Bitter Waters (33 page)

“What did the demons say?”

“Well, it's hard to piece together anything. Even in their own language they talk in shorthand, and often do this weird duet, like they're reading from the same script. We call it test patterning. Ice says that once they confirm they're on the same page, they then talk about differences in the way they're thinking.”

He shook Parity to get him back to the point. “What did they say?”

“They talked about using a machine to force the nephilim to the correct form. One said that Huey had been keyed with
the nephilim and was now a detriment to them.”
Detriment
?
Useless
was probably a truer translation. “The second one said if the nephilim could be corrupted, then the founts should be fetched, and the first said that so far the nephilim proved to be malleable but unassailable. They agreed in duet that if the nephilim couldn't be corrupted, they were far too dangerous to them and had to be destroyed. At first we thought they meant kill the nephilim, but then we realized that they were using plural verbs, whereas when they talked about the nephilim they used only singular.”

The confusion lay in the fact that Ukiah kept changing in number. At the time of the conversation, he could have been in as many as four to a hundred different pieces. Hex had stolen three mice as Ukiah bled to death. Ukiah had awoken surrounded by a horde of mice that the Pack gathered up and moved with his dead body. He had been one but many. The Ontongard would use the singular to mean “the breeder” in a general sense, and “this piece of the breeder” but plural to mean “all parts of the breeder.”

“No, no.” Ukiah groaned. “You misunderstood. You got it all wrong. The br—the nephilim is one, but can be broken down, just like the demons, into lots of parts. It can be singular and plural. They were talking about destroying the nephilim because it's dangerous. The Ae—the founts can't hurt the demons.”

“They can't?”

“Not without killing off everything on the planet, which is what Core might do by mistake. I need to find him. I need to stop him.”

“I—I—I don't know anything. I don't know where Core is, and I don't know if you're telling the truth.”

 

All the candles in the master bedroom had drowned out while he had questioned Parity in the hall. He dragged Parity now into the master bathroom and tied him up with a second set of silk drapery tiebacks. He told Parity before leaving about the dangers of Blissfire, but that seemed to do no more good than to salve Ukiah's conscious. He was gagging Parity when he thought to ask, “Where the hell are we anyhow?”

“Eden Court. Well, actually, it's Elm Court; Core renamed it. We're in Butler.”

Butler? Butler was only ten miles northeast of his moms!

Ukiah searched Parity hoping for a cell phone. He found no phone on the boy, nor money and ID; a wallet-sized photo of Socket was the sole contents of Parity's pockets.

Ukiah considered waking Ping and asking her where Core planned to do the Cleansing ritual, but he found he couldn't even look at her sleeping form without his fragile control slipping. He went out into the clean air of the hall, returned for the gun he'd forgotten in the sink, and started off again. Reluctantly he headed downstairs to find out who was in the wine cellar and what Core had done to them.

 

Eden Court was a massive home, easily twice the size of Max's mansion. Off this second-floor hallway, there were six bedrooms alone. In his drug-fuddled condition, he made a wrong turn, and ended up in another corner of the house, with a set of five smaller bedrooms, apparently once belonging to servants. Finally he found steps leading to the first floor, and stalked through that maze of large, sprawling, interconnected rooms, occasionally silently backtracking to avoid a lone cult member focused on packing.

He found plenty of wall jacks, but no phones, as if Core had stripped them out of the house. Was it to keep his flock from calling out? Max said that cults kept their members isolated.

The house, he finally realized, was built around the center courtyard. A full wing of dining rooms of various sizes eventually led to a massive L-shaped kitchen with industrial appliances. He tried doors branching off the kitchen, looking for the wine cellar. The first opened into a walk-in pantry; he grabbed a jar of peanut butter to eat as he explored. Peeling off the protection foil released the heavenly aroma of roasted peanuts, making him drool. He scooped out half a cup with a finger and gobbled it down. It took half the jar before he could move on, licking clean his finger.

The second door led to a hallway with a laundry room and the empty garages off of it. Ukiah stole a clean pair of boxers
and black sweatpants out of the laundry, and stalked back to the kitchen feeling more stable now that he was dressed, armed, and eating.

Across the kitchen, the last door led down into the basement. The smell of fresh blood and C4 wafted up on the cool air. He crept down the stairs into the low, vast space crowded with water heaters, furnaces, and a jumble of exposed pipes and ductwork. Apparently the great house required multiples of everything.

Worktables were tucked between the hulking furnaces, cluttered with electronic boards and wires, and wreathed with the odor of C4. Zip apparently had been working on more bombs before his death. Ukiah wondered what the cult planned to blow up.

One of the furnaces hissed with the sudden intake of natural gas, making Ukiah startle. With a slight cough of the gas igniting, it roared to life.

Keep focused, he told himself. Sooner or later, someone was going to notice Parity is missing from the hallway and find Ping tied up.

Ukiah followed the blood trail to a solid door with a prominent lock. An old-fashioned key was in the lock, dangling a new piece of string and a little white disk neatly labeled
WINE CELLAR
. The door was locked. Ukiah unlocked it and cracked open the door.

Blood scent flooded out, pouring over him.

From the door, Ukiah could see that the wine racks were empty. Core must have sold the bottles to raise money, or somehow drank it during the six months since he stole the house and child away from Parity's unsuspecting parents. If this cellar held a fraction of the wine that Max had put away, then the cult had carried off a fortune.

Just inside the door sat a clear plastic box studded with Taser-like probes. He recognized it from Kittanning's memories; it was the torture device Hex had used to transform the blood mouse into an infant. Ukiah controlled a snarl. Core must have used it to kill the two babies—but how? The machine had been designed to cause pain, not death.

A soft moan made him take the key out of the lock and slip
cautiously into the room. A lot of blood had been spilt in the room; the smell raising his hackles. He stalked through the empty wine racks, growling softly.

He caught another scent and stilled.

Ontongard.

The only sound was that of tiny claws against plastic, and something large, breathing heavily.

Alien thoughts touched his mind.

. . .Pack. . . Pack. . . hate. . .hate. . . death. . . Pack. . .

The minds were many, and small, and stupid, filled with frustrated anger and a sense of being trapped.

Trapped? He crept downward, gripping Parity's pistol tightly, wishing for a flamethrower and twenty Dog Warriors at his back.

Against the far wall was a set of shelves holding plastic cages designed for small rodents. Black rats with hate-filled eyes scratched frantically at the sides of the cages, trying to reach him, hating him, wanting him dead.

Ukiah focused on the source of the blood, the heavy breathing from something large. Did Core have a larger Get hidden down here, along with the memories? Sniffing, he found the scent, and recognized the source.

“Hutchinson!” He hurried to the federal agent.

Hutchinson curled on the floor, clasping something tight to him. It took a moment for Ukiah to realize how the man was hurt.

Core had hacked off Hutchinson's hand at the wrist.

Beside Hutchinson was a meat cleaver buried in a thick block of wood. On the table beyond, in one of the rodent cages, was Hutchinson's severed hand—just in case it changed form. Next to the cage sat Hutchinson's car keys, ID case and wallet, empty of money and credit cards. Wallet-sized photos of Socket littered the floor. Ukiah realized that the photograph he found on Parity had been what the boy had shown Hash, saying “he had this,” which made Hash drag Core out of the bedroom. Hutchinson had saved Ukiah at a terrible cost to himself.

Hutchinson had made a tourniquet from his belt and clenched it tight. He was damp and chilled, breathing shallow
and weak. He jerked when Ukiah touched him, his eyes flying open.

“Easy, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here to help you.”

“Wolf Boy?”

“I'm going to get you out of this.”

“The bastard. He laughed at me and bragged about sleeping with Christa. He called her his whore. Bastard called my Christa a whore. He said that she was pregnant once already, and they didn't know which of the men had knocked her up, but she lost the baby.”

Ukiah felt a stab of guilt; the Blissfire would have aborted any fetus that wasn't his. Suddenly he flashed to Ping writhing under him as he loosed his seed into her. He groaned in realization that the drug was busily engineering a pregnancy.

Hutchinson had gone unconscious again.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit.” He tore his mind away from Ping and forced himself to focus on the federal agent. He had to get the man to the hospital, and he should take the severed hand, just in case they could save it. How? He eyed the car keys sitting next to the cage; if the cultists hadn't taken the keys, then Hutchinson's car should be nearby. Ukiah pocketed the keys, made the belt as secure as he could around the bloody stump, and hefted Hutchinson up into a fireman's carry. The fragile knit of Ukiah's collarbone protested, threatening to break under the pressure. Trying to ignore the pain, Ukiah picked up the cage holding Hutchinson's hand.

He had to get them both out before the cultists realized he was escaping.

 

The mansion sat on a hilltop with several acres of heavily treed gardens. Two heavily armed cultists patrolled the grounds, dressed in black, with IR goggles. Ukiah spotted them before they saw him, and ducked behind a low stone wall. On his shoulder, Hutchinson's weight was growing monstrous. He eased the man onto the ground and lay beside him, panting from the effort of carrying him up the basement stairs and out of the house.

He tracked the cultists by sound and scent as a storm wind tossed the dark shaggy heads of the trees over him.

A tiny sharp voice came over their headsets, too muffled for Ukiah to understand, and the one answered with a gruff “What is it? Okay. Understood.” After a moment of some silent communication between the two men, they purposely stalked off in opposite directions.

Had someone found Ping and Parity? Did the guards know where he was and were trying to circle him? He strained to keep track of them over the rushing wind. They seemed to move around the corner of the mansion and continue.

He had to risk moving. His chances weren't going to get any better. He heaved Hutchinson back onto this shoulder, and stumbled through the trees to the edge of the property. The street was empty of cars except those parked in driveways. Ukiah dropped to his knees, trembling with exhaustion.

Where was Hutchinson's car? Ukiah couldn't spot the white rental the agent was driving earlier. Had he swapped rental cars? Ukiah fumbled out the car keys, and hit the unlock button. Down the street, parked in a driveway, a red sedan flipped on its lights.

It was a relief to ease Hutchinson into the passenger seat and seat belt him in. The dashboard clock showed that it was one in the morning. Ukiah felt like he'd lived a lifetime in the last twenty-four hours.

He made four blind turns until he suddenly hit East Brady Street and recognized it. After that it was only a mile to Butler Memorial Hospital. He drove up to the ambulance-unloading zone and turned off the car. He sat there, shaking, trying to summon strength to get up and out of the car.

An orderly came out to investigate, opening the driver's door. “Hey, dude, are you okay? You're not allowed to park here if you're not hurt.”

“My friend. They cut off his hand. I need a phone to call the police.”

The orderly yelped and ran around the other side of the car, yelling, “I need help out here!”

Wearily, Ukiah undid his seat belt and climbed out. He heard a muffled explosion, and turned; thus he saw the
fireball as it bloomed on the far hillside, roiling upward bright orange and bloodred. The sound hit him, and a second later the shock wave riding a hot buffet of winds followed; it shattered windows in bright clear twinkling of falling glass. In all directions came the howls of car alarms, and then the wail of the Butler Fire Department sirens.

Butler Memorial Hospital, Butler, Pennsylvania
Friday, September 17, 2004

From the air, as the Lifeflight helicopter rose from the Butler Hospital helipad, it was clear that the stately mansion was indeed engulfed in flames. Ukiah stared at the destruction in sick bewilderment. Had Core left the bomb to kill everyone after maiming Hutchinson? Or had the cultists found Ping and Parity, freed them and fled, setting off the bomb to cover their tracks. Or had the cultists, finding Ukiah gone, simply chosen to die?

Despite everything, he hoped Ping and Parity had survived.

The level one trauma center at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh could do the delicate surgery needed in an attempt to reattach the agent's hand. After Ukiah explained that the same people that cut off Hutchinson's hand were also the ones that just fire-bombed their own house, the emergency doctors decided to send Ukiah with Hutchinson. Apparently the doctors felt that moving a possible target of madmen out of the area would be a good thing.

The Butler staff had put Ukiah on a glucose drip, and his body elected to sleep until the helicopter arrived.

 

The emergency-room staff had made good their promise to call Max; his partner waited at the end of the ramp leading to Mercy's raised helipad as the helicopter came in for a landing.
Hutchinson had been unloaded first, sucking most of the emergency staff with him. Max trailed behind Ukiah's stretcher as they brought it into the hospital and stayed back until they were satisfied that Ukiah was stable and his injuries light. Then another trauma claimed the staff's attention and Ukiah was able to sit up.

“Are you okay?” Max caught hold of him, and hugged him hard. Ukiah sagged against Max, relieved beyond words to have him there. “We've been worried sick since the police found your bike smashed on the turnpike. When they called to say they were flying you here, I was worried you'd show up in pieces.”

“I'm a little shaky.” Ukiah pulled out the long IV needle from his arm. “Did you get hold of Indigo?”

“Yes, she's on her way to Butler but she wants you to call with more details. What I had to pass on was fairly sketchy: the cult hacked a hand off of Hutchinson and blew up a mansion.”

“That's the size of it.” Ukiah slid off the stretcher. “Let's get out of here before they can connect monitors up to me and take blood samples.”

Sam waited with the Hummer that was illegally parked out in front of the main entrance. Ukiah wearily climbed into the backseat, pleased to note that between the IV and sleep, the last of the Invisible Red had worn off. The only alluring thing about Sam was the fragrant Tupperware container she handed him, along with a fork. “Oh, kid, you look like hell. Here, we emptied the fridge for you.”

“How the hell did you get in Butler?” Max slid in behind the wheel. “Were they the ones that kidnapped Kittanning?”

Ukiah peeled the lid off the Tupperware dish; inside was an odd assortment of take-out Chinese, fresh fruit, and expensive cheese. “I don't even know where to begin.”

“When we talked to you a few hours ago, we figured out that William Harris was probably Billy Bob, and that the Temple probably had Kittanning, the Ae, and perhaps the two other babies, but not why.”

Ukiah grunted around a mouthful of General Tso's Chicken. “You're going to hate why.” He chewed, trying to
think of a way to explain everything he'd learned. “Eleven or twelve years ago, Core—Harris—was on top of his world. He was a small-town preacher's kid, an all-around popular guy. Then he graduated from high school and had to deal with the real world. He didn't cope well, and while an EMT, started killing accident victims as part of an insane plan to see the face of God in the eyes of the dying.”

Max swore vehemently and started up the Cherokee. “Well, that explains why he wasn't popular with the ambulance crews.”

“Then one day,” Ukiah continued, “Core saw a Get come back to life. He lost whatever hold he had on reality. He took off for California to get far away from the Ontongard and ended up in prison where he met Goodman.”

“Who taught him violence and sexual deviancy,” Sam said.

“Yeah. He did his time in prison, and then came back home a changed man. He gathered up his old Bible study group, and took them hunting Ontongard. Any reservations his friends had about killing were blown away when the Gets came back from the dead or splintered down into rats and so forth. He fed his friends lines about being holy warriors, and they ate it up. They put up a Web site to draw in other people looking for meaning in their life, and the Temple of New Reason was born.”

“What a lure,” Max said. “To be superheroes or at least Buffy the Vampire Slayer; kicking ass with no guilt involved.”

“Two important things happened fairly quick afterward. The first was that they connected with Ice, who talks them into moving to Boston and going underground. That's when they dumped the public Web site and went covert. The second was something led them back to Iron Mountain. Either they came across information on Omega Pharmaceuticals being one of the Ontongard dummy companies, or Zlotnikov, alias Zip, finally connected Hex with the password he overheard, or maybe they learned something while wiretapping the Ontongard. Whatever. The Temple staged a raid on Iron Mountain using Zlotnikov's information and stole the Ae, leaving
behind a bomb so they'd know when the Ontongard discovered that the Ae are missing. It takes the Temple a few years, but they get the first Ae working. Luckily, it's Hu-ae.

“By now they're short on money, so they use Hu-ae to create Invisible Red. Just like Goodman lured Eve out of the mall and into his car, Core starts seducing wealthy people like Socket. Once again he nails the deal by having true monsters to kill, but he adds in other brainwashing techniques, topped off with incredible sex. Even Hash falls under the combination.”

“How does coming back to Pittsburgh to kidnap babies work in?” Max turned onto Bigelow Boulevard, and they swept along the hillside, looking down at the Strip District and the Allegheny River beyond.

“If you kill a Get and burn them before they can transform, then the residue left looks human. We saw that with Janet Haze in June. The Temple's burn site was found in Massachusetts, so they had to flee the area before they were connected to the killings. I'm guessing—from what we found on the Web site—they went to Buffalo because that's where the mother ship was going to land.”

“In Buffalo?” Sam cried.

Max snapped his fingers. “The geological maps and the Niagara energy grid.”

“Yeah. Remind me to send some of the Pack up to see if the Temple cleaned out all the dens in that area.”

“Why would the Ontongard land their ship in upstate New York? Why not some place remote—like Africa?” Sam asked.

“Because Hex is in the United States, and doesn't like to travel.” Ukiah finished the food and resealed the lid. “It puts him at mercy of the elements and human beings.”

“And there's Niagara Falls for power,” Max said. “I wouldn't be surprised if Hoover Dam was their backup landing site.”

“Perhaps. But all hell lets loose in Pittsburgh. The Dog Warriors stumbled onto Hex's plan and killed Janet Haze's supervisor, who was a Get. Hex, in trying to salvage the plan, infected Janet Haze. She lost the remote key and got herself
killed. Hex involved the FBI while trying to recover the key. Indigo raided several dens, and the Pack made sure those Gets stayed dead, leaving Hex shorthanded. All that means Hex probably pulled his Gets out of Buffalo, leaving the cult nothing to fight.”

“And we blow up the mother ship,” Max added. “And kill Hex, so everything goes quiet, as far as the cult is concerned.”

Ukiah nodded. “I think Core was planning to move to Butler already and might have been just waiting for Parity's parents to clear out of their house. All things considered, I think Core sees Pittsburgh as the origin of the demons, not Oregon.”

Max stopped for a red light. “If your prey goes suddenly silent, I imagine you get fairly paranoid.”

It had the ring of profound truth. “Yes, I think you're right. They mistranslate something Hex says to mean that the Ae can kill the demons en masse and that becomes Core's top priority.”

Max glanced in the rearview mirror at him, a look full of worry. “Can they?”

“No. Trying to will only make the Ae more deadly, but Core doesn't realize it.”

“Shit.”

“In the same conversation, the cult mistranslated ‘breeder' to mean nephilim—the offspring of angels mating with humans.” Ukiah sagged back in the seat, trying to piece together the events. “Most likely, Gunter had a photo in a local newspaper, so they raided his studio for everything he shot that day and then some. The pictures found on Zip clearly showed that a baby was recovered from the airport terminal, which confirmed the nephilim theory in Core's mind. He assumed that Kittanning was turned over to Child Youth Services.”

“With their skills,” Max said, “the cult could have hacked CYS for the list of infants in foster care without anyone being the wiser.”

Ukiah hadn't thought of that, but it made sense. “But none of the CYS kids are listed as found abandoned at the airport. So Core decides to kidnap all kids under a certain age and test them using the machine Hex used to make Kittanning a baby.
Then I came home and made the evening news. Core recognized me from the photos, Socket did a search to get my ‘home' address, and Goodman was ordered to kidnap Kittanning.”

“Only Goodman decided to ransom Kittanning,” Sam said. “Which gets him killed.”

Ukiah nodded. “Goodman's view of religion had nothing to do with demons and everything to do with his sexual obsessions, but he was broke and dependent on Core. The ransom would have given him the money he needed to leave Core. Sensing the double cross, Core had his people tap into the spy satellite and follow Goodman back to the farm.”

“That wouldn't have been too hard to do if Goodman was in communication with Core,” Max said. “Once he called in to Core, they could have traced the call back to Goodman's location and lock on to him.”

“After they got Kittanning,” Ukiah continued, “they tried to test him and he proved to be the one they were looking for by turning into a puppy.”

“A puppy!” Sam cried.

“A wolf dog puppy.” Ukiah measured the size with his hands. “So big.”

He told them about his failed attempt to rescue Kittanning and Hash's comments about Kittanning being recaptured. “Socket is taking Kittanning to Core, wherever he is, so he can key the Du-ae and do this Cleansing ritual. Parity told me that it had something to do with water.”

“Well, the Allegheny River comes within twenty miles of Butler through the city of Kittanning,” Max said. “Or he could be setting up at Lake Arthur, or Lake Erie.”

Lake Arthur was a small man-made lake just west of Butler, and Lake Erie was just over an hour's drive.

“Eve might know something,” Sam said.

“What?” Ukiah said.

“Think of it. Adam left everything he knew behind in California to join Core, and finds him fighting monsters. Pissed to hell, he breaks off with Core and tries to set up his own paradise. If he's like any other divorcee in the world, he's bitched like crazy to his new girlfriend about his ex.”

“Maggoty ideas,” Ukiah murmured, and then quoted back what Eve had said.
“In prison, Billy had crazy ideas, but they were small as fly eggs. It wasn't until these new friends of his filled him up with so much shit that the eggs became full maggots.
But Goodman had that backward. It was Core filling his friends up with crazy plans.”

Ukiah replayed in his mind the conversation with Eve, the broken little sex toy in the blackberry bushes, bruises blackening to the color of ripe berries. Neither that discussion nor the one Ukiah had with Indigo after her questioning of Eve held any clues of where Core could be holding the ritual. At this time of night, there would be no accessing the girl either.

There had been so little evidence at the farm. The cult had carefully picked over everything and taken away anything damning. The only thing left behind had been the mural. As he considered, he started to see the biblical symbolism that he missed before: the tree of knowledge, the tempting snake, and the forbidden fruit. He considered the other images in the painting. The mysterious leaves had been wormwood. There had been information on the Temple's Web site about the falling star called Wormwood. Ukiah realized that the “sun” in the upper left-hand corner had been a star, dropping the leaves of the plant of the same name down to the treelike object.

Suddenly Ukiah realized that the drawing hadn't been of a tree, but of the three rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers joining to create the Ohio River. Only in the painting, the wormwood leaves turned the Allegheny black as death shortly before the confluence.

“They're going to poison the Allegheny, which will take out the Ohio and the Mississippi, the whole way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” Ukiah said.

“What?” Max and Sam both cried.

Ukiah quoted back the Scripture related to the symbolism. “The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the water, because it was made bitter.”