Alien Taste (22 page)

The last one pushed everything out of his mind, leaving him trembling, weak, cold, and confused.
“Max?” He plucked at his sheets, trying to pull them about his shoulders and failing. “What are you doing here?”

“I've come to find out what the hell you've done to yourself. Pittsburgh isn't a big town, kid. Kraynak called me last night to talk about your shootout yesterday. I tried to call you and your phone was off. I called Agent Zheng and she told me that you'd taken off after the Pack. She was all ‘don't worry, we've got him bugged,' but when I checked back later, it's ‘sorry, we lost him.” '

“The Pack found the bug. Rennie broke it.”

“You're shit lucky they didn't hold it against you.”

Ukiah hunched over, holding his head, which banged painfully with the flow of his blood. “Yeah, yeah, they cut me slack because they think I'm a kid and don't know better.”

“You are a kid, but you should know better. You promised me.”

Ukiah flinched under the stinging words. “I took my gun and I told Indigo where I was going, but I couldn't take backup, Max, not to visit the Pack.”

“I figured you were either in deep shit, or here at home with no idea of the chaos you were causing. So I called out here to eliminate the second.”

Ukiah returned to his sleeping memories and discovered he had heard the phone, moaned in reply to Mom Jo's soft query, and they had cleaned him up, tucked him into bed, and forced liquids down him. “God, I was out of it.”

“So I gathered. They said it looked like food poisoning to them, but they didn't know you'd run off to visit the Pack, or that Doctor Haze was running a full viral infection before she went loony. Now, what the hell did you do to yourself?”

“Rennie gave me the Pack memory. My immune
system was fighting it, but I think they've come to a compromise.”

Max moved suddenly from the foot of the bed to his side. He caught Ukiah's chin and studied his face carefully. Worry overcame anger in Max's eyes. “The Pack gave you an unknown drug and you took it?”

Ukiah moaned, rolling his head free. “Max, please. I had to take it. I had to know what the hell was going on. The Pack tried to kill me, you know how close they got. Worse was how close they came to taking out you and Indigo. Rennie warned me, when he was dropping me off downtown, that there was another gang, one that makes the Pack look like puppy dogs. That shootout yesterday was with one of them, Max. I walked into the room, and he chewed through a dozen cops trying to get to me. I had to know what I had gotten into the middle of. I had to know before the trouble followed me out to the farm.”

Max understood the beginning of his logic but not the end. “Ukiah, no drug is going to explain gang warfare to you. All they do is get in and screw with your mind.”

“I didn't say it was a drug, Max. It was the Pack memory. Actually, it was a mouse. And it did explain everything.”

“Memory? Mouse? What's a mouse?”

“A mouse. A little hairy thing, like Mickey Mouse, only more real.”

Max reached out to press a hand up against Ukiah's forehead. “I think you're still out of it.”

Ukiah pushed his hand away. “I'm not out of it, I only sound like I'm out of it. It's impossible to explain.” Ukiah threw back his covers and climbed shakily out of bed. He was starving and dehydrated.
He cast about and found his bathrobe. “You wouldn't believe me anyhow.”

Max flung up his hands in exasperation. “So you're not going to tell me? Are you going to leave me wondering again as to what the hell the Pack has done to you this time? Why don't you trust me anymore?”

Ukiah closed his eyes, not sure how they got to this point. There had been a break between them. It had been growing over the last few days, and the whole ground was about to give in. How had he missed it? How did he stop it?

“Max, I don't trust anyone more than I trust you. I don't even trust myself as much as I trust you. Before Janet Haze, I knew I was your partner, Cally's brother, and my moms' son. I loved my job. I loved my life. Then it all went to shit.”

He dropped back to sit on the edge of his bed, shaking his head. “It's like I fell through the looking glass. There's a girl turning into ferrets. The Pack does this really weird mind-meld shit to me, where they actually experienced my memories like I was some type of ViewMaster. I'm suddenly telepathic with the Pack! I can read their minds, and they can read mine. Last night I watched Rennie cut his wrist and bleed into this coffee can.” He picked up the can and held it out to Max. “When I got home, his blood had turned into a mouse. I held the mouse in my hands, and it merged with my body.” He considered the can himself. “Yeah, I really think the mouse bit sums up my life for the last three days. How can I ask you to believe me when I don't even believe myself?

“And all that is nothing to what I learned last night. Oh God, Max. Everything I've ever thought or believed about myself isn't true. I'm not human, Max.
I've never been human. My father was some rebel from an invading alien force. They used this machine to make my mother pregnant. I was supposed to be the first step in taking over the Earth. That's why the Pack tried to kill me. My father made the Pack to stop the invasion, to protect the world, and they saw me as a threat. I'm the only breeder ever born.” Ukiah hunched over in sudden misery. “Oh god, Indigo! What am I going to tell her? What if I got her pregnant? We used protection, but what if that doesn't work with me? What if I've infected her? God, how do I tell her I'm some kind of monster?”

“Ukiah, stop it.” Max dragged him upright and made Ukiah look at him. “If this was what you were born as, then nothing has changed. You are what you always have been, a good, honest, loving person. I've seen you wade through knee-high muck for sixteen hours to find a little girl. I've watched you burn the soles off your shoes to carry Boy Scouts out of a forest fire. I've pulled you half-drowned out of filling storm sewers because you won't stop looking. You're kind, compassionate, loving, and human. I've always been proud of you and there's no one on this planet I trust more. Nothing has changed.”

Ukiah scrubbed at his face, feeling brittle. “What do I tell Indigo? I can't hide this from her. It would be like not telling her that I have AIDS.”

“I'm not sure. Come downstairs. Let's get some breakfast. Tell me everything you know, and we'll see what we can figure out.”

 

The fridge was disappointingly bare—one stick of butter, a few tablespoons of sour cream, a dozen eggs, a pint of mushrooms, a gallon of milk, a can of frozen orange juice, a wedge of cheese, a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup, and a four-pack of AA
batteries. Must be Saturday, when Mom Lara cleans out the fridge and goes food shopping. He started with the dry goods instead, washing five potatoes and putting four into the microwave. He ate the fifth raw. He didn't cook the eggs either. He cracked the full dozen into a glass, planning to drink them raw.

Max intercepted the glass. “I hate when you eat this way.” He got out a nonstick skillet, poured the eggs into it, added milk, and whipped them well. “Okay, explain.”

There were so many angles Ukiah could take. He could start at the very beginning when the Ontongard overpopulated their native planet and reached for the stars. Or he could start with their most recent success, the planet Prime had been born on, a planet with thousands of native species and trillions of life forms, all replaced by the Ontongard. An entire ecosystem reduced to one vast hive mind. He could explain how Prime sabotaged the invasion ship, or how his father failed to act prior to the scout ship departing the main ship, allowing the Ontongard to reach Earth.

He decided instead to start with Schenley Park and Janet Haze, as he should have days ago. He told Max for the first time about finding the mouse and “losing” it and what he realized later as to what had truly happened with it. He recounted the trial completely—memory search weirdness and all.

As Ukiah talked, Max pushed the scrambled eggs about the nonstick skillet until they formed a fluffy yellow mountain. The smell was maddening to Ukiah, and when Max spooned three-quarters of the scrambled eggs onto a plate for him, he ate frantically.

“So you're telepathic with the Pack?”

Ukiah nodded, his mouth full of hot fluffy eggs.

“Why? Do you know?” Max asked.

“Well, I think it has to do with the fact that we're collections of cells, a communal being. The Dog Warriors are one creature with twenty bodies, a continuation of my father. Despite my mother's DNA, I'm genetically very like my father. The Ovipositor tended to favor the alien genes over the native life-forms when it could. So, in the way that my toe communicates with my nose, I can communicate with the Pack.”

“I don't get this toe communicates with your nose.” Max set the remaining eggs on the back burner, layered them with cheese, and started to grill a small onion and a cup of mushrooms. Once they were done, he folded them into the cheese and eggs.

“Well, it's hard to explain.” Ukiah got up for orange juice. “If you have a skin cell, normally that's what it stays. But with me, if there's a sudden need for heart tissue, the skin cell converts into heart tissue. There's a communication between the cells, working to keep the whole colony alive.”

“That's handy.” Max got the potatoes out of the microwave and set them in front of Ukiah with butter, sour cream, bacon bits, chives, salt, and pepper. Certain Ukiah was preoccupied with the potatoes, he sat down with his semi-omelet. “So, the Pack agrees with me. You're a good person, not a monster. Go on.”

Ukiah launched into the part about the Ontongard at the police station and his realization that he wasn't human. He skipped quickly over his search and hit on the discussion he had with Rennie. “He gave me a memory mouse. It's a weird thing Pack blood does. Basically all our cells are mimicking the human body.” He pointed to his forearm. “This patch of cells are mimicking skin and pores and hair. If
someone cut a chunk out of my arm, the cells can't survive as skin and pores. They need oxygen, and a way to absorb nutrients. So they communicate with each other, pick a form, and convert into it. The animal they form depends on the size. A small chunk becomes a mouse.”

“A large chunk, say a heart, liver, or brain, becomes a ferret.”

Ukiah nodded. “Yeah. It has to be something we've handled, something we know down to a genetic level. Janet Haze kept ferrets, so her cells had that genetic blueprint to follow. But the cells aren't too happy being split off. A mouse is easier to kill off than a human. A memory wants to rejoin with the main body.”

“Which is why your Schenley Park mouse was so friendly and snuck back in the first chance it got. Why do you keep calling them memories?”

Ukiah sighed, scrubbing at his face. Max's questions were unfolding answers in his brain, huge and complex and instantly realized. It felt so weird to know something without learning it. Worse was trying to explain, because he couldn't just show the path he took to find the answer. “Our memories are genetic, which I guess is a good thing because our cells move around. What was a brain cell today might be a heart cell tomorrow, if I was shot in the chest. Actually, human brain cells are fairly fickle things to start with. Rennie gave me enough genetic material that my immune system could whomp the heck out of it and still have something to absorb. Basically the mouse was viral DNA, and not very happy about being handed over to me. There was a small biological war in my system, but we came to a truce, and I got the Pack's memories attached to my normal DNA sequence.”

“Yeah. Right. If your memories are genetic, why did you forget your fight with Haze?”

“It takes hours for memories to be coded down to the genetic level. The information is collected in the bloodstream, and the blood cells handle actual coding and dissemination, so eventually all the cells have the same memories. If you start to bleed, well, it's a crap shoot as to what you lose memory wise, and what you get back, if you can recollect the lost blood via a mouse. That's what happened to me in Schenley Park. I lost memories and got a lot back, but there's details missing. Everything slightly fuzzy. The cells holding that information probably died off, unable to survive being outside my body.”

“So you have all of Rennie Shaw's memories?”

“And Coyote's, who had infected Rennie, and my father's memories, who had infected Coyote, and his father's.” Eons of memories threaten to cascade out. The older memories were dark things, with no hint of emotions, no thoughts beyond eating and reproducing. Coyote's life as a true wolf was more comprehensible than the early generations of the Ontongard. It was like suddenly being able to communicate with pond scum, able to hear them think out budding, growing, stretching out to cover all available surface.

“You okay?”

“I think so. Basically, the Ontongard came to Earth to replace all life. My father, Prime, was a mutation in that he was an individual. He sabotaged the main invasion ship. He and another of his kind, called Hex, came to Earth on a scout ship, something he tried to stop but couldn't. They landed in Oregon, hundreds of years ago. There was nothing there but Native Americans with bows and arrows to stop them. With the technology on the scout ship, Hex
could have still wiped out everything on the planet. So Prime blew up the ship. Only Hex figured out what was happening, and killed Prime. In sheer desperation, my father infected Coyote, to carry on the battle.”