Tainted Trail (3 page)

“It's so like a woman to overanalyze things.”

Ukiah dropped into the window seat. “And that's just my family.”

“I meant to ask you how the picnic went on Sunday.”

“Well, her brothers and sisters seemed to like me. Her older brother Zane said that if Indigo could run around shooting people, she certainly could date anyone that she pleased.”

Max laughed at this.

“Her parents, though . . . to them I'm a long-haired, teenage, Native American, Unitarian, Wolf Boy raised by lesbians, with an infant son obviously from a previous failed relationship.”

“Are you quoting?”

“Indigo's mother doesn't realize how well I hear.”

“Ouch.” Max winced for him. “Don't worry, kid, they'll come around.”

Ukiah nodded, but heard again Indigo's quiet “if.” “Mom Jo is worried that we haven't given enough thought of ‘how' we could stay married. I don't know the first thing about living on my own, and Mom Jo says that would throw Indigo
into the role of caretaker. She says it could put a lot of stress on Indigo that she's not expecting.”

“Your Mom Jo is a good woman,” Max said. “But she's always underrated your ability to learn. If you want to make this marriage work, you can.”

Again—
if.
Some part of him certainly craved being married to Indigo, despite it being a vast unknown. Unsuspected, he had a deep want for
his
wife and
his
son living in
his
house—all the fine trappings of being an adult.

The realization bothered him. Could wanting to be married have nothing to do with loving Indigo?

Pendleton Municipal Airport, Pendleton, Oregon
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

When Ukiah remembered Oregon, he recalled only steep mountains and towering pines. He was startled when the turboprop airplane dropped down through the clouds to reveal a land nearly flat and utterly treeless. More startling, the land was marked with a multitude of huge circles.

“What are those?” he asked Kraynak.

Kraynak leaned over to peer out the window. “Those are from the long, rolling irrigation . . . thingies. They anchor one end and it rolls in a circle about the endpoint.”

They landed without Pendleton coming into view. The airport was laughably small after the Houston airport: four modest-sized public rooms linked together. Over the sole door leading to a single X-ray device was a sign proclaiming
ALL GATES
. It was the first airport of the day in which Ukiah wasn't immediately overwhelmed.

Four children with black hair, dark eyes, and dusky skin played in the largest room. Ukiah watched the children while Max rented two Chevy Blazers from a Hertz kiosk-styled office, doing the typical corporate paperwork dance to allow Ukiah to drive under the age of twenty-five. Were the kids Native Americans, Chinese, or Mexican? None of them came close enough for him to tell.

Max threw him the keys to the first Chevy. “You sure you're okay to drive?”

“If I take a few minutes to get settled in, yeah. There's no crowd to deal with.”

The Hertz agent laughed. “Wait two weeks, and there will be. The annual roundup starts then. It's a rodeo with an Indian powwow. Pendleton goes from a population of twenty thousand to sixty thousand.”

“Ouch,” Max said. “Well, hopefully we'll be gone by Thursday.”

“People will be drifting in starting this weekend,” the Hertz agent said.

“Explains why getting hotel rooms was so fun,” Max muttered, resetting his watch to local time. “It's five-thirty now. See you at the hotel in two hours or so? We'll probably both be out of regular cell-phone range, so take one of the satellite phones with you. Call me if you run into trouble.”

Ukiah snagged one of the equipment bags with a phone and GPS system in it and went out to the parking lot. The Blazer was unlocked and stifling hot. He started up the SUV and let the air conditioning run while he stood outside, acclimatizing to the world around him.

The airport sat on the edge of a river valley. The flat land broke suddenly to drop down in ragged hills. The stubble of wheat on the nearby fields shined gold, and heat wavered liquid in the late-afternoon sun. He could pick out the constant hum of distant highway traffic and the faint gurgle of river water. Once the interior of the Blazer was bearable, he slid in, closed the door, and started out to find Jesse Kicking Deer.

 

Pendleton was at once familiar and strange, like a house that been remodeled. The streets lay in a straight grid, as much as the river valley allowed. None of the street names seemed right, and only a handful of buildings struck a resonance in him. He drove up out of the river bottom, and pulled off just short of the I-84 on ramp. Getting out of the Blazer, he looked back at the island of civilization, surrounded by vast, empty prairie.

Mom Jo had slipped him out of Oregon without visiting
Pendleton, so he wasn't recalling a recent memory. Was he finally remembering something from his childhood?

He focused on the memory, and found it wasn't his. It belonged to Rennie Shaw.

When Ukiah had realized that he, the Pack, and the Ontongard weren't human, he had gone to Rennie Shaw and begged for answers. What was he? How was he related to the Pack? Who were the Ontongard? Where had they all come from? Why did the Ontongard want to kill him? Instead of answers, Rennie bled into a coffee can and gave it to Ukiah, telling him to use it. The blood transformed into a mouse—as Pack blood was wont to do once separated from the main body—and contained Rennie's genetically coded memory. After much bafflement as to how he was supposed to use the mouse, Ukiah absorbed it, and Rennie's memories had been added to his own.

Oddly, while the memories were sharp and clear as his own, they were harder to access. A stray thought or image would trigger Ukiah's memories to the surface. Rennie's memories lurked like silvery minnows under the shimmer of his own thoughts and memories, there to catch and examine, but never really offering themselves up freely.

Ukiah fished out Rennie's memory and examined it. Rennie had been in eastern Oregon twice. The first time had come a decade after Rennie's last day of being human: May 5, 1864.

The Ontongard reproduced by invading a host, much the same as a virus would, using the host's own biology to reproduce and then replace all the cells in their body. The hosts became identical to those that begot them on a cellular level—with an important difference. These “Gets,” as the Ontongard called the hosts once they had been wholly taken over, retained all innate abilities and skills needed to not only survive but excel in the host's native ecology. Thus, as the Ontongard spread across the galaxy, not only did they receive bodies adapted to the new worlds, but they also gained intelligence, education, and memories, all wrapped in a camouflage shell of a being known to the uninfected natives.

Once little more than lowly pond scum, the race had stolen all they needed to leap across the stars.

To fight the Ontongard, Prime had no choice but to make Gets of his own.

A West Point trained Union officer, Rennie had been wounded, trapped under his dead horse in the tangled undergrowth west of Wilderness Church. Prime's first Get, Coyote, came to Rennie in moonlight, a wolf changed into a man by alien blood, named for a native god, offering the cursed gift of life as a Get. Only twenty-three, with a wife and child to live for, Rennie accepted, thoughtless of the cost. Coyote's blood burned its way through his body, the viral genetics changing him cell by cell into a copy of Coyote that wore Rennie's face.

He was Coyote's first Get. By that time, however, Hex—the sole Ontongard to reach Earth after Prime crashed the mother ship on Mars and sabotaged the scout ship—had made a small army of Gets.

Rennie never returned to his family. He dedicated himself to the war against the Ontongard, protecting his wife, son, and the rest of humanity from the alien invaders. He and Coyote's other Gets forced Hex into hiding by 1874. Leaving Hex to the others, Rennie formed the Dog Warriors and backtracked to Oregon, hunting Hex's scattered Gets. The country had been raw frontier, and the Dog Warriors killed Ontongard with open, reckless abandon.

Rennie returned to Oregon during the early part of the last century, called back by Degas, the leader of a pack clan named the Demon Curs. By then, the killing between Pack and Ontongard had become a secret war; it behooved neither side for the humans to know that aliens lived among them.

Rennie had stood on this same ridge overlooking Pendleton, amused by his own surprise.
It's been fifty years, you old dog. Of course it's going to change. Hell, they've even changed the name from Goodwin Station.

The gold boomtown of the Old West had been a good place for hunting Ontongard,
Rennie thought.
It's going to be harder to put the Ontongard down and burn them to ashes in this
Pendleton
than in Goodwin Station.

“They even have a sheriff now,” a voice said behind Rennie, surprising him. “Although the first one got himself killed in a jail break. One would think he was a martyred saint or something, the way they carry on.”

Rennie jerked around, pulling out his hidden pistol before the wind shifted, bringing him the stocky man's scent, deeply drenched in woodsmoke. Rennie recognized him then. “Degas.” Last time they had hunted together, Degas had been newly made. His curly hair had been a bright carrot red with muttonchops down to his sharply pointed chin. That had been—what?—twenty years. Their alien gene drift toward black hair had muted the red to auburn. Combined with a clean shave, Rennie hadn't recognized the solid-built leader of the Demon Curs.

“You took your time,” Rennie growled, unsettled that he hadn't caught the other man's approach. It had been a long time since someone took him unaware.

Degas came down the hill, wiping his hands with a white handkerchief, staining it with blood. “You can't hide your thoughts from me, Shaw. You're angry that I surprised you.”

“You know I am,” Rennie snarled, annoyed afresh.

Degas gave a soft smug laugh. “Oh, stop snarling and growling, and be the man you were born, not the wolf that you've become, or next we will be sniffing asses.”

“You asked me here just to make me wait and then insult me to my face?”

“You're the one that's late.” Degas lifted the bloodstained handkerchief. “The killing's started—on both sides. We caught one of Hex's Gets nearly drenched in Pack blood.”

“Who did it kill? Was it permanent?”

“Don't know.” Degas let the wind take the handkerchief. It flew out over the prairie like a wounded dove. “None of the Curs are missing. Most likely it had been a new Pack Get, turned out to grow back into itself. If it wasn't a permanent death, it'll be back on its feet soon enough.”

In those words hid an ugly truth: The Curs were casually making Gets wholesale.

Rennie growled softly. “That's not our way.”

“It should be! Hex infects humans daily. We should match him, Get for Get.”

“So if he takes over half the world, we take the other half?”

“How can a hundred fight a thousand?”

“By using the intelligence we were
born
with. Hex keeps his Gets too close, refusing to let them think. They're like infants without his thoughts guiding them.”

“Infants with tommy guns.”

“All the more need to be clever, then.” Rennie watched the distant tumble of bloodstained white. A thought started to form, and then, with a realization that Degas would read his mind, Rennie veered away from that line of thinking.

Degas glanced hard at him, suspicious of the guarded feelings. “What?”

“We're wasting time here.”

“That's not what you were thinking.”

“What I was thinking isn't up for discussion.” Rennie turned and stalked away, keeping his mind carefully void.

 

Outside the memory, Ukiah wondered at the timing. Had the war between the Pack and the Ontongard had anything to do with him? Rennie had no memories of Ukiah in Oregon. The Pack had no knowledge of Ukiah prior to this June. Still, Ukiah couldn't ignore the odd coincidence of the date; Rennie arrived in Pendleton on September 23, 1933—the same year that the Kicking Deers lost a child they believed had become the Umatilla Wolf Boy.

Kicking Deer Farm, Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Straight east on I-84, and Ukiah found his missing mountains. They rose like a wall running north to south before him. But where were the trees? The mountains in front of him looked as bare as the vast fields around him. He passed a sign reading
ENTERING UMATILLA INDIAN RESERVATION
alongside the highway, but there was no other indication he crossed a boundary. The fencing and fields on either side of the road continued unchanged.

With the GPS system, the ranch was simple to find. All the local ranches seemed linked to the main roads via long, winding driveways. Sometimes the houses were tucked unseen behind a gentle swell, up to a half mile away, but black gravel made the driveways obvious.

He followed the Kicking Deer driveway back to a sprawling ranch house with several well-kept outbuildings. He parked in plain view of the front door, and sat, listening to the engine ticking, suddenly nervous.

If this was his family—then what?

He'd given no thought to how he'd feel and what their reactions might be. Would they recognize him? 1933 was at once unimaginably long ago, and yet, via Rennie's memories, as clear as an hour ago. He struggled to see the passage of time in normal human terms. It was difficult. His only points of reference were Rennie's memories of his childhood, drifting banks of tattered clouds compared to the
Pack's razor-sharp, sequential, and easily searchable memory. Ukiah suspected that even Rennie's memory wasn't a true representation of how humans thought, since Rennie had been made a Get young, and Ukiah viewed his childhood memories after they had been recalled and stored to alien sharpness.

Ukiah couldn't judge what his family might remember. He wished he'd been able to talk to Max freely about what to expect, but Kraynak's presence had made that impossible.

Nor was he sure what this family were hoping to find. The newspaper clipping spoke only of “boy” and “child.” How old was that? Five? Eight? Twelve? Eighteen? Were they expecting a child to return, or an old man?

And now that he started to wonder, he wasn't sure why they would want to find him. Mom Jo said once that if she lost Cally, she would look for her daughter until she died. Believing Ukiah's parents would feel the same about their lost son, she hired Max in attempt to reunite Ukiah with them. He knew now that Hex killed his father, and his mother was surely dead.

So who was this Jesse Kicking Deer? Why did he want Ukiah back? How much? Enough to demand that Ukiah move back to Oregon? Even as unlikely as that might be, Ukiah was glad that he was legally an adult and able to choose for himself.

But if these people were his real family—would
he
desperately want to be with them?

A woman's face appeared in one of the windows. He had been noticed.

Suddenly the house seemed like the humane cage that Mom Jo had caught him in; his life was about to totally change. He hadn't expected this. He wasn't sure if he truly wanted whatever the future held anymore.

Still, he couldn't just sit out here. He'd invaded these people's privacy. He should at least explain his presence. Reluctantly, he got out and walked up to the front door.

The door opened even as he raised a hand to knock: The rich smell of fried bacon and potatoes flooded out into the summer dusk. The woman from the window stood in the
doorway, without welcome in her stance. She was in her late fifties, long graying hair drawn back into a ponytail. Her dark eyes regarded him with hostility. “Yes?”

“Claire Kicking Deer?” Ukiah got a slight nod. “I'm sorry to bother you. I would have called, but your number is unlisted. I'm looking for Jesse Kicking Deer.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why don't you people just leave him alone?”

Ukiah blinked with surprise. “Pardon?”

“Go away.” She started to shut the door.

“Wait!” He stiff-armed the door to keep it from closing in his face. “There's some kind of confusion here. I'm not who you think I am.”
Whoever that was.

“Let go of the door.” She tried pressing it shut.

Ukiah resisted, talking quickly. “Please, I just want to talk to Jesse Kicking Deer about an article in the
East Oregonian.
He was asking for information on a feral child.”

Claire Kicking Deer tried to yank open the door in a way that suggested she would slam it shut in his face, arm or no arm. He caught hold of the door, reacting without thinking. “Let go of the door, or I'll call my son to the door, and you don't want me to do that.”

He kept hold of the door, sure if he let her close it, she wouldn't listen to him, and he'd lose this chance to reconnect with his lost family. “I don't understand why you're so angry with me. I just want to talk to Mr. Kicking Deer. I'll ask him a few questions and go away. Please, you have no idea how much this would mean to me.”

“Jared!” She called over her shoulder.

Oh, shit!
Heavy footsteps heralded the arrival of the son. Instincts told Ukiah that violence was becoming a distinct possibility. He released the door and backed up. The door jerked completely open, and Jared Kicking Deer stepped out onto the porch, looking fully capable of said violence. He was a tall man, in his late twenties, broad in a way that suggested weightlifting sometime in his past, and had a bearing that spoke of being unafraid of a fight.

“My mother said to leave my grandfather alone.”

Ukiah held out a hand to ward off any blows. “Look, I'm
a private investigator from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm out here on business with my partner.” Once sure that Jared Kicking Deer wasn't going to swing at him, Ukiah took a business card out of his wallet, and handed it to Jared.

Jared didn't bother to glance at the card. “PI from Pittsburgh. You here to find Alicia Kraynak?”

One surprise after another.
“Yes. I'm an expert tracker; we specialize in missing persons. The thing is, when I was thirteen, I was found running feral in Umatilla National Park by my adoptive mother. She took me home to Pittsburgh. I thought, since I was in the area, I'll try to find out who I really am.”

“Well, you're younger than most of them, but I've heard this song before.”

Song? Ukiah tilted his head in puzzlement. “What do you mean? You've had a glut of amnesiac wolf boys coming here?”

The man gave a dry snort of laughter. “More or less.”

Ukiah considered him for a moment, finding it difficult to judge this stranger. “You're not kidding.” A horrifying possibility suggested itself to Ukiah; Kittanning might not be the only clone made out of his blood. “Oh, please don't tell me that they all look like me! Do they?”

Another laugh. “No. If anything, you're the only one so far that looks like a Cayuse.”

So there wasn't a flood of his violence-born copies like Kittanning. He relaxed slightly. “I don't know what's made you so hostile, but I promise you that I mean no harm. I'm only looking for my own identity.”

There was bored disbelief in the man's eyes. “We're sick of you people. You should be ashamed of yourself, preying on the hopes of an old man. Now, I suggest you leave before you find yourself in jail for trespassing and fraud.”

“What harm could it be just to let me talk—”

“I said go!”

Ukiah backed down. “Okay. I'll go. If you change your mind, just call me at any of those numbers.”

Red Lion Hotel, Pendleton, Oregon
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Their hotel, the Red Lion on South Nye Avenue, sat on the ridge above Pendleton. Ukiah checked the front desk for their room numbers, dropped his bag in the empty rooms, and went in search for Max and Kraynak at the restaurant.

He found them taking up the corner booth. Maps fought dinner dishes for table space. A tall, lanky woman in her late twenties sat with Max and Kraynak. She wore black-leather hiking boots, tight blue jeans, a black-leather bomber jacket, and her blond hair cropped short. She glanced up at Ukiah in surprise with pale green eyes as he pulled up a chair to sit down.

Kraynak wearily nodded his welcome, eyes bloodshot and bruised from the vomiting. He carefully ate a bowl of chicken rice soup, several slices of white toast, and a side of rice.

Max's dinner of steak and steak fries sat cooling, barely touched.

“How did it go?” Max asked.

Ukiah pantomimed an airplane dive-bombing the ground and exploding.

“That bad?” Max winced. He caught the woman's look of curiosity. “This is my partner.” Max let Ukiah introduce himself. Establishing a strong presence, Max called it, and they practiced it until it was smooth.

“Ukiah Oregon.” He offered his hand.

The woman startled slightly. “Ukiah? Like the town?” It was weird to get the reaction. In Pittsburgh, no one realized he was named after an actual place. Pennsylvanians thought it was an odd family name, often confused with Uriah, Uriel, and once, by an old Jewish man, Uzziah. (The man went on to
tsk
over his supposed Jewish parent for marrying outside the religion.)

Max coughed instead of laughing and said, “His mom named him after the town.”

She accepted this explanation and Ukiah's hand.

Ukiah shook her hand just as he was taught—meet the
eyes, give a serious half smile, firm grip but not too hard, and finish with, “Glad to meet you.”

“Sam Killington.” Her grip was strong, her skin warm and dry, the touch telling Ukiah a host of disturbing information. Gunpowder from a handgun cuffed the back of her hand under his thumb. Ash from burnt carpet, mattresses, and painted wood was lodged in various creases of her palmprint. With the motion of shaking hands, the cuff of her jacket brushed him, reporting the presence of charred human flesh.

Ukiah jerked his hand back, and wiped it clean on his pants.

Max caught the exchange, flared an eyebrow at him, but leaned back slightly, away from Sam. “She's a reporter. She's offered to help however she can.”

“Not really a reporter. I write occasional fluff pieces. I thought I could pick up food and supplies, that kind of thing,” Sam elaborated calmly, though obviously noticing Max cooling toward her. “If you're here to find Alicia Kraynak, you don't have time to waste trying to find the grocery store.”

Ukiah gazed at her.
Who was she? What did she want?
Under Obsession perfume, female sweat, leather jacket, woodsmoke, and gun oil, he caught the engine smell from a motorcycle. There had been a Harley-Davidson in the hotel's parking lot. Stepping back through the day, he found it again at the parking lot of the airport. He flipped through memories of the airport and found her, hidden behind a newspaper and the loudly playing children.

She met his eyes levelly for several minutes and then looked away. “So, Max tells me you're a tracker. It seems slightly stereotypical that the Indian is the tracker.”

“Ukiah is the best tracker in the country,” Kraynak stated, waving a piece of toast.

She dragged her gaze back to Ukiah. “You're real good at that evil eye.”

“You were waiting for us at the airport,” Ukiah stated.

She shrugged. “I heard the rumor that you were coming and was curious. It's not a crime.”

“You're currently carrying a pistol, either on a shoulder holster or kidney holster. You fired that weapon this morning. You've been in a burned building, a house I think, and you've been exposed to human ash.”

There was silence at the table, and then Kraynak stated, “I said he was the best.”

“I'm impressed.” Sam pulled a business card from her jacket pocket and slipped it gracefully onto the table. “I'm a private detective. I'm investigating the death of a local family. They were killed in a house fire last Thursday. I was at the site this morning, after some target shooting.”

Kraynak claimed the card first, glanced at it, and handed it to Max. “What does that have to do with Alicia?”

“I'm playing a hunch,” Sam admitted, spreading her hands. “A family of six dies in a house fire on Thursday. Four days later, a hiker from Pennsylvania disappears. I thought there might be a connection.”

Max took the card, showed it to Ukiah long enough for Ukiah to memorize it, and then studied it himself.
SAMUEL ANNE KILLINGTON
,
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
, it read, followed by a Pendleton address and telephone number. “Samuel Anne?”

“My parents were twisted,” Sam said. “My sister is Kendall Jane.”

“So what's the connection?” Kraynak asked.

Sam gave a weak laugh. “Well, it struck me as odd that the hiker's uncle was flying in two private detectives. Professional pride aside, a local investigator would know the area better and be a hell of lot cheaper. And two men instead of just one seemed like overkill, so maybe they were hired muscle. The father of the family worked at the casino. Dead casino worker. Two hired goons.” She rolled her wrist as she listed the last two points and ended with her hand cocked upward in speculation. “Organized crime?”