Bitter Waters (27 page)

 

Ukiah and Rennie arrived at Iron Mountain shortly after noon. There was no signage at the entrance beyond the stylized company logo landscaped into a hillside. The employee parking lot was tucked back away from the road, and the drive leading down into the mines curved sharply beyond a guard
shack and barricade. If they hadn't known what to look for, it would have been simple to drive on by.

Ukiah stopped at the guard shack and tried for an unconcerned smile. They decided he would drive and talk, as he looked the more harmless of the two. He was in office casual of white oxford shirt and slacks. “Hi! This is Iron Mountain, isn't it?”

“What are you here for?” the female guard asked.

“We're with Omega Pharmaceuticals. Apparently they've been looking for some records down in the main office, and they think they might be in storage out here. We were sent out to pick up the things.”

“We have a service for that,” the guard said.

Ukiah managed to keep the wince off his face.

Rennie leaned over and said, “We don't have an agreement for your employees to handle our records.” Casual office clothes and a haircut did nothing to disguise the menace in Rennie; it was like engine grease, stained too deep into the skin to wash out.

“Hold on a minute.” She called on a radio and a few minutes later a SUV pulled up and a man got out.

“You two with Omega Pharmaceuticals?” He ignored the fact that Ukiah was driving and addressed Rennie as the obvious senior in age.

“For now,” Rennie said. “We're undergoing a merger at the end of the year with a Swiss company and undergoing a name change. We've done a lot of restructuring and layoffs, so no one knows what we have up here.”

“Normally our staff pulls whatever materials are needed and ships them directly to the office.”

“So we've been told.” Rennie lied as smoothly as Max could, building on what they could assume Hex would set up. “But according to our records, and our procedures, we don't allow nonemployees to handle our records and so we didn't sign any agreement with your company to allow access to what's in storage other than to maintain the space itself.”

“Let us check the vehicle and then meet me inside and we'll check you through.” He said it to mean
we'll check to see if you're bullshitting.

The inspection was thorough, checking through the back of the Cherokee, under seats, in glove boxes, and under the car. Afterward, Ukiah drove down a steep curving ramp into the monster maw of the mine entrance. Massive steel gates guarded over an opening approximately twenty feet high. To the right was a high-tech monitoring system. To the left, employees dropped off photo IDs as they passed through metal detectors on their way out.

Ukiah glanced at the metal detectors.
“Good call that they check for guns.”

Rennie grunted unhappily. They had hidden weapons in the Cherokee in hopes that they'd be able to drive it to the vault. It was a compromise that left them unarmed if they had to leave the SUV behind. Rennie only consented because of Alicia/Hex's rant on being surrounded by humans, and reluctantly since he didn't completely believe her. If the Ontongard had since taken over the complex, or Alicia had lied in the first place, they could be easily overwhelmed.

“We've done some digging into our records, and you're right. We don't write contracts like this but we inherited a few when Iron Mountain bought the facility. Omega Pharmaceuticals allow limited access only to their items in storage. You know, they've only been here three times in nearly fifty years.”

Ukiah nodded. “That's what we've been told.”

“We need photo IDs and to have you sign in. First, what's the password?”

It felt so wrong to say it. “I am Hex.”

 

They signed in, and needed to argue over the right to drive back to the vault. In the end, they followed a guard in a golf cart through a maze of two-lane roads, several intersections cryptically marked. The miners in the previous centuries had left massive pillars of stone, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, to hold up the twenty-foot ceiling. They passed where they were pouring a cement floor for a new vault and the great cement truck fit easily under the high ceiling. Floodlights dotted the roads like streetlights, and the columns had been spray-painted silver to reflect the light, but even then darkness
gathered in every corner. The air was chilled, sluggish, and dry. Most of the doors were marked only with letters and numbers. Some, though, had logos of large corporations and government branches. The guard stopped finally beside a red door, marked as Alicia said it would be, E-44.

Ukiah pulled into a small niche twenty feet farther down, trying to tuck the Cherokee out of the way. The guard stood jingling his key ring as Ukiah and Rennie got out and walked back to him. Just beyond the Cherokee, the tunnels reverted to something rougher and untouched from the mining days. A ventilation fan, painted red and two feet in circumference, roared as it fed fresh air into the tunnels. Even over the blast of surface air, Ukiah could smell water, which meant it had to be in vast amounts.

“I smell water,” he said to the guard, and Rennie nodded in agreement.

The guard looked startled and pointed back into darkness where the pavement gave way to rough floor. Dimly Ukiah made out a wall of clear plastic stapled to a freestanding door frame. “There's a five-acre lake over there where the miners broke into the aquifer level. Basically it's the level of rock you'd tap into if you drilled a well. We use it for our drinking water and the toilets. We got a certified water treatment plant behind that door there.” He pointed to a door nearest to the darkness. “And we go through like ten thousand gallons of water a day.”

Rennie glanced upward at the mountain over their head. “How do you get rid of the waste water this far down?”

“Pumper trucks come in daily.” The guard jingled his keys, now an obvious nervous habit. “I'm Mark Stewart.”

Ukiah shook his head and introduced himself. Rennie merely glared, too on edge to do so.

“This door is legendary,” Stewart said. “Omega was one of the first clients and yet no one entered the vault for half a century. Then one day, like five years ago, someone came.”

Ukiah turned to him sharply as it jarred wrongly. “Five?”

“Yeah, I had just started working here. In 1999. We made end of the world jokes about it.”

Ukiah glanced at Rennie.
“Alicia said ten years ago was the last time Hex was in.”

“We might be too late already.”

“Did they take things out of storage?” Ukiah asked the guard.

“Well, they came with a U-Haul truck. Said they wanted stuff from storage. I locked up, though, and everything looked the same as when I unlocked the vault. I'm not sure what they did.”

Stewart slotted the key into the door and turned it, opening the heavy steel door. The air was stale and cool. The room was basically ten by twenty feet deep and twenty feet high. The guard leaned in to turn on the lights, and fluorescent lights flickered on. There was nothing cavelike to the room, squared off, drywalled, and painted white, it seemed like any aboveground chamber except for the dry chill. In the far back corner sat four wooden crates of equal sizes, almost surreal in contrast, aged battered wood in the otherwise empty, stark room.

They were antique shipping crates, Ukiah recognized, from Wells Fargo when freight was moved by railroads and horse wagons. The wood still had traces of shipping labels from a hundred years ago. The four were now strung together via yellow plastic
DO NOT TOUCH
ribbon.

“No one has been in here since 1999?” Rennie asked.

“Well, we get in to check safety equipment.” Stewart pointed up at the sprinkler system that ran the length of the room. “And check the lighting and such. We don't touch items in storage.”

Ukiah and Rennie stalked across the room to the crates. They were larger than Ukiah expected—most likely the crates had layers of packing material protecting the equipment.

“If they're still inside,” Rennie murmured.

“Is something wrong?” Stewart asked.

“Perhaps,” Ukiah examined the box without touching it. At one time the lids had been nailed into place with old-fashioned rectangular-headed nails. These had been mostly pried up, leaving behind gaping rust-coated holes. It appeared that
the lids now rested lightly on top of the crates instead of being attached. “I would think they would have nailed the lids back on if they just opened to check on them.”

“Or taken the box,” Rennie said and stilled as he focused on the box.

“What do you remember about the people that were here five years ago?” Ukiah asked.

“What? You think they weren't Omega employees?” Stewart walked over to join them. “They wore Omega uniforms.”

“Uniforms?” Ukiah asked. The Ontongard wouldn't have bothered with that deep a deception.

“Hmmm, you're right!” Stewart said. “The lids are just lying on.” He reached out to lift the nearest one up.

Ukiah felt Rennie start to move, accompanied with a wordless roar of protest, his motion intending to check Stewart. Ukiah was in Rennie's way, and the Pack leader changed his intent even as Ukiah turned, trying to carry out Rennie's plan. The smell of C4, released by the opening of the lid, hit him along with the awareness that this was Rennie's darkest fear, a trap. Later he would be able to step through the memory, finding the click of the trigger released even before Rennie's shout. At that moment, he was aware of only Rennie jerking him off his feet and dragging him backward even as he reached for the unsuspecting guard.

Then there was noise: a massive, bone-deep sound.

It struck him microseconds before the flame and shards of wood and a hard hand of displaced air.

Rennie's initial movement took them halfway to the door. The slapping hand smashed them the rest of the way. They hit the ground hard, Rennie on top of him, shielding him from the worst of the damage. Their clothes were burning and their flesh writhed, trying to escape the agony. Ukiah rolled to his knees, realized that Rennie was unconscious or dead, and picked him up. There was another deep bellow as the second crate exploded, set off by the first. He raced the oncoming wall of flame out into the tunnel. A hundred running steps, and he flung himself at the wooden door guarding the lake.

The door shattered, spilling him and Rennie into the shockingly cold water. The third bomb went off while they
were submerged. The shock wave slammed through the water, a stunning roar. Ukiah floundered on the brink of unconsciousness.

What an irony, to drown in the middle of fire.

He hit bottom, though, and pushed off and found the surface in the cave darkness. Sirens wailed from somewhere in the tunnel system. Flames and black smoke shot through the open door, and Rennie stayed an unmoving weight in Ukiah's arms.

Iron Mountain
Thursday, September 16, 2004

Ukiah's full panic dropped to only partial terror when Rennie groaned softly in pain. The fact that he didn't have to smuggle a dead body out of the high-security facility helped relieve some of his fear. Ukiah slogged ashore as the Iron Mountain's fire team dealt with the fire with surprising efficiency. Black smoke coiled around the ceiling, and the great roaring fan beside the lake had reversed, sucking out the smoke.

An employee spotted him and shouted, “We've got wounded here!”

“I'm fine, but my friend is hurt.” Ukiah dodged the man's effort to stop him and carried Rennie to the Cherokee. “I need to take him to the hospital.”

“We'll call for an ambulance,” the employee said.

Ukiah juggled Rennie's limp body to get the Cherokee's passenger door open. “No, no, it will be faster if I take him. I think he's dying.”

The head of security came out of the smoke, coughing. “You! What the hell happened?”

“I'm not sure. Someone swapped our stuff out and left bombs behind,” Ukiah said. “I don't know who. I don't know why. Rennie is hurt bad; I need to get him to a hospital.”

“Where's Stewart?”

Ukiah squinted at him in confusion until he remembered that the guard with them had introduced himself as “Mark
Stewart.” Ukiah looked back at the flames licking out of the chamber. “Oh, shit! He's still in there!” He flashed back to the moment before the bomb went off. “He opened the crate and triggered the bomb. He took the blast full on.”

Most likely the poor man had died instantly.

“How did you get out?”

“My friend carried me out. He shielded me from the worst of it.” Ukiah motioned to Rennie. “I've got to get him to the hospital. I think he's dying.”

The head of security looked at the heinously burned Rennie and swore.

“Let me take him to the hospital. I can get him there in the time it will take an ambulance just to get here.”

“Fine, fine, let me get you through the front gate.”

 

His mothers' home was the nearest safe harbor. The house was empty and still. Ukiah carried Rennie up to his bathroom, put him into the empty tub, and then raided the kitchen. Judging by the food crowding the refrigerator in strange dishes, and the many human scents lingering in the house, Mom Jo's large extended family had rallied to her side. On the kitchen table was last night's
Butler Eagle,
the headline reading “Second Baby Found Dead: Local Baby Taken.” Pinned to the refrigerator by magnets was a
MISSING
flyer with Kittanning's photograph. Beside it was a crayon drawing by Cally of an empty crib labeled in crudely copied letters “taken.”

He took the food upstairs and used it to coax Rennie back to consciousness.

“Where are we?”
Rennie felt like a supernova of pain against Ukiah's awareness, the burnt skin cells peeling off in sheets.

Ukiah tried to mentally distance himself from Rennie's pain. “My parents'. Drink this.” “This” being a quart of orange juice, eight raw eggs, and a bottle of chocolate syrup mixed together. “Where are the Dogs?”

“What day is it? What the hell happened?” Rennie gulped the drink down hungrily.

“We found a nasty surprise at Iron Mountain.”

“Where?”

“I'll explain later.” Ukiah gave up on trying to get information from Rennie. “We're safe now.”

Rennie grunted and dropped the empty bottle over the edge of the tub. “More.”

They split Uncle Johnny's homemade deer jerky, Aunt Kat's egg salad, a package of kielbasa, and an apricot Jell-O and cream cheese salad donated by one cousin or other following the family's traditional recipe. The last was solely a comfort food for Ukiah. Afterward, Ukiah cut away the wet burned clothes from Rennie, peeling off burned dead flesh with the cloth. Rennie's back was a blistering, bleeding mass thick with splinters of ancient wood. Ukiah used tweezers to pick out the largest pieces of wood—Rennie's body would eject the smaller pieces. When Ukiah had been healed back from being shot by Hex, he woke covered with the shotgun pellets.

When Ukiah had done all he could, he fed a jar of peanut butter to Rennie, exhausting his mom's ready supply of protein. “That's it. Go to sleep.”

“Are you safe?” Rennie's thoughts were already clouded with sleep.

“Yes. Go to sleep.”

Ukiah sat on the tiled floor beside the bathtub, hurt and heartsick, watching Rennie sleep, ashen and deadly still. His mind, though, was locked on those last few moments, the guard alive and unharmed beside him, smelling of Old Spice cologne, standing near enough that Ukiah could sense the heat of his body.

And now he was dead.

They had been so focused on Kittanning that they blinded themselves to the danger. He should have called Max and Sam. He should have told Indigo about the trip to Iron Mountain. Maybe one of them could have guessed that the trap left wouldn't ensnare, like he and Rennie thought it would, but simply kill.

“The ‘what ifs' will drive you insane if you let them,”
Max had always said, and Ukiah knew that it was never so very true as now. But an innocent man was dead, blasted away.

There was nothing he could do, and Kittanning was still missing.

He got up to change.

He stripped out of his damp clothes, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and rescued what was in the pockets of his wet slacks. His wallet was a soggy mass that he dropped onto his nightstand. His phone was dead, killed sometime between the bomb blast and the swim in the underground lake. He called Max on the house line.

Max answered, apparently reading the phone number on his display and leaping to a conclusion. “Is something wrong, Lara?”

“It's me. I've got a mess,” Ukiah said and recounted what had happened at Iron Mountain.

“Iron Mountain?” Max swore. “Zlotnikov worked there. It was one of the first jobs he held down after dropping out of college.” He read dates off to Ukiah.

“That's ten years ago, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn, he was there when Hex's Get picked up the remote key. Hex set up password codes instead of the photo IDs and such that they normally use out there. Zlotnikov could have heard the code ten years ago, and then five years later, given it to cult members dressed as Omega Pharmaceuticals employees to steal the machines and leave bombs.”

“If the cult is making Invisible Red, then it's the cult that has Kittanning,” Max said. “And vice versa.”

“But where?”

“Damned if I know. If they're from the area, though, they know it well. We've talked to half a dozen classmates already . . . oh, damn!”

“What?”

“William Harris. Billy!” Max snapped. “What's Harris's middle name? Robert?”

“Robert.” Sam's voice was audible through the phone.

Max swore. “Hutchinson is somewhere in front of us on this. He's talked to the same people we interviewed today. If the cult has the machines, we're going to have fun getting to them before the federal government gets them.”

“Only if Hutchinson can find the cult before we do.”

“I'll put Alicia, Chino, and Janey on this,” Max said. “One of his classmates might know where he is.”

Ukiah frowned, missing a link. “Zlotnikov? He's dead.”

“Billy Bob!” Max said. “William
Robert
Harris—Billy Bob Harris—was the popular minister's son that befriended Zlotnikov! According to the yearbook, his nickname in school was ‘Will,' or ‘Iron Will,' or ‘God's Will.' He was in a half-dozen clubs: war games, ROTC, first responders, computer club, and a prayer group. We made a quick stab at tracking him down earlier, but let it drop when we hit pay dirt on others that graduated with Zlotnikov.”

“Hutchinson knew Harris's name when he came to the office.”

Max thought a moment and said, “That's right. I forgot that.”

“Why did he miss the connection?”

“He might not have,” Max said. “He might not be sharing everything he knows.”

Ukiah heard his mom Lara's Neon pull up, the slam of doors, and Cally's high voice. “My mom just got home. I need to catch her before she finds Rennie.”

“Okay. Call me back when things are settled there. We'll start looking for Harris.”

“Be careful,” Ukiah said. “If he's Adam's Billy Bob, he's deadly.”

 

Cally was first through the kitchen door, slamming it open and squealing at the sight of him. She glanced quickly around the room and then rushed for the living room. Ukiah snagged her first, wincing as it pulled tight on the burned flesh of his back.

“Hey, hey, hey!” he said as she wriggled violently in his grasp.

Mom Lara came from the door, eyes hopeful. “Did you find him?”

“No,” he said. “Rennie's been hurt and I needed to take him someplace safe.”

Cally went still in his hold. “Kittanning isn't here?”

“No, pumpkin, we haven't been able to get him back yet,” Ukiah said. “One of my friends is upstairs in my bathtub. He's hurt and needs you to be quiet. Can you do that?” He put her down. “Why don't you go out and play? I need to talk to Mommy.”

Lara stood motionless as he approached her, arms wrapped tight around her.

“Are you okay?” he asked, rubbing a hand along her shoulder and back. When she nodded, he told her, in as few as possible sentences, about how the questioning of Alicia had led to the storage site, and the bombs left as a trap. Then, because she still seemed so distant, he said, “I'm sorry about bringing Rennie here. I don't know if the offices are being watched, and he's hurt too much to defend himself. He should be fine in a few hours, and we'll leave then.”

Lara sobbed then and caught hold of him. “I wasn't going to cry. I wasn't. I could have been the strong mother, if you'd just be the little lost boy.”

“I've got my own little lost boy to be strong for,” he told her, which only made her cry more.

 

When Lara had calmed down enough to start lasagna for dinner, Ukiah returned to the attic to check on Rennie and changed into a dry T-shirt, underwear, and riding leathers. Sooner or later, Iron Mountain would check with Butler Memorial Hospital; once they learned Ukiah never arrived with Rennie, they'd probably report both men and the Cherokee to the police. Now was not the time Ukiah wanted to be answering difficult questions; he was going to switch vehicles to his motorcycle.

He was pleased to see that Rennie was recovering swiftly; the Pack leader would be back on his feet in a few hours. Unfortunately it left him without a backup. Picking up his jacket, he trotted back downstairs.

Max called him back just as he hit the last step. “Have you turned on the television?”

“No.” Ukiah carried the phone into his moms' living room and turned on their modest set. It showed a helicopter view of
smoke pouring out of the hillside of Iron Mountain. “The mine explosion on Channel Eleven?”

“It's on all the local channels. They're trying to decide if it's a terrorist strike. Apparently there are lots of government and banking records stored in the mine.”

Ukiah flipped through the local stations, wincing at what he found. As Max claimed, reporters from the four or five major stations were speculating on which terrorist group could be responsible and why. He muted the sound and let the images continue to play. “Have you gotten a lead on Will Harris/Billy Bob, yet?”

“No one was at the manse, but one of the neighbors was home and we talked with her,” Max said. “She had the television on and that's where we spotted the reports on Iron Mountain. Apparently, Billy was a middle-aged surprise for his parents; his father, the preacher, retired right after Billy graduated from high school, and his folks didn't have the money to send him to college. He had some EMT training, so he joined an ambulance crew.”

“Did he work with anyone we know?”

“I'm not sure at the moment. The neighbor used little town connections: girlfriend's second cousin's in-laws. You know how it is—lots of interconnected relationships but rarely a full name. It sounds like Billy didn't fit in well though, the rest of the crew seemed to think he was an arrogant little son of a bitch whose sloppiness was going to get him fired or thrown in prison. Then he suffered a mental breakdown and started to talk about seeing demons and angels. His parents were trying to get him diagnosed when he vanished and showed up in California, arrested for assault and battery.”

“Which is how he met Adam Goodman.”

“So it seems,” Max said. “The neighbor only knew that he came back to Pennsylvania, gathered up his old friends, and they moved to New England.”

“What's in New England?”