Dog Warrior (16 page)

“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 when 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.

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.”

“Who uses a machete to cut through red tape,” Atticus sang.

“Are you saying I don't have a chance?”

“I'm not saying that.”

“If she knows you two are . . . you know . . . it's not like I have to compete with you.”

Atticus sighed. He hadn't counted on Kyle wanting to join them at breakfast. “She knows. What did you find out about her?”

“She's twenty-six, like
moi,
and an Aries, extremely compatible with a Virgo like me. Her tax records claim that she's single and owns a luxury one-bedroom
studio
condo in
Pittsburgh.” Kyle crooned the word “studio.” “You know what that means—no live-in boyfriend. Her hobbies are science fiction and mystery novels, motorcycles, and cooking.”

Cooking?
The stocked refrigerator in Zheng's hotel room took on new meaning. “My God, she's a nerd's dream come true.”

Undeterred, Kyle went on. “She's got a Suzuki Katana and a Ford Mustang, a black belt in judo, and is the Pittsburgh field office's top scorer in pistol.”

Atticus shooed Kyle back into his room so Ru could go on sleeping. They'd been out late, working through the addresses Agent Zheng had provided. The places were so scattered that they drove nearly two hundred miles just to hit the first two.

On Kyle's laptop various windows were open to lingerie models.

“And the lingerie relates how?”

“These are all things she ordered last month from Victoria's Secret.”

He was going to have to have a long talk with Kyle about what the words “find out everything” really entailed. “I don't know, Kyle. Women wear things like that when they have someone to show it off to.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

Kyle dropped into a sulk.

“What about the Ontongard?”

He looked unhappier. “Either Indigo sanitized her reports completely or there just isn't anything. She joined the FBI in 1999, and I've been searching through five years of reports, but so far, officially, the only ‘aliens' she's dealt with are Russian Mafia and Chinese Tongs. I'm sorry, Atty; I'll do some more digging.”

Atticus went to gaze out Kyle's window, looking down on Boston Harbor. Fog masked all but the wharf at the foot of the hotel and its collection of sailboats and cabin cruisers.
It felt like the fog extended through his soul; Atticus knew he wasn't human, but who was telling him the truth? Could he believe Agent Zheng merely because she was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way? Was “alien” any saner than “werewolf,” “angel,” or “demon”? Who knew the truth and who was deceiving themselves?

In the long run, did it really matter? After what he and Ru found yesterday, he knew that the cult needed to be stopped.

Deciding that Ice's instruction to Ascii might indicate a general direction to look, they investigated the northernmost addresses on the list. The New Hampshire farm had indeed been sold and the new owners were an investment banker from Boston, his pregnant wife, and their two children. After what they learned at the next site, Atticus nearly drove back to the farm and told the banker to pack up his family and flee any chance of interacting with the cult.

Zheng's list had innocuously noted:
burn site
. The police report had been dryly worded. What they found was little more than secluded acreage on the edge of extensive wetlands. There had been cinder blocks stacked around the bonfire, making crude fire tunnels, but they'd been numbered and hauled away to FBI crime labs. The ash had been gathered for bone fragments, the ground scraped for evidence, and all that was left was scorched earth and the scent of long-dead fires.

He searched anyhow, crouching in the cold wind, fingering the marshy edges of the clearing. In the break between two slightly singed bushes, he found where a woman had crawled through, missing a left arm and a right foot, burning hot enough to scorch the ground she scrabbled over. In a low hollow, fifty feet from the incinerator, she broke into a collection of mice—but that hadn't saved her. The cultists had smashed the mice with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. The police missed or ignored the pitifully small, charred bodies. Atticus steeled himself to
pick one up, breaking open the heat-mummified remains to find intact DNA.

The cult killed the mice while they were still caught between two species. This cell was a mouse. That cell was . . . well, one couldn't call it human.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ru had whispered from behind Atticus.

“Yes.” He dug a hole in the damp, loose soil and buried the mice. There was nothing else he could do; he couldn't take them to the police and say, “These were a woman—someone just like me.”

It was a chance encounter with the incinerator's neighbor that exposed the rest of the horror.

“They did it at night—to hide the smoke,” she'd said only after they'd shown her ID. She had the doors of her car locked, and the window cracked only a finger width. “The wind usually blows west to east—so it goes out over the wet-lands, but one night last fall I could smell it—I live the next lot down the lane—so I called the fire department. They needed to bring in a psychologist for the whole department—it was like something out of a Nazi death camp.”

Ru tsked. Atticus hung back, letting Ru finesse her. People liked Ru and opened up to him. “It must be terrifying to have something like that so close to home.”

“We've bought a dog and a gun and had alarms installed on all windows and doors.”

“Very intelligent of you,” Ru murmured.

“I wouldn't have stayed except we would have taken a terrible hit trying to sell our house—it was all through the news, and no one wanted to live next to that.”

Ru made more encouraging noises.

“I can't believe those monsters were so close to my house—that I might have passed them in the car and looked them in the face.”

“Have they caught any of the ones responsible?”

“No, no.” She scanned the empty road, either becoming
aware they were alone on the country lane, or looking for monsters in the form of men lurking in the bushes, or maybe both. Ironically, she'd probably mistake Ascii as an ally against the monstrous. What would she make of Atticus? “The police keep asking us, insisting we must have seen something. There were cars every now and then—and trucks of firewood—but I thought those were deliveries for someone farther down the road. The McBeals or the Henrys.”

Ru showed her the artist sketches of the cult members, but she didn't recognize anyone.

“Is this drug related then?” She seemed incredulous, as if unmotivated murder was simpler to understand than drugs being sold in her neighborhood.

“That's what we're trying to find out.”

In the end, she could enlighten them only about the aftermath, not about the murders themselves. She repeated her tale of calling the fire department, and expanded on the story, telling about the police canvassing the area to see if residents were missing, and how the local paper still carried stories each time a victim was identified. “They think there were thirty to forty bodies cremated there. Once the news came out, I called everyone I knew, just to check on them—even one thieving cousin I won't let in my house; he might be a bastard but I wouldn't wish that on him.”