Dog Warrior (21 page)

Suddenly one of the joggers slammed into him, jabbing a hypodermic needle into him. Ukiah jerked back, surprised and then panicked as he felt some drug surge through his system, carrying numbness.

Oh, this is bad.

Other joggers veered toward him, and he realized he'd been seeing them for over a half hour, circling him on the paths around the park. The cult had laid their own trap and he was neatly in it.

As his legs folded, the cultists caught hold of him,
pressed him up against the railing, and then flipped him over.

The Charles River expanded to fill his vision, and he hit hard, a flash of stunning pain. Then he was flailing in the icy water.

Oh, God, this is so bad.

There was someone in the water with him, snagging something onto his jacket. As he was dragged upward, he considered slipping free of his coat, and then realized that in his current condition, if he did, he'd drown. Moments later they broke the water's surface, and he coughed and sputtered for air.

The boat loomed up beside him, a wall of white, and hands were tugging him upward.

“Well, look what we landed,” Ice drawled as Ukiah was dragged aboard. “An angel fish.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Atticus ran like a fox before the hounds. The chase went through the quiet treed lawns and stately old brick buildings of MIT's campus, and out onto its busy main street. He was used to dashing through cars and crowds—although usually running
after
someone rather than
from
—but the principle was the same. The trick was making eye contact with drivers and other pedestrians and convincing them with a hard stare to keep the hell out of your way.

He'd just made the opposite side of the street when a bullet struck him high in the left shoulder. He stumbled and fell, the window above him shattering as a second bullet missed him. He hit the sidewalk in an explosion of pain that threatened to black him out. A bullet kissed the sidewalk beside his cheek and ricocheted off in a whine. Another tugged at him as it plowed through the leather of his jacket. He rolled and fumbled out his pistol. He hated to use a gun in an urban situation, but he had no choice.

He scrambled to his knees, braced himself, and aimed down on the shooter, who was nearly on top of him. His first bullet took the shooter square in the chest, sprawling the man backward onto the sidewalk with a meaty, lifeless thump. Recoil sent a shock of fresh pain through Atticus. Gritting his teeth, he aimed at the second man. His pistol
kicked pain through him as he fired, the first bullet only grazing the man's shoulder. Unlike a normal human, the man—no,
creature
—didn't even flinch, coming straight at him as if pain and death didn't matter. Atticus squeezed off two more shots, nailing his attacker this time.

His SIG Sauer had a magazine of twelve bullets plus one in the chamber. As he lined up the axe man, he counted the bullets down. Nine. Eight. Seven.

Six bullets left, he thought as he lurched to his feet, ears ringing. Three down, but would they stay down? There were rats forming in the pooling blood from the first, and he sensed the body knitting together heart muscle at stunning speed.

The other two—Parity and the woman—were closing. He could wait and shoot them, but then what? He'd be out of bullets and the first man would be healed. He needed breathing room and more of a plan.

He ran east, along the busy street. Behind him he sensed the first dead man come to life and start after him.

A human Atticus could outrun, even if he was hurt. Wounded, against these creatures so like himself, he could sense the gap between them quickly closing. There was the Jag, though, parked close by; if he could get to it, he'd be home free.

Bullets whined past him, striking storefront windows, marking his trail with fractured flowers of destruction in the safety glass.

He was running past a red-trimmed building when a bullet caught him in the leg. He stumbled out of his full run, and the female Ontongard tackled him through a window. They dropped down a stairwell beyond. Atticus hit worn tile a story and a half below, the female on top of him, a smothering blanket of hate in human form.

They were on a subway station platform, and the handful of people waiting were startled by their sudden, violent appearance. An outbound train had just pulled in, its doors
clattering open. From the dark tunnel of the inbound line came the ominous roar of an incoming train.

Not good.

The gunman and axe man he'd shot, the ones who should still be dead, dropped down to land lightly beside him.

Atticus lashed out at the woman, slamming her off him and coming up in sweeping kick to take out the axe man. He couldn't reach the gunman in time.

This is going to hurt.

Suddenly Rennie Shaw was between him and the gunman, wearing a black leather jacket with the picture of a snarling dog and the words “Dog Warrior.” The gun thundered, booming in the enclosed space. The bullet punched through Shaw, exiting out of his back in a fist-sized hole. Blood splattered Atticus and crawled, gathering together into a tiny mote of snarling anger.

The female punched Atticus hard in his wounded shoulder, distracting him from the sentient blood. He caught her arm and broke it as he swung her into the axe man. Humans would have fumbled, but the two dodged each other with choreographed ease. The female grasped Atticus's arm, her bones already knitting, and held him as the axe man swung back his axe. Behind them the inbound train thundered into the station.

With a snarl, Hellena Gobeyn dropped from street level to the axe man's feet, picked him up, and flung him into the path of the oncoming train. The man vanished under the bright steel wheels with a bloom of blood scent. A moment later, rats swarmed out up out of the pit.

Another Ontongard and a wave of Dog Warriors rolled down the stairs, already locked in battle. The subway platform became a mass of snarling, struggling bodies.

The door-closing chime sounded on the outbound train and Atticus found himself suddenly hauled up and thrust into the subway train.

“Go!” Rennie Shaw barked, producing a sawed-off
shotgun from under his duster like in a magic trick. He turned, firing at one of the Ontongard in a roar of sound and a cloud of gunsmoke.

Then the door closed and the train pulled away from the carnage.

Atticus grabbed a pole to keep from falling. His phone vibrated. He pulled it out to discover he'd missed two calls already.

“Steele.”

“Where are you?” Ru cried through the phone. “Cambridge looks like a war zone! What the hell happened?”

“I'm on a subway train.” Atticus turned to ask the other passengers the train's destination and found that they had crowded to either end of the car, as far away from him as they could. “Where are we going?”

“C-C-Central is the next station,” the nearest of the passengers stuttered, “then Harvard, and . . . oh, God, I don't remember.”

“Porter, Davis, Alewife,” someone behind Atticus said, but when he turned, he couldn't tell who. Everyone had big doe eyes of fear.

The train pulled into Central, and when the doors opened the passengers bolted, throwing frightened glances back to see if he was getting off too. He didn't have the heart to follow them; he couldn't stand them looking at him like he was a monster. The door-closing chime sounded. The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station.

“Atty?” Ru's voice pulled his attention back to the phone.

“I'm on a train going to Alewife.” Atticus sighed and sat down in the now empty car. “Come get me there.”

“Okay.”

He hung up and sagged back in the seat. What the hell was that? Zheng had warned him, but with quiet, reasonable words. She had left out that they would recognize him from a distance and how profound their hate for the Pack ran.
Why? Weren't they the same race? What the hell was that all about?

 

Usually Ru bandaging him up was a soothing activity, but Atticus found his mind racing over the last few days, the little scraps of information that he'd pieced into an imperfect patchwork quilt of knowledge. He was finding gaping holes in his knowledge. He wasn't even sure which theory to believe about himself: werewolf, angel, demon, or alien? Who did he trust to tell him the truth? Agent Zheng? The Pack?

“You know,” he said to break the silence of his own thinking, “Batman was just a nutcase.”

“Hmm?”

“No, here he was, stinking rich, huge house, no need to do any work at all, and what does he do? Get a wife? Adopt some needy kids whom he doesn't bend to his own vigilante lifestyle? No. He sulks around at night, breaking the law, ruining crime scenes, and destroying any chance of building a criminal suit against any of these lowlifes. No wonder the badly run insane asylum was full—by the time he stomped through a case, the only thing you could legally do with these criminals was commit them and then lose the paperwork.”

Ru paused in stripping the sterile wrapper from an oversize bandage. “Is this a ‘we should get a life and go on vacation' speech?”

“What?”

Ru shrugged and gingerly pressed the bandage in place. “The line of reasoning usually goes: He let a petty criminal define his life, he should have moved on, all that money and he never kicks back and enjoys it, let's go to Bermuda.”

“You missed that he should at least have bought a few politicians and pushed through stronger gun-control laws and three-strikes-you're-out programs.”

“Oh, yeah, that too.”

Atticus considered the battered neighborhood around the Alewife train station's parking garage, bleak and cold with autumn rain. “Yeah, Bermuda might be a good idea, but that wasn't the point I was trying to get to.”

“It wasn't?”

“No. I never told you this, but I've always hated Batman because he's racist. At least in the new canon.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he distrusts Superman because he's not human. Sure, he'll fuck Catwoman, a cheap petty criminal, but trust an alien that has done nothing but risk his life for others, nope, nope, can't do it.”

“Sooo?”

“Well, it doesn't stop him from joining the Justice League and fighting with Superman.”

“And this relates how?” Ru asked.

“I don't trust Zheng to tell me the truth. Superman, when he needed to know about who he really was, he retreated to Fortress of Solitude and sought knowledge from the source.”

Ru busied himself putting away the bandages, radiating unease.

“What?”

“Atty . . . you know . . . sometimes it worries me that you get your moral guidance from comic books.”

“Where else am I going to go? Everything else assumes you're human.”

“
Sou desu.
” It was a Japanese phrase meaning “that is so,” which neither agreed or disagreed with the speaker, just confirmed the facts.

“I need to talk to the Dog Warriors.”

“They know you're a DEA agent.”

“Yeah, but there's a bigger picture here that I'm not seeing, and I think not knowing is going to get me killed.”

 

Ponkapoag Camp—once they figured out how to spell it—proved to be an eighty-five-hundred-acre wildlife reservation just fifteen miles from Boston. Its Web site claimed that the campground was a collection of twenty rustic cabins dotting the shore of Ponkapoag Pond.

As he drew close to the reservation, he could feel the Dog Warriors, a hard, angry knot of Pack presence. There were motorcycles lining the campground's road, dozens of them, and an occasional pickup truck. Men walked the road, reluctantly moving to the edge to let him pass. They wore leather jackets, and the club badges identified them as various New England motorcycle clubs, from Gold Wing Riders to Hell's Angels.

The Pack was having a party.

The partygoers had built a bonfire on the edge of Ponkapoag Pond, the flames reflecting in the dark water. The bikers had brought a portable stereo, and it thumped out, ironically enough, “Smoke on the Water.”

Atticus pulled in and got out of the Jaguar. Coming now felt like a mistake. He was glad, though, that he'd been able to talk Ru into staying with Kyle, playing his backup instead of his voice. He wanted to be alone when he heard all the dark secrets the Pack might tell him.

“Hey.” Someone—a regular human—shone a flashlight onto the Jaguar, seeking him out. “This is a private party.”

“And he's invited,” a voice rumbled out of the dark. The flashlight flicked to the speaker, and hit Rennie Shaw as he drifted out of the shadows. The light reflected in his eyes with the greenish gleam of a wild dog's. There was a bullet hole in Shaw's leather jacket—a reminder of the Dog Warrior's intervention that afternoon. “This is our Boy.”

The light jumped back to Atticus, finding his face. He squinted against the glare, as his eyes had been getting accustomed to the dark.

“Oh, I see,” the wielder of the flashlight said, and the light snapped off.

The hairs on the back of Atticus's neck rose.
Am I that much like them?

“Mouthpiece said you might be coming around, Boy.” Shaw motioned that Atticus was to follow.

“You're having a party?” Atticus covered his disquiet.

“We're having a Gathering of the clans.” To the bikers, Shaw called back. “Nothing happens to the car, or you'll be the ones we track down.”

“Does that mean we have to stand here and guard it?” One of them whined, and was immediately cuffed by the man standing beside him.

“Okay, Rennie,” the wielder of the flashlight said. “You can count on us—sir.”

“Hell's Angels calling you sir.” Atticus murmured as he and Shaw moved into the woods. “That's pathetic.”

“They have their uses. Mostly that the cops have to wade through them to get to us.”

There were knots of parties scattered through the campground; the largest concentration of people being down by the bonfire. He could
feel
solitary Pack members moving through the crowds like herd dogs. It surprised him that he recognized some as they brushed against his awareness.