Alien Taste (14 page)

“I don't know what the fuck you did to piss them off, Wolf Boy, but don't mess around with those dudes. Most bikers are regular joes. Yeah, they'll get drunk sometimes and brawl, but who doesn't? Bikers work nine to five, eat macaroni and cheese with the wife and kids, and spend their evenings sitting on the couch watching TV while drinking a cold one. They're just everyday people—weekend warriors and all that. But, shit, the Dog Warriors! You're talking paramilitary hard asses. They don't have another life except being mean SOBs. Stay far, far away from those dudes!”

“I plan to,” Ukiah said, then wondered if he truly meant it. There were so many questions that Rennie didn't answer. Questions already niggling at him. How long could he stand not having the answers all the while knowing that the Pack held the knowledge he wanted? “Besides, they kind of made me an honorary member.”

“Get out!” Mike shouted. “You, a Dog Warrior? You're the man!” Mike held up his hand for a high
five, and Ukiah slapped his palm. “My friend, the Dog Warrior!” Mike laughed as he went to his desk to pick up a key ring. “I'll send my bill. Here's your keys.”

Ukiah caught the keys that Mike threw to him. He kept his bike keys separate from the rest. Home, office, office garage, the three company cars, and still others made his key ring an impressive collection of keys he was afraid to leave jiggling out in the open as he drove down the highway. “Thanks, Mike.”

Mike followed him out to the street, where his bike sat gleaming bright red in the afternoon sunlight. Ukiah stuffed Cally's present into the seat storage, then swung his leg over the seat. The smile dropped off Mike's face again. “Look, kid, an honorary member or not, don't get messed up with the Dog Warriors more than you have to.”

Ukiah made a vague promise. “I'll try not to.”

He crossed Veteran's Bridge to catch I-279 heading north. His mind worked over the day's events as he drove. He shied away from the actual kidnapping, the emotions too raw there. Strange how he could still feel so bad about lying to Max when it saved all of their lives. Perhaps it came from a fear that Max would no longer trust his word completely. Shifting forward in time to the point where Rennie opened the car trunk, he reviewed the Pack and his trail.

The sensations that were Rennie rolled through his mind again. The smell of leather, hot oil, engine exhaust, sweat, and surprisingly, wolf. Like Janet Haze, Rennie had the odd fractured DNA, an odd jumble of genetics seemingly smashed together. Ukiah picked at it trying to make sense of it. Here—the normal pattern for a white, young adult male. There—something that seemed like a wolf.
Underscoring it was something hard, jagged, strange—and yet uncomfortably familiar.

He moved forward to Hellena's first touch. He focused on her skin and found the same fractured DNA. Odder yet, as he picked over it, the similarities grew too many to ignore. Hellena seemed like a twin to Rennie. True, she was female, and of more Italian descent than Rennie's Irish, but the jumbled pieces—that hard strange something—matched perfectly. It seemed as if someone had taken the same base and just overlayed Rennie and Hellena onto it.

He wished that he had touched one of the other Pack members, or at least touched something they had handled. He recalled their scent, and found, as a collective, a weird mix of man and wolf. He realized that all during the test, he'd been aware of the Pack movements even as his eyes were locked on Hellena. He felt them stalk through the darkness behind him, their presence a tingle like static electricity on his skin. No, not quite on his skin—on some part of him that existed just above his skin that he never noticed before, an invisible layer of sensitivity.

Shuddering, he backed away from the thought, returning instead to the sense of familiarity to Rennie's and Hellena's twin base DNA pattern. Was it only Janet Haze's genetic pattern that triggered this déjà vu? He recalled it and found a few points of common reference in that of the Pack members'. He ran the length of the Pack genes, trying it against the various recent samples he had experienced. Wil Trace? No. Agent Zheng? No. The kidnapper of Wil Trace? Hmmm, his pattern matched Janet Haze's almost exactly, just as Rennie's and Hellena's had been near twins.

Then the obvious hit him, and he checked.

It was his DNA that he was thinking of.

Not twined like Rennie and Hellena, but definitely a match to the Pack members and not that of Janet Haze and the mysterious kidnapping Other. Only where their pattern broke, jumbled, and tumbled in odd confusion, his genetic pattern was a seamless whole.

“He's just a boy,” Rennie had shouted. “A Pack cub! I know what Prime expected to crawl out of that girl's womb, I've had nightmares about it since I joined the Pack. But this isn't it.”

The Pack, he suddenly realized, wasn't a biker gang. It was a family. His family.

 

In the end, he didn't have a chance to tell his moms about his kidnapping or his newfound family. Cally was sitting in wait for his arrival and ambushed him at the door. He made the mistake of admitting that he had remembered the doll, but forgot it outside with his bike. From then on, chaos reigned until he took her outside to open her present.

“An Indian princess.” Cally breathed in delight as the last piece of silver wrapping paper had been reduced to shreds and the top of the box flung aside. “Thank you, Ukiah, she's beautiful.”

The doll also earned him one of Cally's choking, misplaced hugs.

Far off, he could hear the whine of a motorcycle. Linked so closely to the Pack, it suddenly seemed like a menacing noise. The unknown rider turned at the end of the farm's long driveway and started up it, slower now, the engine more of a growl. It sounded like an angry animal, and it sent his heart pounding.

He pried Cally off and tried for one of Mom Jo's commanding voices. “Go in the house, Cally.” Amazingly, she went without fuss.

He unholstered his pistol, checked his clip, and walked to where the old stone wall and one of the pines gave him cover. The motorcycle climbed the slight grade and shot into the driveway too fast. The rider saw almost too late that the road ended here and braked hard, half sliding, sending up a spray of gravel.

The rider gave the sprawling yard, the far kennels, and the great old house under the massive oaks a long study, working the throttle slightly to keep the engine running. Ukiah leaned against the pine, studying the rider. The bike wasn't a big one, yet large for the rider, so it was a small woman. Ukiah breathed deep and filtered out the gas fumes and hot oil for her scent. It was Agent Zheng. He shook his head. Why was she here? Mom Jo was going to freak.

She came to the end of her sweep and saw him standing in the shadows. Her mirrored visor reflected his image, and he was surprised how fierce he looked. She killed the engine, put down the kickstand, and pulled off her helmet.

She combed her hair back out of her eyes. “Is this place Max's too?”

“What are you doing here?” He couldn't keep from growling. “How did you find it?”

“Your cell phone. When I called Max yesterday, this is the cell he was in, and this is where you trotted back to this afternoon, so I came out to see what was out here.”

“Why?” He put his pistol away.

She marked the fact he had been armed, but replied without a comment on it. “Because in the last two days I've spent most of my time wondering where you were and if you were still alive. I wanted to fill in the holes of what I didn't know about you,
just in case this trend continues. Why are you so angry?”

He sighed, letting go of his anger. “This isn't Max's place. It belongs to my family. I don't want anything to do with this case to touch their lives. They don't even know what happened to me yesterday. They think I worked last night, called in at breakfast as usual, and came home for dinner.”

“Your records don't say you have a family.”

He hopped over the stone wall to cross the driveway to her. “That's to keep nosy FBI agents out of their lives.”

A smile touched her eyes for a moment. “Is not.” She hung her helmet on the handle bars and dismounted the bike.

“Is too.” Ukiah crossed his heart. “Scout's honor.”

She crossed her arms, cocking her head as she looked up at him. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”

“Yeah.” The scouting experience had ranged from horribly stilted interaction to great fun. It had taught him a lot more about people than the crafts and skills he was trying to learn. He supposed he also took the moral lessons a little more to heart than was recommended. “I gave it up to work with Max.”

“So, why don't you want nosy FBI agents here?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“That's what I'm good at. So why the no-fed zone?”

He shook his head; she was persistent. “Look, I was never adopted officially. Until I became of legal age, my Mom Jo was afraid that the government might take me from her. It doesn't matter much now that I'm a legal adult. Old habits are hard to break, though.”

“I see.” She walked to the stone wall and sat down with her back to the house, looking out over the land.
“Beautiful place. You know, your mom probably had nothing to worry about if she had consent letters from your birth mother.”

“I was abandoned.” He sat beside her. “Mom Jo found me in Oregon. She actually probably broke all sorts of laws bringing me across the country to Pittsburgh.”

Agent Zheng shook her head wearily. “Yes, she did break the law. Several federal laws. Okay, Boy Scout, I see why you don't want FBI agents here. How old were you? An infant? One? Two? How did she know you were abandoned and not lost?”

Ukiah laughed. “I was about twelve, it was the middle of winter, I was naked, and I was eating the guts out of a dead rabbit when she first laid eyes on me. It was a pretty good bet that I hadn't gone missing over lunch.”

“Rabbit guts?” She raised an eyebrow at him, open disbelief on that unreadable face.

He had to smile and push it, enjoying being able to read her at last. “Oh yeah. See, I was being raised by a pack of timber wolves, and we considered the guts the best part. It had been a hard winter, so a whole rabbit to myself was actually terrific.”

She cocked her head, trying to decide if he was telling the truth or not. “Do you tell a lot of people that story?”

“Actually—” he sobered, “I think you're only the second person. Max was the first.”

She looked away. “I've been told your nickname is Wolf Boy and the police jokingly call you ‘the boy raised by wolves.' It would seem you've told a lot of people that story.”

“Oh, I tell them I was raised by wolves, but I've never told them about not having clothes on and eating the rabbit guts. You have to tell people
something, sooner or later: why you don't know what it's like to be a normal kid with trick or treat, Christmas, birthday parties, school, proms, losing your baby teeth, getting your shots. Why you don't remember a cool kid's show that everyone your age watched when they were ten. Why you miss tons of culture references from old commercials, political scandals, world events—”

She turned her luminous eyes back to him. He stared into them, trying to find her again.

“If you just say, ‘I don't remember,' they keep feeding you clues, like they can trigger the memory in you. When they find out you have a photographic memory, you can't even say, ‘I don't remember,' because then they know you're lying, but they don't realize what part you're lying about. So you admit it, not as the first thing you say to them, but some time early on. I was raised by wolves, I ran with a pack of timber wolves, I don't know what it's like to be a normal child.”

He fell silent. There was a slight softening about her eyes, as if she believed him. He'd have to be content with that, for now.

“So how did you end up working with Max?”

“Mom Jo hired him to see if he could find out who I was, and he couldn't. The first day he was here, though, doing background questioning, we took a walk and ran across a trail of a man setting traps on the farm. I tracked the man for over a mile at a trot to catch him at his truck. Max ran him off. About a week after my case panned out, Max was hired to find a little boy. John Libzer, sixteen months old, vanished from his yard, gone for two days without a clue.”

“You found him?”

Ukiah nodded. “He followed a neighbor's cat
across the street and into a wood lot. There was the bore hole for an oil well there, no more than this wide.” He put his hands out to illustrate. “You wouldn't have thought a kid could fit down it, but I could smell him.”

“I know this case,” she said softly. “I reviewed it when I came to Pittsburgh. I spoke to the agent who worked it. He said he'd been through that lot twice and never saw the hole. I don't remember hearing about you, though.”

Ukiah shrugged. “Well, my moms weren't home when Max came out and asked me to help him. He knew the FBI was involved and knew how Mom Jo felt about them, so as soon as I'd found Johnny, he called 911, gave Mr. Libzer his bill, and got me out of there. My moms were pissed, but we watched the whole rescue, and they cried when the firemen got Johnny out alive. After that, I tracked with Max part-time, about once every two weeks. Then three years ago, Max asked me on full time.”