had calmed down enough to start lasagna for dinner, Ukiah returned to the attic to check on Rennie and changed into a dry T-shirt, underwear, and riding leathers. Sooner or later, Iron Mountain would check with Butler Memorial Hospital; once they learned Ukiah never arrived with Rennie, they’d probably report both men and the Cherokee to the police. Now was not the time Ukiah wanted to be answering difficult questions; he was going to switch vehicles to his motorcycle.
He was pleased to see that Rennie was recovering swiftly; the Pack leader would be back on his feet in a few hours. Unfortunately it left him without a backup. Picking up his jacket, he trotted back downstairs.
Max called him back just as he hit the last step. “Have you turned on the television?”
“No.” Ukiah carried the phone into his moms’ living room and turned on their modest set. It showed a helicopter view of smoke pouring out of the hillside of Iron Mountain. “The mine explosion on Channel Eleven?”
“It’s on all the local channels. They’re trying to decide if it’s a terrorist strike. Apparently there are lots of government and banking records stored in the mine.”
Ukiah flipped through the local stations, wincing at what he found. As Max claimed, reporters from the four or five major stations were speculating on which terrorist group could be responsible and why. He muted the sound and let the images continue to play. “Have you gotten a lead on Will Harris/Billy Bob, yet?”
“No one was at the manse, but one of the neighbors was home and we talked with her,” Max said. “She had the television on and that’s where we spotted the reports on Iron Mountain. Apparently, Billy was a middle-aged surprise for his parents; his father, the preacher, retired right after Billy graduated from high school, and his folks didn’t have the money to send him to college. He had some EMT training, so he joined an ambulance crew.”
“Did he work with anyone we know?”
“I’m not sure at the moment. The neighbor used little town connections: girlfriend’s second cousin’s in-laws. You know how it is—lots of interconnected relationships but rarely a full name. It sounds like Billy didn’t fit in well though, the rest of the crew seemed to think he was an arrogant little son of a bitch whose sloppiness was going to get him fired or thrown in prison. Then he suffered a mental breakdown and started to talk about seeing demons and angels. His parents were trying to get him diagnosed when he vanished and showed up in California, arrested for assault and battery.”
“Which is how he met Adam Goodman.”
“So it seems,” Max said. “The neighbor only knew that he came back to Pennsylvania, gathered up his old friends, and they moved to New England.”
“What’s in New England?”
“Who knows?” Max said. “But Hutchinson said they scrapped everything there and moved to Buffalo.”
Ukiah recalled the Buffalo power grid they found on the cult’s Web site. “Actually, that makes sense. The Ae need power. Usually you hook one of the portable generators up, like the ones we used in Oregon.”
“If they have the Ae and they have the power, why are they in Pittsburgh kidnapping kids?”
“Maybe they thought they needed to key the Ae to a breeder.”
“But Rennie said the one that makes Invisible Red is keyed already,” Max pointed out. “Besides, how would they know Kittanning is a breeder? If they knew that, wouldn’t they also know about you? Hell, how do they know about any of this stuff? I’ve seen Ontongard technology—how did Zlotnikov, a security guard with a high school diploma, figure out that they’re alien doomsday devices? We’re not talking honor roll student here.”
“I don’t think he did realize that the Ae are doomsday devices,” Ukiah said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been killed by it.”
“Oh, shit, that’s right. The Invisible Red wouldn’t hurt him until it cleaned out of his system. When the police jailed him, it set him up to be knocked off.” Max was silent for a moment, and then said, half to himself, “Zlotnikov knew enough to get one Ae to work, but how?”
Ukiah hoped that it was only one. “I don’t know.”
“Unless there’re instruction manuals you haven’t mentioned, this goes back to the Ontongard. We’ve used their machines only by wit of Pack memory.”
“But if Zlotnikov is dead, he wasn’t Ontongard.”
“So we keep saying,” Max said. “I hate to say this, but we might need to make sure that Zlotnikov was actually buried and not running around perfectly alive at the moment.”
“Good point,” Ukiah said. “Goodman is definitely dead, though.”
“And how,” Max agreed and sighed. “That’s all we’ve managed so far. We’re going to see if we can track down who all went to New England and if any of their families have heard from them, or know anything enlightening.”
“Okay.”
“Be careful,” Max said sternly and hung up.
Ukiah sat massaging his temples, trying to make sense out of the mess. He reviewed what he knew about the cult, from Hutchinson’s first mention to the Web site tied with what Max just reported.
Was Zlotnikov human or a Get? The dead security guard at Iron Mountain had said that someone accessed the machines, counter to what Alicia/Hex remembered. Also the thieves made an elaborate production out of moving the Ae, using Omega Pharmaceuticals “uniforms.” The Ontongard wouldn’t have bothered with such props. So it seemed likely Zlotnikov was solely human and at least partially responsible for the Ae’s theft.
Why the bombs though? Zlotnikov would have known that the Ae sat unchecked for fifty years. Why endanger so many human lives on a trap that might not be triggered for another fifty years?
Ukiah gazed at the muted television, still showing the smoke billowing out of the entrance of Iron Mountain. He picked up the remote and flipped through the local stations again: slices of the same disaster, seen from different angles.
The bombs weren’t a trap. They were a warning signal to the cult: their theft had been discovered.
Whatever the cult had planned surely now would change. With this, they knew they were being closed in on. They would move. They would dig in deeper, someplace new.
One thing he learned from running with the wolves, one had to kill a snake before it went underground.
Cally had been sitting on the front porch steps when he walked out of the house. He patted her on the head as he passed, deep in his own thinking. Mom Jo’s extended family might actually prove to be a good resource in finding William Harris, alias Billy Bob, alias Core, and his cult, the Temple of New Reason. Whereas he, Max, Indigo, and the Pack would all be outsiders stumbling over unfamiliar ground, Mom Jo’s family had a vast, old, and trusted network throughout the entire Butler County region. There might even be members of the cult related to Mom Jo that he didn’t know about, although he doubted it; otherwise Goodman’s attack probably would have come at the farm.
But he knew Mom Jo’s family well enough that they would respond best if Mom Jo organized the search rather than he or Mom Lara.
It was another twenty minutes before Mom Jo got home from the zoo, and his bike was nearly out of gas, so the best use of his time would to be to hit a local gas station.
As he backed his bike out of the wagon shed that served as the farm’s garage, he noticed that Cally had followed him, and watched him with big sad eyes.
“What’s wrong, Cally?”
“Kittanning is coming back. Right?”
“I hope so, honey.”
She burst into tears. “This is all my fault.”
“Pumpkin.” He leaned down to hug her. “How could it possibly be your fault?”
“I asked God to take Kittanning away, and he did!”
“What?”
“I’m the baby!” Cally wailed. “I thought we could go back to the way it used to be, but everyone just cries when they think I’m not listening. And I didn’t want him hurt, I just wanted him to go away, but those mean men have him, the ones that are killing all the babies, and it’s all my fault!”
“Hey, hey, God wouldn’t make Kittanning go away because you asked him to.”
“He wouldn’t?”
“Would Mom Lara or Mom Jo ever hurt someone just because you asked them to hurt them?”
“No.”
“If God is wise and powerful, why would he do something Mama or Mommy wouldn’t do because it was silly.”
She frowned, trying to fit the two worldviews together.
“God wouldn’t do it,” Ukiah said firmly. “This isn’t your fault.”
He rode to town with Cally on his mind. Guilt had taken root in her beyond what simple logic could pluck out. He supposed it was the nature of being raised within a faith. All Cally’s life she had been told that God would answer an earnest prayer, and now, beyond all reason, she thought he’d granted her selfish wish. She had heard Ukiah, understood, and yet, even as she acknowledged the wisdom of his words, she still believed in her too-generous God. Ukiah supposed it was the problem of all religions, that God was defined and thus limited by the worshiper; Cally had not foreseen the harm Kittanning’s disappearance would cause, and thus neither, she believed, could “her” God.
There were two gas stations in Evans City. The first sat across from the bank on Main Street. To get to the gas station with slightly lower prices, he would need to take Main Street across the railroad tracks, past the elementary school, and out of town proper. He decided on the cheaper gas, but as he sat waiting for the red light on Main Street to change, his thoughts went then to his own beliefs. Not long ago, his view had been as simplistic as Cally’s. The addition of Rennie and Magic Boy had done much to grow his view of God. From the Ontongard, he understood now the size of the universe, or at least the local galaxy, and from Magic Boy came a crowd of ancestral and animal spirits. Creation was huge, but they were not alone.
And so, when the light changed to green, it somehow felt right to detour away from Main Street, and swing up to the graveyard that overlooked Evans City.
The Evans City Cemetery was old and crowded with familiar names, testament that many of the town’s families had been there for generations. Mom Jo’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles, distant and some not so distant cousins, and so on all lay under worn headstones, lilacs, and yew trees. Parking his motorcycle, Ukiah walked the windswept hilltop, visiting the graves of the people he had actually known. Uncle Ollie. Great-aunt Minnie. Scotty. Grandma Pfiefer.
Ukiah crouched at Grandma Pfiefer’s grave, hand on the warm stone, the cold wind cutting through him. “Grandma, have you been watching? Have you seen what’s happened? Evil people have taken my little boy, and I can’t find him. Can you help me? God, in heaven, please, please help me. He’s so small and helpless, and I love him with all of my heart.”
The wind had been blowing straight east, as it was wont to do in Pennsylvania. The wind shifted suddenly hard to the southwest, blasting through the cemetery with a roar of fury. It scoured over the graves, snatching up dead leaves like fragments of prayers, and flung them heavenward.
Ukiah stood, his hackles rising as a shiver of cold went up his spine. As he watched the leaves rise up, he noticed a great grizzly bear-shaped cumulus cloud lumbering across the sky, heading south.
It did not occur to him to question it.
He ran to his bike and went.
It was a quick whip down to 68 and up the twisting 528. Trees screened the sky from sight on the right as he climbed the reservoir hill, but the bear raced across the reflection on the water, leaving him behind. When he reached the on-ramp to I-79, it was nearly to Cranberry already, and on the exposed hilltop, the wind roared around him.
He opened the big bike up and flew down the highway, chasing the bear. Late evening, and both the northbound and southbound lanes contained only scattered traffic. On either side of the road, the wind rushed through the trees wrapped in fall colors and blasted the dead leaves off in a bright colored blizzard.
He caught up to the great shadow racing under the cloud just as the highway divided and wove around a hill, below an exit ramp and above other roads.
“. . .Daddy?. . .”
Ukiah felt Kittanning’s presence speed past him, as if brushing across his back with outstretched fingers, and disappear. He braked hard, fighting to keep from flipping nose first, leaving a trail of smoking rubber behind him. “Kitt!”
The touch had come, east to west, in front, under and behind as he crossed over the Pennsylvania turnpike. The kidnappers had Kittanning in a car, going west on the turnpike, heading out of state. While the highways crossed here, both roads were heavily fenced to keep deer off them. He had already passed the on-ramp for the turnpike connector road, but he’d have to go back to it.
Ukiah dodged a tractor-trailer, its horn blaring, to U-turn and head back against traffic. With his phone dead and left behind, Ukiah would have to find a phone and stop moving to make the call. And what would he say, his son was in some vehicle, type and color unknown?
He had to catch up with Kittanning before the kidnappers could leave the turnpike.
The connector cut from I-79, over State Route 19 and to the turnpike with a tangle of ramps connecting all three together in the name of lessening congestion. He flashed up the I-79 on-ramp, ignoring the blare of protesting horns, and darted across the oncoming traffic to the lanes entering the turnpike. There was a line of cars taking turnpike tickets. The center lane was blocked off with a red light and an orange cone. He ducked through the closed aisle, cut off a blue minivan pulling away from the far ticket machine, and barely made the turn onto the westbound lane. Once onto the level pavement of the turnpike, he nailed the throttle to open.
The speed limit was sixty-five, but most people traveled at seventy or seventy-five. The speeders cruised around eighty. Ukiah raced past them all, already at a hundred and climbing, darting through them as if they were standing still. Luckily the road curved constantly, so he rushed up and past vehicles before drivers could react.
Ideally he would follow the kidnappers at a discreet distance until he found a chance to call for help. He had to close the distance between them first; otherwise he’d be running blind. He risked a glance skyward, but the wind had shredded away any sign of the bear, if it hadn’t been all his imagination. He quested with his mind instead, reaching for Kittanning.
“Kitt? Kittanning?”
A faint mental wail of hope and fear, growing quickly stronger. “Daddy?”
As the contact became stronger, Ukiah slowed, trying to judge which of the cars ahead Kittanning was in. A knot of vehicles traveled westbound. The first was a U-Haul rental truck pulling a trailer. The second was a red, extended cab pickup truck with a large dog carrier in the back. A gold minivan fidgeted in the back, and as Ukiah approached, pulled out into the passing lane.
The minivan? Ukiah reached mentally for Kittanning.
In the back of the pickup, a small dog leapt to its feet in the dog carrier to stare intently at him. It bounced excitedly as their eyes made contact. “Daddy! Daddy!”
And Ukiah realized the scent from the dog was that of wolf cub. “Oh, Kittanning, what have you done to yourself?”
Kittanning cringed at the rebuke. Memories of pain and confusion flashed through their mental link. When Hex created Kittanning, he had locked Ukiah’s mouse in a sealed box, from which there was no escape from the pain except compliance to Hex’s will. As Ukiah was telepathic with the Ontongard, Hex’s mentally conveyed demands had been clear: take human shape. Somehow the cult had Hex’s torture box. Inexplicably they had locked Kittanning into it and turned it on. They failed, however, to give Kittanning any clue to what shape they wanted him. In pain, Kittanning had chosen a form that was more mobile. Unfortunately he’d chosen one less intelligent too; the simple lock on the carrier confounded the puppy.
Ukiah slowed down and pulled behind the pickup truck as the minivan passed it and then the U-Haul truck.
There were three men in the pickup’s cab. As Ukiah watched, the front passenger turned and Ukiah recognized him. It was Hash. The large man eyed the dog crate with a worried frown, leaving Ukiah to wonder how well they had the crate secured. Was Hash worried that the crate would fly out of the back? Or had Kittanning’s transformation unnerved him?
Whatever the cause of Hash’s unease, he turned back facing front, satisfied for now. He said something to the driver, who turned at the comment, giving Ukiah a chance to see his profile. He was the blond Ice, lean and ripcord to Hash’s bulk, but still something in the look he gave Hash, and the fact that he was driving, suggested that he was the alpha male of the two.
Ukiah would have to follow them, waiting for a chance to call for backup or grab Kittanning. Much as he wanted to get Kittanning to safety, he had to think of the machines; he couldn’t lose track of the cult.
A sudden bolt of fear went through him as his perfect memory flashed the recall of his gas gauge, the red needle hovering over the red line. He didn’t need to look to know he was riding on fumes. He probably wouldn’t even make the next exit.
He had to stop them, here and now.
He’d left his gun hidden in the Cherokee. He had the bike and his body, neither one he wanted to use. He glanced up the road, beyond the pickup, trying to estimate how close they were to an exit and civilization.
The Pennsylvania turnpike seemed to have been built with the minimum of waste in mind. Between the left lane and a cement center barrier, there was only a foot clearance. The breakdown lane on the right was only wide enough for a single car, and lined by walls to keep the crumbling hillsides from sliding down and blocking the road. The rental truck up ahead was traveling too fast for its trailer, and it had picked up a dangerous shimmy, suggesting a timely accident.
Ukiah glanced back. The road behind them was clear of other cars. If he acted now, before he ran out of gas . . .
But could he live with himself if he killed an innocent driver?
He swung out to the white dashed divider line and looked ahead to the U-Haul’s side mirror to see the driver’s face. Almost as if she felt his gaze, Hutchinson’s Christa, alias Socket, glanced into her mirror to look back at him.
“They came with a U-Haul truck,” the guard at Iron Mountain said shortly before he was killed. “Said they wanted stuff from storage.”
Ukiah growled, and gunned his motorcycle. He shot around the pickup truck, and wove back to the far right until he threaded the yellow line of the berm. If given warning, Socket could probably take him out without danger to her truck. But if he could get her to overreact, pure surprise might do what a game of chicken couldn’t. He judged the wild swing of the trailer and then nailed his throttle to over a hundred. Ten seconds he raced along the trailer, and then the huge truck body that could flatten him without noticing. He needed to get clear fast, before the pickup could warn her.
Back axle. Passenger door. And then he was at the right bumper. He glanced back to make sure his back wheel was clear of her bumper and cut straight across the front of the truck.
It was almost perfect.
With a scream of brakes, Socket jerked the truck to the left, trying to avoid him as he suddenly appeared in front of her. The already fishtailing trailer jumped to the breakdown lane, dragging the back of the truck enough so the whole truck now slid sideways at him. The movement was a graceful slide until the trailer’s edge kissed the retaining wall. Instantly it ricocheted off, twisting on its hitch. With a sound like a gunshot, the tire blew under the stress, and when the bare rim touched pavement, the pavement caught hold of the trailer, yanked it hard from the back of the truck, and set it hurling through stunning somersaults of obliteration. It was like watching a tornado focused on only one object, quickly becoming many objects as the trailer burst open and its contents shattered into pieces, all with their own trajectories.
The pickup’s brake joined the scream of protest, suddenly silenced by a deep thud of metal against cement. Later, he would remember the plastic dog cage vaulting from the bed of the pickup and smashing open, freeing a wobbly Kittanning.
Truly almost perfect. Only at that moment, the last fumes of gas spent, his bike died under him. He could feel the heavy front end of the rental truck bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do. The truck was too wide to avoid. It smashed him to the ground, and he tumbled, a series of bone-breaking body-meets-unyielding-pavement impacts. His collarbone that had healed only the day before snapped along the still fragile knit.
Then there was silence and stillness. Then the click of toenails on pavement, and Kittanning was there, nosing into him, whimpering in distress.
“Oh, fuck!” a male voice said, a passenger in the rental truck he hadn’t noticed.
“You okay, Parity?” Socket asked.
“Daddy?” Kittanning licked at his fingers, whining in distress.
The pickup truck’s passenger door opened, and Hash spilled out. The two cultists in the rental truck got out.
“Run, Kitt! Get away.”
Kittanning licked anxiously at his face. “Daddy!”
Ukiah pushed at him, gasping as the move shot pain through him. “Run!”
Yipping, Kittanning darted away, stubby tail tucked between his legs.
Hash started after the puppy, but Ukiah lurched to his feet, and blocked the large man, growling.
“You! You’re the Wolf Boy!” Hash shifted into a fighting stance.
Ukiah snarled at the man, willing Kittanning to keep running.
Hash tried to feint left and then go right, ducking around Ukiah after Kittanning. Even wounded Ukiah managed to shift back and punch him. Hash rolled with the blow so that Ukiah barely tagged him, but he still felt his skin break and blood smatter his knuckles. With a roar, Hash tackled him to the ground. They tumbled, and Ukiah gained the top, only to be smashed aside by the pickup’s driver, Ice. Seconds later he was pinned and Socket shoved a revolver tight to his forehead.
“Hold still!” The revolver seemed huge in her small hands. “Or I’ll splatter your brains all over the pavement.”
“Just pop him, Socket!” Hash shouted.
“He’s the Wolf Boy!” Socket cried. “He’s not one of them.”
“Who gives a flying fuck?”
The gun barrel pressed hard against Ukiah’s temple, rocking with Socket’s agitation. “Give it up, damn it!”
Ukiah couldn’t get the leverage he needed to wriggle himself free, the broken shoulder only cracking more under the stress. If he let them kill him, he’d be completely helpless. He forced himself to relax. “Okay. Okay. You win.” Like it was a child’s game.
“We should just shoot him anyway,” Parity muttered.
“Ice?” Hash turned to the pickup driver.
“Bind him, get him into the truck,” Ice said. “We’ll let Core decide what to do with him. Dongle, get the cell phone and the GPS out of the Jimmy and go after the puppy. Someone will be back to fetch you in an hour or so. Stay out of sight of cops, but get the puppy back.”
The third cultist from the pickup truck scrambled over the guardrail and after Kittanning. Hash forced Ukiah to roll onto his stomach, face to the hot pavement, and then knelt on the center of Ukiah’s back. He quickly bound Ukiah’s arms with a thin strong wire, wrapping it tightly from wrist to nearly forearms in a web of steel. Ukiah’s shoulder became an endless wave of blinding pain. With Ukiah secure, Socket moved off, tucking away her pistol.
“We’re going back?” Hash hauled Ukiah to his feet and pushed him to the rental truck.
“Core needs to know what happened.” Ice unlocked the padlock on the gate, and he pushed it up to reveal that it was stacked haphazardly with boxes. “Clean out of the Jimmy,” he ordered the rest. “We’re leaving it here.”
Hash and Socket moved quickly at the orders, well trained. Parity drifted, as if in a haze.
“Oh, shit!” Parity picked up something from the road. “One of the founts was on the trailer!” He turned the item in his hand and Ukiah recognized it as an Ae’s shattered induction board.
“What?” Ice nearly shouted.
Socket brushed past them to climb into the back of the truck. “All of them were supposed to be on the truck!”
“Which one was it?” Ice asked.
“I don’t know.” Parity eyed the shard.
Socket scrambled over the boxes, peering into the dark corners, swearing. After a moment she came to stand in the doorway. “There’s only one in here.”
“Which one?” Ice asked.
“Huey,” Socket said.
A distant siren wailed at the edge of hearing range.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Parity asked again and again like a mantra. “What do we do?”
“Parity, shut up,” Ice said.
“But what do we do? We’ve lost the puppy. The Jimmy is screwed to hell. We’ve got . . .”
“Shut up!” Ice roared. “We take him and go! Before the cops come.” Ice pushed Ukiah in among the boxes. “Parity, you ride in the back.”
“Me?” the boy yelped.
“There’s only room in the front for three.”
Parity didn’t reply, nor did he move.
“I’ll ride in back,” Socket said.
“Fine,” Ice snapped. “Stay out of range of his legs.”
Ice waited until Socket climbed in beside Ukiah, and then pulled down the gate, saying, “We’re heading back to Eden.”