"Spencer,.Wen.-.Ukiah.2.-.Tainted.Trail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spencer Wen)

"Mom Lara has this cascade theory, that Indigo seduced me because she overreacted to me saving her life and the Pack kidnapping me, and then she dated me because she felt guilty about seducing someone so young, and now she's pushing for marriage because I ended up with Kittanning by trying to rescue her."
"It's so like a woman to overanalyze things."
Ukiah dropped into the window seat. "And that's just my family."
"I meant to ask you how the picnic went on Sunday."
"Well, her brothers and sisters seemed to like me. Her older brother Zane said that if Indigo could run around shooting people, she certainly could date anyone that she pleased."
Max laughed at this.
"Her parents, though ... to them I'm a long-haired, teenage, Native American, Unitarian, Wolf Boy raised by lesbians, with an infant son obviously from a previous failed relationship."
"Are you quoting?"
"Indigo's mother doesn't realize how well I hear."
"Ouch." Max winced for him. "Don't worry, kid, they'll come around."
Ukiah nodded, but heard again Indigo's quiet "if." "Mom Jo is worried that we haven't given enough thought of 'how' we could stay married. I don't know the first thing about living on my own, and Mom Jo says that would throw Indigo into the role of caretaker. She says it could put a lot of stress on Indigo that she's not expecting."
"Your Mom Jo is a good woman," Max said. "But she's always underrated your ability to learn. If you want to make this marriage work, you can."
Again—if. Some part of him certainly craved being married to Indigo, despite it being a vast unknown. Unsuspected, he had a deep want for his wife and his son living in his house—all the fine trappings of being an adult.
The realization bothered him. Could wanting to be married have nothing to do with loving Indigo?

Pendleton Municipal Airport, Pendleton, Oregon
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

When Ukiah remembered Oregon, he recalled only steep mountains and towering pines. He was startled when the turboprop airplane dropped down through the clouds to reveal a land nearly flat and utterly treeless. More startling, the land was marked with a multitude of huge circles.
"What are those?" he asked Kraynak.
Kraynak leaned over to peer out the window. "Those are from the long, rolling irrigation ... thingies. They anchor one end and it rolls in a circle about the endpoint."
They landed without Pendleton coming into view. The airport was laughably small after the Houston airport: four modest-sized public rooms linked together. Over the sole door leading to a single X-ray device was a sign proclaiming ALL GATES. It was the first airport of the day in which Ukiah wasn't immediately overwhelmed.
Four children with black hair, dark eyes, and dusky skin played in the largest room. Ukiah watched the children while Max rented two Chevy Blazers from a Hertz kiosk-styled office, doing the typical corporate paperwork dance to allow Ukiah to drive under the age of twenty-five. Were the kids Native Americans, Chinese, or Mexican? None of them came close enough for him to tell.
Max threw him the keys to the first Chevy. "You sure you're okay to drive?"
"If I take a few minutes to get settled in, yeah. There's no crowd to deal with."
The Hertz agent laughed. "Wait two weeks, and there will be. The annual roundup starts then. It's a rodeo with an Indian powwow. Pendleton goes from a population of twenty thousand to sixty thousand."
"Ouch," Max said. "Well, hopefully we'll be gone by Thursday."
"People will be drifting in starting this weekend," the Hertz agent said.
"Explains why getting hotel rooms was so fun," Max muttered, resetting his watch to local time. "It's five-thirty now. See you at the hotel in two hours or so? We'll probably both be out of regular cell-phone range, so take one of the satellite phones with you. Call me if you run into trouble."
Ukiah snagged one of the equipment bags with a phone and GPS system in it and went out to the parking lot. The Blazer was unlocked and stifling hot. He started up the SUV and let the air conditioning run while he stood outside, acclimatizing to the world around him.
The airport sat on the edge of a river valley. The flat land broke suddenly to drop down in ragged hills. The stubble of wheat on the nearby fields shined gold, and heat wavered liquid in the late-afternoon sun. He could pick out the constant hum of distant highway traffic and the faint gurgle of river water. Once the interior of the Blazer was bearable, he slid in, closed the door, and started out to find Jesse Kicking Deer.
***
Pendleton was at once familiar and strange, like a house that been remodeled. The streets lay in a straight grid, as much as the river valley allowed. None of the street names seemed right, and only a handful of buildings struck a resonance in him. He drove up out of the river bottom, and pulled off just short of the I-84 on ramp. Getting out of the Blazer, he looked back at the island of civilization, surrounded by vast, empty prairie.
Mom Jo had slipped him out of Oregon without visiting Pendleton, so he wasn't recalling a recent memory. Was he finally remembering something from his childhood?
He focused on the memory, and found it wasn't his. It belonged to Rennie Shaw.
When Ukiah had realized that he, the Pack, and the Ontongard weren't human, he had gone to Rennie Shaw and begged for answers. What was he? How was he related to the Pack? Who were the Ontongard? Where had they all come from? Why did the Ontongard want to kill him? Instead of answers, Rennie bled into a coffee can and gave it to Ukiah, telling him to use it. The blood transformed into a mouse—as Pack blood was wont to do once separated from the main body—and contained Rennie's genetically coded memory. After much bafflement as to how he was supposed to use the mouse, Ukiah absorbed it, and Rennie's memories had been added to his own.
Oddly, while the memories were sharp and clear as his own, they were harder to access. A stray thought or image would trigger Ukiah's memories to the surface. Rennie's memories lurked like silvery minnows under the shimmer of his own thoughts and memories, there to catch and examine, but never really offering themselves up freely.
Ukiah fished out Rennie's memory and examined it. Rennie had been in eastern Oregon twice. The first time had come a decade after Rennie's last day of being human: May 5, 1864.
The Ontongard reproduced by invading a host, much the same as a virus would, using the host's own biology to reproduce and then replace all the cells in their body. The hosts became identical to those that begot them on a cellular level—with an important difference. These "Gets," as the Ontongard called the hosts once they had been wholly taken over, retained all innate abilities and skills needed to not only survive but excel in the host's native ecology. Thus, as the Ontongard spread across the galaxy, not only did they receive bodies adapted to the new worlds, but they also gained intelligence, education, and memories, all wrapped in a camouflage shell of a being known to the uninfected natives.
Once little more than lowly pond scum, the race had stolen all they needed to leap across the stars.
To fight the Ontongard, Prime had no choice but to make Gets of his own.
A West Point trained Union officer, Rennie had been wounded, trapped under his dead horse in the tangled undergrowth west of Wilderness Church. Prime's first Get, Coyote, came to Rennie in moonlight, a wolf changed into a man by alien blood, named for a native god, offering the cursed gift of life as a Get. Only twenty-three, with a wife and child to live for, Rennie accepted, thoughtless of the cost. Coyote's blood burned its way through his body, the viral genetics changing him cell by cell into a copy of Coyote that wore Rennie's face.
He was Coyote's first Get. By that time, however, Hex—the sole Ontongard to reach Earth after Prime crashed the mother ship on Mars and sabotaged the scout ship—had made a small army of Gets.
Rennie never returned to his family. He dedicated himself to the war against the Ontongard, protecting his wife, son, and the rest of humanity from the alien invaders. He and Coyote's other Gets forced Hex into hiding by 1874. Leaving Hex to the others, Rennie formed the Dog Warriors and backtracked to Oregon, hunting Hex's scattered Gets. The country had been raw frontier, and the Dog Warriors killed Ontongard with open, reckless abandon.
Rennie returned to Oregon during the early part of the last century, called back by Degas, the leader of a pack clan named the Demon Curs. By then, the killing between Pack and Ontongard had become a secret war; it behooved neither side for the humans to know that aliens lived among them.
Rennie had stood on this same ridge overlooking Pendleton, amused by his own surprise. It's been fifty years, you old dog. Of course it's going to change. Hell, they've even changed the name from Goodwin Station.
The gold boomtown of the Old West had been a good place for hunting Ontongard, Rennie thought. It's going to be harder to put the Ontongard down and burn them to ashes in this Pendleton than in Goodwin Station.
"They even have a sheriff now," a voice said behind Rennie, surprising him. "Although the first one got himself killed in a jail break. One would think he was a martyred saint or something, the way they carry on."
Rennie jerked around, pulling out his hidden pistol before the wind shifted, bringing him the stocky man's scent, deeply drenched in woodsmoke. Rennie recognized him then. "Degas." Last time they had hunted together, Degas had been newly made. His curly hair had been a bright carrot red with muttonchops down to his sharply pointed chin. That had been—what?—twenty years. Their alien gene drift toward black hair had muted the red to auburn. Combined with a clean shave, Rennie hadn't recognized the solid-built leader of the Demon Curs.
"You took your time," Rennie growled, unsettled that he hadn't caught the other man's approach. It had been a long time since someone took him unaware.