Helix: Plague of Ghouls
Helix: Plague of Ghouls
Published by Tyche Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Pat Flewwelling
First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2016
Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-53-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-54-2
Cover Art by Galen Dara
Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey
Interior Layout by Ryah Deines
Editorial by Simon Rose
Author photograph: C2 Studios
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.
This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.
“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”
- Herman Melville,
Moby Dick
ISHMAEL SAT SHIVERING
and sweating at his computer, eyes wide, listening over his tense shoulder to a sound outside. He was in the middle of the building, surrounded by shelves full of laptops, bins of computer parts, rattling fans, and whirring hard drives. He shouldn’t have been able to hear someone knocking on his locked server room door, let alone someone standing outside.
Not now. Not now!
He shuddered, mostly from the fever, but partly because he had to admit that he was suffering from something he’d picked up in quarantine at Wyndham Farms.
Ishmael wiped his forehead with his sleeve and toggled from the video editing software he’d been running, to the network script he’d been repairing, to the program that monitored all live feeds from the surveillance cameras dotting the estate at Varco Lake. In one video, a shadow moved along the third floor hall of the main house. He saw the empty foyer in another feed; someone was setting up breakfast in the cafeteria; a lumber truck rolled past the gas pumps at Varco Valley Station; in the second floor library, Holly shifted uncomfortably in a chair too wide and too long for her. Her eyes flashed as she watched someone off screen. Blonde hair had fallen in front of her pointed ears, giving her a wild faerie look, which was accentuated by her visible alarm. She hugged her legs to her chest and pretended to read.
For three weeks, Wyrd membership had been up in arms over Ishmael and his Pack of mismatched, misshapen lycanthropes, fearing that they carried some mutant strain. For those same three weeks, Ishmael swore his Pack of so-called “Tiger Dogs” were no threat, despite the fact that his shoulder still bore scars from some inmate’s teeth and claws. Now, unless his health took a turn for the better, he’d have to eat his words, and they’d all have to run for their lives.
Ishmael’s hand shook as he switched to different cameras. In the one labelled, “labext1”, a fish-eyed lens captured somebody in a hooded winter coat as he weakly shoved his shoulder against the outside door. Wind whistled shrilly down the corridor, as loud in Ishmael’s ears as a dentist drill, until the door was shut tight again. His ears rang.
Ishmael watched the interior camera feed as Gil negotiated the narrow corridor with his forearm crutches. Enormously relieved that this intruder wasn’t Angie Burley, again, especially not now, Ishmael rolled his chair back to unlock and open the server room door. Even this was enough to knock the breath out of him. Ishmael sat forward with his forearms on his knees, hoping to quell the vertigo.
Canes clacked beside him.
Dr. Gil Burton looked irascible, especially now that he’d brought in the breath of frost with him. His coat hung open, and the heavy pockets swung in front of his hips, tangling up his canes when he walked. He stopped a few feet away from Ishmael’s open door, straightened—or tried to—and caught his breath. Under his winter gear, Gil was wearing a faded blue sweatshirt with the design of a tilted, yellow happy face printed on it, and the words “Quitcher Bitchin” written around the circumference. Gil took one look at Ishmael, who was sweating profusely and forcing a smile, then glanced pointedly at Ishmael’s bank of glowing computers. He shook his head, clucked his tongue, and wheezed. “What, again?” The monitoring software was rotating through all its views, and at that very moment, the picture had returned to Holly. “You’ll go blind,” Gil warned. Ishmael snorted a laugh. “Too damned early in the mornin . . .” His breath gave out.
It was 6:30, and Ishmael had already been working for two hours—and that was after thirty minutes in the gym, a shower, a five-kilometre walk in the cold, and a raid on the kitchen.
“Is there coffee?” Gil asked. “Why are you up?”
“Yes to the coffee,” Ishmael answered as he stood. “And I couldn’t sleep.” He pretended to be jaunty and aloof, when really he was leaning against the shelving unit to keep from lurching across the topsy-turvy floor.
For a while, Gil didn’t say anything. He looked Ishmael up and down, and he shook his head sadly, muttering to himself. “Come with me,” he said. After that, he focused on squirming through his medical lab door, traversing the tiled floor and down the ramp to a curved desk with several Apple computers, torn calendars, crumpled Jos. Louis cake wrappers, loose printouts, and a collection of empty energy drink cans. He kicked down a makeshift brake on his wheeled office chair so that he could sit without the seat escaping from under him. Even the act of sitting seemed to take monumental efforts of concentration and balance. Still holding his crutches, his arms sagged at the sides of his chair. “Couldn’t sleep because you’re . . .” His breath failed again. “Too busy watching those . . . cameras. You lech.”
Twenty-three years earlier, Gil had been the lead singer of Backdoor Access, with Ishmael on keyboard and Jay Brandywine on bass. Now Gil could barely cross the floor without getting winded, Ishmael was a prisoner and pariah, and Jay was on the run.
“Any more trouble?” Gil asked, more seriously.
Ishmael shook his head. His neck was stiff. “Not lately. Not since Fitch pinned her in the library.”
Gil shrugged. “She’s better in a fight . . . than you are.”
“Don’t I know it,” Ishmael freely admitted. He’d seen her fight in fur and in human form. There was a good reason why she’d survived nearly six years in quarantine.
“She doesn’t need you . . . looking at her all the time.” The last word came out as a whisper, since his sentence had outrun his breath.
“It wasn’t her I was looking at,” Ishmael said.
Gil looked like he was gearing up to say something funny, but all the spirit went out of him. He inspected Ishmael with bright but baggy eyes. Ishmael tucked his hands in his pockets and feigned sudden interest in a piece of paper on Gil’s desk. “The kittens?” Gil asked.
Ishmael looked everywhere but at Gil. Anger mixed with his fever, and his cheeks burned. “Gil, you’ve gotta give me something. I’m going in circles here.”
“I don’t know anything,” Gil said, patiently. Ishmael had been needling him for information since the day he’d arrived from quarantine. “No more than last time you asked.”
“Which is nothing more than the party line,” Ishmael said between clenched teeth. “Same thing every time. Ask Harvey, ask Harvey, he found the video, ask him.”
“So ask Harvey!” Gil said.
“I’ve tried,” Ishmael said. “The second after I email him, Burley comes down my neck telling me to mind my own business and let
her
handle the investigation.”
“So
let
her,” Gil said. “You trained her!”
That wasn’t completely true. Angie Burley had been a cop before she was turned, and all Ishmael did was layer on some technical and survival skills. That made her even more qualified to handle the investigation than Ishmael, but he couldn’t let it go. Someone had taken eight women and infected them with Ishmael’s feline variant of the lycanthropic curse. That meant only one of two things: either Ishmael had turned them, or Ishmael was not the only one of his kind, as the Wyrd Council had always sworn. The Wyrd Council believed the first, because Ishmael had deliberately fallen off Wyrd’s radar countless times in the last six years, and it was anyone’s guess what he’d been up to. But Ishmael knew better, and with one exception, Ishmael had never attempted to turn a human being.
Yeah, and see how that turned out.
Gil was the reason he never tried twice.
He’s pushing fifty
. Ishmael hadn’t changed more than his hairstyle since Michael Keaton was Batman, but Gil was already an old man, nodding off in his chair.
“Someone’s got to be looking for them,” Ishmael said.
“Yes. Wyrd is.”
“No, I mean the
girls
. Wyrd is out looking for kittens. I’m looking for the women who went missing. If we can figure out where they disappeared from, then maybe we can triangulate where they are now. There have to be missing person reports. Someone has to be making a connection between all eight of those women—maybe more of them, for all we know. But I need
something
, some clue who they are in human form, or some metadata on the video, anything! Before anyone else is turned.”
It was because of those so-called kittens that Ishmael had been sent to quarantine. Unauthorized infections were usually punishable by death—specifically, having one’s wrists and ankles shackled to an anchor at the bottom of Varco Lake—but he’d been sent to the Wyndham Farms quarantine instead. According to the official Wyrd Council statement, this was meant as a temporary prison term; according to less official accounts—namely Bridget’s own suspicions—the quarantine was meant as a painful, drawn-out, much more dramatic death sentence than a simple drowning.
