Alien Taste (2 page)

If the killer came in the back, he probably left by the back door too. Yet Ukiah still needed a baseline on the missing woman, which meant he'd have to go into the house. “Okay, let's go.”

The first woman was sprawled by the front door, a bloody trail showing that the police had shoved her sideways as they forced the front door. Her scalp hung in tatters, and she was missing fingers where she had tried to protect her head with her hands.

Ukiah swallowed a wave of nausea and fingered one of the wounds, finding traces of dense steel. “Have you found the weapon?”

“Nope.” Kraynak answered him from the porch. “Never seen wounds like these before either. Thin like a knife, but with amazing force. You usually get this amputation with axes and such.”

Ukiah scanned the room, then nodded his chin toward a piece of black lacquered wood on the wall. “Sword rack for a
katana
.”

“A what?” Kraynak asked.

“Japanese sword.” Max answered, stepping over the body to tap on the rack. “The sword is missing. It looks as if someone was a rabid Otaku. That's a fan of Japanese animation.”

“Damn,” Kraynak swore. “I thought that was some kind of weird coat rack. Well, we didn't find any sword, so the killer took it with him.”

Max bent to point out a length of hollow wood. “Left the sheath.”

“We'll dust that for prints.” Kraynak pulled on a disposable glove. He picked it up and dropped it into a long clear plastic bag.

The second dead woman was in the cluttered living room. Ukiah examined it and moved on. The third was in the kitchen and the back door hung open, its doorknob bloody. He returned to the front hall, earning a puzzled look from Kraynak in the doorway.

“I'm not sure who I'm looking for yet,” he explained, and detoured upstairs to examine the bedrooms. The three on the second floor were unmarked by the chaos of the first floor. He moved through them, checking the clothes and the bedsheets to establish which dead woman belonged to which empty bedroom.

“There's an attic bedroom.” Max tapped a door in the hall.

“That's hers, then.”

Max opened the door, revealing narrow, steep stairs leading upward. The smell of a young woman bloomed out, tainted with the odor of sickness. Pillows that had been set on the bottom step plopped out onto the hall floor. Stepping over the pillows, Ukiah led the way up into the cramped bedroom. The dormer window was thrown open, and the oncoming storm winds played with a black blanket
serving as a curtain. A desktop computer sat on a desk, its plug dangling over its dark monitor. Small dinosaurs made of K'NEX guarded an open book. A ragged stuffed rabbit sat at the head of the unmade bed, ears drooping, wearing an overlarge green turtleneck sweater. A normal bedroom of a normal woman, but there was something that sent shivers down his spine. Something was wrong. Something was out of place, but he couldn't place what.

“Our twenty minutes are almost up,” Max said quietly from the attic door.

He checked the bed, closing his eyes, ignoring all background noise to focus on the sheets. They were good quality, one hundred percent cotton with a thread count of three hundred. The woman was in her mid-twenties, tall, dark hair, eyes a deep blue. She had been sick—the sheets were still slightly damp with sour sweat, and there were signs her white blood cell count had been high. He frowned as he found odd fractures in her DNA, hard twists he had never felt before.

He pulled himself up out of the focus. If he didn't find her soon, she would be dead. He trotted down the steps, murmuring “Got her” to Max as he brushed by his partner.

The wooden back porch looked unpromisingly clean of evidence. He dropped to his knees and ran his hands over the flaking gray wood. Bare wood. Dirt. Asphalt. Crushed grass. He hit a blood trace and grew still. Two blood types, mixed together. He identified the first: the woman at the front door. The second came from the woman in the living room. He hazarded a guess that the blood had mixed on the sword blade and dripped onto the wood. There was a faint smear of blood beside the first trace. He
focused on the worn wood, found the faint outline with his fingertips. A small woman's shoe, right foot.

He crept forward, running fingers before him. On the rough cement steps he found the barest print from the small shoe, again right foot. He moved down to the parking pad, sniffing the still warm stone to help catch the faint trail on the broken asphalt.

Suddenly one of Max's hands was in front of Ukiah's eyes, and the other on his shoulder. Dimly, he realized Max had been talking to him. On the porch had appeared young, fit, uniformed policemen—their backup.

“Got it?” Max asked.

Ukiah recalled what Max had said, what he had been too focused to hear. “These yahoos want you to play base command since their men aren't equipped with GPI tracers. You won't be coming into the park, but I've got the promised backup. You've put one of our spare tracers on them, so you'll be able to keep us together. I'll try not to outrun them. If we get out of the park, I'm to wait till you can move the Cherokee closer.”

“Good.” Max patted him on the shoulder. “What did you find?”

“She walked out.” He considered the placement of the feet. “No. Ran. Her feet are far apart, barely touching the ground. She's running, running quickly.”

“Running for her life.” Max swore. “Wait for my mark, then go on, and be careful.”

Ukiah watched him go, feeling uneasy and weird. They often split up, especially if the trail was old but well marked. Ukiah could then track at a run, and Max, who was almost twenty years older, used the GPI tracer and the Cherokee's navigational computer
to drive to points intersecting his route. At the trail's end, the 4x4 and its cargo were usually vital to getting their client out alive.

I've worked without Max behind me,
he told himself,
I can do it again.

But he didn't like it. Not now, not with a killer on the loose.

“Okay, Ukiah, I'm at the Cherokee, you can go.”

Across the parking pad and the alley of mostly mud and occasional ancient cobblestones there was a wall of trees and weeds, the edge of Schenley Park. The woman's trail led to a break in the weeds, which screened a well-beaten path. Dusk was full on them and night was hiding in the woods.

Ukiah went down the path quickly, bent nearly in half, hands occasionally patting when eyes and nose failed him. The woman's footprints vanished on the hard-packed dirt, but blood was sprayed unevenly along the trail as the killing sword was swung in pace with running feet. But who held the sword? He had yet to find the killer's track.

Behind him, coming like a herd of moose, his police backup scrambled to follow. Dimly he was aware of Max's voice over his headset, marking his progress via the tracer and coordinating with the police dispatcher. His focus, however, stayed on the blood.

The blood trail left the footpath, turned, and followed an animal run through scrub trees. Ukiah ran half-crouched under the bowed branches. The run burrowed deeper into the thick, uncut growth, a strange haven of wilderness at the heart of the city.

A sharp whistle sounded in his ear piece, and he paused. “What is it, Max?”

“You lost your posse back there. You don't have backup. Don't get too focused or you might walk into something deadly.”

“Okay, Max.”

Ukiah considered stopping completely, but he could hear his backup, loud and clumsy, moving quickly closer. He had visions of trying to track while they crowded around him. So he pressed on, skittering down a steep hillside. In the gully below, he found the woman's footprints again, pressed deep into the mud. She had scrambled up the other side and paused beside a large tree. There, where the sword would have hung at her side, was a pool of blood. Another set of footprints, a heavy man with large feet, came from the right, following the stream. The woman had stepped behind the tree, letting the man past.

“Max.” He whispered, suddenly aware of the rustling storm wind blocking his hearing. Ukiah crept forward, hating what he was sure he would find.

“I hear you, Ukiah.”

She followed the man once he had passed, walking over his footprints. “Max, I think the woman is the killer. She's got the sword.”

“Are you sure?”

Fifty feet through the heavy woods, she had followed the man, then killed him. Ukiah crouched beside a dead uniformed policeman, hacked and sliced with brutal efficiency. “She killed a cop. I just found his body. There's no one else out here but me and her.”

“Get out, Ukiah.”

There was a tingling awareness in the center of his back and he turned quickly.

The woman crouched amid the underbrush, her eyes so bright the whites seemed to shine. “You're one of them. Aren't you? I could feel you coming, like a light moving through the darkness, a thousand
million voices screaming at once. You're one of them.”

“Shit,” Max's voice hissed in his ear. “Ukiah, I see her.”

The woman gave a wild laugh, full of insanity. “God, how do you stand it? They won't shut up. I won't shut up.
Look! Look! See! See!
”

“Ukiah, get out of there.” Max's voice had gone flat and cold.

“You didn't tell me it was going to be this way. That I couldn't even sleep because I
had
to listen to them breathe. Even when you can't hear them, you have that damn blood river flowing in your head!”

“Ukiah, just get out.”

“How do you stop listening?”
She wailed the words, like a trapped animal calling for help. She caught a handful of her tangled hair, thick with weeds and dead leaves, and tugged hard with her bloody left hand. The right still held the glittering sword. “How do you stop listening?”

Ukiah almost stepped toward her, would have if he could have thought of any way to help her, comfort her. But then her eyes snapped back to him, glittering hard as a mink's at the sight of blood.

“You knew this would happen! You planned it! You didn't want the other stuff. All you really wanted was them dead, wasn't it?”

Ukiah held up his hands. “I don't know you. I've done nothing to you.”

She gave a high, ragged laugh. “Don't lie to me. I can tell now. I can tell. Goddamn bugs. How can they be so loud and you can't see them? There must be millions of them, but where are they during the day?”

“Ukiah, draw your gun. You're going to need it out if she jumps you.”

There was a flash of lightning, and she jumped at him with the speed of a striking snake. He leaped backward, throwing up his arm to ward off the blow. Unbidden came the memory of the fingerless girl. The sword came as a shining arc in the flickering light, and he felt the cut along his arm—sharp, thin pain. He tumbled, reaching desperately for his pistol. As he gained his feet, the sword kissed him again, slicing upward along his unprotected throat. Hot blood pulsed from the wound with the pounding of his heart. He slapped his left hand over his slick throat and blindly pulled the trigger again and again. The gun leaped in his hand, the discharge bright in the rain-cloaked night woods. He saw her twitch and jerk as the bullets struck her. His knees buckled and he fell, still desperately pressing his hand against the cut in his neck.

There was another crack of thunder, swallowing the echoes of his gunfire, and it began to rain.

Monday, June 15, 2004
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Darkness flashed over Ukiah and he was, for an uncounted stretch of time, without touch, sound, sight, or even thought. Strangely, after this absolute stillness of being, when the world blared forth upon his senses at its usual volume, he knew it had lasted several minutes.

He was still sprawled facedown in the night-cloaked woods, his left hand clamped to his neck. Cold rain pounded down on him, mixing the smell of gunpowder with the blood on the torn black earth. A siren wailed in the distance, growing nearer. Heavy bodies crashed through the underbrush to his left accompanied by a dozen hissing, crackling police radios. Helicopter blades thrummed in the air, its spotlight moving through his vision like an angel of death loosed in the woods. Max's voice was ranting over the headset, in midsentence, obviously talking to someone else. “ . . . left, God damn you, Kraynak, don't you know your left from your asshole? He's my partner, just let me . . .”

Ukiah was cold but too weak even to shiver. With
rescue so close, he lay unmoving, knowing somehow that any attempt to even try would be futile.

“Damn it, Bennett, you just wait for the ambulance.” The headset conversation echoed off to his right, accompanied by the sounds of a large body crashing through the underbrush. “There's no sign of a path and you're going to have to direct them too. I'll find the kid.”

“Then go to your fucking left, you're almost to him.”

“There is a damn rock in the way, and I'm just going around it.”

The helicopter's spotlight raced suddenly toward Ukiah and pinpointed him on the ground, its light so brilliant he felt his spine prickle. A shout went up from the nearby underbrush, and the searchers swarmed toward him, blood clinging to their feet.

“We found him.” Kraynak's voice echoed all around him. The big detective paused over Ukiah, muttering softly, “Oh shit.”

“Is he alive? How is he? Kraynak, is he all right?”

Ukiah managed to croak, “I'm—” Fine? No, not fine. “I'm here.”

“Ukiah!” Max shouted in his ear. “Oh, thank God.”

Kraynak dropped to his knees beside Ukiah. “Is this your blood? Are you hurt?”

“My neck,” Ukiah hissed, and tried to unclasp his hand to show his wound.

Kraynak stopped the motion, clamping his hand over Ukiah's. “Keep up the pressure. Bennett would kill me if I let you bleed to death. Bennett, where's that ambulance?”

“I've found a service road. I should be able to get it within a hundred feet of you. How is he?”

“Just make it fast.”

They kept Ukiah pinned on the ground with their hands and light until the ambulance stopped a stone's throw away on a dirt service road masked by the trees. With the helicopter still thumping overhead, its spotlight blasting the area with harsh brilliance, a gurney was muscled through the trees and mud to him. Then, with surprising care, the policemen lifted him onto the gurney.

As they started their bumpy way back to the ambulance, Ukiah caught sight of the woman, sprawled in an awkward heap not far from where he had lain. His semiautomatic had punched an angry line through her. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl. Her eyes were open to the rain. Yet he sensed something there, some germ of life.

“Max.” He could only whisper, hoping that the mike would catch it, that Max would hear where no one in the bedlam would. “She's still alive.”

The EMS glanced down at him and frowned at the headset. “Sorry, but I need to take that off.”

He tried to protest but he was too weak. A black void seemed to hover at the edge of his vision. He gave up and let the emergency crew take him.

 

“Well, you look like someone dipped you in a blood bank, but you've only got a scratch.”

It was the first time someone had spoken to him, not shouted alien-tongued instructions over his prone body. Over him stood a young resident with retro wire-rimmed glasses, apparently bored with Ukiah now that his life-threatening injury had been disclosed to be a routine laceration.

“It was close,” the resident said, keying notes into Ukiah's patient chart. “A half inch longer and deeper, and you would have bled to death in a matter of minutes, but this was only a scratch.”

“I'm so cold,” Ukiah whispered.

“That's shock.” The resident took out a penlight and flicked it in Ukiah's eyes and noted the reaction. “I'm not surprised, considering what you've been through. We've got you on a glucose drip, which should do the trick, and we're going to keep you for observation. First, though, what is your birthday?”

Ukiah blinked in confusion. “I don't know.”

The resident frowned and paused to beam the penlight into Ukiah's eyes again. “Do you know what year it is?”

“It's 2004.” Ukiah considered the question, unsure what the resident truly wanted to know. “I was abandoned as a child. I don't know my birthday. We celebrate my found day.”

“Oh, I see. Sorry. Okay, how about just the year you were born?”

Ukiah shook his head.

“You can't calculate using the year you were abandoned, and how old you were when it happened?” The resident took in Ukiah's steady shake of his head. “Not even roughly?”

“Not even.” Ukiah whispered. He wished he wasn't on his back, weak as a newborn cub. He was sure that fact was making the conversation seem more hellish than it was.

The resident frowned and started to talk slower and louder. “I have to fill this in. I can't believe you don't know your age. You say you were abandoned. Abandoned where, when, how?”

“I was,” Ukiah sighed and explained with reluctance, “abandoned in the Oregon wilderness when I was”—he shrugged helplessly—“young.” He closed his eyes, thought for a minute, and came to an answer the resident might accept. “Three years ago the court recognized me as legally eighteen so I could
vote, drive, carry a gun, and apply for a private investigator's license. Well, not all at once, but—you know—that's a rough guess at my age.”

The resident gave him an odd, disbelieving look. “Okay. We'll put in that you're twenty-one and that would make a birth date of 1983.” Said information was added to his charts. “Place of birth?”

If I said I didn't know, he'll probably just talk slower and louder.

“I was found outside of Ukiah, Oregon, so I was named after the town.”

“It will do,” the resident muttered. “So you lived alone in the Oregon wilderness for an unknown number of years. Tell me, how the hell did you survive? Were you brought up by Bigfoot?”

“I was raised by a pack of gray timber wolves.”

“You're joking.” He looked at Ukiah in amazement, his glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose and threatening to fall off. “You're not.” He pushed his glasses back up with his right pointer finger and shook his head. “You can't be a feral child. I've read about them, and you are not feral. Feral children are so developmentally delayed by their isolation that they don't develop speech. They rarely learn any socialization skills at all. They tend to have horrible scarring and usually die within years of discovery. There's not a single case of a feral child reaching adulthood.”

Ukiah searched for a reasonable answer, then decided not to bother. His own parents had been dumbfounded (and vastly relieved) by his transition from nonverbal wolf boy to professional tracker in six short years. He shrugged instead, wishing the resident would just go away. “Why would I lie?”

The resident regarded him for a long moment and eyed the chartboard again. “Social Security number?”

The resident finished just as Max appeared at the part in the curtain. Max identified himself to the doctor and they conferred beyond the curtain in low whispers. Moments later, Max returned, stowing away a worried look to enter the cubicle with a relieved smile. “Hey! There you are! Boy, you look like shit. Your mothers are going to kill me when they see you.”

“Yeah, you're a dead man.” Ukiah laughed weakly, then sobered. “The woman. Is she okay?”

Max's face went grim. “She's dead on the scene, Ukiah.”

“I thought she was still alive when they were taking me out.”

Max shook his head, patting Ukiah earnestly on the shoulder. “They body-bagged her minutes after that, Ukiah. It's okay, kid. You had no choice. She called the game. Sudden death. It had to be you or her.”

“What happens now? Will the police arrest me for killing her?”

“She ginsu-knifed four people to death, kid, and started work on you. No one is going to blame you for anything.” Max snagged a chair and settled into it. “There will be an inquest after the coroner does an autopsy. The inquest will probably focus on why she went psycho—pinpoint if she was just a nutcase or if she was high on something.”

“Are you sure?”

“Kid, I heard the crazy things she was saying over your link. She was completely psycho.”

Ukiah tried to recall the conversation and found that there were huge gaps in his normally photographic memory. He remembered clearly the ride down in the Cherokee, the cat in the white Saab, but then the holes started. The investigation jerked and
stuttered through his mind. Max telling him to take the .45. The first victim in the hall. The woman's bedroom. Snippets from a film, spliced with darkness. His last memory before waking in the rain was the woman crouching in the shadows, madness glittering in her eyes.

He knew there was more: she had wounded him; he had shot her. He had seen her wounds. He knew he had made them. He could still feel the recoil in his shoulder. The memory of it happening, however, was gone.

“Do you still have a disc of it?”

Max considered and nodded. “I was recording like usual. The disc is still in the deck.”

“I need to see it.

“Tomorrow.”

“You could bring your laptop computer and . . .”

“No. No. No. Look, kid, two news trucks followed the ambulance to the hospital, and another pulled up minutes after we got here. I need to call your moms and warn them off. You have to sleep. Doctor's order.”

 

After the glucose drip finished, they moved him upstairs, tucked his personal effects into the closet, and started to explain the various room functions. He waved them sleepily away. He had visited Mom Lara when she was in Presby and knew its personal quirks. Alone at last, he closed his eyes and started his night rituals. He scanned and learned the noises of the hospital around him. Once they regressed to background static, he released the flood. The day's events washed over him, every small noise, taste, smell, and sight, repressed until this quiet time. There was a lot of useless stuff stored there. The distant buzz of a tractor as he ate breakfast. The front
page of the newspaper that Mom Lara was reading across the table. The news stories and commercials of Max's news radio. The faint smell of the cat in the white Saab. The taste of earth and blood when he woke in the woods. He skimmed the junk and discarded it.

What he wanted most, the memory of the woman, was gone. There were only clean-cut breaks where they had been, as if the woman had sliced them out when she cut him open. He growled softly in frustration. He riffled through the remaining memories of her house. Why had her room seemed so strange? He scanned the titles of her books, CD-ROMs, and music CDs. Her taste in music was much like his, but the books were mostly on advanced robot programming.

Sighing, he flipped through the rest of the house, at least those memories that remained after his surgical memory loss. Only a handful survived. The full flood started again when he woke in the woods. A paramedic arrived to shoulder Kraynak aside, his deep masculine voice hovering only inches over Ukiah. Others moved in orbit around him: various members of the police force, the newly arrived Max, and seemingly the farthest ones out, the news reporters, kept at bay by the faint flutter of police tape. A half-dozen conversations pressed in at once, a jangled chorus that he had simply ignored at the time. He listened to it again, only vaguely interested in the discord.

“Breathing is shallow and rapid. [Jo?]
Get Forensics out here before it rains again.
[It's me, Max] {Going live in five.} [Ukiah's been hurt.] {Four.} Blood pressure is low. {Three.}
Make sure we don't have any accomplices hiding in the bushes.
{Two.} (So?) Appears to have a laceration near the left carotid artery. [No, I don't know how badly.] {One.} (They've killed each
other, for the time being.) Patient is currently conscious and applying pressure. [They're taking him to the hospital now.] {I'm Paula Kiri with Channel Four News.} (What the hell is Hex up to? Why did he have two of his people kill each other?) [No, I don't know which hospital yet. I'll call you when I find out.] {I'm live in Oakland with an update of the multiple slayings.} (I'm not sure if he owns them both—I think the boy might be one of us.)”

Ukiah frowned at the last statement. He was one of whose? The police? Who was talking? He untangled the conversation from the rest, using direction and volume to find both parts of the conversation.