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"A day or two. Maybe a week." Max unloaded the bag. "We need to get hold of
Leo and make sure no one can take the baby. Kittanning. There's the whole mess
of you coming back from the dead." He paused to turn on the television. The
Martian landscape appeared on the screen. As they watched, the alien ship,
repulsive to the human eye, flickered into existence.
Max turned the channel. The alien ship loomed in the Mars Rover's cameras,
huge and menacing, its true dimensions lost as it towered over the Earth
vehicle. Next channel. The blinding explosion, seconds of brilliance before
the Mars Rover vaporized in the destruction of the alien ship, followed by the
gray static. Next channel. A frame by frame analysis of the sequence. Channel
after channel. All normal programming preempted. Photos enlarged until they
were blurred. Computer modeling done in an attempt to grasp the true
dimensions of the now vanished ship. Shots of Mars through the Hubble
telescope, showing a massive dust storm, blurring all features. Experts from
every field across the world were being interviewed, offering no real
explanations.
"Okay, we might be hiding out longer than a week," Max finally said.
"I'm sorry, Max."
"Hell, kid, considering all the ways this could have turned out, I think we
got a pretty good deal."
***
They slept. They ate. They watched the endless coverage on the spaceship,
because there was nothing else to watch. Finally, Max went out and bought a
DVD player and a couple dozen comedies. Life, he said, had been too exciting
lately for thrillers. They packed up Kittanning and their guns and cautiously
ventured out each day to let the cleaning staff in.
They made their phone calls while out driving. Indigo paid them compliments on
neatly vanishing and arranged to meet them at the Grove City Outlet Mall, just
off of I-79, halfway to the safe house on
Saturday afternoon. Chino reported that the work was proceeding on the office
and that no one seemed interested in him, the offices, or their location. Leo,
their lawyer, was much less optimistic; while fathers were optional, the legal
system mandated that newborns came with birth mothers. He promised to work on
a solution.
By Saturday, Max still looked like a raccoon, but not a single bruise remained
on Ukiah.
***
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The safe house was a lovely craftsman cabin with faded blue siding, set on the
shore of a lake.
Maple and oak trees stood close to shelter it from the sun and wind, but
beyond it was the wide openness of water and sky. When they arrived, Ukiah's
moms and Cally came out in their summer dresses to fuss over him. When they
were done, Max and Indigo distracted Cally off to the beach, and Ukiah lifted
the sleeping
Kittanning out of the car.
"Who's this?" Mom Jo whispered.
"This is my son. His name is Kittanning."
***
The song of wolves woke him. The wind was up, tossing the treetops, rushing
thin veils of clouds across the star studded sky. Ukiah found Mom Jo on the
back porch in her flannel bathrobe, staring out over the lake.
"There aren't any wolves in Pennsylvania," she breathed.
"Yes, there are," he said, feeling the faint prickle of Pack presence. "They
just walk on two legs instead of four." He started down the steps, out into
the wild night.
She reached out and caught him by the shoulders. "I know they're calling you.
Just remember to come back."
In the dark, with his other family nearby, he finally found the courage to ask
the question he wanted to ask all day. "Does it bother you, Mom, that I'm not
human?"
She laughed into his hair. "Oh, Mowgli, my little wolf boy, I knew you weren't
human when I saw you sitting in the snow, eating that rabbit. Go on, run with
your gray brothers. Just remember to come back to me."
[Front blurb]
QUESTIONS
Ukiah scanned through the conversation again, wondering. Who were these
people? Why were they watching silently in the dark? Who was Hex? How did he
know Dr. Janet Haze? Ukiah found no answers in the short cryptic conversation.
It was only as he started for the third time, from the very beginning, that he
realized something amazing.
The conversation hadn't been in English.
With his odd photographic memory, he could recognize and name many languages:
Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese. It wasn't any of these. It had
been so familiar to him that he had translated it unconsciously. Odder yet, he
could find no instance when he had heard it spoken. The knowledge was there,
deeply buried, lost but not forgotten.
The only time in his life he could not recall with complete clarity was his
early childhood. Who were his real parents? Where had they gone? How had he
ended up running with the wolves? The answers had always been lost behind a
veil of unremembering darkness.
He sat up in the hospital bed to stare out his window, across the dark
landscape of Oakland to
Schenley Park.
They knew the town where he had been found. They spoke a language he knew from
that dark forgetfulness. They claimed he was one of them.
He had to go now, while the trail was fresh, and find these people. . . .
[Version Information]
Version 1.0 - scanned, OCR'd, spellchecked, and formatted.
Version 2.0 - 10-8-2002 - proofread and corrected by The_Ghiti. If you find
errors, please fix, increment version number by 0.1 and re-post.
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