by Wen Spencer
"Yeah," Animal whimpered. "But I hoped if I made the pot rich enough . . . I can throw in a pair of Desert Eagle pistols and a dozen nickel bags of Pixie Dust."
A growl rose from the Dogs. It was one of the differences between the Pack and the outlaw biker gangs that followed them; the humans treated women as objects to be traded and sold. Even if the Pack weren't morally against such debasement, there was the matter that the women of the Pack were physically equal to the men.
"Okay, okay, okay. I know 'no' when I hear it." Animal held up his hands.
Rennie tossed the bare drumstick toward the trash pit and hit it unerringly. "Where is the Temple of New Reason?"
"Those fairies?" Animal asked.
"Yes," Rennie rumbled.
"They're—"
Daggit gave Animal an angry shove to silence him. "Is it Pixie Dust that you want?" Rennie's silent snarl made Daggit try for a lighter tone. "Look, you can buy through us. We'll give you a good price."
Rennie struck Daggit with savage speed, catching him by the back of the head with a fistful of hair, and the other hand yanking him down to his knees until the leader of the Iron Horses crouched in the dirt in front of Ukiah. "Look at what the Temple has done to our Cub. They ran him down with a truck and shot him full of holes."
Daggit hissed in pain, but managed. "So it's true what they say—you can't keep a good man down."
"Where are they?" Rennie growled.
"I don't know," Daggit's voice went sharp as Rennie put pressure on his arm.
"He knows," Animal said quietly. "He won't tell you. But I can tell you everything I know."
"You don't know shit!" Daggit snarled.
"Who did they contact first? You? No, me!" Animal thumped on his chest with his index finger. "Me!"
"You don't know where they are," Daggit said.
"Yeah, but I know how to get ahold of them."
"We don't want to talk," Rennie said.
"I can set up a meeting."
"Shut up, asshole!" Daggit snapped, and hissed as Rennie tightened his hold. "You know what they're going to do to those idiots."
"I want to be Pack," Animal said. "I want to be fast and strong and cool."
"Dumb fuck," Daggit muttered and squirmed in Rennie's hold. "You don't have to fuck them over, Shaw. Your Cub is fine."
"Make me Pack, and I'll gift-wrap the bastards for you."
"Do you have any idea what you're saying?" Ukiah pulled on his shirt.
"My cholesterol is through the roof," Animal said. "I've got rheumatoid arthritis in my knees so bad I can barely sit on a bike, and all the men of my family die before they turn fifty. I figure I only have, like, ten years or so left. I'm willing to gamble."
Ukiah sensed the direction of Rennie's thoughts. " No. We can't make him a Get."
" We need to be quick and dirty," Rennie thought. " We need to find the cult before they can use that damn machine."
" No."
" Do we beat the information out of them instead? Torture them? Men can stay amazingly silent for lots of money."
Ukiah thought of the bundles of twenties that Kyle and Atticus had stashed away.
" The drug is killing him," Rennie pressed on. " The only way he's going to live is by becoming a Get."
" If he survives the process."
" There is that."
Ukiah studied the bikers, their clothes glittering with motes of Invisible Red. The concentration of it on their groins puzzled him until he noticed that they absently rubbed themselves, the lingering effects of the drug still stimulating them. There was not one unmarked by the shimmering dust—doomed by the exposure to Invisible Red. Rennie was right. They had to shut down Hu-ae and get Loo-ae back as soon as possible. " Okay."
Rennie shoved Daggit away and drifted back into the darkness. "Come." He motioned to Animal. "Walk with us."
"Animal!" Daggit tried to catch Animal's arm, but Smack blocked him. "Mike! Shit, man, think about this."
"I've thought about this for twenty years." Animal followed Rennie into the woods.
***
A half mile from the campsite, they stopped in a marshy clearing. While there was no house in sight, a knee-high stone wall meandered along the edge of the woods. The night sky overhead had cleared, but fog drifted through the trees, as if the clouds had sunk down out of the sky to hide. Some of the Dogs—Stein, Heathyr, and Smack—had stayed behind to keep an eye on the bikers. The rest ranged through the darkness, grim with the knowledge of what was about to happen.
"Okay!" Animal threw open his arms, welcoming the experience. "Make me Pack!"
"Tell us about the cult first," Rennie commanded. "Who's your contact? Where are they now? Everything you know, and then we'll do the mauling."
"Ahhh." Animal raked his hand through his wild red hair. "My sister has a boy, a stepson actually, Eddie." He shrugged his lean shoulder as if the boy were nothing of consequence. The lack of blood connection equaled lack of affection. "The kid gave her a lot of lip when she first got married, and his real mom didn't want to deal with him, so they shipped him off to military school. They brainwashed him on that God-and-country shit."
Animal took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out. His hands were shaking, and he laughed nervously as he fumbled with lighting it. "Look at me. Shaking like a virgin with his first whore." He took a deep drag, the tip of the cigarette glowing angry red in the darkness.
"What about Eddie?" Ukiah pushed Animal back to the cult.
"After graduation, Eddie joined the army or marines or one of those but got kicked out. He moved back with my sister for a few months, and then dropped out of sight completely. Didn't even show up for his father's funeral. It turns out he'd joined this cult—Temple of New Reason."
"Do you know his cult name?"
"Ice." Animal laughed, shaking his head. "I've met some of the others and they've got the shit-stupidest names: Mouse, Link, Ether, Ascii, and Io. What a bunch of dweebs. Though Socket and Ping are hot babes."
"Eddie what?" Ukiah tried to fit "Eddie" to the ruthless Ice.
"Eddie Howard," Animal said. "He got hold of me at the end of last year. He knew that I sold reefer and speed and sometimes handled cocaine, that I know people like Jay Lasker. He wanted me to sell this new shit. He gave me a free sample. After my first hit, I knew it was pure gold."
"Where is the cult?"
Animal shook his head again. "Eddie got really paranoid. He wanted everything set up without anything that could be traced back to him. Like it was some fucking French Connection."
"So you don't know where he is." Shaw glanced back to where Daggit was being detained.
"I know how to get ahold of him! We'd use the personals on the Internet." Animal named the Web site they used, an online dating service. "I'd post under the name Pokeyl02 and he posted under Gumby666."
Ukiah did not recognize the references for either one. "Why those names?"
"You don't use 'drug runner' and 'drug lord' as handles and expect to stay hidden from the narcs," Animal said. "You don't mention drugs or money or city or anything like that in the message. Usually I say something like, 'Drop me a hundred' and he'd post back, 'Cam noon Sunday.'"
"That was your last buy?" Rennie asked.
"Cambridge." Animal nodded. "I hadn't set up the next buy yet."
"You have preset places to meet? Cambridge sounds too general."
"Cambridge is the Cambridge Bridge. For the drugs, the buy is always on the bridge, and the drop weighted, so if the narcs try to bust us, we'd throw the bag over the side of the river, and it sinks. No evidence, no conviction."
"Which bridges do you use?"
"Cam is Cambridge. LF is Longfellow." Animal named a few more bridges, but the list was short.
"That's the complete list?" Ukiah asked, surprised that there were so few.
" This isn't Pittsburgh," Rennie said.
" But it's got a river and a harbor, right?"
" Pittsburgh went a little nuts w
hen it came to bridges."
Rennie returned his attention to Animal. "What does Daggit know? Can he call and warn them?"
Animal started to swear that Daggit knew nothing, but then, with a hard look from Rennie, retracted the claim. "I'm not sure what Daggit knows. He's been selling them stuff like guns, explosives, and shit like that—hard-to-get equipment—while I've been running the drugs down to Philly, Baltimore, and places like that. But I really doubt Daggit knows crap. Eddie's a paranoid little shit. He doesn't even do the drug deals—he uses peons from the cult."
They questioned him further, but found out little else. Animal and his sister had had little to do with Ice most of his life before he joined the cult. With the exception of occasional weapon purchases, Animal had dealt with lower-level cult members.
"We are doing this? Right?" Animal dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his booted foot. "I've been steady for the Pack, right there, with whatever you guys needed. Guns. Bikes. You name it and I've supplied it. You fucking owe this to me."
"Not everyone survives this," Ukiah told him. "You can die."
"Or I could live forever," Animal said. "Life is a fucking crapshoot. You've got to play to win. So are we fucking doing this?"
"We're doing this." Rennie growled. He lifted his head, sniffing the wind, extending his Pack sense. While they'd talked, the other Dog Warriors had ranged out in all directions, making sure they were alone in the woods. They tensed now, hating what they must do, but resolved.
With the exception of the Kicking Deers, who had been made perfect hosts via Magic Boy's blood, most attempts to make a human into Pack led to death. Rennie had been the first to survive the process; he'd been shot in the shoulder and pinned under his dead horse on a Civil War battlefield. After countless failures, Rennie guessed, wolflike, that the weak made better prey than the healthy. He picked the sick and the wounded, and sought comfort in the knowledge that those who died had already been doomed.
Surviving, however, was not the same as thriving.
Ironically, the outlaw bikers proved to be not only willing, but also quite successful as Gets. They loved the life—the fighting and the nomadic existence—finding it a natural extension to a life they had already chosen. The bikers expected an initiation rite, and the Pack couldn't always afford to wait for one to become conveniently ill or hurt. Thus the maulings became a hated tool of necessity.
Animal shifted nervously. "Well?"
"Run," Rennie growled.
Animal's eyes went wide and he edged away from Rennie.
"Run!" Rennie roared.
And Animal bolted into a run.
" He's covered in Invisible Red," Rennie sent a hard thought Ukiah's direction. " Stay out of this." And then he was gone, loping after the running man.
Ukiah stood a moment in the empty clearing, feeling the hunt move through the woods without him. Rennie's howl went up, calling out the trail, and Ukiah felt the pull of kinship.
No, he wouldn't hunt, but he would stand witness.
Animal had said that he understood what a mauling entailed, but he couldn't really. The biker laughed as he ran, heavy footed and nearly blind, tripping and falling often as the Dogs paced him easily.
There was a mile of woods until the berm of a highway—the Dogs let Animal run half of it before the first hit. Bear had been running silently behind the biker; he surged forward and knocked Animal off his feet. As the biker scrambled in the wet dead leaves, churning up the rich black dirt to scent the night, Hellena broke his left arm with a hard, precise kick.
Animal cried out then, falling back into the autumn leaves. With carefully judged blows, they beat on the fallen biker, hurting him but not killing him.
Rennie stood over Animal, holding a syringe full of the Pack blood that would make the biker a Get or kill him, his thoughts on the red-haired boy with the mohawk who had come to the Gather nearly twenty years before. Rennie had seen the look of envy in Animal's eyes then, and known this was the probable end. "This only gets worse. If you want, you can stop it here, and we'll see that you get to a hospital."
"Fuck you," Animal whispered hoarsely. "You promised."
"So be it." Rennie pinned him and stabbed the needle home.
Silence fell except for Animal's harsh breathing and the distant roar of the surf.
"It's done." Rennie stepped away. "It's in God's hands now."
***
Animal died before sunrise.
CHAPTER NINE
Truck Plaza, Massachusetts
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Fog had thickened the air into a cold, damp blanket. Sunrise only paled the world. Leaving Bear to deal with Animal's body, the Dog Warriors had taken Ukiah north, away from the killing grounds. They stopped for gas, and Ukiah took advantage of the truck plaza's bank of pay phones to call Max.
"Bennett." Max answered the phone with his normal snap, and then groaned slightly. "Oh, God, what time is it?"
"Six thirty," Ukiah said. "I'm sorry, Max, I've been up all night . . . and . . . and . . ."
"Ukiah? What's wrong? You sound upset."
And with those simple words, Ukiah was torn. He desperately wanted Max there—morally steadfast in the most confusing of times. Yet at the same time, he was glad Max wasn't there to be tainted by the gray. He was ashamed to admit what he'd witnessed. Ashamed to admit having done nothing to stop it. He was tempted to lie to Max, but couldn't bear the thought of staining his trust.
"Things I can't talk about over the phone," Ukiah said finally, rubbing at his suddenly burning eyes.
"Ah."
"I'm sorry for calling you so early."
"No, no, I've been worried sick about you. When you didn't call back Monday, Sam and I did a background search on the owner of the cell phone you'd used—Hikaru Takahashi."
Ukiah groaned slightly. "He's Atticus's partner."
"Yeah, Indigo dropped the bomb about your brother yesterday. She called us to say they'd found you and to call off the background search."
"Which bomb?"
"It was a multiple strike. That you had a brother. That he was DEA. That the Pack had tested him. That the Pack raided the DEA and took their shipment of Invisible Red. She sounded pretty pissed—for Indigo, that is."
Ukiah winced. When he'd called Indigo early yesterday morning—to let her know that she'd be tripping over the DEA in the guise of his brother—he'd caught her between the postmortems of the cult members. She'd been focused on the discovery that Boston-area doctors had seen enough Invisible Red-related deaths to actually recognize the symptoms. They were, however, still mystified as to the cause.
The conversation had turned bitterly cold as he explained what had happened after she left. "Yeah, she is. I let her go knowing full well what could happen to Atticus."
"She's not angry enough to . . . ?" Max paused, searching for a tactful question. Ukiah realized that Max was still looking for the cause of Ukiah's distress, and hoping that the source was as mundane as a fight with his lover.
"I don't know." Ukiah thought of Animal, dead, even now being settled into a shallow grave. What was he going to tell Indigo?
There was a sudden blare of a deep horn from Max's side of the conversation.
"What the hell was that?" Ukiah asked as Max swore.
"A barge. We took the boat downriver a ways and slept on it. Just in case. The horns, though—they about put me through the ceiling every time."
We?Ukiah said nothing. Any precaution on Max's part was well justified at this point.
"You're coming home today?" Max asked as if the answer were an automatic yes.
"No. I need to see this through."
There was a long silence from Max, another blast of the barge horn echoing up the distant Ohio River valley in the background.
"I know you feel like you have to do something," Max said, "but if you want a life with Indigo and to be a father to your son, you can't run with the Pack. You can't do both. If you keep walking the
edge, you're going to fall off."
"I know. But there's too much on the line here. Too many lives at stake."
Max sighed. "What can you do that the Pack can't?"
"Well, I can ask you to help me set up a trap for the cult. Computer literate, the Pack isn't."
***
The only problem with working undercover was dealing with the hours. Not so much the long hours, though occasionally that sucked, but the guilt of not spending every waking moment working when you were undercover. It wasn't a job you started at nine o'clock and did your eight hours for. No matter how late you stayed up the night before, as soon as you woke up, you felt the need to do battle with the forces of evil.
The clock read six thirty and they had an eight-o'clock meeting with Agent Zheng. It was, though, a perfect morning, and Atticus didn't want to stir. He and Ru were tucked together just right, the morning light through the window sublimely pale, and the cries of gulls mixed with the deep horns of ships. He could lie, watching Ru sleep, and feel a fragile peace. So fragile that moving, let alone questioning it, would shatter it all.
Then Ru stirred, opened his eyes, and smiled sleepily. "Morning."
"I love you," Atticus whispered.
"Good." Ru kissed his jaw and snuggled back down into the blankets. "Because I love you too."
And then Ru was asleep again, and the moment hadn't passed so much as changed. Atticus's happiness solidified, and he felt now that he could get up, shower and let in the world.
Kyle was waiting when he came out of the shower, two sweaters in hand.
"What do you think, the gray or the green?"
"What?"
"Which looks better on me?" Kyle held up first the green sweater. "The green brings out my eyes—don't you think?"
"What's the special occasion?"
"We're having breakfast with Indigo this morning." Kyle overlaid the green sweater with the gray. "This is much more macho, though, don't you think?"
It took Atticus a moment to connect "Indigo" with "Agent Zheng." "You've got to be kidding me. Agent Zheng?"
"She's a complete babe." Kyle ducked back into his connecting room and returned—sans sweaters—with a color photo of Agent Zheng. "She's really sharp. She has a mind like a diamond."
