Bitter Waters (22 page)

On the left side of the tree, Goodman had painted a spiky sun up high, an arch of blue that might have been the rim of the sky, and a line of dark green fernlike leaves to the tree. Otherwise the area was blank.

On the other side of the tree, however, the images were penciled in so tightly together that only the color scheme allowed one to pick out individual figures. Goodman seemed to be fixated on one mythical creature: a half-snake, half-woman creature. Goodman had painted half a dozen on the wall. While its overfull breasts and female genitals were prominently displayed, the writhing gray snakes that made up the
creature's hair always obscured its facial features. Throughout the room, the snake woman performed acts of sexual torture on slight blond figures. Dominating the mural, though, was a large copy of the creature masturbating beside an apple tree, snaky tail wrapped about the trunk; the tree's large red fruit making a mockery of the wormy apple stuffed into Goodman's mouth.

Goodman had done a self-portrait of himself naked and sexually rampant. Yet another slight blond figure knelt at his feet, back to the viewer in order to show hands elaborately bound tight, mouth exaggerated open in profile to show the person about to pleasure the man, eyes gazing up in a manner that suggested worshiping. One of the man's hands rested on the blonde's head, and the other was raised so that a bolt of lightning struck his pointer finger.

“Something about this really gets my hackles up,” Ukiah said to Max as his partner came in from searching the kitchen.

Max followed Ukiah's gaze and shook his head. “He was one sick puppy.”

“A lot of these are copies of his prison tattoos.” Ukiah pointed at the snake woman around the tree. “That's the one he has on his right arm. It was her tail that I could see when he shot me.”

Max studied the snake woman and then looked around the room, eyes narrowing in thought. “I'll go out on a limb and say his need to dominate his relationships is because his first sexual partner was a seriously twisted older woman. Maybe his mother.”

“What?”

“The gray hair always obscuring the face, as if Adam didn't want to show her face. These blonds here are all male.” Max pointed to the blonds being tortured. “The male being much smaller than the female could indicate that he was a young child. They say most men who prey on children were abused as a child themselves.”

Ukiah studied the mural, growing aware that the hair on the back of his neck
was
raised. Why did he find it so disturbing? Just because his son had been at the mercy of this
man, and would keep perfect memories of whatever had been done to him?

No, it was something deeper, more basic. Ukiah reached out and touched the apple tree, the most pleasant thing on the wall. Adam used acrylic paint, sienna brown with streaks of black for the tree bark. The tips of his fingers, though, tingled slightly, as if pressed against the ends of a flashlight battery. He slid his hand up the trunk and through the ruffled green leaves and swirls of red fruit. Why did it feel this oddly? He came to the end of the tree and slid over the expanse of white.

There, on the pure white, he found the source of his uneasiness. With no acrylic to cover the latex, he felt what was mixed in with the paint. It jangled through his senses like an erotic buzz, chiming softly in his ears as the nerve endings translated the energy to sound. Now that he was within arm's reach of the wall, the faint glitter intensified to a bright shimmer. He was completely aroused and suddenly panting.

Around him, the Pack went still, focusing on him.

“My God, where did he get it?” Ukiah whispered. “And why would he put it on the walls?”

“Get what?” Max asked.

“Invisible Red.” Rennie stalked into the room. “And if Invisible Red is here, Cub, then you shouldn't be.”

“I know I'm not going to like the answer,” Max said, “but what's Invisible Red?”

“It's an Ontongard biological weapon,” Rennie growled, catching hold of Ukiah's collar and dragging him back from the wall. “It's to encourage unions between hosts and breeders.”

“It's an aphrodisiac?” Max said.

“To some,” Rennie said as he half carried Ukiah out of the room, through the kitchen, and out of the house. “But to most, it's just a very pleasant death.”

 

The spring water proved to be ice cold and pure. Ukiah's hands turned red and then pale white as he washed them until the chimes finally stopped tinkling in his ears. Even then the girl—young and firm and already plucked—loomed deep and powerful as a black hole on his awareness. That desire he
could control, probably. What threatened to slip his grasp were an extreme irritation and a strange giddiness ricocheting through him at bullet velocity.

“Did you find anything?” Ukiah snapped when Rennie came to check on him.

“The Invisible Red wasn't enough?” Rennie said lightly although Ukiah could feel his unease. “We assumed, since Hex never used the Ae, they had been destroyed with the ship. Why would he start using them now?”

The number of inaccuracies the comments held forced a bark of laughter out of Ukiah. Once released, the laughter swelled up and tried to consume him. His eyes were tearing before he got it checked. “Hex is dead. The ship isn't destroyed. A Get wouldn't have given Invisible Red out to be used as wall paint.”

“Yes, that's too imaginative for the normal Get to think of,” Rennie agreed. “I hate to think of a mall painted with this stuff. This house needs to suffer a catastrophic fire.”

The wind gusted, bringing Ukiah the girl's scent. She was still wet from a morning encounter with Goodman. He remembered that she wore only drawstring shorts, tied loosely over her flat belly.

“Not now.” Ukiah moved upwind of Eve, determined to ignore the sudden desire to pull the string and unwrap her like a present. “Later, and bring the whole house down quick. Use a gasoline tanker if you have to. Don't give firefighters a chance to respond.”

“I'll pretend I didn't hear that.” Max joined them.

“Good.” Rennie glanced toward the Hummer, eyes narrowing as he realized the source of Ukiah's problems. “It needs to be done. The house is a biohazard as it stands.”

“It's like the walls are painted with poison!” Ukiah growled and then gasped as he realized that, of them all, Max was in the most danger. “Did you touch the walls, Max? You can absorb it through your skin.”

“No,” Max said. “I was being careful because of fingerprints. It's not that deadly, is it? Goodman had to have spent hours touching it.”

“Invisible Red is like the black ops of biological
weapons,” Ukiah explained as Rennie walked back to the house to fetch a cooking pot and carry it to the springhouse. “It seems completely safe. It's massively pleasurable to take, but it's nonaddictive, and there don't seem to be any lasting side effects. But in truth, it's an extremely complex, nearly nondetectable, nano device. It varies the speed and method that it kills so that it isn't linked back to the drug.”

“I'm surprised that the Ontongard are that subtle.”

“The original design is Gah'h, who realized that if the drug was recognized immediately as dangerous it wouldn't be distributed throughout the Ontongard. Even rats will avoid poisoned bait if there's another rat lying dead beside it.”

Rennie carried the pot of fresh water upwind of the girl and set it in front of Ukiah. “Take off your clothes. Wash all of your exposed skin. And rinse out your mouth.” To Max, he said, “Don't go back into the house. If it's in the air, it can affect you too.”

Max eyed Ukiah worriedly. “Are you going to be okay?”

Ukiah nodded, kicking off his boots. “I'm fine! I'm fine!”

“It would never kill a breeder,” Rennie explained to Max as Ukiah stripped off his pants. “But the cub is more susceptible to its manipulations. It cuts through any inherited instincts, lack of intelligence, or lack of interest a breeder might have to make him want to breed.”

A fact made obvious when Ukiah peeled off his boxers. Max turned away with a wince.

“You're not bothered by the drug?” Max asked as Rennie searched Ukiah's jeans for wallet and keys to be saved when the Pack burned his clothes.

“It's inert in Gets.” Rennie rinsed the keys and tossed them to Max. “We can't breed, so it doesn't try to manipulate us, and it's keyed to kill only nonuseful humans.”

Max pocketed the key ring. “So why didn't it kill Goodman?”

“This has a complex logic tree of when to kill and when to wait. Anyone that repeatedly takes the drug might be either a supplier or a highly visible user, neither one the drug wants to suddenly drop dead.”

“Goodman's constant exposure to the Invisible Red was
what probably saved him from it,” Rennie said. “The drug would wait for a decrease of certain markers in his system.”

“So a drug pusher could deal in this stuff for months,” Max asked, “but it would kill someone exposed to it only once?”

“Like you?” Naked now, Ukiah rinsed his mouth and spat out the water with disgust. “Yes!”

“What about the girl?” Max jerked a thumb back toward the Hummer.

“It won't hurt her; she's viable breeding stock.”

While Ukiah washed his face and neck, Max fetched the pack of clean clothes that they kept in the Hummer.

“What kind of name is Invisible Red?” Max asked when he got back. “Is it normally red, or invisible? How will I recognize it?”

“It's nearly invisible to a human.” Ukiah pretended to be rubbing it between his fingers. “It would feel like dry oil, frictionless, so clear you probably can't see it. We call it red because we can see it, hear it, and smell it. It smells like red.”

“Smells like red?” Max said.

Ukiah frowned, pulling on underwear and pants, trying to put the sensation into plainer English.

But from a border guard came a warning
“Incoming!”

“No siren?”
Rennie cocked his head, listening.
“Take cover.”

“Shit!” Ukiah tugged on a pair of boxer shorts. He motioned Max toward the trees. “We've got company.”

They faded back into the apple trees and waited, guns ready. Seconds later Hutchinson's white rental sedan crested the hill, hesitated in the shadows, and then moved down the driveway toward the Hummer.

“Damn it,” Ukiah swore and headed out to intercept Hutchinson. With the Dog Warriors so jumpy, there was a risk they'd take out the federal agent in the name of tying up loose ends. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Hutchinson ignored him, and zeroed in on Eve lying on the Hummer's tailgate, wrapped in the blanket so only the top of her head showed. He pulled aside the blanket, looked at her face, and sagged slightly. “I'm Agent Hutchinson of Homeland Security,” he said once he pulled himself back together.
“What's your name? Are you hurt? What happened to you? Do you live here?”

Eve gazed at him in the mute shivering fear and shock.

Hutchinson glanced to Ukiah for help. “Who is she?”

“Eve Linden.” Max joined them at the Hummer, carrying the change of clothes that Ukiah had left behind. “She's one of the two people that kidnapped Kittanning. Her partner's dead in the barn.”

Hutchinson did a slow scan of the rolling hills of pasture, the woods, and the isolated farmhouse. “How the hell did you find them?”

Ukiah told him about finding the fingerprints and Indigo matching them to Goodman. He stopped there, leaving it to Max to come up with a better bridge than what truly happened.

“An informant who was in prison with Goodman suggested that we look for local runaways. Young. Desperate.” Max indicated Eve. “We got a lead on the girl. This farm belongs to her family. It's all simple connect the dots.”

As he listened, Hutchinson uncovered Eve in sections, examining her gently, and clicked his tongue at the broken leg. “You do this?”

“Hell no,” Ukiah snapped and shifted downwind of her.

“She and her partner had a falling out with the people that hired them; they tried a double-cross by ransoming Kittanning.” Max handed Ukiah his clothes. “She jumped out the second-story window. He didn't get away.”

Covering Eve back up, Hutchinson eyed Ukiah's bandages, stark white on his ruddy skin. “Why are you half-naked?”

“He got into some poison ivy,” Max lied smoothly. “It will stay on any clothes until you wash them, and you need to wash all exposed skin off immediately or get a nasty rash; it's an occupational hazard of tracking.”

“Like nosy federal agents?” Hutchinson tapped out a cigarette. “Have you called the police?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “They'll be here shortly. How did you get here before them?”

Hutchinson considered them, weighing his options, and
decided to confide in them. “I'm not sure if it's the farm I found, or just you. A little while ago, someone hacked into a top-secret spy satellite system and followed a car across country to this farm.”