by Wen Spencer
“It’s not the same.”
“Because I’m not a man? I’ve seen the walls of the farmhouse. A woman tortured Goodman when he was a child.”
“You don’t torture me,” Ukiah said, and picked her up. “And in case you haven’t noticed lately, I’m fully capable of defending myself.”
“Ukiah!” She yipped and squirmed in his hold. “Hey. You can’t deny that you were a virgin.”
“And I was supposed to stay a virgin the rest of my life?”
“I just jumped you. I didn’t even ask if you liked me.”
“If I remember correctly, and generally I do, I had bought you a present and gave it to you before you jumped me.”
“The wolf fetish.”
“Yes.” He kissed her. “Trust me, I was raised by wolves; I knew what males did with females. I wanted to kiss you. I wanted to take off all your clothes and explore all your nooks and crannies.”
She giggled, a surprising sound out of her. “Okay, okay, I was being overly sensitive about the issue. Hey, what are you doing?”
Ukiah had started across the room, kissing her as he carried her toward the back steps. “Oh, I think I should give you a full demonstration of my physical prowess.”
“Ukiah, I don’t have time for this!”
“We’ll just have to be quick, then!” He raced up the steps with her giggling and slapping his chest.
While there was nothing fragile about Indigo—under the silk suit was all muscle—she was still a small woman. Their sex was usually a dance between equals. This time he put his strength to use, supporting her in gymnastic positions. They ended, however, with her sitting on his chest, pinning him lightly, slick with sweat and glowing.
“Okay, Wolf Boy, you’ve made your point.” She smiled down at him. “And I’m going to be sooo late, and I haven’t told you everything I found out.”
“Oops.” He winced, only slightly repentant. For the first time since touching Goodman’s poisoned wall mural, he felt at his normal sharpness. “Did Eve tell you where Goodman got the Invisible Red?”
“She didn’t call it Invisible Red.” Indigo gave him one last kiss before letting him up. “She called it Blissfire, and said it made the sex so good that you felt like you were going to go up in flames. Goodman got it off of Billy, last name still unknown.”
“Are we sure it was Billy that killed Goodman and took Kittanning?”
“Yes.” Indigo ran warm water into the sink to wash up. “Goodman told her to hide, so she went upstairs. She could hear them talking. Goodman seemed to be making excuses as to why he hadn’t turned Kittanning over. She gave us an impressive list of guns that Goodman had, but apparently he went out to talk to Billy with only Kittanning in hand.”
“There were no guns in the house.”
“When we find Billy, he’s going to be well armed.” Indigo rinsed out the washcloth that she had been using and handed it to him. “She heard someone yell, ‘What are you hiding in the house?’ and a fight start. That’s when she jumped out the window and crawled away.”
“He protected her?”
“It seems like it.” Indigo started to dress. “She wants to believe he did. She heard them kill him, but she doesn’t seem to realize what she heard yet. To her, it was the sound of men hitting pumpkins with baseball bats.”
He wondered about screams, and then remembered that Goodman had been gagged with an apple. “She told us that Billy was Goodman’s prison bitch. I wonder if the relationship was as abusive as the one he had with Eve.”
Indigo stilled, and he regretted bringing the conversation back to that point. “No,” she finally said quietly. “Eve was quite proud of the fact that she was a better bitch for Goodman. In prison, he definitely topped Billy, but Billy grew claws and a backbone after being released. The relationship flipped, so Billy was the user, and Goodman was the used, and he didn’t like that. Eve, Kittanning, and the ransom were all part of Goodman’s plan to ditch Billy and buy a place in Florida.”
“So Billy went through a radical personality change?” Ukiah rinsed out the washcloth and hung it up to dry.
“As far as Goodman was concerned, yes,” Indigo said. “I tried to sound out if Billy had been infected by the Ontongard. Since Goodman kept Eve hidden from Billy, it’s very difficult to judge, but I don’t think he has been. You say that Invisible Red is inert in Gets, and apparently Billy and his friends use it to engage in orgies.”
“Ontongard don’t have sex, with or without Invisible Red.”
“Exactly.”
Ukiah frowned as he dressed. She came to stand in front of him until he realized she was there. He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled into her.
“What are you thinking?” She ran her fingers through his long black hair.
“These machines are not so much complex as obscure. The Ontongard never have anything like an instruction manual; they only have machines that they all know how to operate.”
“And?”
“As Rennie says, humans are clever little monkeys. I wonder—did some humans find these machines and figure them out?”
If Rennie had returned prior to Indigo’s departure, he stayed out of sight and out of mind until she drove away. Moments later, though, Rennie rumbled down the street and into the driveway; seemingly too well timed to be coincidence.
“I think this is the one.” Ukiah showed Rennie the name of the storage facility: Iron Mountain. “It seems the closest match to the level of security that Alicia talked about.”
“If she was telling the truth.”
“You think she lied while under hypnosis?”
“It does not sit well that two days after Hex’s reclaimed Get returns to Pittsburgh that a breeder is kidnapped.”
“Alicia’s human,” Ukiah said. “She’s back to the person I know, and that person wouldn’t have helped steal Kittanning away.”
“How can we know what permanent mark being a Get left on her? What if we’ve made some accidental hybrid with a human’s ability to act and lie but with a Get’s morals?”
It was a terrifying thought, but he rejected the possibility. “No, she’s not acting. I’ve known her too long. She’s herself—a good deal bruised, but not corrupted.”
Ukiah and Rennie arrived at Iron Mountain shortly after noon. There was no signage at the entrance beyond the stylized company logo landscaped into a hillside. The employee parking lot was tucked back away from the road, and the drive leading down into the mines curved sharply beyond a guard shack and barricade. If they hadn’t known what to look for, it would have been simple to drive on by.
Ukiah stopped at the guard shack and tried for an unconcerned smile. They decided he would drive and talk, as he looked the more harmless of the two. He was in office casual of white oxford shirt and slacks. “Hi! This is Iron Mountain, isn’t it?”
“What are you here for?” the female guard asked.
“We’re with Omega Pharmaceuticals. Apparently they’ve been looking for some records down in the main office, and they think they might be in storage out here. We were sent out to pick up the things.”
“We have a service for that,” the guard said.
Ukiah managed to keep the wince off his face.
Rennie leaned over and said, “We don’t have an agreement for your employees to handle our records.” Casual office clothes and a haircut did nothing to disguise the menace in Rennie; it was like engine grease, stained too deep into the skin to wash out.
“Hold on a minute.” She called on a radio and a few minutes later a SUV pulled up and a man got out.
“You two with Omega Pharmaceuticals?” He ignored the fact that Ukiah was driving and addressed Rennie as the obvious senior in age.
“For now,” Rennie said. “We’re undergoing a merger at the end of the year with a Swiss company and undergoing a name change. We’ve done a lot of restructuring and layoffs, so no one knows what we have up here.”
“Normally our staff pulls whatever materials
are needed and ships them directly to the office.”
“So we’ve been told.” Rennie lied as smoothly as Max could, building on what they could assume Hex would set up. “But according to our records, and our procedures, we don’t allow nonemployees to handle our records and so we didn’t sign any agreement with your company to allow access to what’s in storage other than to maintain the space itself.”
“Let us check the vehicle and then meet me inside and we’ll check you through.” He said it to mean we’ll check to see if you’re bullshitting.
The inspection was thorough, checking through the back of the Cherokee, under seats, in glove boxes, and under the car. Afterward, Ukiah drove down a steep curving ramp into the monster maw of the mine entrance. Massive steel gates guarded over an opening approximately twenty feet high. To the right was a high-tech monitoring system. To the left, employees dropped off photo IDs as they passed through metal detectors on their way out.
Ukiah glanced at the metal detectors. “Good call that they check for guns.”
Rennie grunted unhappily. They had hidden weapons in the Cherokee in hopes that they’d be able to drive it to the vault. It was a compromise that left them unarmed if they had to leave the SUV behind. Rennie only consented because of Alicia/Hex’s rant on being surrounded by humans, and reluctantly since he didn’t completely believe her. If the Ontongard had since taken over the complex, or Alicia had lied in the first place, they could be easily overwhelmed.
“We’ve done some digging into our records, and you’re right. We don’t write contracts like this but we inherited a few when Iron Mountain bought the facility. Omega Pharmaceuticals allow limited access only to their items in storage. You know, they’ve only been here three times in nearly fifty years.”
Ukiah nodded. “That’s what we’ve been told.”
“We need photo IDs and to have you sign in. First, what’s the password?”
It felt so wrong to say it. “I am Hex.”
They signed in, and needed to argue over the right to drive back to the vault. In the end, they followed a guard in a golf cart through a maze of two-lane roads, several intersections cryptically marked. The miners in the previous centuries had left massive pillars of stone, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, to hold up the twenty-foot ceiling. They passed where they were pouring a cement floor for a new vault and the great cement truck fit easily under the high ceiling. Floodlights dotted the roads like streetlights, and the columns had been spray-painted silver to reflect the light, but even then darkness gathered in every corner. The air was chilled, sluggish, and dry. Most of the doors were marked only with letters and numbers. Some, though, had logos of large corporations and government branches. The guard stopped finally beside a red door, marked as Alicia said it would be, E-44.
Ukiah pulled into a small niche twenty feet farther down, trying to tuck the Cherokee out of the way. The guard stood jingling his key ring as Ukiah and Rennie got out and walked back to him. Just beyond the Cherokee, the tunnels reverted to something rougher and untouched from the mining days. A ventilation fan, painted red and two feet in circumference, roared as it fed fresh air into the tunnels. Even over the blast of surface air, Ukiah could smell water, which meant it had to be in vast amounts.
“I smell water,” he said to the guard, and Rennie nodded in agreement.
The guard looked startled and pointed back into darkness where the pavement gave way to rough floor. Dimly Ukiah made out a wall of clear plastic stapled to a freestanding door frame. “There’s a five-acre lake over there where the miners broke into the aquifer level. Basically it’s the level of rock you’d tap into if you drilled a well. We use it for our drinking water and the toilets. We got a certified water treatment plant behind that door there.” He pointed to a door nearest to the darkness. “And we go through like ten thousand gallons of water a day.”
Rennie glanced upward at the mountain over their head. “How do you get rid of the waste water this far down?”
“Pumper trucks come in daily.” The guard jingled his keys, now an obvious nervous habit. “I’m Mark Stewart.”
Ukiah shook his head and introduced himself. Rennie merely glared, too on edge to do so.
“This door is legendary,” Stewart said. “Omega was one of the first clients and yet no one entered the vault for half a century. Then one day, like five years ago, someone came.”
Ukiah turned to him sharply as it jarred wrongly. “Five?”
“Yeah, I had just started working here. In 1999. We made end of the world jokes about it.”
Ukiah glanced at Rennie. “Alicia said ten years ago was the last time Hex was in.”
“We might be too late already.”
“Did they take things out of storage?” Ukiah asked the guard.
“Well, they came with a U-Haul truck. Said they wanted stuff from storage. I locked up, though, and everything looked the same as when I unlocked the vault. I’m not sure what they did.”
Stewart slotted the key into the door and turned it, opening the heavy steel door. The air was stale and cool. The room was basically ten by twenty feet deep and twenty feet high. The guard leaned in to turn on the lights, and fluorescent lights flickered on. There was nothing cavelike to the room, squared off, drywalled, and painted white, it seemed like any aboveground chamber except for the dry chill. In the far back corner sat four wooden crates of equal sizes, almost surreal in contrast, aged battered wood in the otherwise empty, stark room.
They were antique shipping crates, Ukiah recognized, from Wells Fargo when freight was moved by railroads and horse wagons. The wood still had traces of shipping labels from a hundred years ago. The four were now strung together via yellow plastic DO NOT TOUCH ribbon.
“No one has been in here since 1999?” Rennie asked.
“Well, we get in to check safety equipment.” Stewart pointed up at the sprinkler system that ran the length of the room. “And check the lighting and such. We don’t touch items in storage.”
Ukiah and Rennie stalked across the room to the crates. They were larger than Ukiah expected—most likely the crates had layers of packing material protecting the equipment.
“If they’re still inside,” Rennie murmured.
“Is something wrong?” Stewart asked.
“Perhaps,” Ukiah examined the box without touching it. At one time the lids had been nailed into place with old-fashioned rectangular-headed nails. These had been mostly pried up, leaving behind gaping rust-coated holes. It appeared that the lids now rested lightly on top of the crates instead of being attached. “I would think they would have nailed the lids back on if they just opened to check on them.”
“Or taken the box,” Rennie said and stilled as he focused on the box.
“What do you remember about the people that were here five years ago?” Ukiah asked.
“What? You think they weren’t Omega employees?” Stewart walked over to join them. “They wore Omega uniforms.”
“Uniforms?” Ukiah asked. The Ontongard wouldn’t have bothered with that deep a deception.
“Hmmm, you’re right!” Stewart said. “The lids are just lying on.” He reached out to lift the nearest one up.
Ukiah felt Rennie start to move, accompanied with a wordless roar of protest, his motion intending to check Stewart. Ukiah was in Rennie’s way, and the Pack leader changed his intent even as Ukiah turned, trying to carry out Rennie’s plan. The smell of C4, released by the opening of the lid, hit him along with the awareness that this was Rennie’s darkest fear, a trap. Later he would be able to step through the memory, finding the click of the trigger released even before Rennie’s shout. At that moment, he was aware of only Rennie jerking him off his feet and dragging him backward even as he reached for the unsuspecting guard.
Then there was noise: a massive, bone-deep sound.
It struck him microseconds before the flame and shards of wood and a hard hand of displaced air.
Rennie’s initial movement took them halfway
to the door. The slapping hand smashed them the rest of the way. They hit the ground hard, Rennie on top of him, shielding him from the worst of the damage. Their clothes were burning and their flesh writhed, trying to escape the agony. Ukiah rolled to his knees, realized that Rennie was unconscious or dead, and picked him up. There was another deep bellow as the second crate exploded, set off by the first. He raced the oncoming wall of flame out into the tunnel. A hundred running steps, and he flung himself at the wooden door guarding the lake.
The door shattered, spilling him and Rennie into the shockingly cold water. The third bomb went off while they were submerged. The shock wave slammed through the water, a stunning roar. Ukiah floundered on the brink of unconsciousness.
What an irony, to drown in the middle of fire.
He hit bottom, though, and pushed off and found the surface in the cave darkness. Sirens wailed from somewhere in the tunnel system. Flames and black smoke shot through the open door, and Rennie stayed an unmoving weight in Ukiah’s arms.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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.”
