Ukiah - Alien Taste Part 18

There was a crack and flare of the stunner and the woman went limp. Hex nodded, guiding the needle end of the Ovipositor over her bare stomach- ***

Ukiah bolted upward with a shout. He was in his bed, not in his bathroom. It was daylight out. He found himself clutching his stomach, unable to erase the image of the long needle out of his mind. It wasmemory, a memory, he chanted, of a time long ago. He looked about the room, trying to fill his vision center with something else. The braided rug on the floor. The coffee can on his nightstand. Max standing at the foot of the bed, looking angry and worried in equal parts.

The last one pushed everything out of his mind, leaving him trembling, weak, cold, and confused.

"Max?" He plucked at his sheets, trying to pull them about his shoulders and failing. "What are you doing here?"

"I've come to find out what the h.e.l.l you've done to yourself. Pittsburgh isn't a big town, kid.

Kraynak called me last night to talk about your shootout yesterday. I tried to call you and your phone was off. I called Agent Zheng and she told me that you'd taken off after the Pack. She was all 'don't worry, we've got him bugged,' but when I checked back later, it's 'sorry, we lost him.'"

"The Pack found the bug. Rennie broke it."

"You're s.h.i.+t lucky they didn't hold it against you."

Ukiah hunched over, holding his head, which banged painfully with the flow of his blood. "Yeah, yeah, they cut me slack because they think I'm a kid and don't know better."

"You are a kid, but you should know better. You promised me."

Ukiah flinched under the stinging words. "I took my gun and I told Indigo where I was going, but I couldn't take backup, Max, not to visit the Pack."

"I figured you were either in deep s.h.i.+t, or here at home with no idea of the chaos you were causing.

So I called out here to eliminate the second."

Ukiah returned to his sleeping memories and discovered he had heard the phone, moaned in reply to Mom Jo's soft query, and they had cleaned him up, tucked him into bed, and forced liquids down him. "G.o.d, I was out of it."

"So I gathered. They said it looked like food poisoning to them, but they didn't know you'd run off to visit the Pack, or that Doctor Haze was running a full viral infection before she went loony. Now, what the h.e.l.l did you do to yourself?"

"Rennie gave me the Pack memory. My immune system was fighting it, but I think they've come to a compromise."

Max moved suddenly from the foot of the bed to his side. He caught Ukiah's chin and studied his face carefully. Worry overcame anger in Max's eyes. "The Pack gave you an unknown drug and you took it?"

Ukiah moaned, rolling his head free. "Max, please. I had to take it. I had to know what the h.e.l.l was going on. The Pack tried to kill me, you know how close they got. Worse was how close they came to taking out you and Indigo. Rennie warned me, when he was dropping me off downtown, that there was another gang, one that makes the Pack look like puppy dogs. That shootout yesterday was with one of them, Max. I walked into the room, and he chewed through a dozen cops trying to get to me. I had to know what I had gotten into the middle of. I had to know before the trouble followed me out to the farm."

Max understood the beginning of his logic but not the end. "Ukiah, no drug is going to explain gang warfare to you. All they do is get in and screw with your mind."

"I didn't say it was a drug, Max. It was the Pack memory. Actually, it was a mouse. And it did explain everything."

"Memory? Mouse? What's a mouse?"

"A mouse. A little hairy thing, like Mickey Mouse, only more real."

Max reached out to press a hand up against Ukiah's forehead. "I think you're still out of it."

Ukiah pushed his hand away. "I'm not out of it, I only sound like I'm out of it. It's impossible toexplain." Ukiah threw back his covers and climbed shakily out of bed. He was starving and dehydrated. He cast about and found his bathrobe. "You wouldn't believe me anyhow."

Max flung up his hands in exasperation. "So you're not going to tell me? Are you going to leave me wondering again as to what the h.e.l.l the Pack has done to you this time? Why don't you trust me anymore?"

Ukiah closed his eyes, not sure how they got to this point. There had been a break between them.

It had been growing over the last few days, and the whole ground was about to give in. How had he missed it? How did he stop it?

"Max, I don't trust anyone more than I trust you. I don't even trust myself as much as I trust you.

Before Janet Haze, I knew I was your partner, Cally's brother, and my moms' son. I loved my job. I loved my life. Then it all went to s.h.i.+t."

He dropped back to sit on the edge of his bed, shaking his head. "It's like I fell through the looking gla.s.s. There's a girl turning into ferrets. The Pack does this really weird mind-meld s.h.i.+t to me, where they actually experienced my memories like I was some type of ViewMaster. I'm suddenly telepathic with the Pack! I can read their minds, and they can read mine. Last night I watched Rennie cut his wrist and bleed into this coffee can." He picked up the can and held it out to Max. "When I got home, his blood had turned into a mouse. I held the mouse in my hands, and it merged with my body." He considered the can himself.

"Yeah, I really think the mouse bit sums up my life for the last three days. How can I ask you to believe me when I don't even believe myself?

"And all that is nothing to what I learned last night. Oh G.o.d, Max. Everything I've ever thought or believed about myself isn't true. I'm not human, Max. I've never been human. My father was some rebel from an invading alien force. They used this machine to make my mother pregnant. I was supposed to be the first step in taking over the Earth. That's why the Pack tried to kill me. My father made the Pack to stop the invasion, to protect the world, and they saw me as a threat. I'm the only breeder ever born." Ukiah hunched over in sudden misery. "Oh G.o.d, Indigo! What am I going to tell her? What if I got her pregnant?

We used protection, but what if that doesn't work with me? What if I've infected her? G.o.d, how do I tell her I'm some kind of monster?"

"Ukiah, stop it." Max dragged him upright and made Ukiah look at him. "If this was what you were born as, then nothing has changed. You are what you always have been, a good, honest, loving person. I've seen you wade through knee-high muck for sixteen hours to find a little girl. I've watched you burn the soles off your shoes to carry Boy Scouts out of a forest fire. I've pulled you half-drowned out of filling storm sewers because you won't stop looking. You're kind, compa.s.sionate, loving, and human. I've always been proud of you and there's no one on this planet I trust more. Nothing has changed."

Ukiah scrubbed at his face, feeling brittle. "What do I tell Indigo? I can't hide this from her. It would be like not telling her that I have AIDS."

"I'm not sure. Come downstairs. Let's get some breakfast. Tell me everything you know, and we'll see what we can figure out."

The fridge was disappointingly bare-one stick of b.u.t.ter, a few tablespoons of sour cream, a dozen eggs, a pint of mushrooms, a gallon of milk, a can of frozen orange juice, a wedge of cheese, a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup, and a four-pack of AA batteries. Must be Sat.u.r.day, when Mom Lara cleans out the fridge and goes food shopping. He started with the dry goods instead, was.h.i.+ng five potatoes and putting four into the microwave. He ate the fifth raw. He didn't cook the eggs either. He cracked the full dozen into a gla.s.s, planning to drink them raw.

Max intercepted the gla.s.s. "I hate when you eat this way." He got out a nonstick skillet, poured the eggs into it, added milk, and whipped them well. "Okay, explain."

There were so many angles Ukiah could take. He could start at the very beginning when the Ontongard overpopulated their native planet and reached for the stars. Or he could start with their most recent success, the planet Prime had been born on, a planet with thousands of native species and trillions oflife forms, all replaced by the Ontongard. An entire ecosystem reduced to one vast hive mind. He could explain how Prime sabotaged the invasion s.h.i.+p, or how his father failed to act prior to the scout s.h.i.+p departing the main s.h.i.+p, allowing the Ontongard to reach Earth.

He decided instead to start with Schenley Park and Janet Haze, as he should have days ago. He told Max for the first time about finding the mouse and "losing" it and what he realized later as to what had truly happened with it. He recounted the trial completely-memory search weirdness and all.

As Ukiah talked, Max pushed the scrambled eggs about the nonstick skillet until they formed a fluffy yellow mountain. The smell was maddening to Ukiah, and when Max spooned three-quarters of the scrambled eggs onto a plate for him, he ate frantically.

"So you're telepathic with the Pack?"

Ukiah nodded, his mouth full of hot fluffy eggs.

"Why? Do you know?" Max asked.

"Well, I think it has to do with the fact that we're collections of cells, a communal being. The Dog Warriors are one creature with twenty bodies, a continuation of my father. Despite my mother's DNA, I'm genetically very like my father. The Ovipositor tended to favor the alien genes over the native life-forms when it could. So, in the way that my toe communicates with my nose, I can communicate with the Pack."

"I don't get this toe communicates with your nose." Max set the remaining eggs on the back burner, layered them with cheese, and started to grill a small onion and a cup of mushrooms. Once they were done, he folded them into the cheese and eggs.

"Well, it's hard to explain." Ukiah got up for orange juice. "If you have a skin cell, normally that's what it stays. But with me, if there's a sudden need for heart tissue, the skin cell converts into heart tissue.

There's a communication between the cells, working to keep the whole colony alive."

"That's handy." Max got the potatoes out of the microwave and set them in front of Ukiah with b.u.t.ter, sour cream, bacon bits, chives, salt, and pepper. Certain Ukiah was preoccupied with the potatoes, he sat down with his semi-omelet. "So, the Pack agrees with me. You're a good person, not a monster. Go on."

Ukiah launched into the part about the Ontongard at the police station and his realization that he wasn't human. He skipped quickly over his search and hit on the discussion he had with Rennie. "He gave me a memory mouse. It's a weird thing Pack blood does. Basically all our cells are mimicking the human body." He pointed to his forearm. "This patch of cells are mimicking skin and pores and hair. If someone cut a chunk out of my arm, the cells can't survive as skin and pores. They need oxygen, and a way to absorb nutrients. So they communicate with each other, pick a form, and convert into it. The animal they form depends on the size. A small chunk becomes a mouse."

"A large chunk, say a heart, liver, or brain, becomes a ferret."

Ukiah nodded. "Yeah. It has to be something we've handled, something we know down to a genetic level. Janet Haze kept ferrets, so her cells had that genetic blueprint to follow. But the cells aren't too happy being split off. A mouse is easier to kill off than a human. A memory wants to rejoin with the main body."

"Which is why your Schenley Park mouse was so friendly and snuck back in the first chance it got.

Why do you keep calling them memories?"

Ukiah sighed, scrubbing at his face. Max's questions were unfolding answers in his brain, huge and complex and instantly realized. It felt so weird to know something without learning it. Worse was trying to explain, because he couldn't just show the path he took to find the answer. "Our memories are genetic, which I guess is a good thing because our cells move around. What was a brain cell today might be a heart cell tomorrow, if I was shot in the chest. Actually, human brain cells are fairly fickle things to start with.

Rennie gave me enough genetic material that my immune system could whomp the heck out of it and still have something to absorb. Basically the mouse was viral DNA, and not very happy about being handed over to me. There was a small biological war in my system, but we came to a truce, and I got the Pack'smemories attached to my normal DNA sequence."

"Yeah. Right. If your memories are genetic, why did you forget your fight with Haze?"

"It takes hours for memories to be coded down to the genetic level. The information is collected in the bloodstream, and the blood cells handle actual coding and dissemination, so eventually all the cells have the same memories. If you start to bleed, well, it's a c.r.a.p shoot as to what you lose memory wise, and what you get back, if you can recollect the lost blood via a mouse. That's what happened to me in Schenley Park.

I lost memories and got a lot back, but there's details missing. Everything slightly fuzzy. The cells holding that information probably died off, unable to survive being outside my body."

"So you have all of Rennie Shaw's memories?"

"And Coyote's, who had infected Rennie, and my father's memories, who had infected Coyote, and his father's." Eons of memories threaten to cascade out. The older memories were dark things, with no hint of emotions, no thoughts beyond eating and reproducing. Coyote's life as a true wolf was more comprehensible than the early generations of the Ontongard. It was like suddenly being able to communicate with pond sc.u.m, able to hear them think out budding, growing, stretching out to cover all available surface.

"You okay?"

"I think so. Basically, the Ontongard came to Earth to replace all life. My father, Prime, was a mutation in that he was an individual. He sabotaged the main invasion s.h.i.+p. He and another of his kind, called Hex, came to Earth on a scout s.h.i.+p, something he tried to stop but couldn't. They landed in Oregon, hundreds of years ago. There was nothing there but Native Americans with bows and arrows to stop them.

With the technology on the scout s.h.i.+p. Hex could have still wiped out everything on the planet. So Prime blew up the s.h.i.+p. Only Hex figured out what was happening, and killed Prime. In sheer desperation, my father infected Coyote, to carry on the battle."

"I have to admit one thing." Max got a gla.s.s of milk and poured Ukiah one too, adding chocolate syrup to it. "All this is too impossible to believe."

"Except at the day-to-day level," Ukiah said, gazing at the milk.

"What the h.e.l.l does that mean?"

"You got me milk without me asking, chocolate even."

Max made a frustrated noise. "You would have asked for milk right after I closed the door. You always do when you eat this way. The more calories you take in, the sooner you stop eating, so you got the chocolate."

"And when do I eat like this?"

Max looked at the milk then at Ukiah, emotions warring on his face. "Oh h.e.l.l, Ukiah, this doesn't mean s.h.i.+t."

"When do I eat like this?"

"When you get the s.h.i.+t beat out of you," Max snapped. "You eat like a pig, sleep like a dog, and in a few hours I'm wondering why I was so worried about you because you look fine."

"But it's not really human, is it?"

Max shook his head. "No, but it still doesn't mean s.h.i.+t. We've done this so many times we don't have to talk about it. Just because we now know why doesn't change anything."

"What am I going to tell Indigo?"

"Depends." Max got up to wash his dish and the pans. "If she's your first love that breaks your heart in a few weeks or months, probably not everything. She is the FBI, and you could be considered a carrier of a dangerous virus. Ex-lovers are sometimes your worst enemies. But if she's the girl that youmake forever with, then you tell her everything."

Ukiah laughed weakly. "So I tell her a little every day for the rest of our lives?"

"Well, that's one way of doing it." Max came to rest a hand on Ukiah's shoulder. "I don't know Indigo the way you do, kid. I won't be living your life. I wish I could tell you to do X, but that might be something I could live with and you couldn't. Take the day off. Go and see her. Think before you say anything. That's all I can tell you to do."

Ukiah sighed. If he had only known a few days earlier, then he could have avoided the problem by not becoming Indigo's lover. The thought, though, made him feel desolate and cold. No, he couldn't stand the concept.

Surely to love was a sign of being human.

Max had a lead on their skip, heading down into Wheeling, West Virginia. He had come out to pick up Ukiah to ride shotgun on the trip. Ukiah tried to offer to still come with Max, but Max firmly turned him down.

"Look, you've had your throat cut, you've been kidnapped-well, shot in the chest and then kidnapped-and had the s.h.i.+t kicked out of you and almost shot, and then been violently ill all in three days.

By rights I should just stick you on an airplane for the California defensive driving school, but I don't think running away will be good for you. I'll just get Chino to come with me. Go see Indigo."

"She's probably going to be mad that I didn't call her already. h.e.l.l, it's almost noon."

"I called her this morning. I told her that your moms had called me and you were here, laid low with food poisoning. She was worried, but not mad."

"Thanks, Max."

"I'll be back probably late tonight. It's a two-hour trip down, two hours back, and the normal couple of hours of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. If it gets too late, I might stay the night."

"See you tomorrow, then. Watch your tail."

"Watch your head." Max tousled his hair and got up into the Cherokee. "And keep your Colt on."

"Right." He followed the Cherokee out to the end of the driveway and watched it go down the lane.

Clouds as big as s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps were cruising across the summer sky, and one slid across the sun, throwing Ukiah into shadows as the Cherokee turned onto the main road and headed off for West Virginia.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Sat.u.r.day, June 20, 2004.

Evans City, Pennsylvania.