Helix: Plague of Ghouls (23 page)

And after each of Dep’s false starts, he’d stop and take an inventory of what else he’d lost. If he missed some observation, she’d point it out to him. By the time they were in sight of the garage, Dep had to untie his hair from its ponytail to let it hide his cupped and triangular ears which, for now, lay flush against the sides of his head, instead of swivelling out like satellite dishes.

At the first sight of people moving between the main house and the garage, Ferox stopped Dep. She knelt and rolled up the cuffs of his pant legs. She hoped this would disguise how short the pants were on him now. His legs were hairy, but in the way that most men’s legs were hairy. In a couple of hours, that hair would be replaced by fur, she figured. As it was, his calf muscles had lengthened, as had his ankles, and his heels wouldn’t reach the ground.

“Maybe we should wait until after your next false start.” She checked her watch.

He took her hands, gently. His eyes had changed, too. Now they were copper-coloured, with flecks of jade, and she couldn’t help but stare at them.

“Did you know dat Bridget was a mother?” he asked.

“No,” Ferox replied. It wasn’t the question she’d been expecting.

“I don’t know how many children. She never told me. But she knows. She remembers dem. She remembers their names, their birt’days, where dey were born, what dey looked like.”

“From before she was changed?”

He lost his balance, and Ferox, unthinking, caught him under the arm and propped him up. He thanked her, then withdrew his heavy arm from her shoulders. He put his clawed hands back into his pants pockets, though the pants were too tight around the thigh, and too big around his middle. “Nobody is suppose’ to know dat she knows. Once you change . . .” He pointed to his head. “You lose everyt’ing.”

“Almost everything,” Ferox agreed.

There wasn’t much she remembered either, but she did remember some of the bad things, like how she’d had to pay for two seats on an airplane once, and how her thighs had spread into the aisle and onto the adjoining seat. Two hundred and sixty-three was a number that came up frequently in her dreams. Dep had told her that she wasn’t much shorter after her first full cycle than when she’d first come into quarantine, which meant she’d not been much more than five foot six; and if two hundred sixty-three had been her maximum weight, at that height, she’d have been morbidly obese, with all of the harassment, abuse, inconvenience, and bad joints that went with it. But could she remember any friends? Family? She didn’t know if she was married, or engaged, or attached to anyone. She didn’t even know why she’d gone to Dr. Grey in the first place, or why she’d agreed to his secretive new medical treatment. Maybe she’d had cancer, or a thyroid problem, or maybe he’d convinced her it was the only way she could safely lose weight in a hurry. She just didn’t know. She only remembered having been obese, angry, and alone.

“But dere was a way,” Dep said. “To keep what she remembered.” He took one of her hands and led her to the back door of the garage, careful to see if anyone was watching. “And me, I already know I’ve lost a lot. But not my brudder. Not Vengeance. Not anybody in quarantine. I remember some about school, and about a fight I had wit’ my fadder . . . but I don’t remember my
maman
now. I remember Hawk being in ’ospital, but . . .” His hand was on the door knob. He looked distraught and confused. “But I don’t remember what his real name was. I should ’ave recorded it down, but I forgot.”

“Recorded—”

He put his clawed finger to his lips, shushing her as Ferox had shushed Helen the night before. Now looking mischievous, he opened the garage’s back door and led her up the stairs on their immediate left. At the top of the stairs was a hallway leading to a couple of storage rooms. The door on their right was the one Dep wanted. He felt above the doorframe—the lintel was nearly eye level to him now—and he picked up a key. He unlocked the door and returned the key to its hiding place, before shuttling Ferox inside the storage room and snuggling in beside her. He closed the door. If not for an air vent over their heads, Ferox would have suffocated. It was a room smaller than a jail cell, cramped from floor to ceiling with shelves and boxes of car parts.

“I come ’ere, two, t’ree times a day,” he said. “So what ’e says stays in my ’ead,
là
?”

On one shelf, there was a portable DVD viewer with the screen already lifted open. He turned it on and checked which DVD was in the drive. There wasn’t any. He smiled to himself and cursed his forgetfulness, but after two attempts, he found the jewel case in a box of Audi spark plugs on the highest shelf. He dropped the DVD into the drive and pressed play.

Ferox heard Bridget’s voice first. “Okay, go ahead.”

In the video, Dep was sitting on a stool in one corner of the garage. Crickets were singing outside, and Dep looked so much skinnier, so much shorter, so much faster. He grinned self-consciously and looked at the floor. “I uh . . .” He cleared his throat. “Hey.” He waved to the camera. “My name is André.
Your
name is André. I am becoming
you
.” His accent was there but not nearly so strong, and the emphasis fell on the right syllable in every word. “And I’m going to tell you all of this again in French, just in case you forget your English too, because I want you to remember this, no matter what.” He held up his finger and closed his eyes in a professorial manner, saying, “
Tout d’abord, toi mon gars, tu aime ta blonde Dani Smith.
First off, my boy, you love your girlfriend, Dani Smith. And if you do anything to hurt her,
calisse de vierge, m’a t’en crisser une!
” He shook his fist at the camera, and Bridget laughed.

He found Ferox’s hand. His bones were lengthening in some places, shortening in others, and when a knuckle popped, she held his hand a little more warmly.

THE RECORDING WAS
about seven minutes long, reminding Dep of the most important pieces of his current life. He told himself that there was a lot that he could let go of. He told himself that he’d had a father, and they hadn’t been close toward the end. He’d had a mother, but she died of cancer. He’d had a brother, too, but he’d committed suicide sometime after reaching quarantine, though he hadn’t mentioned anything about Hawk’s infection, or how he’d slaughtered his attacker, Vengeance. He’d talked at length about the quarantine, what he’d been through, what he believed in, and what he was becoming, though he didn’t have all the details at the time. He named all the people he was supposed to trust, though most of that part was in French. Ishmael, he’d said, was like a boss to him, but not much of a friend; a man to be trusted, a man to follow and to protect, but not to get too close to, because Ishmael didn’t like to be close to others. The Padre, he reminded himself, was the best damned gay priest there ever was, even if he wasn’t ordained, and with him, a secret was a secret, no matter what. Shuffle was a good man—no mention of Shuffle being the infamous Dr. Grey, who’d gotten them all into so much shit in the first place—and Mary Anne was his wife, a bit of a snarky bitch like Foster, but tough as nails when the chips were down. Helen was like a little sister to him. Abram Haberman couldn’t be trusted. Bridget was . . . well, Bridget was trying to be helpful. He reminded himself of the time that she’d brought him to quarantine, so he was allowed to hate her for that, but he also told himself about how Bridget had run after him, into the Park, to save his life from Vengeance, after Dep had punched him in the balls. He’d finished the video the way he had started by recounting all of the reasons why he loved Ferox.

When the video was over, Dep said there were two other reasons why he loved her, and he apologized for not recording a message about them. When she asked what they were, he grinned broadly, reached across, and squeezed both reasons. She laughed.

“I love you too, Dep.”

She slipped her arms around his shrinking waist and listened to his heart thump slowly underneath his shifting ribs.

“I know you don’t like what I’m becoming,” he said. “I don’t like it either. I’m . . .” His chest swelled and deflated. She heard the air rushing in and out of his lungs. He was too tall to kiss now, unless he bent over or she stood on a chair.

Vengeance had been over seven feet tall, and he almost never became human again.

“I’m scared,” Dep said.

She tightened her embrace. “You get used to it.”

He kept his arms around her shoulders. They’d fit better together, once. He used to put his chin on her head. He couldn’t even do that now.

“You were there for me from the start to the finish,” she said. “I’m going to do the same for you.”

He chuckled, but something in his lower spine crunched, and he grunted. She held him tight.

“But so help me God, Dep, if you hit me again, I’m going to bring you down to my level and I will make you bleed.”

“Okay,” Dep said, cheerfully.

She looked up at him. He smiled down at her. “And don’t even think about turning into a cannibal,” she said. “I will make your life into a living hell. You’ve seen me do it for others. You know what I’m capable of.”

Dep’s ears perked, slipping free of his hair.

“What?” she asked.

Dep listened.

“What is it?” she whispered.

She heard Angie Burley’s voice. She was asking someone about keys to the ATV. Someone asked if she knew how to find the Hollow.

“I think she’s looking for Helen,” Dep whispered.

“You’ll get in deep shit if they find you in-cycle so close to the main house,” Ferox said. “I’ll buy you some time to get out of here. You get back to the Hollow.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know! Be . . . big. Protect Helen,” Ferox said. “I don’t know what it is, but that woman creeps me out.”

Dep didn’t argue. He opened the door for her, and they listened until someone jangled keys and somebody else started up the ATV. Once the motor was roaring, Ferox snuck down the stairs to the back door, with Dep following behind after a count of twenty. Ferox ran around to the front of the garage.

Angie Burley was more suitably dressed for the weather this time, though she’d soon get hot. She wore a woollen scarf under a fleece-lined leather jacket, with jeans, and pink fur-lined boots.

“Oh, thank God,” Ferox said. She put her hands on her hips and gasped for air, as if she’d run the whole way from the Hollow. “I was hoping I could find someone. Angie, please, you’ve got to help me.”

Angie turned off the ATV and pulled the scarf down from her face. “I was just going out to look for you, sweetie,” she said, as she dismounted.

“I’m worried about Helen. Ishmael said that if I needed any help with Helen, you’d help me.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I can’t find her. I spent all yesterday and all night looking for her. I heard her a couple of times, but as soon as I got close, she’d run off. She’s having her false starts. Angie, she’s not even thirteen years old yet. Do you have any idea what this kind of metamorphosis does to a girl that young?”

“I’ve got a rough idea,” Angie drawled. “Dammit.” She fidgeted, and she pursed her lips. “Never seen such bad timing. Honey, you’re gonna have to make a big choice right about now, all right?”

“Uh . . . okay . . .”

“I just got a call from Ishmael. You know I sent him out as backup for Agent Maple on a job in Northern Ontario?”

Ferox nodded impatiently. “And you sent him with Bridget, Holly, and the Padre, yes, they told me. But Angie—”

“The situation’s a hell of a lot worse than anybody anticipated. Even I didn’t know how bad it was ’til last night.” She put her hand on Ferox’s shoulder. “And now we’re gonna need to call in everybody we got left. Especially those of you who are immune to the second generation strain.”

That set Ferox back a step.

“I haven’t cleared this with Abram yet, because he’s . . .” There was sweat on Angie’s upper lip. She cast a quick, frightened look toward an upper storey window of the main house. “Come with me.”

Angie pulled her along at a quick trot. They weren’t headed toward the house. They were headed toward the lake, for which the estate was named. They didn’t stop until Ferox could barely see the outlines of the garage through the trees.

“What the hell’s going on?” Ferox asked, dropping the damsel-in-distress act.

“There’s a lot of bad shit about to happen here,” Angie said. “I’ve only got a vague idea what it is, but it’s big, and it’s got something to do with that outbreak in Ontario. I think Jay’s about to do something monumentally stupid. And bad shit is about to happen to me too. I thought I knew what I was gettin’ into, but he’s three steps ahead of everybody. He’s been planning this for years.”

“Planning
what
, Angie?”

“Ishmael is walking into a goddamned trap and a lot of people are gonna watch it happen—and by a lot of people, I mean a lot of
human
. . . goddamned . . . beings.”

“What?”

“Now you’ve got to make a choice. Either you have to head down there and help Ishmael, or you stay here and help your little girl Helen. If it were my choice, I’d go help Ishmael, for the sake of us all.”

“I can’t just leave her like that,” Ferox said. “Especially not now. I can’t leave Dep either!”