Alien Taste (20 page)

“That only works when we have time to kill.” Rennie indicated with his eyes that Hellena was to leave. “This is the quick and dirty way to hand off memories.” He took off the lid, flipped the can upside down to tap out coffee grounds, glanced at the shining interior, and set it on a rock. “This might not work. Your immune system might just destroy it.” He flipped out a stiletto knife, the blade bright in the moon light. He made a fist and, in one quick cut, opened the vein in his left wrist. Ukiah winced at
the sudden self-violence. “And it might kill you, but I doubt it, not with you being Prime's son.”

His blood poured from the wound, at first beating down in a tinny rhythm like rain into the coffee can. The bottom of the can was quickly covered, and the sound became more like water from a faucet.

“Are you going to be all right after losing that much blood?”

“This is nothing,” Rennie scoffed, “I'm a first Get from Coyote, who's a first from Prime. I'm closest in the Pack to you, except for Coyote, and he's gone back to the woods. To give it the best chance to work—and at the moment you're in desperate need of it working—I need to be the donor.”

“Chance for what to work? What are you doing?”

“I'm giving you a cure for what ails you—ignorance. This is knowledge. If it works, you'll know everything that I know at this moment.”

The blood stopped flowing from Rennie's wound. He shook the last drop from his wrist and quickly snapped on the lid. “Now, go someplace you can afford to be sick, because you might be, and not that Shadyside mansion of your partner's. We found you there and so can they. If it doesn't work, come find me without any fleas.”

“If I can find you again.”

“I have faith.” Rennie handed him the coffee can, frowned, took it back, punched holes in the lid, and handed it to Ukiah again. “Don't spill it and don't let it get away.”

One last roar of motorcycle engines and Ukiah stood alone in the woods, holding the can of Pack blood.

 

It took some doing to wedge the coffee can into his seat storage, and he drove home carefully.
Carrying it would have been easier, he thought ruefully, if Rennie hadn't put holes in the lid. What was he supposed to do with the blood? Drink it? He shuddered at the thought.

The house was dark when he reached the farm. In the full moonlight he popped the seat storage and lifted the can out. There was no sign of spillage. As he examined the rim, the can tilted oddly, as if the contents suddenly gathered to one side, and it almost flipped out of his hands. He tightened his grip. As he did, the can shifted again, and this time he heard the skittering of small claws.

The smell of blood was gone, he suddenly realized, and another smell seeped out through the holes. He sniffed cautiously. Field mouse.

He stood for a long time in the driveway, holding the coffee can. He had seen Rennie pour his own blood into the can. It was the same can. There had been blood in it.

The mouse skittered loudly in the stillness.

So this is what it meant not be human. It was pretty bad when your own kind could creep you out.

 

After wandering about the house trying to decide where would be the best place to experiment with the blood mouse, Ukiah decided on his bathroom. The last mouse had vanished without a trace. Until he figured out what he was supposed to do with this one, he would have to be careful with it. The bathroom was small, had only the toilet to hide behind, had no small holes through which the mouse could bolt if it got loose, and the door closed tight to the floor.

Ukiah lifted one edge of the red plastic lid and peered into the coffee can. In the slant of light, the mouse looked back at him warily. It looked like the
mouse he had found in Schenley Park, black-furred and black-eyed. The feeling was completely different. Before, it had been as if he had found something fragile that was lost. This mouse was going to hurt him if it could.

He closed the lid and considered the problem. How did one
use
a mouse? He thought blood had been tricky. He set the can into the center of the bathtub and went to flop onto his bed.

Obviously, the Pack and the Ontongard had a strange cell structure when compared to humans. Humans did the normal bleeding/bled routine and that was the end of it. The blood of the Pack, though, seemed to be able to survive being removed from the body. There was Janet Haze and her organ ferrets. There was Rennie's blood mouse. His thoughts went back to the mouse he found in Schenley Park, the way it had come fearlessly to him, as if it were his.

Realization hit him and he slapped a hand over his eyes.
It was mine.

He had found it where his blood had soaked into the ground. Not as neat a container as a coffee can, but the results had been the same. How many mice had he left scattered behind unnoticed before? Not many, surely, or there would be more holes in his memories. Certainly his lost memories of Crazy Joe Gary still skittered about the cabin in West Virginia. Thinking back, he could remember the surprising lack of blood on the floor when he came to, the small frightened bodies scurrying from hiding place to hiding place. But there had been his maddening hunger that led to the grisly find in the refrigerator, his battle to resist the roasted leg of Boy Scout, and the welcomed arrival of the paramedics. He had paid no attention to his scared, lost memories, never gone back to recover them.

But what about the thousands of cuts, scrapes, and punctures he'd gotten over the years? He had no other memory loss. Why? Maybe the amount of blood mattered—usually he only bled a small amount. Ukiah took out his Swiss army knife and made a shallow slice across his thumb. A pale slit of pain showed on the pad of flesh. Blood seeped up, coloring the line to crimson. He stared, making no move to blot away the blood, rub it away, lick it away, bandage it out of sight, or his favorite—just plain ignoring it until it wasn't a problem. This time he would watch.

The blood flowed, stopped—then slowly seeped back into his flesh where it laid. It took minutes to complete, but in the end there was no sign of the cut except a thin scab he knew would be gone by morning.

From his bathroom came the sound of small claws on metal, amplified by the porcelain bowl of the bathtub. If the mouse Rennie gave him was a holder of memories, then it would explain the reappearance of Ukiah's lost memories after he found the Schenley Park mouse.

Obviously Ukiah used his memory mouse, but how? Last he remembered, it had been in his pocket, and then it was gone. He had already scanned through the morning and then the afternoon of that day. When he tried before, he hadn't bothered checking his sleep memories. They were fuzzy things, mostly of sound, smell, and touch. Occasionally he used sleep memories with books on cassette tapes, but otherwise found them useless. He focused on the long nap in the quiet house. Sure enough, there had been a stirring in his pocket followed by tiny feet running across his bare chest to rest in the hollow of
his neck. A warm wetness developed there and then vanished completely.

So, one made flesh-on-flesh contact with the memory and it became part of you. Ukiah remembered the hostile look of the Pack memory.
Yeah, sure.

It would be easiest to kill it and then hold it. He remembered the carefully created air holes in the coffee can's lid. No. It probably wouldn't work if it was dead.

He went back to the bathroom, closed the door tight, and peeled the lid off the coffee can. The black mouse glared up at him. Reaching into the can with both hands, he trapped the mouse between his palms and lifted it up.

It bit him. The pain was so sharp and unexpected that he almost flung the mouse away. He controlled the reaction and pressed his hands together tighter. The tiny body struggled frantically, tearing and biting with its small razor teeth. He could feel his own blood, hot and sticky, pouring out between his palms. He tried to stop the biting by pressing his palms together even tighter, but this made the mouse scream in a thin, terrified wail.

I hate this! I hate this! I can't do this!

He opened his hands to release the mouse, and it was gone. There were tiny mouse droppings, deep tiny bites, and his own blood covering his palms. No mouse. It worked! Maybe. He had the mouse in him. When could he access the Pack memories it contained? It hadn't been until the next day he had noticed the return of his own memories.

He debated about washing his hands. What if the memory was just a coating at the moment, a bacterial and germ layer that needed to work in? It was a sure sign, he thought suddenly, of how civilized he had become—worried about blood on his hands. He rinsed
them lightly as a compromise and threw himself into bed. He realized that he should call Indigo and—

 

—
Is this Prime's monster?
Rennie crouched among the trees, training his field glasses on the two private investigators standing beside the tan Hummer.
He's just a kid. He doesn't look any more than sixteen. Why does he look so young?

Another question was, how did he get to Pittsburgh? All the paperwork on the boy started suddenly three years ago, all originating from Pittsburgh. It was as if he had materialized here. Had the Ontongard been involved?

Rennie shook his head. If the Ontongard had brought the boy to Pittsburgh, they would have him locked away, not left him running free with this private detective. Rennie watched as the man patted the boy on the back, gave the kid a smile, and got a grin back. The next-of-kin listing took on new meaning. The two were close.
Oh damn, this seemed so simple.

Rennie focused on the boy, trying to quell the rising doubt.
He's Pack. I can feel him from here.
There was even a certain facial resemblance. He had Hellena's eyes; same shape, same color. He had the straight black hair common among the Pack. Bear's nose. Rennie's own mouth. It was as if he was the blend of all the Pack members, but Rennie knew it was actually the opposite, it was his traits spread through the Pack.
No, not his, Prime's.

Rennie watched them walk up the front steps of the new Ontongard's house. He'd been inside and found it a poor ambush site. They would have to wait until the detectives made their way into the park, following the trail of the kidnapped FBI agent. He signaled the others into the park, then checked his shotgun.

This is going to be a bitch. I'm going to sit around the den for days wondering if I took out a child instead of a monster, that I'm becoming like the Ontongard, that somewhere I lost all the humanity that I had left.
He gritted his teeth against the inner doubt.
Come on, Rennie, don't start this. Coyote changed you, but you're still human at heart. You know what Prime's child could do to this world.

Rennie glanced back to the house one last time and immediately wished he hadn't. The two had paused on the stoop, letting the FBI agent enter first. The man had his hand on the boy's shoulder, telling him something of importance. The boy nodded occasionally—silent, attentive, respectful. The speech reached its end. The boy gave his bright easy smile again. The man cuffed him and into the house they went.

Yeah, yeah. Facts don't change though. He looks like a good kid, and I'm going to kill him without even making sure he's the monster we think he is—

 

Ukiah found his own eyes and looked through them instead of Rennie's. His head was pounding, and he was half slumped over the edge of his bed. The room lurched and started to slowly spin. Something heaved and fought against his stomach muscles, trying hard to expel his stomach contents up the wrong way. He tried to stand, fell instead to the floor. Gagging in the effort to control his bile, he crawled on all fours to the bathroom. Somehow he made the toilet before he started to vomit. There wasn't much in his stomach to bring up. After the initial rush, he hunched over the bowl, dry heaving as if his gut was trying to leap out of his mouth. Finally the heaving stopped and he laid his head on the heavenly cool rim of the bowl.

Oh God, what have I done to myself? I should do something, get someone—

 

“—made it, Mary, I almost made it.” Rennie whispered, his voice in tatters after hours of shouting. He had called for a surgeon at first, then for help in getting the dead horse from his legs, then just for water. “My time is up. I could have come home. Oh, Mary, why'd I leave you and Danny? A boy needs his father.”

There was movement in the moonlight. He fell silent, peering into the slants of shadow and silver light.

“Is someone there?” He forced the shout out, each word feeling like a steel rasp against his throat. He coughed in pain but cried out again. “Please, please help me.”

A man drifted in and out of the shadows, his footsteps silent, his eyes gleaming like a dog's at night. He went barefooted, with Confederate pants, a white undershirt, and a long Union officer's coat. He came to crouch across the dead horse to gaze at Rennie. “You want my help?”

Rennie flinched back in fear then controlled it.
Think of Mary, Mary and Danny.
He had to wet his mouth twice before managing, “Yes. Please.”

The strange man tilted his head back and forth, considering the massive damage to Rennie's body. “What I have to offer might kill you, might not. I vowed I'll never be like them, twist and shape flesh to my needs, but I'm lonely.”