Helix: Plague of Ghouls (3 page)

“I’m sorry, Gil,” Ishmael whispered. It was so hard to look at him. For Gil, some days were better than others, but every month, the standards for “a good day” were lower than the month before. He had another five years, maybe. But they wouldn’t be good years.

And it’s my fault.

Ishmael wanted to get up and walk away forever. “I am so, so sorry.”

Gil didn’t respond until Ishmael rose and started putting equipment away. “I’m not dead yet,” Gil said, forcing good humour. “Besides. I asked.”

Ishmael didn’t understand at first.

Gil was looking at his own hands.

“I screwed up, Ish,” Gil said. “All this . . . started with me.”

“You want me to put these vials in the centrifuge?” Ishmael asked, louder than necessary. Gil said yes, then gave him more specific instructions about speed settings and how to latch the lid.

“When you’re done there . . . come here,” Gil said.

“I should get outside.”

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Gil said, without a drop of humour.

Ishmael picked up a pen from the floor and tossed it onto the desk. With his aching hands on his hips, he stood behind Gil’s chair. Gil pointed to two of his monitors. “Hair sample,” he said. “Day one out of quarantine. Arm hair.” Gil pointed at one monitor. “Left arm. Just below the scar.” The microscope picture showed a straight hair that was jagged, scaly and dark brown at its edges, while reddish-brown in the middle. In the other monitor was a second hair sample. “Same location, opposite arm.” That hair was straight, short, smooth, and black. Gil clicked his mouse button. “Hair samples, same locations. Day four.” There didn’t seem to be any change. “Day six.” Still no change. “Day eight.” Ishmael didn’t see any difference, so Gil switched between day four and eight, then up to day twelve. The black hairs were becoming scaly and rough. By day sixteen, the scales seemed to be peeling away from the rest of the hair, becoming as coarse as the hairs on his infected left arm.

It was his human body hair that was changing.

“And your blood . . . flooded with latent change hormones . . .” The last word was barely audible. “Four times higher than in a normal . . . lycanthrope.”

“Therianthrope,” Ishmael said, scratching at his chest. Hair was thickening and growing between his collarbones.
Not now, damn it!
“We prefer the term therianthrope.”

“Skin-walker . . . by any other name,” Gil snarled. Then he puffed a bitter laugh. “At least you learned something . . . from Foster before you . . . offed her.”

“Didn’t kill her, Gil. Believe me or don’t, that won’t change the truth.” His teeth chattered, and he pulled his too-small jacket tighter to his body.

Gil grunted. “Whatever. Weight. Height. Blood pressure. Pulse. Temperature. Go.”

Ishmael visited each station grudgingly. “I need to go, Gil.”

“Patience.”

“If I have an accident, it’s your fault.”

The results weren’t much of a surprise. Ishmael’s blood pressure was dangerously low, his pulse raced, his temperature was through the roof, and he’d put on another seven pounds.

“But at least I haven’t gotten any taller,” Ishmael snarled, as he sat down almost knee-to-knee with his erstwhile college roommate. He was almost twice as wide across the shoulders, compared to Gil.

“God,” Gil muttered. “That’s another fifteen pounds . . . so far this week.”

“I know.”

“It’s only Wednesday.”

“I know.”

Ishmael had gone into quarantine sporting a hundred and seventy pounds of combined bone, muscle, and fat. When he escaped six days later, after so many changes and so little food, he weighed in at a hundred and four. Now, only three weeks post-quarantine, he tipped the scales at one hundred and ninety-three, with very little fat. Cycling through two and three times a week kept the fat off as easily as if he were back in quarantine; but cycling through also converted beef, pasta, and moose-on-the-hoof into raw muscle and bone. Even between cycles, food seemed to bypass his stomach and go directly to his neck muscles. All that would be wonderful, he thought, if he wanted to get into extreme bodybuilding or heavyweight boxing—or if he just felt healthy while packing on the mass. Instead, for the last three days, he’d been suffering from fever, flop sweats, migraines, and nausea. Vomiting was unheard of among lycanthropes. They had to process and store every calorie they could in order to survive the metamorphosis from human to animal and back again. Vomiting was a logistical nightmare. Even week-old road kill was food, so most therianthropes had lost the gag reflex.

“Could be a mental cause,” Gil said. “Stress, like you mentioned. Could be physical. Could be viral.” He pointed limply at Ishmael’s left shoulder, which felt hot, as if sunburned from the inside out. “Either way, you do need . . . to get out of here.” He drew a loose circle around his face. “Far.”

“And go where?” Ishmael asked, drawing up his hood.

“Make a new passport.”

“Facial recognition software,” Ishmael reminded him, pointing to his own face. “I mean, when it stays human for more than an hour at a time . . .”

“Wear make-up. And high heels.” Gil chuckled, airily. “Like at that gig in Hamilton.”

“Phuh,” Ishmael puffed, in place of a laugh then shook his head. “Is it true? They use GPS tracking tags?”

Gil’s smile ebbed. “Not my department.”

“Do they?”

“Ask Burley,” Gil said. “I only heard rumours.”

“Where? Physically?”

Gil shrugged. “Up your ass, maybe. How the hell . . . would I know . . . ?” He drank more of his coffee. “You need to get away . . . from here. Somehow. And soon.” He sat forward, and awkwardly dumped his long, skinny hand on Ishmael’s shoulder. He stared into Ishmael’s eyes as if downloading directly into Ishmael’s brain a hundred private messages of warning, encouragement, and regret. Then he sat back, and his hand fell. “Place is going to hell in a hand basket, Ish.”

“I do need to get out.” He got up to pace. “Away from all this. Away from me.” His thigh spasmed with the need to run and his knee buckled. “I need to get outside.”

“Ish, they know about Moldova.”

“Don’t care,” Ishmael said.

“I think they know about Chloe,” Gil added, stressing the name. “And about Anders.”

Wyndham Farms Quarantine had been a different world, one that made sense, for all its cruelty. The rules had been simple and cardinal: find something to eat, don’t be eaten, sleep when and where you can, use every resource you find, and spend every moment keeping each other alive. In quarantine, he could smile broadly and laugh out loud, because no one was ashamed of fangs. When conflict arose, he’d fought among equals. He’d fought, tooth and nail, holding nothing back, and they did likewise. No prisoners to drug and interrogate. No immigration officers to bribe, no police to bully, no victims or spouses or children to deal with. No surveillance cameras, no cell phone video footage, no YouTube. No humans to worry about. On the island, if anyone died, it was because they’d brought death down upon their own heads. No diplomacy, no easily bruised egos, no negotiation, no clever machinations. Just raw . . . bloody . . . power. Always at his disposal. Always just beneath the surface. His power. His.

And I want this.

“You’ve got to get this under control,” Gil said.

“I shouldn’t have to. Not out here.”

This is mine. No one can take this from me.

Except, they had.

Human beings had taken him down in an airport lobby. They’d thrown him into an island prison so damned scary that he’d forgotten how to change. And the worst threat hadn’t been those crumbling cannibals either: it was Dr. Eva Foster. She could stick a needle in his skin, rob him of his animal power, and make him mortal. And she’d do it with a smile.

“Ish,” Gil said, impatiently. “At least take it outside.”

Ishmael growled and cracked his neck. He’d been able to down-cycle in the middle of a fight with the Lost Ones. Surely, he had the ability to down-cycle in Gil’s lab. What he lacked was the motivation.

“You have no idea how bad it smells . . . when you people change.”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“Allergies,” Gil said, as he hooked Ishmael’s elbow with one of his canes. He couldn’t pull Ishmael closer, of course, not with Ishmael’s feet planted on the rubberized floor, but he made the effort. Ishmael stepped in. “You,” Gil whispered, “need . . . to get this . . . under . . . control.”

Under the skin, Ishmael was control. Turned inside out, he could hear everything, see everything, smell and sense everything around him. There was no trapping him, no catching him unawares. Turned inside out, he could rest with one eye and one ear open, and he could move from sound sleep to battle mode in a split second.

No one would take that from him again.

He made eye contact. Colours were turning to grey, and someone was turning up the lights. He heard Gil’s heartbeat quicken.

“I don’t want to,” Ishmael murmured.

“Something’s going to happen,” Gil said, in a rush. “To you. To Bridget. To your Pack.”

Ishmael checked Gil’s face for any sign of mischief. The rest of his body may have belonged to a prematurely aged curmudgeon, but his colourless eyes were as young, as sharp, and as pissed off as ever.

“When?” Ishmael asked.

“I don’t know. Soon.”

The Council’s ready to hand down a decision. What’s it to be? Drowning? Or a new quarantine?

No . . . no, they’d find a way of hobbling me and forcing me to watch as they execute everyone else first. Everyone. Including Bridget and Gil.

At Wyndham Farms, Ishmael had killed a man nearly twice his size. He’d clamped his jaws on the man’s throat, and he’d squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, until the throat stopped working, and the man had fallen down, unable to breathe. And that had been when Ishmael was at nearly half his current weight.

Bring it on, you bastards. Try and come between me and my Pack now, you sons of bitches . . .

“Ish,” Gil said.

“I’ll go,” he growled.

“Get it under control. They want you to fail. They want an excuse.”

“God,” he said, his voice thickening and his upper lip splitting, “how I wish I could give them all the excuses they want.”

“Hit the fans on your way out.”

“I didn’t do it, Gil.” Ishmael’s jaw bone was swelling. “Foster. The kittens. None of it. Remember Moldova.” He slapped at a switch beside the door. Fans whirred, and a light outside the lab switched on, warning incomers that the place had been flooded with change pheromones. A similar light was rigged at the main security desk, inside the manor house. “You know I wouldn’t try to infect—”

“Except for the exiles,” Gil said, over his shoulder. “And now look at them.”

Neither forgotten nor forgiven am I?

“Except for—” Gil opened his mouth to say something else, and it was going to be agony for both of them. “Go.”

“Gil. I never meant to—”

Gil shut his mouth, turned his back, and flung out his hand, knocking coffee mugs, papers, and his keyboard off his desk.

RAIN SPARKLED WHITE
like wet snow in the twin headlight beams. Hector Two-Trees shut off the engine, snapped off the lights, and pulled the key from the ignition, but he missed his pocket, and the ring of keys fell between the seat and the middle compartment. “High calibre reflexes, Two-Trees,” he muttered.

Halo County was the last place he wanted to be. But fate found ways of bringing him back, again and again, to gawk in morbid fascination at the bloody leftovers and the hollow-eyed survivors.

The truck’s interior lights faded, and, except for the occasional flash of the network connection light on his cell phone, it was soon as dark inside his truck as it was outside. It was only 7:00 p.m., twenty minutes before sundown, but it looked like the middle of the night. In the country, under a stubborn rainstorm, the darkness was stuffy and cold.

Because investigating a random act of brutality is never required in full sunlight . . .

Two-Trees flapped his open coat across his leg and jammed his hand down the narrow space beside the driver’s seat. He was getting tired of having to manoeuver around his potbelly, and not for the first time, he made a committed mental note to definitely maybe think about going to the gym. “Six weeks,” he grumbled, grimacing at the pebbly encrustations on the side of his seat, “and already gotta detail this thing again.” He sat up once the keys were firmly in hand.

There was a hooded face where his driver’s side reflection was supposed to be.

He jarred and shouted, curling up his fists. “God
damn
it!” He put his hand over his heart.

Rain fell like beads from a stiff hood, illuminated from below by a failing flashlight, which set the visitor’s glasses aglow. Sheet lightning flashed, and the face within the hood was lost in shadow.

“Can I ask what you’re doing here, sir?” a man asked, through the closed window. The voice sounded human, but in Two-Trees’ line of work, that didn’t mean much.