Bitter Waters

by Wen Spencer

  Because the caterpillar had been more bone than blood, the back memories extended to Kittanning’s birth. They had lucked out that the kidnapper had waited so many hours before wounding Kittanning. The memories of the kidnapping itself had been encoded into genetic memories, and fully accessible. He found the beginning of the kidnapping.

  . . . shock slammed through Daddy’s body as a bullet struck him down. Kittanning wailed, feeling the pain as if it were his own flesh being torn. Daddy’s warm comforting thoughts vanished as he dropped dead onto the floor. The gunman came down the dark hallway, footsteps loud, his stride breaking where he stepped over Daddy’s body. He cast a shadow over Kittanning’s car seat moments before he loomed over the baby, gun still in hand, wreathed in gunsmoke. The smell of blood flooded the kitchen. Daddy’s blood. Kittanning screamed in helpless terror and anger . . .

  There, the true start, as Kittanning’s car seat was roughly jerked upward.

  Ukiah got up from his desk and walked through the kitchen, picking up his shotgun as he passed. There was the soft rumble like a gathering storm as the Pack started their motorcycles. Max cut short his conversation with Sam and climbed into the Hummer. Ukiah tucked the shotgun into the Hummer’s gun safe and swung into the passenger seat.

  “Start on the front street, heading south.” He rubbed the spot where Kittanning’s memory had absorbed into his skin.

  “Hold on, Kitt, Daddy’s coming.”

  Goodman had carried Kittanning out to the waiting car; Eve opened the back door as Goodman approached the sedan. The kidnapper slid into the backseat, slammed the door shut, and sat bleeding and swearing. Eve drove hesitantly with lots of startled cries of dismay while Goodman shouted instructions.

  Ukiah leaned back so his field of vision matched Kittanning’s limited range, and guided Max through remembered turns and stops. The Dog Warriors followed, close at hand, on their motorcycles. Ironically, as their current time of day matched that of the kidnapping, they fought the same heavy rush-hour traffic. They crawled through the random turns that the kidnappers took trying to lose Sam, and then risked tangling with the police to follow the busway down to Grant Street rather than lose the thread of Kittanning’s memories.

  . . . the car cut down to the dusty, sun-baked parking lots of the strip district. There the girl, Eve, slithered into the backseat, and plucked a still crying Kittanning from his car seat.

  Goodman got out, slammed the back door shut, and opened the driver’s door. “Just like we practiced, remember? Piece of cake.”

  “What if I can’t find you?”

  “Just keep going around the block.” Goodman slid in behind the wheel. “Now get out, hurry.”

  Eve threw open the back passenger door, stepped out of the car holding Kittanning, and swung the door shut. As Goodman pulled away, she shouldered Kittanning with an irritated, “Oh, be quiet, I’m not happy about this either.”

  Three steps and they were at another car, a dark blue Honda, just beyond the parking lot’s barrier. She must have had a key fob; there was the solid “thunk” of doors unlocking. A car seat was already in place.

  Her parking space was too good to be just luck. Goodman must have parked it late at night, when the lot was empty. From the parking lot, Eve doglegged to Fort Duquesne Boulevard, and then turned left onto Stanwix to stop at the curb where Ukiah had lost Goodman the night before. It was a short easy drive, even in rush hour, for an inexperienced driver.

  “So far, so good,” Max murmured.

  Goodman took over driving, rounding the corner to jump on I-279. Ukiah and Rennie had guessed right—with the other routes deadlocked, the kidnappers had taken the only route with freely moving traffic out of the city—but they were too far behind to catch up.

  “We drive straight for a long time,” Ukiah said. “I think they’re heading for the turnpike.”

  “Did Kitt see the outside of the car they’re in?” Max asked.

  “It’s a dark blue Honda. He didn’t see the plates. They’re going someplace very rural. After they arrive, his memory starts to fragment.”

  “Hopefully they didn’t move him.”

  “At the end they start to talk about going to the bathroom, making something to eat, and going to bed. It sounds like they stopped wherever they’ve been living. Eve put a blanket over Kittanning as they got out, so I don’t have any visual memories of the place.” And after that, the gaps of blackness started.

  They fell silent, neither wanting to speak about what happened to Kittanning the next morning.

  “When we get there,” Ukiah said finally, “you hang back and the Pack and I will go in.”

  “Like hell,” Max snapped.

  “If this is Ontongard, you’re the only one that can be killed,” Ukiah said. “Even if they’re only human, you don’t want to get between them and the Pack.” Max glowered at the road until Ukiah added, “I won’t be taking point either.”

  Goodman took the turnpike out to Irwin, a small town on the very fringe of Pittsburgh’s sprawl. Housing plans gathered around the turnpike exit, still congested with commuters arriving home. They continued east, away from Pittsburgh, and houses dropped away to farms and woods. The road grew narrow and windy.

  “Slow down,” Ukiah said finally, watching the steep woodlot of wild cherry and maples alongside the road. “We make a right-hand turn soon. Slower. Slower. Here.”

  Here was a little more than a tractor path through the woodlot, climbing a short, steep hill as it curved to the left so its far end vanished behind the trees. Tall grass grew up the center of two hard-packed ruts, bent over by passing cars, indicating that the road had seen little travel all summer and only recently been put to use. A rusted-through mailbox leaned at a drunken angle beside the turn, the only indication that the dirt driveway led back to a house.

  Max pulled into the drive far enough to get his back bumper off the road and killed the engine. Ukiah checked his clip and stepped out of the Hummer, closing the door quietly behind him.

  The Pack settled around him, silencing their engines.

  “We’re close,” Ukiah said, keeping his voice low, speaking aloud for Max’s sake. “The car stops in a couple of minutes and Kittanning’s taken out of the car.”

  Rennie flared his nostrils, sniffing the wind. “I don’t sense Hex or Kittanning.”

  Fresh tire tracks pressed into the ruts, coming and going, several different makes of cars. The Pack walked their bikes up until they were out of sight of the main road and tucked them in among the trees, and then fanned out around Ukiah, armed to the teeth and pissed off.

  Max handed Ukiah a headset. “Be careful.”

  Rennie and Bear took point, loping off on the hunt. Ukiah followed, gun in hand, keeping to the dappled shadows.

  After the drive reached the top of the short hill, the scrub trees gave way to an old apple orchard, a layer of Macintoshes rotting on the ground under gnarled trees. The farm perched on a ridge wrapped around a steep hollow, shaped like a thumb pressed against a forefinger. The forefinger was a shorn field of wheat; the thumb was the orchard, the farmhouse, and its outbuildings, with a deep, narrow crease in the land between field and buildings. They had just climbed the base of the thumb. There, where the valley started its pleat, sat the stone foundation of a roofless springhouse. Water gushed out of a short pipe onto the ancient flagstone floor and out the doorless entry. A well-beaten path indicated that the kidnappers were using the spring as a water source. The path joined the road and headed toward the house with a barn beyond it, resting on the far knuckle of land.

  A little farther down the driveway, a crude outhouse had been set up, basically a bench straddling a narrow pit. Diapers mixed with urine and feces in the open, reeking hole. Opposite the outhouse, a handful of worn gravestones marked a family graveyard. It would have been lost under knee-high wildflowers except someone had trampled down the flowers, and pried up one or two of the stones, leaving pits to mark the theft.

  The house had bee
n built sometime in the last century, a two-story clapboard farmhouse. Weather had long worn off the paint, leaving bare gray wood. All the windows facing the driveway were broken, leaving jagged dark mouths. The front porch looking out over the valley had collapsed into a jumble of rotten wood and slate roofing tiles. Some attempt had been made recently to make the collapsing back porch safe—new two-by-fours propped up the sagging porch roof and the stolen gravestones were arranged to replace broken steps. A massive oak shaded the backyard with autumn leaves that had run to bloodred. Rennie moved ghost silent to the oak and crouched behind its wide trunk to eye the back porch. Ukiah dropped down behind him, and went still as only a Pack dog could.

  “Bad juju there,” Rennie murmured into Ukiah’s mind, indicating the gravestones.

  Ukiah reached out, searching for Kittanning’s Pack presence. He could sense the Dog Warriors ranging invisibly through the trees and grass around him, but of his son, there was nothing. Nor did there seem to be anything moving in the house. “Kittanning’s not here.”

  Rennie’s lip curled back in a soundless snarl.

  They moved as one to the back porch. Plaster dust coated the worn wood, a fine grit underfoot as they crept to the back door and peered through.

  Built before modern utilities, the house had never been updated, thus the kitchen had no electric outlets or lights and only a rusted hand pump for plumbing. Built-in wood cabinets lined the walls, except where a wood stove once sat, its access to the brick chimney still an open black sore, scenting the kitchen with ancient soot.

  Temporary adaptations had been made. A trestle table, made of old lumber and sawhorses, held a propane camping stove, various pots and pans and cooking utensils. Tucked under the table, a large ice chest took the place of a refrigerator. A plastic dishpan and gallon milk jugs filled with spring water stood in for a sink. A paper shopping bag served as a waste container, a line of ants crawling down its side. Ukiah lightly touched one of the ants, making it scurry off in a panic; it wasn’t Kittanning’s. Two empty formula cans sat in the bag, the source of the ants’ interest. He caught the slight scent of old blood and pushed the cans aside. A plastic bag from Borders bookstore held a folded newspaper, stained with Kittanning’s blood, which had been sucked up by the paper and killed.

  Ukiah pulled the bag free, smothering a growl. The newspaper was the Sunday Real Estate section of the Miami Herald with properties circled in red. The prices ranged between a hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand. They stole Kittanning for beachfront property?

  Rennie had been focusing on the house. He shifted out of his stillness. “There’s no one in the house.”

  “They parked their cars here,” Bear stated from outside, indicating a patch of crushed, oil-stained grass, now innocent of cars.

  Rennie opened the ice chest beside him, releasing the smell of raw meat. “This is full of food. Ice is melted, but the water is still chilled.”

  As Ukiah handed Rennie the paper, he spotted pruning shears among the cooking utensils. He touched the blades and found them coated with Kittanning’s blood. This time there was no holding the growl in. Only Eve had handled the shears, and he felt an instant deep hate for her.

  “You okay?” Max whispered in his ear.

  “It will be hard not to kill this bitch that hurt my child,” Ukiah growled through his clenched teeth.

  “I’m coming in,” Max said, and far off came the start of the Hummer.

  By design, the adjoining room would have been a dining room, but it was bare of any furniture. Sun streamed through smashed-out windows to shine on an ancient linoleum carpet, cracked and buckling, and a mural freshly painted on the nearest wall. The front door out to the porch was missing, as were the steps leading up to the second floor. Heavy plastic covered the door beyond the cavernous hole that had been the staircase. Ukiah pushed his way through the overlapping sheets of clear plastic. It seemed to be the only room whose windows retained their glass. The fireplace had been used recently. An air mattress and sleeping bags made an adult nest in one corner. The smell of sex clung to the sheets. In the opposite corner, a clothes basket made a bed for Kittanning. Goodman and Eve had been using cardboard boxes as dressers; only someone had scattered the clean clothes onto the floor and overturned the boxes in a hasty search.

  Another plastic-covered doorway opened to a spiraling back staircase. The ceiling of the second floor was slowly collapsing, damp from years of rainfall, and plaster littered the floor. All the windows were missing, and the wind breezed through openings, bringing Ukiah the scent of blood. He followed the smell through the empty rooms, the fine rubble crunching underfoot.

  In the far bedroom, the edge of the broken glass remained in the only window, held in by ancient points, paint, and putty. Blood tainted the glass where Eve had gripped the window frame and cut her hand. Below the window, a story and a half down, Bear crouched in the trampled weeds. He glanced up at Ukiah.

  “She jumped from there. Looks like she broke a leg and crawled away.” Bear stood, and indicated a wavering trail pushed through the tall grass.

  Ukiah filled his lungs, sniffing for the scent of blood. “Do you smell that? Somewhere a lot of blood has been spilled.”

  From the barn the sudden bristling of minds.

  “The others found something.”

  They had found Goodman, only someone had found him first.

  He had been stripped down to nude and nailed to the floor of the barn with ten-inch spikes driven through his outstretched palms and bare feet. His capturers silenced him with a wormy apple, wedged into his mouth to the point of choking. Judging by the blood, they had taken off the right arm, and then the left leg above the kneecap, leaving him still pinned, until the amputation of the right leg freed him. Then, bleeding to death, they let him struggle, thrashing on the floor, trying to unpin the remaining limb.

  Had they promised him salvation if he managed to free himself, or had it been sheer determination to live that kept him fighting to the end?

  One man walked through the blood then to crouch beside the dying Goodman. To hear some whispered confession? To check to see if he was alive? It was impossible to say. After several minutes of leaning over the hapless man, the killer stood, casually pinned Goodman with one foot to the chest, and beheaded him. It had taken several swings to hack through the muscular neck. Afterward, the axe man had sat on a wooden crate, blood dripping from his clothes and weapon, and studied his work for several minutes. The corpse finished gushing out its blood. The axe man returned to the body, prodded it with the axe, and then walked away, trailing the axe as if he forgot he carried it.

  And after all that inhumane brutality, the killer threw up into the weeds beyond the barn doors. Smack found the axe in the deep grass a dozen feet away, flung as far as the man could throw it.

  Eve was hidden in a blackberry patch, the ancient sweetness coming from the fruit dried onto the thorny stems. A bloody broken mess. The sight of her put a shiver of fear through Ukiah, and when he realized why, he started to growl with anger. He had Kittanning’s memory of her holding his tiny finger between fingers and maneuvering pruning sheers into place.

  “What have you done with the baby?” Rennie demanded.

  She managed to shake her head, shivering from exposure and shock. “I know my rights. Right to remain silent. That’s what they say on all the cop shows.”

  “Do we look like the police to you?” Ukiah growled. Her eyes widened. “I’m the father of the baby whose finger you cut off.”

  “Adam made me do it!” she whimpered. “He said if I really loved him, that I prove it.”

  “What did you do with my son?”

  “They took him. They came and killed Adam and took your baby boy.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I think it was Billy and his friends. Adam said that they were dangerous, all crazies, and never took me with him when they went for the other babies. He said we were courting trouble by keeping your baby to ourselve
s, that Billy wouldn’t like it. When Adam heard the car coming, he told me to run upstairs and hide. Hide?” She gave a hysterical laugh. “Where was I to hide? When I heard them coming up the stairs, I jumped out the window. I think I broke my leg, but I knew if they found me, they’d kill me. I crawled away, quiet as I could, and never laid eyes on them.”

  “What’s Billy’s full name?”

  “I don’t know. There was just one Billy. He was Adam’s bitch in prison, but then he started talking back to Adam, acting like he was better than Adam. It was all the fault of his new friends, who thought he was such hot shit, filling his head up with maggoty ideas. That’s what Adam said. That in prison, Billy had crazy ideas, but they were small as fly eggs. It wasn’t until these new friends of his filled him up with so much shit that the eggs became full maggots.”

  “This just gets worse and worse,” Max said.

  “Why did they want my son?” Ukiah asked.

  “Adam said it was another maggoty idea. He said I was better off not knowing all the crazy things that Billy wanted for the world. He thought we’d be safe here; none of Billy’s friends knew about this place.”

  “How did they find you then?”

  “I don’t know. The farm’s been in my family forever; we lease the land but no one ever wanted to put money into fixing the house, especially after it started to fall down. When I told Adam about this place, he thought it was perfect, even falling down like it is. He said it was best not to get dependent on outside luxuries, so we wouldn’t miss them when they go. But then it started to get bitter cold, and nothing we did to stay warm helped. That’s why we kept your baby. The other kids, their folks were all just scraping by. You could tell just by looking that your dad had money. Adam said we could ransom your baby, and once your dad paid, give your baby on to Billy, because it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Then we’d move to Florida and buy a new paradise.”