Tainted Trail (6 page)

“So, she hasn't started to backtrack?” Kraynak asked.

Ukiah shook his head. “No. We've been swinging east and south for the last hour, so I think she planned to circle back around instead of backtracking.”

Max pulled the map from the Blazer, and unfolded it onto the tailgate. “Well, if she didn't come down that ridge this way, she could have taken this spur, which would have landed her near this road here.” He tapped where the darker
squiggle of the road nearly touched a stacked series of light squiggles that indicated a very steep hill. “It's a fairly level hike back to the campground then, at least according to the map.”

“We've had some bad falls from that hill,” Sheriff Kicking Deer stated. “It's taller, so it's a vantage point. On the maps, that point looks no steeper than the rest, but it's actually a cliff. People not familiar with the area often park and try to find their way up and down it.”

Kraynak studied the map. “Why don't we drive over while Ukiah takes the high country? We'll meet at the bottom, here.”

Max nodded. “Okay. Sounds like a plan. You set, kid?”

“Set.” Ukiah gave them all a wave. “See you later.”

As Ukiah started to run, Sheriff Kicking Deer returned to his car and radioed in their plans.

 

Ukiah backtracked the mile, scrambling easily back up to the ridge and starting along it. His mind, though, kept returning to Sheriff Kicking Deer. Win him over with charm and beauty? He laughed to himself. How do you convince a person that you're his ninety-plus great-uncle when you look eighteen? Maybe in the future he could use cryogenic sleep as an excuse, but he disappeared in 1933.

Reports of alien abductions flourished after the chaos he and the Ontongard caused with the Mars Rover. The NASA Channel faithfully caught and CNN endlessly replayed every moment of the mother ship—from when the cloaking shields dropped to its blinding self-destruction. Later, a hacker group claimed responsibility for the video feed, saying that they swapped the live coverage with doctored footage. Later still, a small group of experts, willing to undergo world ridicule, pointed out evidence why the ship couldn't have been computer-generated graphics. Despite everything, few people believed in aliens, except those who also believed in government conspiracies.

No, he couldn't say aliens had abducted him. He hated the idea of lying.

Besides, the
East Oregonian
newspaper article
specifically named him the Umatilla Wolf
Boy.
Maybe the Kicking Deers were expecting an unaging child. Perhaps the true problem was that he looked too old.

 

“This isn't good.” Ukiah squatted at the cliff edge, scanning for the track.

“What is it?”

“Can you see me?”

“No.”

Ukiah worked his way out onto a narrow outcrop and waved down at the three men. “How about now?”

“Okay. We see you. What's up?”

“The track stops here. I think she fell.”

“Oh, shit.”

Ukiah leaned carefully out, over the ledge, to look down at the jumble of rocks. “Can you work over until you're under me and see if she's—”

Something hit him on the right side of the chest, just over his heart. As it slammed him around in a half spin, he heard a loud crack echoing across the valley. Even as he realized that he had been hit by a bullet, and that he was falling over the outcrop's edge, another struck him hard.

Umatilla National Park, Umatilla County, Oregon
Wednesday, August 25, 2004

“Ukiah! Ukiah!” Max scrambled over the rocks to him.

So he
was
on the ground. Ukiah had hit an outcrop of rock coming down, his arm taking the brunt of the fall in an explosion of pain. He fell again, a second hard hit, this time in the stomach, and then tumbled a few more feet. He expected a third drop through free fall, but apparently he had run out of cliff. Ukiah slowly rolled over, moaning in pain as he did. “Somebody shot me, Max.”

“I know.” Max unzipped Ukiah's windbreaker.

“Don't let him shoot you!” Ukiah pushed at Max, trying to get him to take cover.

“We're fairly well-screened by rocks here,” Max said. “I've got my vest on too. Now, lie still.”

“Oh, I'm not going anywhere.” Ukiah quit struggling and let Max undo his body armor.

Sheriff Kicking Deer joined them, ducking down behind the rocks, talking fast and low on his radio. “Officer needs backup, shots fired. I've got a shooter with a high-powered rifle that just shot the damn tracker. I'm going to need an EMS crew at the foot of Slide Hill. I need backup. Get hold of the state police and tell them we have a sniper.”

Kraynak crouched beside Max. “How bad is he?”

“The vest took the bullets,” Max muttered, eyeing Ukiah's bared chest. “I think the fall damage is going to be the worse.” He leaned up to brush blood-soaked hair back
from Ukiah's forehead and scowled at the wound he located. “There's where the blood is coming from.”

“I think I broke my right arm.” Ukiah considered the rest of his body. “I wrenched my left leg somehow—maybe the hip is broken or maybe it's the knee. The whole damn thing hurts. And my stomach is killing me.”

Max pressed a linen handkerchief to Ukiah's head and placed Ukiah's left hand on it to keep up the pressure. “Damn it, when you waved at us, you made a perfect target.”

Kraynak fingered the dents punched into Ukiah's armor. “It had to have been a semi-automatic supersonic rifle. They couldn't have hit him twice otherwise.”

Sheriff Kicking Deer frowned at Ukiah between squawks of his radio, as if the sniper was all Ukiah's doing. “How is he?”

“Don't know.” Max took out his pocketknife, sliced open Ukiah's right shirtsleeve, and winced at what he found. “Yeah, you broke it, Ukiah. Your radius, it looks like, has punctured through your skin. The tibia's probably broken too.”

Ukiah closed his eyes to avoid seeing the wound. An odd mental glitch made it easier to endure the pain if he didn't look at the injury causing it. Knowing exactly how bad he was hurt only made it worse.

Kicking Deer's radio crackled and reported that an ambulance had been dispatched. He added that it would take the EMS crew an hour to arrive.

Max and Ukiah looked at the Sheriff in surprise and dismay. Since Hex, the leader of the Ontongard, shot Ukiah dead, and he came back to life, they had avoided hospitals. Unvoiced was the worry that, like so many science-fiction movies predicted, Ukiah would fall under government control if too many people saw his oddities. Besides, they had discovered, he almost never needed medical intervention.

While Kicking Deer checked on his backup, Max whispered, “If you can walk, we can talk our way out of an ambulance ride.”

Ukiah sat up only to have his consciousness slide sideways toward darkness.

Max caught him and eased back. “Okay, that's not going to work.”

Through a screen of pine, Ukiah gazed up at the cliff face. The white tips of broken branches stood out in sharp relief against the green needles and dark wood. He stared for several minutes until he realized Alicia must have tumbled down through the tree, the branches snapping as they broke her fall.

“What are you doing?” Max kept Ukiah from sitting up again. “Just lie still, son.”

“Alicia. This is where she would have landed . . .”

 

His moms had been reluctant to let Ukiah off the farm without them. With his newborn sister taking up all his Mom Lara's time, life would be simpler, however, if they allowed fifteen-year-old Ukiah to work part-time with Max. In what would become the pattern for years ahead, Ukiah rode with Mom Jo to her workplace at the Pittsburgh Zoo. While they waited for Max in the zoo's parking lot, Mom Jo taught Ukiah how to call her on a public payphone and filled his pockets with quarters. The Max that picked him up that day had been a man fighting grief and depression, so the ride to the office was filled with edgy silence.

Later, Ukiah would have a scale of luxury to measure the Shadyside mansion against. At the time, the office was merely a very big house, nearly void of furniture. Max led Ukiah through the empty rooms to a keeping room off the kitchen. Besides the grandfather clock presiding over the foyer, the desks and file cabinets occupying it represented the only furniture on the first floor.

What surprised Ukiah was that there was someone already in the room. A teenage girl sat at the nearest desk, studying a computer screen intently. She shook the last bit of a candy bar at Max in greeting, not looking up.

Max checked Ukiah with a hand on his shoulder. “Alicia, there's someone here I want you to meet.”

Alicia glanced up, startled at Ukiah's presence and
scrambled to her feet, popping the last of the candy bar into her mouth. “I was working on those background searches.”

“Good.” Max indicated Ukiah with a pat on his shoulder. “This is Ukiah Oregon. He's the John Doe case I went to Oregon to trace.”

Ukiah and Alicia stared at each other. Her hair fascinated him, a rich shade of purple he had never seen outside of certain flowers. He didn't realize people came with such hair color. Certain cartoon characters suddenly seemed more feasible.

In addition to her hair, Alicia had an abnormal number of tiny holes in her ears, from which dangled elaborate pieces of silver-and-amethyst jewelry. Was there some correlation to the color of her hair and the jewelry?

“Oh, wow! He looks like a Wolf Boy.” Alicia breathed out a chocolate-flavored sigh. She held out her hand to him. “Hi! I'm Alicia Kraynak.”

He leaned over to examine her outstretched chocolate-coated fingers. Deciding she was sharing with him the last remains of her candy bar, he licked her fingers clean. Her hair, according to her life pattern, should have been brown, like her eyebrows. So how did it get purple?

“Ukiah!” Max choked on something that sounded like a laugh.

Alicia's eyes had gone wide. “Um, it's okay, Uncle Max.”

“You're supposed to shake her hand, Ukiah, not lick it.” Max picked up Ukiah's hand, molded it around her salvia-damp palm, and made him shake it up and down. “Look her in the eye. No, not like that—like you're pleased to see her. Um, we'll work on the smile. Now say: ‘Ukiah Oregon, pleased to meet you.' ”

Ukiah did as directed and Alicia's eyes crinkled into a huge smile.

“That's great!” Alicia claimed back her hand. “Let's try it again.”

So they practiced shaking hands with Max interrupting to make small improvements. Later Ukiah would realize Max's patience stemmed from Ukiah's ability to learn; nothing had to be repeated, only refined. Alicia's patience ran deeper,
willing to practice what she already had pat for the simple joy of helping him.

 

“Ukiah?”

Ukiah blinked away the dream recall and looked up at Max in surprise. Max had that harassed look he got when things went bad. “Max? What's wrong?”

“The EMS crew is almost here.”

“The EMS?” Ukiah started to sit up and stopped as pain shot through his body. “Max? What happened?”

Max looked at him, eyes widening. “Oh, damn. What's the last thing you remember?”

“We were at the office with Kittanning, trying to figure out if we could do a stakeout with him along. I was hurt, wasn't I? What happened? Is Kittanning all right?”

“Kittanning is fine. You fell off a cliff and you're bleeding someplace.” Max slipped a hand under his back, running it from shoulder to hip. “You're bleeding and losing your recent memories. I thought I checked you thoroughly.”

Ukiah grunted in pain, trying to distance himself from the hurt by looking around. The place looked hauntingly familiar and it smelled of home. “Max, what are we doing in Oregon?”

“We're on a case.” Max rocked back on his heels. “Ukiah, you're bleeding inside. It's the only place possible. You said earlier that your stomach hurt.”

“Yeah, it hurts.”

“How does this work, with you being Pack?”

Ukiah searched Pack memory. “Um, there are three ways this could go. If I'm not hurt too bad, my body heals up the damaged area and then reabsorbs the blood trapped inside.”

Max looked down at him and shook his head. “I don't think so.”

“Secondly, I'm hurt so bad that I die. That stops the blood from being pumped into the body cavity. My body reabsorbs the blood and then focuses on healing the leak. It's a matter of energy. Once wounded, my body can only do one or the other.”

“Then what's the third thing?”

“I'm screwed.”

“Huh?”

“There's this magic halfway point that's really hard to hit, but when you do, you're screwed. You're hurt too bad to heal, but the blood keeps pumping into the body cavity, so while you reabsorb some, the rest becomes mice. They have no way out. They die trapped inside. Their bodies rot. Blood circulation would spread that toxin through my system, and I'm too hurt for my cells to adapt to the poison, so my body shuts down. When I come back alive, the problem is still there, and I'm only weaker than I was before. I'll die, and come back, then die, again and again, until I simply don't come back.”

Max looked at him bleakly. “Isn't there a way out of it?”

“The Pack usually just kills the person cleanly, usually by snapping their neck: that's fairly easy to heal afterward. The blood stops pumping, and what's trapped inside reabsorbs before the mice form. You're only screwed if the mice form.”

Max looked at him, too stunned to speak. Finally he asked in a weak voice, “How soon does that start?”

“About a half hour after I started to bleed.”

Max glanced at his watch, then covered his face. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“How much time?”

“It's been nearly an hour.” Max's hands slid up until his palms were pressed against his eyes. “I'm sorry, Ukiah. I thought you'd be okay, so I've been looking for Alicia.”

“Alicia?”

“You were tracking her when—never mind. It's not important.” Max sat rocking, hands pressed to his face. Finally he took away his hands to look down at Ukiah. “Have you stopped bleeding?”

Ukiah considered the question. “I think so.”

“So if we get whatever mice are in you now, out, there won't be more?”

“Maybe. I don't think so. This rarely happens, and I told you how the Pack handles it.”

“I am not killing you!” Max growled, undoing his cuffs
and rolling up his sleeves. “It took me weeks to get over the nightmares from killing Hex's Gets disguised as you! I can't do it! Don't even ask!”

Ukiah managed a smile. “I wasn't going to. I don't like being dead.”

“Good.” Max looked up to scan the surrounding woods. “Kraynak! Kraynak!”

“He's here too?”

The big policeman came scrambling out of the underbrush. He had his service pistol in hand. “What is it?”

“One of Ukiah's weirdnesses just turned deadly. We've got to cut him open, now.”

“You're kidding.” Kraynak went pale.

“No. I need your help. You've brought Bonnie along?”

“Of course.” Kraynak slid up the leg of his jeans and undid a knife sheath. He handed knife and sheath to Max. “I sharpened her before we left Pittsburgh.”

“Good.” Max considered Ukiah and shook his head. “Oh, kid, I don't know if I can do this.”

“I can't do it myself,” Ukiah said.

“I'm not doing it,” Kraynak added. “Deal with hacked-apart dead bodies? No problem! Observe autopsies? No problem! Cut open a
living
person? No way! I faint at the sight of live blood. I pass out every time they run us through drug testing.”

“For a homicide detective,” Ukiah observed, “you're a wimp.”

Kraynak gave him a craggy smile. “I'm just too sensitive of a guy.”

“Okay.” Max took a deep breath. “I'll do it. Do you have any idea where I should cut?”

Ukiah closed his eyes and focused tight on his body. “Here.”

“Kraynak, hold him still and don't faint.”

“I just won't look.” Kraynak stated, becoming sober. He put his weight on Ukiah's shoulders and, true to word, looked away.