by Wen Spencer
Ukiah flinched as if struck. "I'm sorry about that." He stood up. "I'll pay you back for the food, and I'll swap you clothes once I get something else to wear."
"What are you going to do about Ping and the dens?" Kyle asked.
"What's this?" Atticus asked.
Ukiah stared at Atticus with his feral gaze that looked the whole way through him, and said nothing.
"We were pulling together information on the dens." Kyle held out a printout of an aerial photo, one building circled in red. "Using information your brother skimmed from the cult. We—he thinks they're holding Ping at an engineering firm in Waltham."
"You think you're going off, getting the Pack, and attacking this office building?"
"Ping will know where Ice has the Ae." Ukiah looked away but his pain was obvious. "And she's pregnant with my child."
"You're not going into an office building with those killers. If you think Ping is actually there, we'll call the FBI and the police and get an assault team set up."
"The Pack exists to fight the Ontongard. Why put humans at risk?"
"Because it's their world, their laws."
"The Gets will fight to the death—and then come back. They'll shatter down to mice to escape any prison cell. They'll infect any human who's jailed with them. You can kill them only with fire and poison, and human law doesn't allow that."
"So you conveniently leave humans in the dark so they can't ever deal with the problem themselves?"
That stumped Ukiah; he tried to brush past but Atticus caught hold of him. With the physical contact, Atticus's awareness of his brother expanded—the room service meal was the only reason Ukiah was still standing. The repeated attacks, the long, cold swim, the repeated dosing of various drugs, and perhaps even starvation in the barren cell on the island had him on the verge of collapse. If Ukiah went into the water in such bad shape, it was amazing he didn't drown.
"How are you going to find the Pack?" Atticus asked, his anger falling away to concern. "You'll probably drop over just outside the door."
"I'll make some phone calls." Ukiah tried to pull away.
Atticus tightened his hold; he couldn't let his feelings jeopardize his brother's life. "Don't be stupid. I'd rather work with you than argue with you."
The fight left Ukiah with a sigh that seemed born more from exhaustion than frustration. He leaned against Atticus. The smell of the ocean still clung to him, as if the water had seeped down to the bone. The tension between them temporarily resolved, the feeling of "this is right, this is good" resounding between them, echoes of an earlier happiness, when they were one. Atticus found himself holding his brother tightly, savoring the closeness like a starving man trying to make a morsel of food last.
It was then that Atticus realized that earlier, when Ukiah sought solace with Ru, it hadn't been Ukiah that he had been jealous of. What idiocy.
"You say that you think Ping is there," Ru said. "Why don't we scout the location, see what's there. The cult might have given you old information."
"It would be dangerous," Ukiah murmured into Atticus's shoulder.
"We are familiar with danger," Atticus said.
Chapter Fifteen
Waltham, Massachusetts
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Ukiah eyed the Ontongard den with faint dismay. It was a huge redbrick cube of an office building. Four floors tall, and equally wide, it sat behind a moat of access roads, a parking lot, and landscaping. Its tinted windows hid its secrets from anyone curious enough to cross the moat and try to spy in.
"We should be able to sense the Ontongard from here," Ukiah told Atticus as they studied the building. Their uneasy alliance was holding, although Atticus had driven from downtown to this beltway suburb with savage speed. Ukiah envied not only his skill at handling the sports car in the pounding traffic, but also the ease with which Atticus dealt with bewildering detours, unfamiliar road signage, and a toll road that required you to fling quarters into an open bin to pass. The DEA agents laid siege to the nest with practiced efficiency. After a cautious drive-by, Atticus pulled in near the front doors. Kyle parked across the parking lot in the Explorer, disassociated from the Jaguar, but connected by radio.
"I don't feel anything." Atticus's voice was flat with hostility.
"That's what I mean," Ukiah said. "Even if there were only one Get inside, at this distance, we should be able to tell."
"If no one's home, let's have a closer look." Still Ru waited for a slight nod from Atticus before getting out.
The foyer was a vast, two-story room with a bulky receptionist's desk. Two visitor's chairs sat close to the front doors, as if visitors were encouraged to leave.
The receptionist herself was another surprise: a pixie-small girl, thin and nearly sexless. Her hair was cut and styled into spikes, and dyed a vivid purple. A collection of gold loops dazzled in her ears, right eyebrow, and left nostril. She wore a silk tunic that matched her hair, black leggings, and cowboy boots.
Despite her outlandish appearance, when she answered the phone with "Good morning, Peter Caldwell and Associates," she sounded as smooth and polished as any receptionist Ukiah had ever heard.
"Is she one of them?" Ru whispered to Atticus.
"I don't think so," Atticus said. "My spider sense isn't tingling."
"She's human." Ukiah walked to the desk and his brother and Ru fell in beside him so that they made an impressive array as the receptionist finished taking a message and glanced up.
"May I help you?"
"I'm Agent Takahashi." Ru showed the girl his ID.
"Oh, shit," she said. "I knew this job was too good to be true."
"We have information that a kidnapped woman is being held here." Ru tucked his ID away before she could see that he was DEA, not FBI. "We need to search the premises for her."
"Don't you need a warrant for that?"
"Not in a kidnapping. Can you tell me how many people are currently in the building?"
"I'm not sure." She shrugged. "This is all of the building I usually see outside the john. People come and go—I'm not allowed to check ID or anything on them. They have new hires all the time, but after a few days they call in sick or . . . You know, this is a really creepy place to work. I knew something was wrong when they put me on front desk."
"What were you going to say about new hires?" Atticus asked.
"This is going to sound weird, but it's like attack of the pod people here. Bright and happy people turn into shuffling zombies in less than a week, or they just don't come back."
"You've never called the authorities?" Atticus sounded annoyed.
"Oh, yeah, like I'm a pillar of the community that the police are going to listen to about zombies from Mars."
"We're looking for this woman." Ukiah showed her Ping's photo.
"I haven't seen her." She eyed them. "Am I in trouble?"
"No, but we would like you to give us your name and address and then go home. Nor would it be wise for you to return. Your employers are dangerous men."
"Oh, I'd believe that of upper management. Most of Engineering and Accounting are okay. They're up on the second floor."
"No pod people?"
"Yeah, zombie-free zones. Just major geeks. Third floor is iffy. No one but pod people go up to the fourth floor. Past the elevator lobby, the doors are locked with card keys."
Her name was Sonya Barnes, and she gave her address in a town called Natick, which looked like Nat-ick to Ukiah but she pronounced it as Nay-ick and had to spell it for Atticus.
"I don't know if this means anything," Sonya said. "But there was a mass exodus a little while ago of the pod people."
"What time?"
"About two hours ago."
Had the cult attacked one of the dens, triggering the Ontongard to abandon the rest?
"If they're moving their . . ." Ukiah paused, as Ru and Atticus both glanced hard at Sonya to remind him that she was listening to their conversation. ". . . hideout, they might ha
ve taken Ping with them already."
"We'll see." Atticus frowned at the near slip.
The DEA agent walked Sonya to the door to prevent any other slips.
"Fourth floor?" Ukiah asked.
"Let's evacuate the civilians first." Atticus shook his head, his annoyance feeling like a coat of thorns. "Just in case we get in a shoot-out."
The elevator slid open to the scent of death and Ontongard. Ukiah growled softly as the familiar reek triggered generations of hate. He went to step off the elevator, but Atticus checked him.
"Wait," his brother commanded, pistol in hand. Ru held the door as Atticus cautiously checked the lobby beyond. "Okay. We're clear."
"Roger that," Kyle whispered from the nearly invisible earbud that Atticus was wearing.
There was a security door with a card-key lock.
"What's bugging you?" Atticus asked Ukiah as Ru produced a small electronic lock pick.
"There's something freshly dead up here." Ukiah wondered how Atticus could miss it.
Atticus sniffed deeply and then nodded slowly.
The door clunked open. Ukiah tracked death through the maze of offices and hallways. Atticus trailed behind, a bristling presence. In a small windowless supply room, they found Ping.
On the night of his rape, after Core had been called away, Ukiah had dragged himself off the sleeping Ping and showered away the drug's control. After tying up Ping, he fled the cult's commune, unaware that the Ontongard were zeroing in on it. The Gets must have found Ping as Ukiah had left her—bound and naked. They put the closest set of clothes on her: Core's black slacks and silk dress shirt, several sizes too large for her slight frame. To keep up her pants, the Gets had made the mistake of giving her a belt. One end of the belt was now tied to an overhead pipe, the buckle cinched tight around her slender neck. The slacks pooled on the floor under her dangling feet, while the shirt at least covered her body to her knees, preserving her dignity.
Ukiah stared at her, horrified, relieved, and ashamed of his relief. "Oh, God," he moaned; and stepped forward to take her down.
"No." Atticus caught him. "Don't disturb the crime scene."
"Poor thing," Ru whispered. "What do you think this mess on the wall means?"
After slicing her fingers on something sharp in her small prison, she had used the blood to paint her last message on the wall.
I misspoke and betrayed them all. Parity has fallen. God forgive me for what I must do.
Had she suspected why the Ontongard were keeping her untainted, or had she acted only to save herself from them? There were no answers on the blood-painted walls.
Above it was a word in the cult's phonetic spelling of an Ontongard word. Ukiah didn't recognize it until he sounded it out. Zaeta. But surely that couldn't be right.
No longer focused on the smell of death, other scents vied for his attention. He abandoned Ping to creep cautiously down another hall, following one smell in particular.
Atticus pulled him up short. "What is it?"
"Don't you use your nose?"
"Apparently not as much as you do," Atticus snapped.
"I can smell C-four. There may be a bomb up here."
"Did you hear that?" Atticus asked his teammates.
"I'll make sure the other floors are empty." Ru headed back to the elevator.
"Calling the bomb squad and signing off." Kyle's tinny voice came from Atticus's ear.
Atticus turned off his radio and then signaled Ukiah to continue. At the end of the hallway, though, Atticus suddenly caught hold of Ukiah's braid and dragged him backward. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's booby-trapped."
"It is?" Ukiah froze.
"The motion detector for the security system." Atticus pointed upward, not down at the floor where Ukiah had been focused. A cord dangled down off the corner unit. "We're not in its range, but we will be in a step or two."
"So how do we get around it?"
Atticus tugged on Ukiah's braid. "We don't. We leave it to experts."
"But . . ."
"Take it from your older, more experienced brother—don't play with bombs!" Atticus pulled him backward via the braid. "Come!"
Atticus didn't let go of his hair until they were on the elevator.
"The Ontongard normally don't bomb their own dens." Ukiah rubbed the back of his head where all the roots were complaining of his brother's rough treatment. "Things blowing up attracts more attention. Also, their means of communication is so loose, a returning Get is more likely to set it off than a human."
"Why did they leave in the first place?"
"If the cult attacked one of the other dens in the hexagon, then they would abandon all the rest except one."
Atticus swore. "Not the cult, the Pack. They went after a den in Watertown this morning while we went to the island."
The elevator door opened to the foyer. Through the tinted glass walls, as they walked toward the doors, they could see the police were arriving, several squad cars' worth.
"Let Ru do the talking." Atticus put a hand to Ukiah's shoulder as they walked out the door.
Ru had found some office workers, and he herded them across the parking lot to where the Jaguar and Explorer sat, screened by some low bushes. Atticus steered Ukiah toward the crowd. The police car passed Ru and pulled up to the building. Atticus ignored it, propelling Ukiah along.
"We got a call on a bomb threat," the officer called after Atticus.
"Yes, it's up on the fourth floor and it's booby-trapped!" Atticus shouted back, not stopping.
The policeman glanced at the building and then started after Atticus and Ukiah, leaving his cruiser behind, door open, lights flashing. "Were you the ones who called this in?"
Ukiah paused, only to have Atticus shove him forward.
"Yes! We found it!" Atticus kept walking.
"Hold on, I need to get your names, take your statement." The officer's hand was now riding his pistol grip.
"DEA! Agent Steele! And the number one rule of bombs, Officer, is clear the area."
As Kyle had the Explorer in the far reaches of the parking lot, they were now over two hundred feet from the building. The policeman paused, glancing back at the building and his cruiser in front of it.
"Don't you think this is a little excessive?" the policeman called.
The building exploded, floors flashing out like Chinese firecrackers, one after another. When the ground floor flared, the blast flipped the police cruiser like a toy. Atticus started to push Ukiah down and then they were both smacked to the ground hard; Atticus shielded him as the deafening noise, smoky heat, and flying glass blasted over them. Ukiah felt a dozen prickles of pain from Atticus as if they were his own.
The sound had been indescribably loud, and the silence afterward was shocking.
Atticus scrambled to the police officer while Ukiah's body was inclined to stay put—it seemed safer that way. The policeman got up, swearing, clearly no worse for the experience.
"Obviously," Atticus said, "it wasn't excessive enough."
The golden afternoon blurred with the arrival of fire trucks and police cars and various government agencies. Atticus tried to keep a hand on Ukiah at all times while fending off offers to take them both to the hospital. True, he had slivers of glass embedded in his back, making him feel as grouchy as a porcupine, but Ukiah withdrew alarmingly into himself. With another man, Atticus would have taken this as an attempt at duplicity, but he could feel his brother's endurance was thread thin and fraying.
He made his way toward the Explorer, pulling Ukiah along with him. Kyle was still holed up in the SUV, eyeing the crowd with dismay.
"You killed your earbud." Kyle reported, motioning to his own ear rather than touching Atticus.
Atticus found the remains dangling from his shoulder, a thin coat of his dead blood on it. Gingerly he explored his ear—a piece had blown off but it had found its way back. Unfortunately the earbud couldn't similarly repair itself.
"I've been trying to tell you,"
Kyle continued. "They blew the other four dens too."
Atticus glanced at the office workers being grilled by police about their missing employers. If his team hadn't evacuated the building for the expected gunfight, all seventy-some employees would have been in their offices when the bomb went off. The midafternoon time might have been chosen to ensure maximum kill. "Do they have any idea of a body count yet?"
"I called in bomb threats on all the addresses we had when you found this bomb."
"Good work!" Atticus gripped Kyle's shoulder.
Kyle grinned shyly at the praise, and then confessed, "Well, your brother stressed the symmetry of the dens, so I figured if they'd blow this one, they'd do the rest too."
Kyle had trusted a virtual stranger, someone he'd seen only twice and had every reason to mistrust, because he was Atticus's brother. Atticus supposed that was the nature of family, but he found it faintly alarming. In the old adage of blood and water, why did thickness make the fluid more trustworthy? Was Ukiah someone who could be trusted? Atticus had wanted to take the den with a SWAT team, but the plain truth was that the machines of justice moved slowly. Everyone in the six buildings would have been killed while they decided how to deal with perps who had already fled the scene. Would Ukiah's conviction that Ping was being held in the office building have been good enough to warrant a search? In the end, Atticus suspected, the law officers involved would have weighed their decision on the fact that Ukiah was his brother.
Atticus saw Agent Zheng stopped at the police barrier by a uniformed policeman. She showed her ID to pass it; another person of questionable reliability gaining automatic trust in the brotherhood of law officers. There had been a thawing of Zheng's arctic north; dismay registered as she saw the extent of the destruction to the office building. She spotted him and something passed through her eyes at the moment of recognition, a flicker of excitement then extinguished by something she saw in his face.
What was that all about? Did he communicate something to her without knowing?
She glanced past him and summer came to the arctic.
From behind him, Atticus felt an answering warm outbreak.
Ukiah—of course.
