by Wen Spencer
Io returned with the first-aid supplies: professional-looking gear boxes. Finding an arm sling in the boxes, Core slid it over Ukiah’s head.
“So I leaned into the car, pulled the pipe free, eased him out onto the ground, and pretended to stanch his bleeding as I stared into his eyes, waiting for him to die. He spoke in the language of angels, which is beautiful and strange, as he bled to death. He closed his eyes at the very end, and I pried them back open. As with all the others, there was no sign of God. Heavyhearted, I moved on to the next car. That driver was pinned, all her ribs broken and her teeth smashed out by the steering wheel, and she was unconscious. She would live, though, and there was nothing I could do to change that short of cutting her throat, so I stood up and looked back at the first driver . . . and he was getting up. There was still a hole in his coat, front and back. He walked away, and just as he got to the edge of the light, he looked back, and his eyes gleamed with the unholy power.”
Core shook two pills out of a medicine bottle and handed them to Ukiah. Ukiah stared at the pills in his hand, trying to focus on them. They were simple over-the-counter pain relievers, ibuprofen mixed with inactive material for bulk and stamped into a pill. His hand, though, barely seemed part of his body.
Realizing Ukiah’s problem, Core laughed, and took back the pills. He produced a bottle of drinking water and opened it. Popping the pills into his own mouth, and taking a mouthful of water, he leaned forward, pressed his mouth to Ukiah’s lips, and forced water and pills into Ukiah’s mouth.
And the splintering of Ukiah’s self became complete. His inner self howled in anger, fear, and helplessness, as his body responded, guided only by sexual desire.
Core leaned back, smiling. “Ah, we’ve got you. It’s only a matter of time now until it’s finished.” He pulled Ukiah to his feet by his good hand. “Come, Ping is waiting.”
They moved through the mansion, shadowed by Hash, ignored by the rest.
“Looking back,” Core said, “I can see God’s hand on me from the beginning, but it took Adam to open my eyes. I thought of myself as a man of peace, but I had been in the rifle club, the fencing club, and was one of the best war gamers in my school. I even formed my own Bible group and we called ourselves God’s Warriors.”
Where were they going?
Core opened a room and guided Ukiah into it.
Dozens of candles lit the room to a soft glow. A king-sized canopy took up the center of the room. An Asian woman waited, kneeling on the white satin sheets, dressed in a black robe so sheer it seemed to be just shadows. Core checked Ukiah just short of the bed, and she stretched with false casualness, the candles silhouetting her lithe form as she arched her back, lifting her breasts.
Ukiah wanted to flee.
His lips wanted to suckle at her breasts.
Ukiah wanted to be faithful to Indigo.
His body wanted to plunge himself into this whore.
As Ukiah stood there, fighting himself, Core sliced off Ukiah’s boxer shorts. The cult leader pressed close, his own excitement obvious, and snaked an arm around Ukiah’s hips to grasp him tight. “Mmmm, a natural man, as I hoped.”
To Ukiah’s disgust, his body responded. He wanted to say “no” but his mouth wouldn’t shape the words. He started to growl instead.
Ping parted the gauze robe aside enough to reveal her sex, and it glittered in the candlelight. She stroked herself there, and lifted her damp, glittering fingers to him.
“Come to me.”
Ukiah’s legs started to move, carrying him to her, while Ukiah could only snarl in helpless anger. A moment later he felt Core’s nude body beside him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eden Court, Butler, Pennsylvania
Friday, September 17, 2004
Only afterward, Ukiah realized that of his eons of racial memories, not one was from a breeder. Pack memory was from Get to Get to Get back to the beginning of the Ontongard venturing into space. The breeders were made, and after they served their purpose, destroyed. He had no memory of being under the influence of Invisible Red, and thus no warning at its intensity. The coating on Ping pushed him into a white haze of painful pleasure, and when his climax hit, he screamed as every nerve fired to white-hot intensity. It was like diving into the sun.
Through it all, he growled his anger at being used this way, but it didn’t stop Ping from opening herself to him, or Core’s rough hands and wanton mouth, or his own body betraying him. He had been saved from the worst of Core’s attentions by Hash’s arrival; the big man dragged Core off to deal with something causing a loud ruckus downstairs. Not that he noticed it at the time, his focus snared by Ping and pinned by the drug. Robbed of control, his unconscious leash on his inhuman strength vanished too, and bruises started to appear on Ping’s pale skin. Dark handprints. Cruel kisses. His anger fled before dismay. Finally the drug’s hold slipped, and he managed to wrench himself from Ping and throw himself onto the floor. Ping rolled over, eyed him sleepily, and drifted off to sleep. Momentarily safe, Ukiah crawled to the connected bathroom, and huddled in a cold shower, sick with himself.
Details ignored while he was under the drug’s control now crowded in.
. . . pain flared jagged from his collarbone as he shoved Core from his groin and pushed into Ping. Outside the mansion came shouts and someone ran through the darkness below the windows. Ping’s long hair fanned out, ink black poured onto pure white. Core sprawled unnoticed close by on the satin sheets, watching the frantic joining. As the candles suffocated them in hot vanilla scent and made a shadow play of his rape, the runner was captured in a hard collision of bodies . . .
Shivering now under the cold water, Ukiah swore as he realized that the cultists had captured someone while he’d been obsessed with Ping. Had it been Bear? Max? Sam? There was enough Blissfire in his system, though, to make the past fraught with sensory traps. As he tried to replay the cultists dragging the interloper into the mansion, the memory of Ping’s slick wet warmth entangled his attention. He found himself standing up in the shower, and fought the desire to go back to the bedroom. Who had the cultists caught?
. . . the stone walls muffled the cultists’ shouts, beyond his ability to pick out individual words, leaving only intonations of surprise and dismay. Core stirred to shift behind Ukiah and lick down his spine. Someone came running up the stairs.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Hash’s voice came from just beyond the door. Apparently he’d been standing guard in the hall.
“We caught someone. Something. Can’t tell which yet.” Parity panted. “He had this.”
“Fuck!” Hash snarled. “Core is going to want to deal with this.”
“Really? Isn’t he . . . ?”
“He’ll want to deal with this.” Hash repeated and walked into the bedroom without knocking or hesitation at the door. He physically pulled Core gently but firmly off the bed and out of the room . . .
Awareness of how close Core came to obtaining his desires made Ukiah stumble out of the shower and throw up in the toilet.
Who had they caught? How long ago had this happened? Ukiah wasn’t sure—he lost all sense of time when Ping first touched him—but the candles had burned down to guttering pools of wax. He guessed that it was well past midnight.
His memory recorded a short period of silence and a faint, muffled scream. A few minutes later the mansion resumed the frantic activity of earlier. Hash returned to the hallway.
“What happened?” Parity asked. “Who is he?”
“Ice will be back in a few hours.” Hash opened the bedroom door, letting in a wash of fresh air and the smell of fresh blood. “Good. They’re still going at it like rabbits. Tell Ice that Dongle found the puppy and we’re going ahead with the Cleansing. Socket picked Dongle up and is meeting us. Guard the wolf until Ice gets here; the lieutenant is to take everyone here to the rendezvous and wait.”
“What wolf? Where?”
“We’re playing cross the river with the wolf,
the chicken, and the grain in a speedboat.” Hash checked the load on a Colt forty-five.
“Huh?”
“You haven’t heard the riddle? How did you get into Harvard? You need to get across a river in a boat, but there’s only room for one other thing. The wolf will eat the chicken if you leave the two together and the chicken will eat the grain.”
“Is that in the Bible?”
Hash smacked Parity in the back of the head. “No!”
Parity rubbed the back of his head. “Okay, okay, Oregon’s the wolf. Who’s the chicken?”
“Socket.”
“Huh? Why is she the chicken? And what’s the grain?”
“You know, sometimes things don’t match up exactly in analogies. We don’t want to take Wolf Boy with us to the Cleansing and we don’t want Socket to see the mess in the wine cellar. So you’re going to stay here and guard this door.”
Hash closed the door on Parity’s startled, “Me?”
“By the time Ping’s done with the Wolf Boy, he’ll sleep for hours, and then Ice will be here.”
“But . . .”
“You’ll have the gun. Kill him if he tries anything.”
“But . . .”
“Just do what you’re told, Parity.”
Ukiah rinsed the traces of vomit from his mouth, and drank his fill out of the sink. The water helped dilute the drug some; food would work wonders on clearing his system. He’d have to deal with Ping and Parity, and get out of the mansion before Ice arrived. Hopefully whomever the cultists caught was still alive in the wine cellar. But most important he had to find out where Core had gone with Kittanning and the Ae.
The draperies were held back with silk cords. He used them to tie up Ping, hands and feet, with knots that would make his scouting master and Max proud. He gagged her with the remains of her gauzy black robe. She stirred as he knotted the gag tight, eyed him through the veil of her long black hair, and then arched, presenting first her breasts and then her groin, moaning seductively. In that movement and siren-song of a groan, she nearly captured him. He lowered his mouth toward her offered breast, suddenly aware that even tied, she remained completely accessible to him, and now deceptively safe.
Deceptively. He caught himself just short of touching his lips to her, the perfume of her silky skin filling his senses. If she could delay him, then he could be caught. And sexually enslaved again.
He jerked back away from her. “You bitch!”
Her eyes narrowed, and she writhed erotically again, moaning softly, the parody of a woman being pleasured.
He backed away, trying not to look at her, anger barely able to compete with the desire aching inside of him. He made it to the door, managed to focus on the hallway beyond despite Ping’s heady distraction.
Parity paced the hall, murmuring softly to himself. “Cross with the grain. No. Cross with the wolf. No. Cross with the chicken, drop it off, go back and get the—get the—wolf eat chicken. Chicken eat grain. Get the wolf.”
“. . . we don’t want to take Wolf Boy with us to the Cleansing,” Hash had said smelling of fresh blood, “and we don’t want Socket to see the mess in the wine cellar . . .”
Ukiah dove out the door and took Parity down. The boy yelped as Ukiah slammed him to the floor. Ukiah punched him to silence him, and then again and again. He managed to stop himself after the third punch. His anger surged through him like a large dark beast, wanting blood and pain, pressing against the confines of his skin until Ukiah was trembling with the effort to keep it in. He had Parity pinned—lover’s close, the pistol hard between their hips—and one hand tight around Parity’s throat, thumb pressed to the windpipe and the boy’s face going an alarming shade of purple.
He was going to kill the boy if he wasn’t careful.
And the angry drugged part of him, the wild thing black as a midnight storm, didn’t care.
“No, no,” he growled and fought his rage back down. Reluctantly his hand let go of the throat, like a beast not wanting to give up a prize bone.
Parity had been flailing at him. He gave the boy a hard shake, and leaned down to growl in his face.
“Be still or I’ll kill you.” Because he wasn’t sure he could stop himself if the boy kept resisting.
Parity went still, panting hard, eyes wide and leaking fear.
“Where’s Core?” Ukiah snarled, his lips peeling back to show teeth, fighting the urge to bite, to maul through skin and muscle to bone.
“I don’t know. Honest to God. I don’t know.”
“Hash talked like you knew. Where has he gone?”
“To do the Cleansing, but I don’t know where. I’m just an initiate. I just joined six months ago. Ping dialed a wrong number and called me by accident one day when she was lost in Cambridge. She was just down the street, and she was so cute that I went out to help her. She took me back to her place and made love to me with Blissfire to thank me. I joined a few days later, but I haven’t worked my way up to the inner circle.”
Ukiah doubted that the call had been an accident nor that Ping had been lost. “What is this Cleansing? What is he going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Parity wailed. “Only the inner circle knows.”
Ukiah struck him. “Quiet. What do you know, you worthless shit?”
“They bought boats for the ritual, and a generator, and gas tanks, and yards of white silk. They probably took the babies. They needed two babies and the puppy. A girl, a boy, any one of them would do, but they had to have the puppy. I didn’t know anything happened to the two other babies. Ping only told me tonight that they died during the testing, that the machine they found at the airport was more deadly than they expected.”
“What machine? Where is it?”
“I think in the wine cellar, but I’m not allowed down there. I’m only an initiate.”
“It’s your fucking house!” Ukiah roared at him. “I’m sick of assholes who let people like Core and Adam use them to hurt others. You know better than this! Any child knows better than this. Core might be insane, but at least he has an excuse. You’re a fucking bastard to let him—fuck no, help him—do this.” Ukiah caught Parity’s hand and pressed it hard against the boy’s face. “This hand! This hand killed Adam. This hand killed the baby girl.” He started to hit Parity with his own hand. “This hand killed the baby boy. This hand threw those naked little bodies into the garbage.”
“I didn’t kill them! I didn’t even know until afterward!”
“You fucking knew you had a house full of kidnappers and murderers, and the minute you didn’t call the police, it’s the same as you doing it yourself.”
“You don’t know the truth! There are demons in the world. Even if you don’t believe it, it doesn’t make them less real. You have to be ruthless to deal with such evil. The ends justify the means, and if a handful die to save the world, then the cost is worth it.”
He could only growl, feeling the resonance of the Pack in Parity’s words. He rebelled against the comparison, heart and soul, but some remote lucid part of him recognized that the cult and the Pack were the same, but different, and it was the differences that separated them into good and evil.
“You didn’t hurt Ping? Did you?” Parity fearfully broke Ukiah’s silence. “Oh, dear God, tell me you didn’t kill her. That wasn’t her fault. Core says it’s the way we were really meant to be: freely sexual beings. The serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge, knowing that she gained only flawed knowledge: shame of natural functions, limiting love with prejudice . . .”
“Did that bullshit help you after Core took you?”
Bleakness came to Parity’s eyes, and then he blinked the look away. “The Blissfire makes it feel good, and later it’s hard to remember the details, like a bad dream. If you don’t think about it, it goes away.”
“What else do you know about the Cleansing ritual?”
“It’s to kill any demons nesting in the area.”
“Are you sure?”
“We found out what Dewey did when we intercepted a phone conversation between the nests of demons. When the FBI started to raid the nests, we recorded the demons talking about moving the founts. Orders were given to move them, but that nest was taken out before they could do so. After that, the demons started to speak in their own tongue instead of English, so we had to translate everything, and it took time. Only recently we learned that they had captured the nephilim, and what Dewey did.”
The Ontongard language didn’t match one to one with English very well. Ukiah guessed that the Ontongard used a word such as “breeder/offspring” to mean Kittanning and the cult translated it to nephilim.
“What did the demons say?”
“Well, it’s hard to piece together anything. Even in their own language they talk in shorthand, and often do this weird duet, like they’re reading from the same script. We call it test patterning. Ice says that once they confirm they’re on the same page, they then talk about differences in the way they’re thinking.”
He shook Parity to get him back to the point. “What did they say?”
“They talked about using a machine to force the nephilim to the correct form. One said that Huey had been keyed with the nephilim and was now a detriment to them.” Detriment? Useless was probably a truer translation. “The second one said if the nephilim could be corrupted, then the founts should be fetched, and the first said that so far the nephilim proved to be malleable but unassailable. They agreed in duet that if the nephilim couldn’t be corrupted, they were far too dangerous to them and had to be destroyed. At first we thought they meant kill the nephilim, but then we realized that they were using plural verbs, whereas when they talked about the nephilim they used only singular.”
The confusion lay in the fact that Ukiah kept changing in number. At the time of the conversation, he could have been in as many as four to a hundred different pieces. Hex had stolen three mice as Ukiah bled to death. Ukiah had awoken surrounded by a horde of mice that the Pack gathered up and moved with his dead body. He had been one but many. The Ontongard would use the singular to mean “the breeder” in a general sense, and “this piece of the breeder” but plural to mean “all parts of the breeder.”
