by Wen Spencer
“A simple yes would have worked,” Rennie bristled, aware of how much information was spilling out to Bridget. “Who would have guessed Hex was a talker?”
Ukiah thought of all his brushes with the Ontongard. “I’ve always found Hex to be amazingly chatty.”
Rennie grunted. “Perhaps it’s like talking with a deaf man; he doesn’t know how loud he has to shout to be heard.”
“Or how much he has to say to be understood,” Ukiah followed the analogy.
“What happened with the Ae?” Rennie growled, pushing Alicia/Hex back to the question.
Alicia/Hex lay quiet, drifting back through time. “I retreated, as did Prime. I had wounded him worse, but he got to the armory first. He chose to flee, and I gathered everything that he had left and put them on a sled. I could not see the shape of his plan; the utter foreignness of his rebellion blinded me. I reacted instead of acting. I took all that the sled could carry and gave chase. I should have stayed and found his bombs, but I chased after and the scout ship was destroyed behind me. Prime wounded me, and I lost even the memory of where its ruins lay.”
“What did you do with the machines?”
Alicia considered the question and shook her head slowly. “I—he—we.” She paused, struggling, then as solely Alicia said, “That’s all from that time.”
Despite his disappointment, Ukiah felt relief to hear her voice, confirmation that Alicia still remained.
“Where are the Ae now?” Ukiah tried a different approach. “Surely, when you—Hex discovered that the breeder survived, Hex thought about the Ae.”
“Prime’s breeder,” Alicia/Hex growled. “I was disappointed at the loss of the breeder until I reviewed those memories and realized what Prime must have done. Swapped the DNA. Used his own. Poisoned the breeder. But it survived, so it might still be of use, but used carefully.”
Ukiah shuddered. “You would need the Ae.”
“Yes. The Ae are in storage. They were still safe when I took the remote key out for reactivating the mother ship, untouched for nearly fifty years.”
“Where are they stored?”
Long silence and then Alicia alone answered, “They’re in a mine.”
Hex’s personality had been so strong that it was almost wrenching to suddenly hear Alicia as wholly herself, free of the Ontongard taint.
“A mine? What type of mine? A coal mine? A gold mine in the Rockies?”
“Um.” Alicia swung her head, as if looking around. “It looks like limestone. It’s been converted to a storage facility. Room-sized vaults. There’s a gate and guards. Very high security.”
“They’re all standing on you,” Alicia had told Ukiah. “Pressing you to the floor, so you can’t move, and can’t be heard . . .” Thus two personalities lay recorded in her mind, Hex’s thoughts and her own awareness as Hex used her neurons to play his genetic-coded memories and make plans. Apparently with Hex exorcised from her, not only could they tap the ghost impression of Hex, but Alicia could also peer into those memories and reinterpret them.
“Where is the mine located?”
“Near a working limestone strip mine.” Alicia traveled out of the mine. “Everything is coated with fine limestone dust. There are farms along the road. There’s a sign for the Pennsylvania turnpike, and it’s pointing south.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to find,” Ukiah said.
“What will be difficult,” Rennie said, “is getting in and finding the Ae. We’ll need the name of the dummy company that Hex used, and how he got through security.”
Ukiah realized suddenly that once they had the three pieces of information, it should be fairly simple to gain access to the Ae. While Hex had been humanoid in shape and size, from his irisless eyes to boar-bristle hair, he could not pass as human. Ironically, because of Prime, Hex was very egocentric for an Ontongard and would not expose his original form to risk. And because of the Pack’s relentless slaughter of Hex’s Gets, Hex could not count on any one Get to be alive in order to retrieve the Ae. Thus Hex would have set it up so that any Get, current or future, would be able to access the storage facility. “How did you get through security to get the key?”
Alicia/Hex harrumphed, agitated. “Snow filled the city. I hate the winter. The air so cold it freezes the inside I lining my lungs; each breath is a murder of myself. There are six of me, I and five Gets. I am comfortable at this number. I am thinking—we are thinking—I am thinking about . . . a mansion of brownstone. I had been there, but I hadn’t, another I had been there and I see through”—a pause as Alicia struggled with pronouns—“my eyes. The house is where it is warm, I will go there after I get the key, but there are humans there that will have to be dealt with, and it is annoying because they will probably die. I am angry at the snow, and the humans that die so easily, taking parts of me with them. Stupid, stupid planet.”
“Where is the house?” Rennie asked, leaning forward. “Describe it.”
But Hex’s recall had run its course, leaving Alicia to puzzle it out alone. “The street is called Royal. It’s narrow and straight, and the houses look like European, something old that’s been updated, but not really changed for hundreds of years. I—he can remember it when only horses moved through the streets, and there was no taint of cars in the air.” She considered for a minute and added, “The house number is seventeen, with tall windows and tall ceilings, and it smells of slow-cooked spaghetti sauce. Someone’s practicing a piano. They’re playing ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ too slow, over and over again, missing the same keys.”
“Which town?”
“I don’t recognize it.” Alicia meant herself this time. She examined alien memories of things she had never seen herself, shaking her head, as she found nothing familiar, and finally said, “The cars have Louisiana license plates. I can smell a river.”
“New Orleans,” Rennie guessed. “How long ago was this?”
Alicia thought for a while. At one point, driven to paranoia by Prime’s rebellion, only Hex made Gets. After the Pack killed Hex, his Gets began making their own. Alicia counted back, thus, the life of the Get that made her Ontongard, to the point it had been created by Hex, and then the memories back more. “Ten years ago.”
So the piano player had been dead or changed into a Get for a decade now.
Bridget whispered, “I’m confused, and somewhat alarmed.”
Ukiah winced at the flare of annoyance from Rennie. “Alicia was—taken over by an alien being called Hex. She’s fine now, but it’s left its mark on her.”
“What are these Ae?” Bridget asked.
“They’re very dangerous machines that we need to find and destroy,” Ukiah said. “Alicia’s the key. They—the other aliens—don’t realize we’ve rescued her and can tap her memories, so they have no reason to move the machines.”
“Why have you kept this secret?”
Rennie sprang toward Bridget and Ukiah leapt between them. He caught Rennie inches from Bridget, but Rennie didn’t struggle, seeming content with the bolt of fear he sent through Bridget. “Could you tell I was an alien? Do you know how to tell a good alien from a bad alien? Can you tell an alien from a human? You can’t.”
Unless you cut them to pieces, Ukiah thought, and suddenly flashed to Adam Goodman, carefully sectioned up, and then watched. Someone knew how to separate humans from aliens—only what was annoying inconvenience to an alien proved extremely deadly to humans.
Rennie caught Ukiah’s chain of thought. “You’re right. That’s why they sat and waited after killing him. They were waiting to see if his pieces became mice.”
“It would be a witch hunt of the worse kind,” Bridget said.
“Yes, it would.” Ukiah attempted to drag the conversation back on track. “Alicia, in the mine, where exactly are the Ae stored? What’s the company name they’re stored under?”
“They’re behind a red door.” Alicia started as only herself. “The letters E-44 are on the door. The guards took us to it and unlocked it.” She
slid into Hex’s recall. “I dislike that they have the keys, but they have needs that can’t be circumvented. It is a worrisome thing, this moving through the herds of hosts, needing to trust that they stay within their algorithms, especially knowing that often they don’t. I touch the madness, over and over again; the disease that took Prime and twisted him so, but there is no understanding it. Salmon will all swim upriver to spawn. Sheep will blindly follow goats and do nothing more than eat and reproduce. Why is man so erratic?”
“What name is it stored under?” Rennie pressed. “What name did you give to the guards?”
It was the second question that produced, “Omega Pharmaceuticals.”
“Damn unimaginative bastards,” Rennie muttered. “Do you use passwords to get in? What do you say to the guards to pass? Or did you have IDs from the dummy company?”
“I used a password. I wanted no trail leading back, no key to be stolen, no paperwork to block me.”
“What’s the password?”
“I am Hex.”
They could not get the name of the storage facility. Alicia became agitated at her own inability to produce it, but Hex hadn’t thought of the name, nor glanced at anything bearing the name on the one set of memories Alicia had access to. Bridget thought it best to stop there, despite the fact that Rennie ached to ask a thousand questions, ranging over a hundred years or more. Ukiah delayed, verifying first that the Ontongard had laid no traps, or split the Ae up at some earlier date. Everything Hex had taken off the scout ship was stored deep within the mountainside, guarded only by unknowing humans.
Rennie bullied Ukiah into taking a cup of cocoa and eating two of the scones as Bridget brought Alicia up out of the hypnosis. The Pack leader also poured out tea for Bridget and Alicia without taking anything for himself. Alicia took the cup from Rennie with a thin, tight smile.
“Do your mothers know all this?” Bridget asked Ukiah.
“Yes. We found out most of it in June.”
“What does this have to do with your son?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re going to find out,” Rennie promised. “Let’s go, Cub.”
Ukiah set down his empty cup and thanked Bridget. Starr met them at the back door, a sheet of paper in hand. “Here. I drew this while you talked. I thought your moms might like to have it.”
Starr had drawn him in profile, surrounded by the trees. A bear rose out of the shadows, looming over him.
“Why the bear?” Ukiah asked, trying to be casual.
“There are spirits that guide and protect us,” Starr said. “I get a feeling that yours is a bear.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bennett Detective Agency, Shadyside, Pennsylvania
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Rennie drove back to the offices while Ukiah sat in the front passenger seat, using the Cherokee’s deck to search the Internet for storage companies. While he pulled up a daunting number of hits, he quickly discovered his query was picking up self-storage businesses located aboveground, and geological information on Pennsylvanian mines.
“I’m not sure how close to Pittsburgh the mine was.” In the backseat, Alicia had her eyes closed as she searched her memories. “It might have been Philadelphia area or Johnstown, but it felt like southwestern Pennsylvania.”
“It’s going to take a while to weed through this.” Ukiah checked the next hit. “I’m assuming that it has a Web site; anything that secure is going to be a fairly large operation.”
“I’ll hit the library,” Alicia volunteered, glancing at her wristwatch. “It should be open by now. I’ll go through their yellow page collection and pull storage facilities for all of Pennsylvania, just to cover all bases.”
Rennie glanced into the rearview mirror at Alicia, eyes still closed, looking inward. Whatever the Pack leader was thinking, he carefully buried it out of Ukiah’s reach.
Max had left him a note to check his voice-mail messages—operating on mid-range paranoia level. Sam and Max had questioned Zlotnikov’s next of kin, but Max went on to say that on the surface, at least, none of it was useful. Zlotnikov had spent a childhood on Polish Hill and moved late in his teens to Butler. The move had changed a boy on the social fringe to a total outcast, but he had lucked into a friendship with a popular son of a local minister. It was, his mother said, the start of his religious interest. After high school, the group splintered, the members scattering into different colleges. Zlotnikov himself had tried college, and failed out. He returned to live in her basement, being fired from a series of jobs. “This kid was on a downward spiral. What’s left in his bedroom makes him look like the Unabomber. I’d hate to see what he took with him.”
After high school, as his friendships became solely Internet-based, his mother lost track of who he talked to. Over time, he became more secretive, and then he disappeared altogether. She had been stunned to discover he was in the area when he died as she hadn’t heard from him for several years.
“She gave me the names of his high school friends,” Max added. “We’re going to do an early lunch and then see if any of them know anything.”
Speaking of lunch, Ukiah raided the refrigerator to fortify his wounded body, put the teakettle on the cooktop, and settled at his desk. He struggled to refine his search. After several false starts, he stumbled across a newspaper story on the national archive of photographs. It stated the archive had been moved to an old limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, in a high-tech, high-security, state-of-the-art environmental storage facility used by libraries, national companies, banks, and the film industry. The writer didn’t give the facility’s name, as he had been asked to stay discreet in the matters of location, actual clients, and security measures. Ukiah redefined his search and found the company name, and then their Web site. Out of habit of working with Max, he wrote out the contact information.
As the teakettle started to whistle, the doorbell chimed. He switched directions to cautiously answer the door.
Indigo waited at the door with all the icy stillness of a glacier.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just as well that Goodman’s dead,” she said in a completely neutral voice that sucked the warmth out of the air. “Otherwise I might have killed him myself.”
Ukiah blinked at the statement. He had never seen her so furiously cold before; he wasn’t sure what to do about it. There was a tension to her that suggested that hugging her was a bad idea; she was too angry to be cuddled. Yet, that she was here, at the door, indicated that she needed something from him. The teakettle continued its long whistle, so he said, “Come in. I was just going to make hot cocoa. You can make a cup of tea, and we’ll talk.”
Silently they made their drinks. He made an expensive instant hot cocoa that Max stocked the offices with, while she selected Earl Grey tea, pouring the hot water over the tea bag. Ukiah got out the honey, added it to his cocoa for a calorie kick, and set it beside her. She pulled the tea bag out of her cup when the water was dark, added a dollop of honey, stirred, and took her first sip before breaking the silence.
“Eve met Goodman at Monroeville Mall,” Indigo said. “She had gone alone and he started to stalk her, touching her. She thought he was creepy at first, and was going to report him to the guards, but then he started to look ‘kind of hot’ to her. Later, he told her that he used the breeding drug on her, stroking it onto her bare skin until she was desperately aroused. By the end of the evening, she went out to his car and let him molest her. He told her everything a love-starved child wants to hear, while dousing her with more of the drug. She’d done heavy petting with boys her age, but the drug made it glorious.”
Indigo took a sip of her tea, her eyes growing colder with controlled rage. “She bragged to me how clever it was of him to drug her like that, to pervert her will until she begged him for intercourse, let him do anything he wanted to her. Eve went on and on about how wonderful Goodman had been, while the doctors found evidence of his abuse, everything fro
m using sharp objects to sodomizing her to branding his name on her.
“He twisted her until she thinks pain is love. Every relationship she’ll seek out will be like this one, trying to recapture it.”
Ukiah struggled to see Indigo’s view of this. Yes, Eve was pitiful, but he knew with horrible clarity what she had done to Kittanning. That she acted not out of fear for her life, but simply to show her love of Goodman merely made both of the kidnappers contemptible to Ukiah. No. He couldn’t forgive her. “She’ll be going to prison, won’t she?”
Indigo glanced at him, but whatever she thought of his lack of feeling was masked by the icy calm she held herself in. “With two babies dead and the others still missing, the district attorney is pushing to have her tried as an adult. Her fingerprints were found in all five stolen cars, so that alone will get her convicted of grand theft and kidnapping. She claims that she and Goodman handed the babies over to Billy alive, and so far there’s no evidence linking her or Goodman to the murders, so she might not be charged with homicide.”
Ukiah could only think that this Billy Bob now had Kittanning. “Any info on Billy Bob?”
“No,” Indigo said. “The prison hasn’t been able to establish an identity for him yet.” She sipped her tea, staring into nothing. “Seeing what Goodman has done with this girl makes me question my own actions.”
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t I guilty of the same thing, of seducing a child? You only had eight years of living with people, and I knew it. I should never have seduced you.”
