Dog Warrior (3 page)

“Well, one day Magic Boy was murdered.” Ukiah pulled a cleaver from the knife block beside him. “He was killed with an axe.”

Atticus watched with horror as the Dog Warrior hacked the helpless doll apart, reducing it to bits.

“It was quite horrible,” Ukiah said sadly, letting the cleaver drop. “All the parts ran in terror. Some went this way.” A leg rolled into a ball that went right. “Some went that way.” The head rolled to the left. “The pieces scattered away, never to be Magic Boy again.”

Ukiah rolled the dismembered torso across the counter to Atticus and then looked at him with the feral stare. “This was you.” He leaned back and pointed at the severed leg in front of him. “This was me.” His story done, Ukiah ate the scattered pieces of dough.

“That,” Kyle whispered, “is profoundly creepy.”

Ru moved the cleaver and the knife block out of the Dog Warrior's range.

Atticus stood and walked away. If it weren't for Ru and Kyle, he would have walked far, far away. He settled for prowling the downstairs. This was too much, too soon. This was like the first time he watched his blood turn into mice. This was like the first time he knew for sure that he had died and come back just by the terror on Ru's face when he woke up. This was like the time he blew off the fingers of his right hand and watched them grow back over a week's time. This was one of those huge mind-altering experiences.

He tried to get a handle on it. He and the boy had been one person. The boy was once his leg or his arm. Someone chopped off his leg and it became the boy. He had a brother. One that bled mice, came back from the dead, and aged oddly too. He wasn't alone.

In the kitchen, the conversation continued without him.

“I need to use a phone,” Ukiah was saying.

“The phone hasn't been connected yet,” Ru lied. “It should be hooked up tomorrow.”

“What about cell phones?” Ukiah asked.

“Sorry, I forgot to charge mine,” Ru said. “And Atticus doesn't own one.”

Atticus glanced back, feeling slightly guilty; as usual, though, Ru was taking all weirdness in stride, calmly putting out food for the boy while fending off requests that could prove awkward.

Undeterred, the boy looked questioningly to Kyle.

“I-I-I forgot mine at home.” Kyle made a bad show of patting his pockets.

There was a reason they kept Kyle out of sight.

Sighing, Ukiah wearily laid his head on the counter. Obviously the food was hitting bottom, and his body was focusing on putting it to good use. He'd be dead asleep in minutes, waking up only when his body burned through all the food he just ate. “I need to call . . .” He yawned deeply. “Let everyone know I'm okay.”

“I'll plug my phone in after we get you in bed,” Ru
promised, clearing away dirty dishes. “You can use it when you wake up.”

“Hmm.” Ukiah didn't move.

“Where should we put him?” Ru asked Kyle. “How many bedrooms are upstairs?”

“There's one downstairs.” Kyle made a face over Ukiah's head and pointed urgently downward.

“
Down
is easier than up,” Ru studied the boy for a moment before saying, “He's asleep already. Atty, can you carry him?”

Atticus realized that he had actually felt the boy falling asleep; the fading of a
presence
making him aware of its existence.

“Atty?” Ru said, meaning,
Are you okay?

“Sure.” Atticus said, meaning,
I'm fine.

 

While not apparent from the driveway, the house was built into a slope, so it had a walkout basement. In one corner was a guest bedroom with glass-block windows. Obviously Kyle thought it made a handy prison; after they tucked Ukiah into bed and shut the door, Kyle produced a latch and padlock, which he installed with a cordless screwdriver.

“Okay.” Atticus eyed the padlock. “You've found something out?”

“Come upstairs.”

Upstairs, Kyle logged back in to his computers. “The Dog Warriors are one of five biker gangs that make up the Pack. They're not like any outlaw motorcycle club I've ever heard of—not that I'm an expert.”

“Outlaw” denoted the one percent of biker gangs, like the Hell's Angels, who embraced being outside the law. Kyle knew enough to distinguish between the “one-percenters” and normal, law-abiding motorcycle clubs; it was a bad sign that he labeled the Dog Warriors as such.

“How so?”

“Well, they don't pretend to be a club. They don't have a
clubhouse, membership dues, charter rules, officers, or any of that stuff. They don't even seem to have a base city or state—they're complete nomads.”

Kyle connected with the Internet and pulled Web pages out of his history log. “This is their leader, Rennie Shaw.” Under a banner of blazing red that read, “Wanted by the FBI,” and a long listing of crimes starting with, “Murder (eighteen counts),” was a slightly blurred photograph of a man with grizzled hair and vivid blue eyes. “His lieutenant, Bear Shadow.” Another “Wanted” page, another blurred photo, this of a Native American with feathers braided into his hair and a necklace of bear claws at his throat. “Shaw's girlfriend, Hellena Gobeyn.” A compact, dark-haired woman sat astride a fallen log, cleaning a pistol.

Kyle pulled up one page after another. “There are approximately twenty members of the Dog Warriors. All of them are wanted by the FBI.”

This was the fear that been eating at Atticus since taking the jacket off of Ukiah. Still, it felt like he'd swallowed cold gravel. “Ukiah too?”

“No.” Kyle hated to abandon his fearful suspicions. “He's not listed with the Dog Warriors. The Demon Curs, another Pack gang, has been active in Oregon for the last few weeks, in and around Pendleton and Ukiah; it's spammed all my searches for your brother. Without a last name, I haven't been able to isolate anything about him.”

“Wearing a jacket doesn't automatically make him one of them,” Ru reasoned. “If he's not listed with the others, then maybe he got it from a thrift store, or found it and didn't know what it was.”

They looked at him.

“I'm farting out my mouth here, aren't I?” Ru said.

“Yes,” Atticus and Kyle said.

“We're sitting on a quarter million dollars, enough guns to take out a police department, and a
possible
FBI most
wanted locked in the basement.” Kyle hedged for Ru's sake. “Brother or not, this isn't good.”

“Do some more digging,” Atticus said. “We need to know who we're dealing with. What about his killers?”

“They're just as scary in a totally different way.” Kyle closed up the FBI pages. “I tapped into the state police system. There was a shootout after you left. One of the men was killed, the other three hospitalized. They've identified themselves as Byte, Ascii, Coaxial, and Binary of the Temple of New Reason.”

“Ascii and Coaxial? You've got to be kidding.”

“No, it's some New Age cult that seems to be on everyone's hit list of ‘loonies to arrest on sight.' The members use computer terms for names. The state police notified everyone from ATF down to NSA.” Kyle pulled up some files copied from the state police, and scrolled down through them quickly, knowing that Atticus could memorize an entire screen in a glance. “The cult had a public Web site like Heaven's Gate, but took it down. I found an old cache of it. They have lots of weird ideas about the end of the world.”

ATF had been notified because the cult was suspected of massing large numbers of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and buying explosives. The NSA were seeking the cult for wiretapping and hacking government computers. The FBI wanted them for kidnapping and murdering several infants in the Pittsburgh area.

“Wait, go back,” Atticus said as a phrase leaped out at him. He leaned over Kyle's shoulder to page backward through the reports. He could call it up in his memory, but then Ru and Kyle wouldn't be keyed in to his thoughts. “Here. New York State Police want them in connection with cremated bodies found near Buffalo. Forensics shows that the bodies had been hacked apart with a bladed instrument, probably an axe, and burned, which matches the MO of murder victims found around the Boston area.”

“Buffalo and Boston,” Ru murmured.

“Do you think that's what they planned to do with your brother?” Kyle asked. “I mean, if they hit him with a car, shot him dead, and then tied him up, maybe they knew that the only way to keep him dead was to burn his body.”

Anger flashed through Atticus, surprising him. Certainly no one deserved such brutal treatment, but this was more than general indignation. Why was he enraged? He forced himself to be honest, backtracking to the source of his fury. He found a series of images and impressions that had preceded the anger—like lightning before the thunder.

The boy lying dormant and helpless in the truck, surrounded by the fearful mice.

Ukiah licking the milk mustache from his lips.

His brother in his arms, reduced to helpless and harmless by sleep, so like Atticus that he couldn't tell where his brother ended and he began.

In his mind he knew there was no reason to trust Ukiah. The boy—no, not boy! Atticus forced himself to remember the snarling young man crouched in the bathroom. He couldn't let himself ignore all facts and suspicions; this was a feral, dangerous stranger. For Ru's and Kyle's sakes, he couldn't harbor any feelings toward this person, not now, and perhaps not ever.

Probably picking up on his inner turmoil, Ru checked his wristwatch. “Well, the buy is going down in about twelve hours. What do you think? Call it a night?”

If Atticus didn't go to bed, neither would they. Kyle rarely slept, driven either by insomnia or hyperactivity—Atticus was never sure which. Ru would stay awake, worrying about him—he could be such a mother hen. All things considered, they needed to be sharp in a few hours.

“Let's lock down,” Atticus said, “and get some sleep.”

 

A storm was blowing in off the ocean. Atticus stood leaning against the glass wall of the master bedroom, watching
the darkness rush over the water as clouds obscured the moon. Light eaten by darkness.

I have a brother. He's a Dog Warrior. A bunch of religious loons tried to destroy him utterly.

The door to the master bathroom reflected in the window, a rectangle of light, the quiet sounds of Ru getting ready for bed. The light snapped off, the clouds covered the moon, and he was in darkness.

“It's like seeing into the past.” Ru came to stare out the window with him. “I look at him, and I see you back when we first met.”

“Is that how I looked to you? Like some wild creature?”

Ru laughed softly. “Okay, so he's like a wolf-man version of you. That stare he has—it's like he looks right down into your soul.” Ru breathed out and his breath smoked the glass. “I wonder what happened to him that he's like that.”

The wind gusted and roared against the house.

“This has really weirded you out, hasn't it?” Ru asked.

“When I touch him, I can't tell where he ends and I begin. I can feel his emotions. When I walk around the house, it's like I have a compass needle in me, and he's north. I can't smell him over my own scent. When I touch things he's used, I only feel myself on the item. He's so close that's he's invisible.”

“Like he's you and you're him.”

“Like we're one person, yes.” Atticus sighed. “What are we going to do with him? We can't keep him locked in the basement.”

“He's not going anywhere soon. We give him a phone to keep him happy, stuff him with food, and let him sleep. It's only for a few days, and then when we're done here, we can deal with him properly.”

“If we let him call the Dog Warriors, they might come here.”

“He doesn't know where he is. We picked him up a hundred miles from here, and he was in a car with Pennsylvania
plates—who knows where those butchers actually killed him?”

“He'll ask.”

“You are just so fucking truthful sometimes it hurts.” Ru laughed softly. “We lie to him.”

“What if he knows this area? He'll recognize it.”

“We improvise. It's what we're good at.”

“I don't want you hurt,” Atticus said.

Ru reached out and brushed his hand down Atticus's side and paused, letting it rest on Atticus's hip. And they stood a moment in quiet prelude—the wordless question waiting for a silent answer. One would think, after all this time, he'd be less hesitant, more comfortable with their relationship, with himself. There was still that point, though, where love and desire didn't completely mesh. So delicate was the act of engaging both, that a single word could derail him. So they learned this silent dance, temporarily reversing their normal roles—Ru taking lead and he nearly passive—until they could bump over some deep-seated block.