Helix: Plague of Ghouls (39 page)

A giant black-striped sabre-tooth wolf stepped out from in front of the truck cab, claws clacking on the pavement, bushy tail low, head low. He sat and squinted at Two-Trees, who skidded to a sudden stop. Bridget and Holly ran on toward the truck as Bridget hit the remote unlock and starter.

The Padre was enormous. Seated on his haunches, the Padre’s animal head came up to the bottom of Two-Trees’ rib cage. Standing up on his hind legs, he could have crunched through Two-Trees’ face with his teeth.

“Hold it,” Two-Trees said, grabbing Holly by the collar. “There’s not one damned way in hell that counts as
passing
.”

Holly extracted Two-Trees’ fingers from her shirt. “We could get
you
on all fours, sniffing around.”

“I’m not kidding! Look at the size of him!”

Holly opened the side door and let the Padre in—all one hundred and fifty pounds of leg and raised fur and striped chest, with claws, a tail, and fangs almost too big for his muzzle. He couldn’t pass for a dire wolf, let alone a cadaver dog. It took several attempts for the Padre to figure out which of his snowshoe-sized feet should go in first. “He can’t stay like that for long,” she said. “Get us to the most recent dump site.”

And if the Padre wasn’t bad enough, there was Ishmael, with his shining, black, and very feline muzzle poking out from the edges of his hood, with enormous black pupils contracting within the thin circles of honeydew-green. A car passed, and though Ishmael turned his head, his eyes glowed yellow.

“This—no,” Two-Trees said. “Hell no. Hell
no
, Bridget.”

“Causing a scene is going to make matters better?” Bridget asked, from the driver’s seat.

“You never said they came as a package deal!” Two-Trees said. “Damn it, Bridget, he’s sick, he’s contagious—”
And he can barely fit sideways through the door.
Ishmael was easily four inches shorter than normal, and his crouch was made only worse by the dramatic bends in his knees and elongated ankles. He wore no shoes. His feet were as big as Two-Trees’ hands, and almost completely round, with brown strips to show where black claws had retracted. Ishmael’s shoulders were wide, which only accentuated the narrowness of his waist; stitching pinched in the sleeves, and his neck was as wide as his big head, so wide that he’d torn his collar. Ishmael moved Two-Trees out of his way and sat on the floor between the front seats and the middle bench. Somebody’s claws tore through upholstery. Two-Trees clapped his hands to his mouth.

“Get in the truck and get us to the body dump site, now!” Bridget ordered.

“Which one?” asked Two-Trees.

“The most recent one!”

“He doesn’t have a lot of time,” Holly said. “He can’t maintain this form for very long.”

“Who?” Two-Trees asked. “God, please tell me you mean
him
.” He pointed at Ishmael, who couldn’t fit on the floor no matter which way he positioned himself. Ishmael snarled and crawled from the middle bench to the back, making the Padre shout-bark at him for stepping on some body part.

“Two-Trees, I will leave you here,” Bridget warned. “And then I’ll come back and shoot you. Get in the damned truck!”

“Please,” Holly said. She opened the front passenger’s door for him. “We’re all worried too, okay? But there are a lot of cameras, and the safest place for any of us to be right now is away from here.”

Two-Trees got in the truck. Bridget put it into reverse before he even had the door closed. “Shandley River exit,” he managed to say.

“I remember it,” Bridget said.

“It’s a twenty-minute drive,” he added, looking into the back seat.

In order to extricate himself from the rear seat, the Padre had to climb over the middle bench, balancing precariously for a moment, before Bridget turned a corner and the enormous canine fell against Holly’s face and into Ishmael’s lap. More growling, more snarling, and one short, loud hiss.

“Shit,” Two-Trees said. “What happened? Why couldn’t—”

“We don’t know,” Holly said. “We won’t know until Eva can gain access to a proper lab. All we can do is make the best of a bad situation, and—”

The Padre spun around and snapped at Ishmael, who extended his claws and boxed the Padre across the striped muzzle before flattening his own ears against his head, wrinkling his nose, splaying yellow-white whiskers, and hissing through fangs as long as Two-Trees’ forefinger.

Two-Trees wished he’d shat before he got in the truck.

“And maybe we should all just shut up for a little while,” Holly said, her voice as terse as Eva’s. She knelt on the middle bench, grabbed the Padre by the scruff of his neck and hauled the lycanthrope, kicking as he was, onto her side of the seat. Claws struck the back of Two-Trees’ seat, and he jerked as far forward as the dashboard would allow. Bridget extended her arm to keep the Padre where he was, away from Two-Trees, who had awfully thin skin. “
All
of us should shut up for a while,” Holly said to Ishmael.

Ishmael didn’t have a human physiology. He may have been able to approximate a bipedal stance, but even without a tail, he just couldn’t sit. Finally, his head disappeared from Bridget’s rear-view mirror. Carpet ripped. Two-Trees guessed that Ishmael had one hand on the floor, and that he was lying half-on and half-off the furthest bench. The pinkish-brown pads of his feet brushed against the truck’s interior. That wasn’t comfortable either, so he thrashed again, making the truck rock as it drove on. The corners of Bridget’s jaw were so angular he could have used her face to punch holes in an oil drum. Her nostrils flared when she breathed. Judging by the speedometer, their twenty-minute trip would take about twelve.

“Tell me you’re not going to change,” Two-Trees said. “If you are, pull over. Gimme the keys.”

Bridget kept looking in the rear-view mirror, especially whenever the truck rocked on its axis. “Shit,” she said. Two-Trees turned around.

There was a car behind them, matching their speed.

“It’s a big highway,” Two-Trees said. “Slow down. Let them pass.”

The Padre crouched on his elbows, his dog-like hind legs curled under him. He took up the entire width of the truck like that, with no room left over for his tail. Down his spine and following the contours of his ribs, the Padre had cat fur, the same colour and texture as that covering Ishmael’s face. This was not the same cursing, crazy-laughing, fang-face that Two-Trees had discovered in the confessional that day so many years ago. This wasn’t human. This wasn’t werewolf. This was a fully-formed predator from the Ice Age.

And nothing like the man who killed my grandfather
. The very idea loosened the band of tension across Two-Trees’ chest, allowing him to breathe for what felt like the first time in hours.

“Hang on to it, Padre,” Holly said. “Please, just a little while longer.”

The truck smelled of blood, wet dog hair, and a little like bile.

Two-Trees’ nose wrinkled. “What the hell happened back there, at the hotel?” he asked, softly.

“All I know is that one of them set the other off,” Bridget said. “We’ll have to wait until one of them can speak English again before we know for sure what happened. Foster must have heard wild animals fighting each other, so she ran to their room. Holly says the first thing she remembers was standing outside their door.”

“Are you sure
you’re
all right?” Two-Trees asked. “I mean after the donut—”

“Don’t start with me, Hector,” Bridget said. She glanced at him, underscoring the threat in her voice. Her eyes glowed a shade of copper in the dashboard lights. “Just . . . not right now. You harsh my mellow, and—”

“I get it,” Two-Trees said.

And Dep survived how long, surrounded by people like you . . . and he stayed human until the day he left quarantine?

Bridget opened the windows with a click of four buttons. Wet, cold pellets of freezing rain peppered Two-Trees’ face. Bridget switched on the wipers as the first sheen of rain speckled the headlights’ glow. They passed a sign for Shandley River, and Two-Trees told her to take the exit.

“How long can he stay like that?” Two-Trees asked.

Bridget didn’t answer his question. “Left or right?”

“Right.”

She merged onto the off-ramp’s right-hand lane and slowed as she approached the stop sign.

Two-Trees turned in his seat and was surprised to see that the Padre had his big head on Holly’s lap, and she had her fingers in the fur between his ears.

The following car took their exit.
Wonderful
.
The press?

“How long?” Two-Trees asked again.

“It depends on the level of threat,” Holly said, on Bridget’s behalf. “You stay in battle-mode until the battle’s done. If there’s no battle . . .”

There was also a good chance that the car following them was an unmarked cruiser.

“How
long
?” Two-Trees asked again. The sign said eight kilometres to Shandley River, and the dump site was another three kilometres beyond the village’s main intersection.

“I don’t know! Forty minutes? An hour?” Holly tossed up one hand. “We prided ourselves on staying
out
of fur for as long as possible, and if we slipped, we took pride on how quickly we could get back to human form. We never tried to stay in animal mode for fear we’d never come
back
.”

“Except for Vengeance,” Bridget said.

“Oh, don’t go there,” Holly groaned.

Two-Trees glanced over Holly’s head at the black shadow that was trying once more to figure out a way to fit in the back seat. Ishmael’s shoulders took up more than half the bench. Holly turned in her seat, kneeling on the upholstery. She reached over and started tugging on the material of Ishmael’s hoodie. He issued a warning growl, which made the Padre’s head perk up, and he growled back.

“Enough,” Holly said, “both of you. Ishmael, help me. Get this thing off you. I need to look at your arm.” She gave up on his hoodie long enough to turn on the interior light.

Morbid curiosity kept Two-Trees’ eyes zeroed in on Ishmael’s stygian fur, once Holly had pulled the hoodie up and over Ishmael’s head and chest. Every short strand shone. Holly pushed Ishmael’s enormous head to the side, but he came close to her face again, breathing hard through moist black nostrils, wide nose wrinkling, ears flat.

“Be careful,” Bridget told her.

All the tension rose in Ishmael’s heavily muscled shoulders, head and neck, and when she moved too close to his left arm, he bared his fangs again, soundlessly this time. The Padre whirled, bumping into Bridget’s seat, Two-Trees’ seat, everything, until he had himself turned around, paws on the middle bench, head blocking the rest of Bridget’s rear-view mirror.

Ahead, dawn lit the underside of wintery rainclouds, and it was so bitterly cold out that puddles no longer splashed under the truck’s wheels. Rain was turning to ice.

“You think he’ll be able to get a scent?” Two-Trees asked. “In this weather?”

Bridget didn’t answer. She reached into her upper plaid shirt pocket and pulled out an earphone. He heard ZZ Top through the earphone she’d left out.

With the rear-view mirror blocked, Two-Trees looked in the side-view one instead, wondering how much of the interior was visible, what with the light on and everything.

They were still being followed.

Could have gone to Cabo
.
I could have gone and never come back.

THERE WERE POLICE
cars and evidence vans beyond an official blockade. Bridget saw it from a long way off and pulled a U-Turn. They’d lost their trailing car only a few moments before, and once they’d swung around, there was no sight of the pursuing vehicle.

They had to backtrack nearly two kilometres before Bridget could find a convenient turnoff. They parked on top of a culvert, next to a field gate.

“He’s still good?” Two-Trees asked.

The Padre was still in his fur, but he was trembling, and his fur was dripping.

“You’re running out of time,” Holly said. She took the collar from Two-Trees’ outstretched hand. The Padre made a loud fuss about the collar and leash, until Ishmael growled deep in his chest and reached across the middle seat to swat claws at the Padre’s face, earning him another loud clack of teeth as the Padre snapped at him. “Enough!” Holly grabbed the Padre by the throat, hoisting him off his front legs and slamming him against the front passenger seat. Two-Trees got out of the truck as if the gas tank was about to explode. Something hard hit something hollow, and Holly shouted again. “Back off.” Ishmael growled and retreated deeper into the truck.

Bridget got out and removed the earphone as she came around the front of the truck. “He get you?” she asked, looking over Two-Trees’ shirt.

“No,” he said. “No. You’re stuck with me a while longer.”

“Good. Shit, what a day. And it’s not even seven-thirty in the morning.”

“We’ll have to make up some kind of excuse for why he doesn’t have an identification vest on him. And I’d said that he’d have a handler with him—a male handler,” Two-Trees said. He wiped his brow. “I thought it would be Ishmael who held the other end of the leash. I never thought—”