Helix: Plague of Ghouls (30 page)

And then you killed Helen’s mother.

“Can false starts really make you that crazy?” Ishmael wondered out loud.

“You’d know better than me,” said the Padre.

“No, you saw more new lycanthropes in six years than I did in my whole career,” Ishmael said. “Most of my targets had been lycanthropes for decades and had gone rogue.”

Ishmael trembled.
Oh God, tell me it’s not that . . .

To create as many opportunities as possible to propagate itself, the werewolf retrovirus sometimes triggered long bouts of extreme aggression and frequent, random, and uncontrollable changes. It was then that a werewolf was deemed rogue, a danger to himself, to society, and to all werewolves everywhere.
Rogue! Shit! It wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

Rogue dogs gave up. They gave in. Rogues killed children, whole villages, and didn’t give a damn if they were caught or not. Going rogue was the lycanthropic equivalent of dementia, or rabies, and it was a death sentence, whether a Wyrd agent put them down or not. One rogue in Moldova had triggered an epidemic and a mass execution.

But Ishmael was the one who was supposed to go on, and on, and on, hunting down all the other lycanthropes as they got older and lost control. He was the exception to all the rules, the one and only, the unique, the invulnerable. And he wasn’t that old. He wasn’t supposed to
get
old. Abram Haberman, Chloe, Jay—they’d all lived to a hundred post-infection. And Anders Jewell Anderson? He’d been a lycanthrope since 1837, with no memory of when he’d actually been born. They were all supposed to go first, not Ishmael. He was supposed to be the one to put down the board members when old age made them a hazard to security. And yet there he was, troubled by an ever-shrinking cycle, and losing control, just like a rogue.

Incontinence of the lycanthrope gland
.
A little like getting Lost.

Abram was showing his age. Old A. Hab never left Varco Lake.

Why is Ahab bald?
Gil had posed that question, presumably because he was trying to get a point across without being understood by eavesdroppers, but now that Ishmael stopped to think of it . . .
Why
is
he bald? Is he still bald when it’s his time to hunt?

“God, I’m glad I didn’t end up Lost then,” the Padre said. “The ones with the worst false starts usually lasted longest, once they were Lost. They were the most aggressive and never waited for a body to die before they resorted to cannibalism. They were all like mini-wendigos toward the end, only without the horns and dislocating jaw.”

“The Lost Ones,” Ishmael said. “When they started going screwy . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Did they have problems keeping it together, too?”

“Mentally?”

“As in having more frequent and more shallow changes before they . . .”

The Padre nodded. “Sure. It’s why they deteriorated so much faster than the rest of us. But too many changes, and they’d have burned out or starved to death. Why?”

The side door of the truck opened, startling them both. It was Eva Foster. She handed Ishmael the laptop and got in.

“Any luck?” Ishmael asked.

“Some,” Foster answered. She threw him his credit card. “But some of the stuff won’t come in until two days from now, and that’s with expedited delivery. The PCR kit, the pipettes, the microscope, they’re all in the mail. Some things we can pick up on our own, like detergent and other reagents. The list is all on the computer.” She quickly closed the door. “I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can,” the Padre said. “We’ll be here. We’ll help you—”

“I was done with this,” she answered, in her gritty, smoker’s voice. “Done. No more Lost Ones, no more quarantines, no more of
you
.” This last bit was tossed at the Padre. “And what’s this I hear about Dep having his false starts?”

She looked at Ishmael. She looked him up and down, saw his torn pants, and frowned in disgust. Ishmael had run away after giving Holly the credit card, before she’d completed her Jekyll-and-Hyde trick and become Dr. Eva Foster. This was the first time Foster had seen Ishmael since the quarantine.

“And why are you twice your size?” she asked. “Are you sick? Why are you sick and muscular?”

The Padre reached across Ishmael’s seat to grab Foster’s arm. “People have been eaten, my niece-daughter is missing, and Dep’s on his way here. We
need
your help on this.”

Foster stared.

I need you too
. “The countercyclical agent,” Ishmael said, wearily. “Just enough to get us through this mission and back home.”

“Home?” Foster asked. She cocked her head like a robin listening for worms. “What, like Varco Lake? Is that home now?” She was so loud, compared to Holly.

“It’s the closest thing we’ve got for the moment,” the Padre said. “Doctor, listen. We don’t have a lot of time. I think it’s a good idea if we sat down with Two-Trees and Bridget and just explained—”

“No. You get in that driver’s seat, you get me to some place quiet and private, and Holly takes over again.”

The Padre pointed out Ishmael’s window. “We can’t just leave Bridget—”

“She’s going to go straight to Wyrd,” she said. “As soon as she knows who I really am, she’ll go straight to Haberman.”

“We can trust Bridget,” Ishmael reminded her.

“Really?” she asked. “Can we?”

They were both watching him now.

“We never found out who was taking our research,” Foster said. Ishmael hated it when she referred to herself as “we”, but her two personalities were as dissimilar as her two human forms. She was the only person in the world who could call herself “we” and be biologically accurate in saying so. “How do we know it wasn’t Bridget? How do we know that whoever stole that research isn’t still waiting to steal more? As soon as I go online to dig up my notes on how to synthesize the countercyclical agent, someone’s going to see me and steal more! Or . . . or realize I’m here—”

“Don’t log onto the Wyrd server,” Ishmael said.

“I
need
the Wyrd server,” Foster said. “There’s only so much we can do in the field. And it’s not like I can just whip this stuff up from memory.”

“Don’t,” Ishmael repeated, “log onto the Wyrd server.” He put his hand in the pocket of his ruined pants and he pulled out her replacement USB drive. “I’m sure everything you need is right here.”

She snatched it from him. “This is my research?”

“It was the only thing I could grab before the flight from quarantine.”

She looked away suddenly, as if someone was talking to her from outside the truck. Her eyes moved like she was reading—the same deadly game of ant-sized tennis Holly had watched earlier. Ishmael wondered if they wrote each other mental sticky notes inside that shared skull of theirs.

“And where do you expect me to set up a lab?” she asked.

“In our hotel room,” Ishmael answered.

More reading of notes.

“Oh
God
, seriously? Seriously?” Foster looked at him like she was going to throw up. “Do you have any idea how much cross-contamination—”

“Don’t need to know,” the Padre said, lifting his hand.

“And with all the biting, and the licking—”

“You know what we need here?” the Padre asked. “Beer. You promised Bridget a lot of beer. And wine! Wine’s great. Some call it a sacrament, you know.”

Foster’s nose was hideously wrinkled, leaving her front teeth bared like those of a rabbit. “And you didn’t even stick to human—”

“Vodka?” the Padre asked, his voice breaking.

“Whiskey. A lot of it. God. Fast.” Ishmael handed the Padre his credit card and pointed in the direction of the nearby LCBO. “Take Bridget with you. Tell her.”

The Padre didn’t like that idea nearly so much. But the news had to get out sometime, and at least in a liquor store, Bridget could be bribed into not screaming. Grumbling, the Padre left them alone, and softly closed the side door as he went.

Foster sat in the seat closest to the back of the truck, holding the USB key in the crux of her hands like a small pool of water. “Tell me everything.”

THEY WERE ON
their second restaurant of the afternoon, and Ishmael was hungrier than ever. He’d arrived in Elmbury already a size XL, and he half expected to leave wearing a tent. Two-Trees watched him with a mixture of dread and respect.

Foster didn’t gorge herself on food. Shifting between two human forms required a lot less energy. Just the same, she clanked her fork through the roast beef and sawed it apart. The Padre had only opted for a salad and a small plate of fries, since stress had robbed him of his appetite. Bridget was eating a plate of spaghetti as if it were the entrails of a worthy adversary. Ishmael, on the other hand, ordered the Lumberjack All Day Breakfast, pushed the vegetables to the edge of his plate and dove in. When he was done, he polished off the vegetables too, then drank half the jug of water the waitress had left on their table, not because he was thirsty, but because he was tired of chewing and wanted his stomach to shut up.

Bridget choked on a laugh. “I’d have thought you would have been happy to get your dog collar.”

The Padre’s scowl was formidable. “Wrong kind of dog collar, dumbass.”

“Can priests say things like that?” Two-Trees asked. “Dumbass?”

Bridget smothered her grin in a napkin. She cleared her throat. “Any luck with that after school project you’re doing for Ferox?”

“No, nothing yet,” the Padre said. “Ferox was right. Too many hits. I don’t suppose you could help me narrow the search a little.”

Bridget wiped her mouth with the napkin. “Well, I know she was picked up outside Surrey, BC, and I know Jay had a hell of a time tracking her down, because her ID was falsified.”

The Padre frowned. “Aw, man! You mean her name might not even be Danielle Smith?”

Bridget nodded. “Angie said there were a few patients like her. Found out how good Dr. Grey’s treatment worked, so she falsified her ID and medical records, so Dr. Grey would take her on as a patient. Happened four or five times, actually. Once with a private investigator.”

“Oh her,” the Padre said. “Yeah, she didn’t last long.”

“I know. Jay got fed up with her questions,” Bridget said. “It’s no excuse, but . . .”

Why only my shoulder? Who has false starts? Why is Ahab bald?
Those were the three pesky questions Gil had asked before Ishmael’d turned into a handsome scaredy-cat and ran away from Foster.

Ishmael knew why his shoulder was scarred. One of the Lost Ones had torn open his arm before he’d had the chance to shift into cat-mode. From those gouges, he’d contracted a mutated form of Daniel Grey’s re-engineered lycanthropy retrovirus. Then his body fought off the infection. His antibodies had stopped Grey’s virus from overtaking his whole body, but he’d sustained long-term damage at the infection site.
“Why only your shoulder?”
Gil had asked. Ishmael had been sliced and diced multiple times during his stay on the island, so Ishmael should have had scars all over his body.

Two-Trees was counting plates. “How did you people ever survive quarantine?” His phone jingled an email notification before anyone could answer. He checked his messages, then left so quickly that he nearly took the table cloth with him.

“Shit, that reminds me,” Ishmael muttered. He leaned back and took his phone out from his pants pocket. After breaking the bad news to Bridget, the Padre had gone to another store with Ishmael’s credit card to buy him a pair of purple sweatpants. The Padre said they were the stretchiest he could find, and couldn’t understand why Ishmael wanted to exchange them for another colour.

Ishmael had a text message notification. “Totally forgot about this.” While Ishmael had been up-cycling, and while he’d been speaking with Gil, Gil had been texting on a secondary phone.

“More good news, I hope,” the Padre said.

“The
hell
is going on?” Ishmael mumbled.

“What is it now?” Bridget asked. “Did they find Helen?”

“No,” he said, turning over his phone to show her Gil’s message.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“No idea.”

When the waitress came back, he asked for more scrambled eggs. Pride purred in his heart of hearts. If he was becoming supersized as a human being, what was he becoming in his feline form?

I remember running
.
My blood was on fire, but I could run . . . everything fit together . . . I could almost run on all fours . . .

“Ish?” Bridget asked.

It had felt so good, prowling that close to civilization, climbing trees that could barely support his weight, watching humans scurry to and from their cars and stores, oblivious to the animal watching them from downwind. His heart was pounding. His mouth watered.