Tainted Trail (26 page)

“How did his son die?” Max asked coldly.

“He was the first drowning victim this year. June thirtieth. Vivian Brody reported him missing out of the yard, and he
was found dead two miles away in the McKay Reservoir the next day. Coroner ruled accidental drowning sometime during the day he disappeared.”

“No sign of being held under?”

Pain flashed across Sam's face for the dead child. “No. He was just five. The Brodys say he couldn't swim.”

“So it wouldn't take much,” Max said. “Just carry him out deeper than he could stand, and let go.”

Sam glared at Max and took out her tablet to flip through it. “We don't have Brody on Alicia's list.”

“If you do a search on the name ‘Kicking Deer,' Jared is the only one that comes up,” Max said. “The listing has him as sheriff of Umatilla County, no home information. Alicia could have gone looking for him at the sheriff's department and ran into Brody there.”

“Is Brody on the other lists?” Ukiah asked.

Sam nodded reluctantly. “But I don't put any weight to it. All the fire and emergency people show up on the lists as being at the scene.”

“What's his wife like?” Max asked.

“Vivian? She's just a little thing,” Sam said. “A munchkin Martha Stewart.”

“Five foot tall, a hundred pounds, and size five shoe?”

Sam said nothing, only stared out the window at the shimmer of sun on water. Ukiah suddenly realized that the lake they were passing was the reservoir itself. They traveled on in silence, each with their grim thoughts.

Sam broke her silence with, “Brody shoots at the same gun range that I use. He's got an M40.” It was the gun that the Marines used as sniper rifles. “And he's good with it.”

Umatilla National Park, Oregon
Monday, August 30, 2004

Your mind had been going round and round, cub.
Rennie stood down wind on the cliff heights: The Pack leader had put his duster back on for the road trip, and the stiff breeze flared it out behind him.
What is it?

It had only taken a short part of the trip from Pendleton to
locate the sniper's location in Ukiah's memory. At first he couldn't pick up the muzzle flash. But then he paid careful attention to the direction of the rifle crack. By backing through his memory of being shot, he was able to pick out the small flare among the green. All that was needed was to stand on the cliff and line up the flash. Chances were that they would find only footprints and tire marks. Ukiah hoped they weren't killing three or four hours for so little, but it was all they had left to go on.

The remainder of trip, he tried to match Brody to the other crimes. Opportunity? In a squad car, Brody had eight hours of freedom. No one would find it odd that a policeman had a weapon in his car. His presence at a crime scene would go unnoticed.

Motive? What reason could Brody have for killing so many people, possibly even his own son? The possible grounds were so impenetrable, Ukiah found himself sliding off to another troubling question.

Did Alicia's investigation into Magic Boy's death in 1933 have anything to do with her disappearance?

“I was killed in 1933,”
he told Rennie.
“The day you came to Pendleton and found Degas covered in blood.”

Rennie cocked an eyebrow at him.
“You think Degas killed you?”

Ukiah hadn't considered that.
“No. I think he might have killed the Ontongard that murdered me—and kept it from discovering exactly what it had just slain.”

“Their sloppiness is our gain.”
Rennie gave a wolfish grin.
“Hex and his Gets can't tell you from a normal Pack dog without checking closely.”

“You and Hellena couldn't tell at first either.”

Rennie cuffed him.
“Why worry about it now, cub?”

“If Alicia had found old evidence of the Ontongard, who better to take it and her than one of Hex's Gets?”

Rennie stilled, staring at him.

“There are thirty people dead in this county in the last two months,”
Ukiah continued.
“Whole families wiped out by fire. Individual family members drowned. This feels so wrong, Rennie.”

Rennie turned to look off to the north where Pendleton lay beyond the horizon, nostrils flaring as if to catch the scent.

“Hex? Here?”

“There's no reason for Brody to do these things.”

Rennie growled softly.
“Sometimes men don't need reasons.”

“You don't think it's the Ontongard?”

“You've been here a week. I've been here for two days. So far neither of us has caught the scent of them.”

“I've actually spent much of that week holding down a bed in various locations.”

Rennie grinned, then sobered.
“The sad truth is that sometimes, cub, men make perfect monsters without the influence of the Ontongard.”

“So what do we do?”

“What we always do—keep your eyes and nose sharp and be ready to fight.”

 

Following the memory of the muzzle flash, Ukiah loped through the forest, Rennie by his side. Straight as a bullet, nearly half a mile from the cliff, they found where the sniper pulled off the road.

The shooter had pulled hastily under trees to hide any windshield glare. He had trotted a short distance to where he was screened by a fallen pine but had a clear view of the cliff. By the depth of the faint footprints, he had only waited minutes before Ukiah came into view. The sniper fired twice, the spent casings still glittering in the grass.

With Ukiah assumed dead, the shooter ran back to his vehicle and sped off.

“Do we call Jared or the FBI?” Ukiah asked Max, leaving the evidence for the police to find.

Max sighed. “You trust Jared, don't you.” At Ukiah's nod, Max glanced to Sam. “You too?”

“He's as good as cops come.”

“We call them both, and make sure neither of them use the police radio.”

Pendleton, Oregon
Tuesday, August 31, 2004

The Brody home was a carefully kept brick ranch on Tutuilla Creek Road, perhaps a mile and a half from the interstate. Max and Ukiah followed behind a long convoy of cars—FBI, State Police, Umatilla County Sheriff's Department, and Pendleton Police Department—as it ran along the shallow Tutuilla Creek. Parking under a rare shade tree, the private investigators watched as law officers broke down the Brodys' front door and swarmed into the house.

For several minutes, the world sat in utter silence and stillness.

“It's clear,” came a report over their hastily purchased police scanner. “There's no one here. We've got some blue jeans here, though, with Celtic knots painted up the side. Women's size fourteen, long. The girl was here.”

 

Yesterday, their luck had held, and the FBI lifted a perfect thumbprint from the spent casings and matched it to Brody's prints on his permit to carry a concealed weapon. Still it had taken nearly twenty-four hours to work through the legal channels and arrange the search warrants for a number of locations where the Brodys might be holding Alicia, starting with their house.

With the possibility of Ontongard in the area, Rennie had kept close to Ukiah as the number of law officers allowed. It was a fine line Rennie had to dance, since now was not the
time to be distracted by FBI agents trying to arrest him. At the moment, he was making himself scarce to the point of being beyond Ukiah's senses. Hopefully, with nearly twenty policemen nearby, Rennie's protection wouldn't be needed.

An hour after the FBI first entered the house, Ukiah's wireless phone rang.

“Oregon,” he answered without looking at the display.

“It's me,” Indigo murmured into his ear. Just her voice uncoiled some of the tension inside of him. “I've got that information you asked for last night. Of the Ontongard killed in Pittsburgh, two were identifiable as from the West Coast. One was a Portland native, reported missing three years ago. Another one was Pendleton native, a Jason Barnhart, reported missing in May.”

“Barnhart?” Ukiah flashed to the author of the
Death of Magic,
Hannah Barnhart. “Who filed the report?”

“James Barnhart, his father.”

A Jason and James. Ukiah couldn't help but think of the Kicking Deers and their inclination for naming boys with ‘J' names: Jay, Jesse, Jared. Were these Barnharts part of his family?

“Okay. Thanks.”

“How is it going?”

“The Brodys were the ones that took Alicia, but it looks like they've slipped through the net.”

“I'm sorry. I hope this isn't more bad news.”

“It might be.”

“Be careful,” Indigo said, and added, “I love you,” and reluctantly said, “I've got to go.”

“What if this turns out to be Ontongard?” Ukiah put away his phone. “It would have been better if we never came to Oregon.”

“You can't fight the ‘what if's.' ” Max said. “You do what you think is right at that moment. Questioning it later only drives you crazy.”

So they waited as the FBI scoured the house, collecting evidence for any eventual court case, knowing it might all be moot.

 

A little after five o'clock, the first of the neighbors started to return home to find the Brodys under siege. The local police took turns answering their questions. One could watch the horror spread across their faces as the realizations hit them. Their nice neighbors kidnapped a woman and possibly killed her. The people next door most likely killed their son. The killers still on the loose knew them intimately. More than one family packed up and left for safer parts until the Brodys could be captured.

Finally the men started to pack up, trying to move quickly in their race to find Alicia. Max got out and Ukiah followed.

“Think they'll let me in?” Ukiah asked.

“We'll check with Jared. Gear up.”

Ukiah hated the idea of gearing up so closely to the numerous FBI agents and policemen who didn't know him, who had no reason to believe or trust him, who could drag him off and lock him up until he answered uncomfortable questions.

In the TV shows, it was always the police or the FBI that killed the aliens when they were friendly.

He left his pistol in the gun safe. The FBI didn't like armed civilians confusing matters. He could pick his pistol up later. He shrugged into his body armor and quickly disguised it with his windbreaker.

Fortunately, the strike force started to pull out as he threaded a tracer into his clothing and hooked on his radio headset. The last Pendleton police car pulled away, leaving Jared's county squad car as the lone marked vehicle. Ukiah locked up the Blazer and crossed the street, skirting the Brodys' front yard roped off with yellow police tape. Until someone gave him the go ahead, he had to respect the thin boundary. He stopped in the driveway, waiting.

The last FBI agent eyed Ukiah warily as he packed away his assault gear. Ukiah tried to look as harmless as he could, nervous under the casual inspection. The agent took in Ukiah's windbreaker, apparently recognized him from reports, and nodded slowly. Slamming his car trunk, the agent walked around to the driver's door and got in. Relief flooded through Ukiah.

As the FBI agent pulled away, though, the wind changed, bringing Ukiah the scent of evil from the house.

A growl started in Ukiah's chest.
“Rennie? Rennie?”

Rennie had gone too far out, trying to avoid the FBI. Ukiah could no longer sense him. Max came out the back door with Jared, who looked shell-shocked.

“They found things from the Burkes, and the other hikers, and the Coles,” Jared said. “Vivian has a brother over in Pilot Rock, and Matt has a sister up in Walla Walla. They've got a search warrant for both.” Jared shook his head, looking young, bewildered, and disgusted. “This is like biting into rare-cooked steak a friend served you and finding maggots.”

“Can Ukiah look around?” Max asked, apparently not noticing the smell. How could anyone not smell
them
?

Jared waved at the house in disgust. “Magic Boy might be the only one that can find her alive. Go on in, I'll cover for you.”

Max waved Ukiah to the back door. “It looks bad, kid. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meet Martha Stewart! You can almost tell when things went bad by the level of grime—like whoever lived here moved away and someone else took over.”

“I can smell them from here. It's one of their dens.”

Max cursed softly as Ukiah stepped through the back door into what had been a pristine white kitchen. The uppermost cabinets still gleamed from the sunlight coming through the windows. On the table, the counters, and the floors, were torn-open bulk packages of cereal and dog food. A yellow plastic tray held a well-gnawed chicken, with bits of bloody meat clinging to the still-connected bones, as if someone had ripped the package open and eaten the chicken raw while standing at the counter.

“Chicken eaten raw, dog food, but no dog,” Max made a sound of disgust. “If you can't get sick from the filth, why bother cleaning up?”

Ukiah glanced outside at the neatly cut yard. “They do enough to blend in.”

“Well, yeah, you certainly couldn't ID Brody on sight.”

There was a splatter of blood beside the chicken bones. Ukiah brushed fingers over the dead blood cells. Matt
Brody's genetic pattern existed as a thin top layer, and underneath was another—alien—code. The blood was from several days earlier. “Brody must have been one of the people in the truck that hit me. He was wounded when he ate this chicken. Either Sam or Kraynak must have shot him.”

“Why couldn't you tell that Brody was Ontongard from his hair?”

Ukiah considered the hair he had found, snagged in the tree branches. It reported only human DNA; a big, blond man. “The hair had been snapped off. The part I found was only old, dead cells. He must have been converted recently, the hair closer to the root would have told me he was Ontongard days ago.”

Max cursed again. “Sam said the kid drowned June thirtieth. We killed Hex and his Pittsburgh Gets the third week of June. We reduced the Ontongard population in Pittsburgh, so Hex's Gets here kick into overdrive to replace them. They infect whole families, using fire and drowning to cover the fact that a huge number of people are dying from viral infection.”

“And they pick up drifters, hikers, anyone that won't be missed.”

Max swore. “Oh, damn. Alicia.”

“They would have infected her the first day they had her.” Ukiah had been braced for them to find Alicia dead for so long, he thought he'd feel nothing now. With his words, though, it was if someone wrapped a hand about his heart and yanked it out of his chest, leaving his ribs wrapped around a hollow ache. Every breath brought pain to that empty spot. “It's been a week. She's gone. Either the injection killed her, or she's one of them now.”

“Let's find Rennie, tell him what's going on and get the hell out of here. There could be hundreds of them here by now. Anyone could be one.”

“We should warn people.”

Max caught Ukiah's shoulder and spun him around to face him. “And what do we tell them? Aliens from space are inhabiting the bodies of townspeople and now the Pack is going to kill them all?”

“I've got to tell them something.” Ukiah pulled away. “Warn them. Both Sam and my family should know.”

Max glanced sharply at him at Sam's name, and remorse filled his face. “Okay, we'll tap Jared on the way out, take him someplace quiet, and—I'll figure out something to say to him. Then we'll warn Sam.”

“Thanks, Max.”

They went out into the summer dusk. Jared's lone squad car sat at the far corner, facing them. The sheriff stood talking with a tall, thin, sloppily dressed young man. Apparently another neighbor was learning the truth about the Brodys' crimes. Ukiah trotted toward them to arrange a private meeting with Jared.

Communication had made the Ontongard effective as a species. Inside one body, the individual cells communicated to keep the whole body functioning.
Swap function. Repair this first and leave that damage until later. Change into this creature so that we can survive outside the host.
As the Ontongard spread across host bodies, they retained the link in a telepathiclike ability.

The Pack and Ukiah kept those telepathic abilities. They could speak mind to mind at a limited range. They could share memories mentally. If they focused, they felt each other at a distance, a prickly awareness across the skin.

And they could feel the enemy.

Jared and the stranger turned. Jared said, “This is Dennis Quinn, he lives next to the Brodys,” and the enemy was there, looking at Ukiah.

Ukiah felt Ontongard awareness wash over him, recognize him as non-Ontongard. The hair on the back of his neck went on end and he slammed to a stop.
Oh, shit!
His body realized its danger, and reacted instantly with fear, as if terror was poured from a bucket over him, drenching him suddenly and completely!
Ontongard! Kill it! Run! It will kill without hesitation!
What was one cell to a full body? Or one body to a creature spread across many beings? So unlike a man, who would only fight while his own survival seemed likely, the Ontongard instantly fought to the death.

Ukiah started backpedaling, growling. Jared frowned at
Ukiah's reaction. With inhuman speed, Dennis Quinn reached out, caught hold of Jared's service pistol, shoved it slightly forward and pulled it out of the holster. Ukiah caught the Ontongard's thoughts.
Kill the witness.
The gun swept up to point at Jared's chest.

“No!” Ukiah leapt toward him with a howl of fury. “Don't hurt him!”

Ukiah felt Quinn's recognition of the oncoming danger. He welcomed the pain as Quinn spun away from Jared to fire at him. The bullet caught Ukiah in the bulletproof vest with a force that smashed him to the ground backward. A second bullet whined across the cement by his cheek as he rolled over and started to scramble to his feet. A third hit him in high in his back, still on the vest but barely, just inches from taking out his spine. It slapped him flat onto the street, knocking his human mind unconscious.

As the awareness that thought of itself as “Ukiah” blacked out, the collective whole—the independent yet interconnected cellular creatures that made up his body—took over. Not guided by human thought and operating solely on instinct, the colony scrambled to its feet.

Jared grappled with Quinn, trying to disarm him. While the county sheriff outweighed the Ontongard Get by fifty pounds, the alien shrugged Jared off. Max dove behind the rental car, shouting to Ukiah.

The colony intelligence ignored Max and dashed across the yard of the nearest house. As he ducked through a breezeway that connected the house to its unattached garage, a bullet splintered the trim of the garage's clapboard siding.

Jared staggered to his car and shouted into his radio. “Officer needs backup, shots fired. Armed suspect is firing at unarmed civilian. Suspect is Dennis Quinn, male, Caucasian, six-five, a hundred sixty-five pounds, brown and brown, wearing dark jacket and blue Levi's. He's chasing . . .”