Текст книги "Dog Warrior"

Автор книги: Wen Spencer

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"The bitch." Atticus searched back through his memories and found Zheng's scent tainting the basement's air. "She was at the beach house with the Dog Warriors before we arrived. She's working with them."

"She's dirty?" Kyle asked.

Unsure, Atticus glanced to Ru, who shrugged. "I don't know if it's that straight-forward. See what you can find on her, and anything you can dig up on a group called the Ontongard."

"How do you spell that?"

"I have not a clue."

"Ooooooookay. Do you have a first name yet for Miss Sexy Agent?"

Atticus found himself thinking of her Mona Lisa smile, her compact body, and the tantalizing flashes of camisole under the sheer white of her silk blouse. He shifted uneasily, slightly aroused by the memories. Where the hell did that come from?

"Indigo, like the color blue," Ru reported.

"And what do I tell Sumpter?" Kyle asked.

"Tell him that the FBI tripped over us." Atticus saw no reason not to stick to the truth.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cape Cod Campground, Massachusetts

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Ukiah woke, naked and bundled against the cold. He lay under a lean-to, deep in rain-soaked woods of stunted oaks and maples, night cloaked tight around him. Beside the sturdily built shelter a small fire burned, hissing when water dripped from leaves overhead. The ocean was somewhere nearby, pounding on the earth, filling the air with salt and the faint aftertaste of fish. Harley motorcycles growled counter to the ocean's rumble, and headlights swept through trees. While Ukiah was alone by a small fire, he felt the Dog Warriors scattered in the darkness. He found Rennie's familiar presence, just beyond the shifting light thrown by the flames. " Is it the Iron Horses?"

" Seems to be."

Instead of tracking down the wanna-bes scattered to their mundane lives, Rennie had sent out word where the Dog Warriors would be camping instead. Judging by the weave of headlights, every member of the local chapter plus some had arrived.

Lambs to a slaughter.

" We won't hurt them if they tell us what we want to know." Rennie slipped through the shadows, staying hidden until the visitors' identity was fully known.

Ukiah sat up stiffly. All the bones of his left arm were once again knitted whole but not yet sound. The massive scabs covering the bullet wounds on his chest and back were hot and itchy; his body was still healing at its furious rate. His stomach knotted up, emptied during his long sleep. Surrounded by the Pack in a womb of safety, he had most likely been awakened by hunger.

Tucked beside him where it would be safe from the rain was a stack of clean clothes. By her scent and the selection—his black T-shirt, his favorite blue jeans, and his "Property of FBI" boxers—it was obvious that Indigo had been the one who raided his closet at Max's. Sitting in the lean-to, Ukiah pulled on his boxers and pants as the bikers settled around him, drawn by the fire.

Daggit had been in the lead, and he eyed Ukiah suspiciously as he killed his engine. "You here alone, puppy?"

"No," Rennie answered, drifting out of the darkness, his eyes gleaming from the reflected headlights. "He's not."

"Shaw." Daggit grunted. "So he is yours."

"Yes." Rennie paused beside Ukiah as he sat tying his boots and lightly touched the top of Ukiah's head. "This is our Cub."

"Does he have another name?"

"Not for you."

"What, you think we're going to cause trouble for him?"

"I think you're smarter than that."

Daggit understood the implied threat with a flash of fear that he shrugged away. "Whatever. Cub it is."

The bikers wandered into the campsite, loud and careless. They carried bottles of alcohol and offerings of food—they seemed to be expecting a party. Ukiah wondered what Rennie told his contact. Animal came into the light, carrying a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bottle of expensive scotch.

While the Pack rarely drank, it made an exception for fine liquor, and the scotch qualified.

"Hey, Shaw, where have you been?" Animal shouted out with alcohol-tainted breath. "You haven't been in this area for a coon's age."

Rennie took the bucket of chicken, and flicked the lid into the fire. "We had Pack business."

"Which means we'll never know," Animal complained.

Rennie grunted at the truth of this and tilted the bucket to Ukiah. " Don't touch the sides of the bucket." A few stray flecks of Invisible Red glittered on the red-and-white container. "Eat."

Ukiah grabbed out a deep fried thigh and bit deep into the juicy dark meat.

"More," Rennie commanded. After Ukiah took a breast, Rennie selected a drumstick and passed the bucket to Bear.

Animal gazed at Ukiah with an odd look on his face. "Where did he come from? I've never seen him at a Gathering."

"Who he is," Rennie growled, "and where he came from is Pack business."

"You know, some of us have been loyal for years, waiting for our turn to be made . . ." Animal's complaint trailed off to slack-jawed drooling in a display of sexual desire that would have been cartoonish if Ukiah didn't know the strength of Invisible Red.

Ukiah glanced over his shoulder to follow Animal's gaze.

Hellena had stalked out of the woods, black leather pants clinging like a second skin, black silk camisole highlighting the shape of her breasts, long black hair spilling down over her shoulders in loose curls. She was lean, strong, and sexy.

"I-I-I've got an anniversary VRSCA V-Rod Harley." Animal pointed to his bike. "It's only a year old. I've got less than a thousand miles on it. I'll trade you."

Rennie frowned a moment, and then he too followed Animal's gaze.

" It's like being surrounded by rutting dachshunds," Hellena thought.

Rennie laughed at Hellena's silent comment, though anger flashed through him. "We don't trade our women. You should know that."

"Yeah," Animal whimpered. "But I hoped if I made the pot rich enough . . . I can throw in a pair of Desert Eagle pistols and a dozen nickel bags of Pixie Dust."

A growl rose from the Dogs. It was one of the differences between the Pack and the outlaw biker gangs that followed them; the humans treated women as objects to be traded and sold. Even if the Pack weren't morally against such debasement, there was the matter that the women of the Pack were physically equal to the men.

"Okay, okay, okay. I know 'no' when I hear it." Animal held up his hands.

Rennie tossed the bare drumstick toward the trash pit and hit it unerringly. "Where is the Temple of New Reason?"

"Those fairies?" Animal asked.

"Yes," Rennie rumbled.

"They're—"

Daggit gave Animal an angry shove to silence him. "Is it Pixie Dust that you want?" Rennie's silent snarl made Daggit try for a lighter tone. "Look, you can buy through us. We'll give you a good price."

Rennie struck Daggit with savage speed, catching him by the back of the head with a fistful of hair, and the other hand yanking him down to his knees until the leader of the Iron Horses crouched in the dirt in front of Ukiah. "Look at what the Temple has done to our Cub. They ran him down with a truck and shot him full of holes."

Daggit hissed in pain, but managed. "So it's true what they say—you can't keep a good man down."

"Where are they?" Rennie growled.

"I don't know," Daggit's voice went sharp as Rennie put pressure on his arm.

"He knows," Animal said quietly. "He won't tell you. But I can tell you everything I know."

"You don't know shit!" Daggit snarled.

"Who did they contact first? You? No, me!" Animal thumped on his chest with his index finger. "Me!"

"You don't know where they are," Daggit said.

"Yeah, but I know how to get ahold of them."

"We don't want to talk," Rennie said.

"I can set up a meeting."

"Shut up, asshole!" Daggit snapped, and hissed as Rennie tightened his hold. "You know what they're going to do to those idiots."

"I want to be Pack," Animal said. "I want to be fast and strong and cool."

"Dumb fuck," Daggit muttered and squirmed in Rennie's hold. "You don't have to fuck them over, Shaw. Your Cub is fine."

"Make me Pack, and I'll gift-wrap the bastards for you."

"Do you have any idea what you're saying?" Ukiah pulled on his shirt.

"My cholesterol is through the roof," Animal said. "I've got rheumatoid arthritis in my knees so bad I can barely sit on a bike, and all the men of my family die before they turn fifty. I figure I only have, like, ten years or so left. I'm willing to gamble."

Ukiah sensed the direction of Rennie's thoughts. " No. We can't make him a Get."

" We need to be quick and dirty," Rennie thought. " We need to find the cult before they can use that damn machine."

" No."

" Do we beat the information out of them instead? Torture them? Men can stay amazingly silent for lots of money."

Ukiah thought of the bundles of twenties that Kyle and Atticus had stashed away.

" The drug is killing him," Rennie pressed on. " The only way he's going to live is by becoming a Get."

" If he survives the process."

" There is that."

Ukiah studied the bikers, their clothes glittering with motes of Invisible Red. The concentration of it on their groins puzzled him until he noticed that they absently rubbed themselves, the lingering effects of the drug still stimulating them. There was not one unmarked by the shimmering dust—doomed by the exposure to Invisible Red. Rennie was right. They had to shut down Hu-ae and get Loo-ae back as soon as possible. " Okay."

Rennie shoved Daggit away and drifted back into the darkness. "Come." He motioned to Animal. "Walk with us."

"Animal!" Daggit tried to catch Animal's arm, but Smack blocked him. "Mike! Shit, man, think about this."

"I've thought about this for twenty years." Animal followed Rennie into the woods.

***

A half mile from the campsite, they stopped in a marshy clearing. While there was no house in sight, a knee-high stone wall meandered along the edge of the woods. The night sky overhead had cleared, but fog drifted through the trees, as if the clouds had sunk down out of the sky to hide. Some of the Dogs—Stein, Heathyr, and Smack—had stayed behind to keep an eye on the bikers. The rest ranged through the darkness, grim with the knowledge of what was about to happen.

"Okay!" Animal threw open his arms, welcoming the experience. "Make me Pack!"

"Tell us about the cult first," Rennie commanded. "Who's your contact? Where are they now? Everything you know, and then we'll do the mauling."

"Ahhh." Animal raked his hand through his wild red hair. "My sister has a boy, a stepson actually, Eddie." He shrugged his lean shoulder as if the boy were nothing of consequence. The lack of blood connection equaled lack of affection. "The kid gave her a lot of lip when she first got married, and his real mom didn't want to deal with him, so they shipped him off to military school. They brainwashed him on that God-and-country shit."

Animal took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out. His hands were shaking, and he laughed nervously as he fumbled with lighting it. "Look at me. Shaking like a virgin with his first whore." He took a deep drag, the tip of the cigarette glowing angry red in the darkness.

"What about Eddie?" Ukiah pushed Animal back to the cult.

"After graduation, Eddie joined the army or marines or one of those but got kicked out. He moved back with my sister for a few months, and then dropped out of sight completely. Didn't even show up for his father's funeral. It turns out he'd joined this cult—Temple of New Reason."

"Do you know his cult name?"

"Ice." Animal laughed, shaking his head. "I've met some of the others and they've got the shit-stupidest names: Mouse, Link, Ether, Ascii, and Io. What a bunch of dweebs. Though Socket and Ping are hot babes."

"Eddie what?" Ukiah tried to fit "Eddie" to the ruthless Ice.

"Eddie Howard," Animal said. "He got hold of me at the end of last year. He knew that I sold reefer and speed and sometimes handled cocaine, that I know people like Jay Lasker. He wanted me to sell this new shit. He gave me a free sample. After my first hit, I knew it was pure gold."

"Where is the cult?"

Animal shook his head again. "Eddie got really paranoid. He wanted everything set up without anything that could be traced back to him. Like it was some fucking French Connection."

"So you don't know where he is." Shaw glanced back to where Daggit was being detained.

"I know how to get ahold of him! We'd use the personals on the Internet." Animal named the Web site they used, an online dating service. "I'd post under the name Pokeyl02 and he posted under Gumby666."

Ukiah did not recognize the references for either one. "Why those names?"

"You don't use 'drug runner' and 'drug lord' as handles and expect to stay hidden from the narcs," Animal said. "You don't mention drugs or money or city or anything like that in the message. Usually I say something like, 'Drop me a hundred' and he'd post back, 'Cam noon Sunday.'"

"That was your last buy?" Rennie asked.

"Cambridge." Animal nodded. "I hadn't set up the next buy yet."

"You have preset places to meet? Cambridge sounds too general."

"Cambridge is the Cambridge Bridge. For the drugs, the buy is always on the bridge, and the drop weighted, so if the narcs try to bust us, we'd throw the bag over the side of the river, and it sinks. No evidence, no conviction."

"Which bridges do you use?"

"Cam is Cambridge. LF is Longfellow." Animal named a few more bridges, but the list was short.

"That's the complete list?" Ukiah asked, surprised that there were so few.

" This isn't Pittsburgh," Rennie said.

" But it's got a river and a harbor, right?"

" Pittsburgh went a little nuts when it came to bridges."

Rennie returned his attention to Animal. "What does Daggit know? Can he call and warn them?"

Animal started to swear that Daggit knew nothing, but then, with a hard look from Rennie, retracted the claim. "I'm not sure what Daggit knows. He's been selling them stuff like guns, explosives, and shit like that—hard-to-get equipment—while I've been running the drugs down to Philly, Baltimore, and places like that. But I really doubt Daggit knows crap. Eddie's a paranoid little shit. He doesn't even do the drug deals—he uses peons from the cult."

They questioned him further, but found out little else. Animal and his sister had had little to do with Ice most of his life before he joined the cult. With the exception of occasional weapon purchases, Animal had dealt with lower-level cult members.

"We are doing this? Right?" Animal dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his booted foot. "I've been steady for the Pack, right there, with whatever you guys needed. Guns. Bikes. You name it and I've supplied it. You fucking owe this to me."

"Not everyone survives this," Ukiah told him. "You can die."

"Or I could live forever," Animal said. "Life is a fucking crapshoot. You've got to play to win. So are we fucking doing this?"

"We're doing this." Rennie growled. He lifted his head, sniffing the wind, extending his Pack sense. While they'd talked, the other Dog Warriors had ranged out in all directions, making sure they were alone in the woods. They tensed now, hating what they must do, but resolved.

With the exception of the Kicking Deers, who had been made perfect hosts via Magic Boy's blood, most attempts to make a human into Pack led to death. Rennie had been the first to survive the process; he'd been shot in the shoulder and pinned under his dead horse on a Civil War battlefield. After countless failures, Rennie guessed, wolflike, that the weak made better prey than the healthy. He picked the sick and the wounded, and sought comfort in the knowledge that those who died had already been doomed.

Surviving, however, was not the same as thriving.

Ironically, the outlaw bikers proved to be not only willing, but also quite successful as Gets. They loved the life—the fighting and the nomadic existence—finding it a natural extension to a life they had already chosen. The bikers expected an initiation rite, and the Pack couldn't always afford to wait for one to become conveniently ill or hurt. Thus the maulings became a hated tool of necessity.

Animal shifted nervously. "Well?"

"Run," Rennie growled.

Animal's eyes went wide and he edged away from Rennie.

"Run!" Rennie roared.

And Animal bolted into a run.

" He's covered in Invisible Red," Rennie sent a hard thought Ukiah's direction. " Stay out of this." And then he was gone, loping after the running man.

Ukiah stood a moment in the empty clearing, feeling the hunt move through the woods without him. Rennie's howl went up, calling out the trail, and Ukiah felt the pull of kinship.

No, he wouldn't hunt, but he would stand witness.

Animal had said that he understood what a mauling entailed, but he couldn't really. The biker laughed as he ran, heavy footed and nearly blind, tripping and falling often as the Dogs paced him easily.

There was a mile of woods until the berm of a highway—the Dogs let Animal run half of it before the first hit. Bear had been running silently behind the biker; he surged forward and knocked Animal off his feet. As the biker scrambled in the wet dead leaves, churning up the rich black dirt to scent the night, Hellena broke his left arm with a hard, precise kick.

Animal cried out then, falling back into the autumn leaves. With carefully judged blows, they beat on the fallen biker, hurting him but not killing him.

Rennie stood over Animal, holding a syringe full of the Pack blood that would make the biker a Get or kill him, his thoughts on the red-haired boy with the mohawk who had come to the Gather nearly twenty years before. Rennie had seen the look of envy in Animal's eyes then, and known this was the probable end. "This only gets worse. If you want, you can stop it here, and we'll see that you get to a hospital."

"Fuck you," Animal whispered hoarsely. "You promised."

"So be it." Rennie pinned him and stabbed the needle home.

Silence fell except for Animal's harsh breathing and the distant roar of the surf.

"It's done." Rennie stepped away. "It's in God's hands now."

***

Animal died before sunrise.

CHAPTER NINE

Truck Plaza, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Fog had thickened the air into a cold, damp blanket. Sunrise only paled the world. Leaving Bear to deal with Animal's body, the Dog Warriors had taken Ukiah north, away from the killing grounds. They stopped for gas, and Ukiah took advantage of the truck plaza's bank of pay phones to call Max.

"Bennett." Max answered the phone with his normal snap, and then groaned slightly. "Oh, God, what time is it?"

"Six thirty," Ukiah said. "I'm sorry, Max, I've been up all night . . . and . . . and . . ."

"Ukiah? What's wrong? You sound upset."

And with those simple words, Ukiah was torn. He desperately wanted Max there—morally steadfast in the most confusing of times. Yet at the same time, he was glad Max wasn't there to be tainted by the gray. He was ashamed to admit what he'd witnessed. Ashamed to admit having done nothing to stop it. He was tempted to lie to Max, but couldn't bear the thought of staining his trust.

"Things I can't talk about over the phone," Ukiah said finally, rubbing at his suddenly burning eyes.

"Ah."

"I'm sorry for calling you so early."

"No, no, I've been worried sick about you. When you didn't call back Monday, Sam and I did a background search on the owner of the cell phone you'd used—Hikaru Takahashi."

Ukiah groaned slightly. "He's Atticus's partner."

"Yeah, Indigo dropped the bomb about your brother yesterday. She called us to say they'd found you and to call off the background search."

"Which bomb?"

"It was a multiple strike. That you had a brother. That he was DEA. That the Pack had tested him. That the Pack raided the DEA and took their shipment of Invisible Red. She sounded pretty pissed—for Indigo, that is."

Ukiah winced. When he'd called Indigo early yesterday morning—to let her know that she'd be tripping over the DEA in the guise of his brother—he'd caught her between the postmortems of the cult members. She'd been focused on the discovery that Boston-area doctors had seen enough Invisible Red-related deaths to actually recognize the symptoms. They were, however, still mystified as to the cause.

The conversation had turned bitterly cold as he explained what had happened after she left. "Yeah, she is. I let her go knowing full well what could happen to Atticus."

"She's not angry enough to . . . ?" Max paused, searching for a tactful question. Ukiah realized that Max was still looking for the cause of Ukiah's distress, and hoping that the source was as mundane as a fight with his lover.

"I don't know." Ukiah thought of Animal, dead, even now being settled into a shallow grave. What was he going to tell Indigo?

There was a sudden blare of a deep horn from Max's side of the conversation.

"What the hell was that?" Ukiah asked as Max swore.

"A barge. We took the boat downriver a ways and slept on it. Just in case. The horns, though—they about put me through the ceiling every time."

We?Ukiah said nothing. Any precaution on Max's part was well justified at this point.

"You're coming home today?" Max asked as if the answer were an automatic yes.

"No. I need to see this through."

There was a long silence from Max, another blast of the barge horn echoing up the distant Ohio River valley in the background.

"I know you feel like you have to do something," Max said, "but if you want a life with Indigo and to be a father to your son, you can't run with the Pack. You can't do both. If you keep walking the edge, you're going to fall off."

"I know. But there's too much on the line here. Too many lives at stake."

Max sighed. "What can you do that the Pack can't?"

"Well, I can ask you to help me set up a trap for the cult. Computer literate, the Pack isn't."

***

The only problem with working undercover was dealing with the hours. Not so much the long hours, though occasionally that sucked, but the guilt of not spending every waking moment working when you were undercover. It wasn't a job you started at nine o'clock and did your eight hours for. No matter how late you stayed up the night before, as soon as you woke up, you felt the need to do battle with the forces of evil.

The clock read six thirty and they had an eight-o'clock meeting with Agent Zheng. It was, though, a perfect morning, and Atticus didn't want to stir. He and Ru were tucked together just right, the morning light through the window sublimely pale, and the cries of gulls mixed with the deep horns of ships. He could lie, watching Ru sleep, and feel a fragile peace. So fragile that moving, let alone questioning it, would shatter it all.

Then Ru stirred, opened his eyes, and smiled sleepily. "Morning."

"I love you," Atticus whispered.

"Good." Ru kissed his jaw and snuggled back down into the blankets. "Because I love you too."

And then Ru was asleep again, and the moment hadn't passed so much as changed. Atticus's happiness solidified, and he felt now that he could get up, shower and let in the world.

Kyle was waiting when he came out of the shower, two sweaters in hand.

"What do you think, the gray or the green?"

"What?"

"Which looks better on me?" Kyle held up first the green sweater. "The green brings out my eyes—don't you think?"

"What's the special occasion?"

"We're having breakfast with Indigo this morning." Kyle overlaid the green sweater with the gray. "This is much more macho, though, don't you think?"

It took Atticus a moment to connect "Indigo" with "Agent Zheng." "You've got to be kidding me. Agent Zheng?"

"She's a complete babe." Kyle ducked back into his connecting room and returned—sans sweaters—with a color photo of Agent Zheng. "She's really sharp. She has a mind like a diamond."

"Who uses a machete to cut through red tape," Atticus sang.

"Are you saying I don't have a chance?"

"I'm not saying that."

"If she knows you two are . . . you know . . . it's not like I have to compete with you."

Atticus sighed. He hadn't counted on Kyle wanting to join them at breakfast. "She knows. What did you find out about her?"

"She's twenty-six, like moi,and an Aries, extremely compatible with a Virgo like me. Her tax records claim that she's single and owns a luxury one-bedroom studiocondo in Pittsburgh." Kyle crooned the word "studio." "You know what that means—no live-in boyfriend. Her hobbies are science fiction and mystery novels, motorcycles, and cooking."

Cooking?The stocked refrigerator in Zheng's hotel room took on new meaning. "My God, she's a nerd's dream come true."

Undeterred, Kyle went on. "She's got a Suzuki Katana and a Ford Mustang, a black belt in judo, and is the Pittsburgh field office's top scorer in pistol."

Atticus shooed Kyle back into his room so Ru could go on sleeping. They'd been out late, working through the addresses Agent Zheng had provided. The places were so scattered that they drove nearly two hundred miles just to hit the first two.

On Kyle's laptop various windows were open to lingerie models.

"And the lingerie relates how?"

"These are all things she ordered last month from Victoria's Secret."

He was going to have to have a long talk with Kyle about what the words "find out everything" really entailed. "I don't know, Kyle. Women wear things like that when they have someone to show it off to."

"You think so?"

"Yeah."

Kyle dropped into a sulk.

"What about the Ontongard?"

He looked unhappier. "Either Indigo sanitized her reports completely or there just isn't anything. She joined the FBI in 1999, and I've been searching through five years of reports, but so far, officially, the only 'aliens' she's dealt with are Russian Mafia and Chinese Tongs. I'm sorry, Atty; I'll do some more digging."

Atticus went to gaze out Kyle's window, looking down on Boston Harbor. Fog masked all but the wharf at the foot of the hotel and its collection of sailboats and cabin cruisers. It felt like the fog extended through his soul; Atticus knew he wasn't human, but who was telling him the truth? Could he believe Agent Zheng merely because she was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way? Was "alien" any saner than "werewolf," "angel," or "demon"? Who knew the truth and who was deceiving themselves?

In the long run, did it really matter? After what he and Ru found yesterday, he knew that the cult needed to be stopped.

Deciding that Ice's instruction to Ascii might indicate a general direction to look, they investigated the northernmost addresses on the list. The New Hampshire farm had indeed been sold and the new owners were an investment banker from Boston, his pregnant wife, and their two children. After what they learned at the next site, Atticus nearly drove back to the farm and told the banker to pack up his family and flee any chance of interacting with the cult.

Zheng's list had innocuously noted: burn site.The police report had been dryly worded. What they found was little more than secluded acreage on the edge of extensive wetlands. There had been cinder blocks stacked around the bonfire, making crude fire tunnels, but they'd been numbered and hauled away to FBI crime labs. The ash had been gathered for bone fragments, the ground scraped for evidence, and all that was left was scorched earth and the scent of long-dead fires.

He searched anyhow, crouching in the cold wind, fingering the marshy edges of the clearing. In the break between two slightly singed bushes, he found where a woman had crawled through, missing a left arm and a right foot, burning hot enough to scorch the ground she scrabbled over. In a low hollow, fifty feet from the incinerator, she broke into a collection of mice—but that hadn't saved her. The cultists had smashed the mice with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. The police missed or ignored the pitifully small, charred bodies. Atticus steeled himself to pick one up, breaking open the heat-mummified remains to find intact DNA.

The cult killed the mice while they were still caught between two species. This cell was a mouse. That cell was . . . well, one couldn't call it human.

"Is that what I think it is?" Ru had whispered from behind Atticus.

"Yes." He dug a hole in the damp, loose soil and buried the mice. There was nothing else he could do; he couldn't take them to the police and say, "These were a woman—someone just like me."

It was a chance encounter with the incinerator's neighbor that exposed the rest of the horror.

"They did it at night—to hide the smoke," she'd said only after they'd shown her ID. She had the doors of her car locked, and the window cracked only a finger width. "The wind usually blows west to east—so it goes out over the wetlands, but one night last fall I could smell it—I live the next lot down the lane—so I called the fire department. They needed to bring in a psychologist for the whole department—it was like something out of a Nazi death camp."

Ru tsked. Atticus hung back, letting Ru finesse her. People liked Ru and opened up to him. "It must be terrifying to have something like that so close to home."

"We've bought a dog and a gun and had alarms installed on all windows and doors."

"Very intelligent of you," Ru murmured.

"I wouldn't have stayed except we would have taken a terrible hit trying to sell our house—it was all through the news, and no one wanted to live next to that."

Ru made more encouraging noises.

"I can't believe those monsters were so close to my house—that I might have passed them in the car and looked them in the face."

"Have they caught any of the ones responsible?"

"No, no." She scanned the empty road, either becoming aware they were alone on the country lane, or looking for monsters in the form of men lurking in the bushes, or maybe both. Ironically, she'd probably mistake Ascii as an ally against the monstrous. What would she make of Atticus? "The police keep asking us, insisting we must have seen something. There were cars every now and then—and trucks of firewood—but I thought those were deliveries for someone farther down the road. The McBeals or the Henrys."

Ru showed her the artist sketches of the cult members, but she didn't recognize anyone.

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