by Wen Spencer
“Do you think they might all be dead?”
“They might be.” Max clicked through the Web site. “It depends on how crazed the leader is and plain stupid luck. If nothing happens to set off the leader, then everything runs fairly smoothly. But if federal agents start sticking their noses into things, or cult members start walking away because the second coming isn’t appearing as prophesized, then we could be talking full meltdown.”
Max had been clicking through the various pages, scrolling quickly over the information. “There’s not a lot here except garbage. ‘The Russian name for wormwood is chernobyl. In Norwegian it’s malurt, not unlike Marduk.’ Talk about covering all bases.”
“Huh?”
“Wormwood is a star mentioned in the book of Revelation that falls to Earth and poisons the water.” He scanned the text and made a rude noise. “They build an elaborate theory where the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl was the foretold ‘falling star,’ thus we’re currently living through the End Days. They go on, though, and add that ‘wormwood’ could also be translated as Marduk, which is the mythical twelfth planet that was supposed to crash into Earth last year, which was yet to happen when they wrote these pages.”
“Anything on Wolf Boy Aliens?”
In a sudden flurry of typing, Max called up a dozen windows and jumped to the bottom of various pages. “Okay this is odd. No, nothing about Wolf Boy, but with the exception of the member testimonials, everything is copied off other people’s Web sites.” Max pointed out where the original authors were cited. “No wonder it’s conflicting.”
“So it doesn’t really tell you what they believe.”
“No. What it would do would suck in anyone that was a hard-core believer of quack theories already.”
“Yeah, but they hid everything.”
“Maybe they only want hackers as members.” Max started to examine the source code for the pages. He made a noise of discovery and pulled up the crude home page of a teenage Asian girl named Lei Lu Lee. Under her smiling thumbnail photograph, the girl had written a greeting in broken English. “This is my page. My big brother tell me to do this. He is silly.” Max read. “Cute.”
“What’s this?”
Max clicked on the girl’s photo and a password box that popped up. “The first site apparently was just to suck in members. They’ve abandoned it; it hasn’t been updated in years. This is their new site, totally covert.” He grunted. “Shoot. It’s a secure server. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to hack it. Let’s do a whois lookup. They probably lied on the Admin listing, but if they’re using someone else’s machines, then they won’t be able to control that info.”
A long listing scrolled up the screen. Max flicked downward and chuckled.
“What?”
“They used the boys in the bunker.”
“Pittsburgh Data Haven?”
“Yup.” Max smiled smugly.
When Max owned his Internet company, he had hired three brilliant young men of questionable morals to maintain his servers. They used his office space, equipment, and T1 line to start up a data haven business. When he discovered the budding company chewing up his resources, he’d given the men a week to move out instead of scrubbing all their data instantly. The men relocated to an old, low-slung, windowless, concrete cable utility building with the nickname of “the bunker.”
“They owe me big time. I’ll call them and see if they’ll let me check the site out.” Max glanced at his watch. “Sam shouldn’t be in until late afternoon tomorrow; that should give me enough time to find out why the Temple is interested in us.”
“I think a better question might be when did the cult develop their interest? If it was at the time of the shooting, then maybe they’ve been taken over by Ontongard. They could be Gets going after the only breeder.”
Max grunted, indicating a doubtful agreement. After a moment of thinking, he countered with, “But Hutchinson said that Zip died of an aneurysm, not a mouse-riddled fever. ‘Aneurysm’ suggests that they did an autopsy and didn’t have the problem of vanishing bodies, or dead coroners. Besides, an aneurysm would barely slow a Get down.”
Ukiah had to admit all that was true.
“I hate to say this, but you should tell Rennie about these kooks. Just in case they turn out to be Ontongard.”
“I don’t know; they just sound like suicidal nutcases to me. I hate to get the Dogs involved—the Pack tends to overreact.”
“If they’re suicidal, then they’re sure to welcome a visit by the Pack,” Max said. “After what happened in Pendleton, I want to cover all bases. Let Indigo know too; see if she can find out if Hutchinson is giving us the straight shot here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
The last few times Max got a bad feeling, Ukiah ended up dead.
Kittanning stirred. Ukiah winced. He had hoped to get real work done while Kitt slept, but Hutchinson’s visit and the search for information on the Temple of New Reason had chewed up all that time. The day was almost over, he had gotten little done, and he already had two commitments for the evening.
Ukiah called and made arrangements with Mom Jo to swing by the office and pick up Kittanning and his moms’ groceries before heading home. There was slight disappointment in Mom Jo’s voice that he tried to ignore. He promised to stay home on Tuesday night, knowing that Max would love the excuse to be alone with Sam. He stripped the guest bed and threw the sheets into the washer; it gave him time to think about what to say to Indigo.
She answered her phone with a terse, “Special Agent Zheng.”
“It’s me,” Ukiah said. “Rennie asked that we come for dinner tonight. They’re doing a cookout and a howling. My moms will watch Kittanning.”
“Both of us? He wants me there? What’s up?”
“Nothing. They want to see me. They’ll like it if you come too.”
There was silence from the other side of the phone.
“We do an early dinner, and I’ll go on alone,” he offered. “Or we can do breakfast tomorrow.” When the silence continued, he said, “It’s just a cookout; I can skip it.”
“No!” It was a hard sharp denial. Indigo took a deep breath, and let it out. “I can’t isolate you from your people. You told me how alone Magic Boy was, how unhappy he was, how desperate he was for someone like himself—it got him killed. I can’t take the Dog Warriors away from you.”
“You don’t have to go with me. I can go alone.”
“How can I slight your family and then ask you to spend time with my family later?”
“Well, your family isn’t a collection of FBI most wanted.”
“Granted, but I think this is important. It’s a package deal. I get them when I take you.”
“You didn’t know that at the start.”
“Life is full of surprises,” she said. “Don’t tell me where the Howling is, though, I might be tempted to raid it just to vent some frustrations.”
“You would?”
She laughed lightly at the surprise in his voice. “No. Probably not. I’d rather not have to deal with the temptation though. Can you pick me up?”
Dusk gathered in the shadows of skyscrapers while Ukiah rode his big Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle through downtown. When afternoon’s rush hour ended, evening usually found Pittsburgh a deserted town, everyone fled to suburb homes. The Kawasaki’s gas gauge read low, he noticed, but there was enough to run up to McConnell’s Mills and back. Ukiah pulled up in front of Indigo’s athletic club; she had wanted to burn off frustration and change into street clothes before heading out to the Howling. She came out wearing leather pants so tight he wanted nothing more than to be alone with her to take them off. That he couldn’t only made him more miserable than he already was.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, reading his face.
“Kittanning wasn’t happy about going home with Mom Jo.” Worse, Kittanning had been able to reach mentally into Ukiah and project all his consuming fear, hurt, and anger. “He kicked up a fuss.”
He pulled out of the parking lot, made his way to the I-279 on-ramp, and headed north. Like one body, moving together, they leaned into the curves and wove through the light traffic.
It was like their lovemaking, purity without words. It seemed like an open communion of souls, but how much did it show him of Indigo’s heart? And how could he expect to know her true desires when he didn’t know his own.
It was full dark as they threaded their way through back roads, cutting down through the gorge and across the picturesque covered bridge beside the old gristmill. Ukiah only had Rennie’s memories of the place: a hilltop farmhouse surrounded by ten to fifteen acres of level land, a set of well-kept outbuildings, and the rest of the farm’s acreage rolling away in a series of steep hills. A large sycamore shaded the front yard, and a bonfire had been built up just beyond its spread, so that the flames shone on autumn-gold leaves and bone-white branches.
The fire made Ukiah slow while making the turn into the drive. The Pack never built fires as big as signal lights unless there were Ontongard to cremate. There were people moving around the fire, some of them turning at the sound of his engine, his headlights reflected in wolf eyes.
Rennie?
So, Cub, you did make it after all.
There was a knot of motorcycles parked together, too many to be just the Dog Warriors. He paused beside them, wondering if one of the Pack clans was moving through the area and stopped for the Howling. Doubtful—the Pack never parked all of its vehicles in one area, out in the open where they could be seen by any passerby.
He continued on past the parked bikes and into the shadows of a wagon shed.
Something hung in the tree, and it took him a moment to realize it was a deer skeleton wired together, complete with antlered head, with huge leather wings attached. When he killed the deep rumble of his engine, he heard then the deep thumping bass of heavy metal music.
“What’s going on?”
“The land has passed on to a younger generation, who’s a twit.” Rennie’s presence grew stronger as the Pack leader moved unseen through the darkness toward Ukiah.
Ukiah scanned the yard. While the Pack kept to the shadows, he could sense their minds on him and caught the occasional gleam of their eyes. The strangers must have come doubled up on the bikes parked out front; they outnumbered the Pack nearly two to one.
“Who are all these people?” Ukiah asked aloud for Indigo’s sake.
“Smack came out yesterday to see if the old alliance still held.” Rennie drifted into the shifting light thrown by the bonfire. “The twit said all the right things, but then called his friends and invited them to the Howling. Pack wanna-bes. They’ve made it an early Halloween party.”
Indigo startled slightly, her hand slipping into her jacket to touch her pistol grip before relaxing. “Shaw.”
“She’s wound tight,” Rennie said. “Thank you for coming.”
“It’s the kidnappings,” Ukiah told Rennie. “The case is getting to her.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t run them off.” Indigo meant the wanna-bes.
“They’re mostly harmless,” Rennie said. “You might have to look the other way tonight, Ms. FBI. I don’t think these brats would learn ‘discretion’ even if you carved it into a bat and beat them with it.”
“I’m not going to pretend I’m blind just to protect your reputation as big, bad asses,” Indigo said.
Rennie grinned, teeth flashing in the darkness. “He’s got a quarter acre of marijuana growing at the center of that cornfield, and there are others here dealing in harder drugs.”
“Can’t you discourage them? Without doing permanent harm to them?”
“Oh, you want to make it tricky,” Rennie said silently, and then said aloud, “We just finished putting out the food. We’re set up in the barn. The kids have food in the house, but it’s mostly pizza and chips. Go. Eat. Relax.”
Rennie drifted off to go “scare off drug dealers.” Ukiah took Indigo’s hand and they strolled toward the barn.
“What got said that I didn’t hear?” Indigo asked quietly.
“Things that would upset you if you heard.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said. “You might be silent, but your body continues to talk. I can see the conversation going on around me, and I’m left guessing.”
“Your family speaks Chinese in front of me.”
She winced slightly, nodded in acknowledgment that it was true, and changed the subject. “I’m surprised the Pack is letting outsiders stay.”
It was his turn to wince. The Pack often encouraged wanna-bes trailing at their heels; it gave them a ready supply of bikes, guns, money, and Gets. He changed the subject again, telling her of his conversation with Mom Lara and Magic Boy’s impatience with his mothers. “Before I left, I was happy to let things ride as they were. Now, though, I want to move forward, but I’m not sure how to take that step. Where do we even stand, you and I?”
“I—I don’t know. I’ve been avoiding it because it’s too hard to know what I should do.”
Marry me!
His eyes must have shown his unspoken words, because her face softened and she pressed her hand to his cheek.
“Sometimes it seems like a cold swimming pool in early summer, so clear and perfect, but the only sane way in is to leap in all at once instead of trying to ease into it. Once you get to the waters, you don’t know why you were so hesitant about swimming.”
He wasn’t sure what “it” was. Marriage? Their future together? Their love? “Is it that you’re not sure you love me?”
“Oh, I know I love you.” She took his hands in hers. “But is love enough? Having that time alone with Kittanning was so wonderful and awful. I loved him so dearly, and yet trying to take care of him and work was so hard. It was a relief to stop, to hand him over to your moms, and yet afterward, I was so desperate to have him back as mine again.
“I don’t know what I want. No, I know what I want, but it’s not real. I can’t have all the good without the bad. And I’m not sure if I can take the bad. Nor am I sure what would even be selfish of me. Would it be selfish of me to say that I don’t want to jeopardize my career and that I’m afraid that one day it could become horribly important for me to give birth to a child that is genetically both of ours, or is it more selfish to try to have it all, even though I wouldn’t be the only one hurt if it all went to shit?”
He winced. There was a certain irony that as Earth’s only breeder, he’d been mandated by the Pack not to sire children. In their war with the Ontongard, the Pack did not want him providing perfect hosts to their enemies. Luckily, since the first time he’d been with Indigo, she’d provided protection even his biology couldn’t defeat; else the Pack wouldn’t have been so lenient with him dating.
“We could make it work. Even Rennie says that if the Ontongard are dealt with, we can have kids together, someday.”
“But what if I mess us all up? You mar people forever with divorces. I can’t bear the thought of making you bitter and hard, of Kittanning being one of those kids being shuttled from house to house because his parents broke up, of what it would do to me.”
“From what all I’ve seen, patience is the most important thing in a marriage. If you’re willing to step back and give things time to work out, there’s not much that you can’t deal with. You and I, we’re patient people.”
She laughed. “Most people don’t think so. We had sex before we dated. We had a baby almost before we had sex.”
“Well.” He struggled for something to say to that. “That just happened. We were a little busy at the time, saving the world and all.”
Wit
h Hex dead, and a large number of his Gets destroyed, finding the Ontongard had become increasingly harder. The other Pack clans continued to hunt the continent. The Dog Warriors, however, kept close to Pittsburgh, watching over Ukiah and Kittanning, while they patrolled for new incursions of Ontongard. To stay ahead of the law, the Dogs moved their sleeping site daily, using mostly campgrounds and abandoned buildings, seemingly in random order. In truth, the Dog Warriors moved down a long list known to them all. They could scatter to the winds for an extended period of time and still know where to find each other at the end of any given day. The cookout deviated from the list, a sudden desire to celebrate—thus Rennie’s personal invitation.
The great doors of the hay barn stood open to the crisp night air, lit by electric fixtures screwed to the massive hand-hewn beams. Ukiah paused just inside, marveling at the difference between the Ontongard’s squalor and the Pack’s comfortable cleanliness.
The Dogs had swept the rough wood planking clean, cleared the rafters of dust and cobwebs, and even scrubbed the high arched window the owners had installed in the back wall. Clothesline, strung at the seven-foot mark, divided up the empty haylofts into smaller, private sleep areas via quilts pinned to the line. While the Pack considered their belongings readily disposable, it hadn’t stopped Hellena and others from quilting scraps of material into beautiful wall panels. Futon mattresses and other personal items had been tucked in the sleeping areas.
In the center of the barn, the Dogs had set up trestle tables and loaded them heavily with food. Starting with sizzling chili with a sour cream side, it worked its way down to the chilled watermelon cut into easy-to-manage wedges.
“Oh, good, no dog food,” Indigo said cryptically, finding the plates and handing one to Ukiah.
“If you don’t see anything you like, we can stop on the way home and get something,” Ukiah murmured quietly to her, although the Dogs probably could hear every word.
