Helix: Plague of Ghouls (40 page)

“Just get him near the site,” Bridget said. “Aw, screw it.” She turned to Holly. “Give me Ishmael’s jacket.” Once she had it, she put it on, zipped it up, drew up the hood and put her coat on over that. The extra layer helped to disguise her chest, but the scent made her snarl and made her eyes turn caramel-coloured. “There. Male enough,” she said.

She took the leash that Holly offered her. The Padre was as paw-confused getting out of the truck as he’d been going in. He settled for a big leap into the grass, landing near enough to Two-Trees to knock him off one foot. Bridget looked up at the sky, then in the direction of the body dump site. By then, the rain had let up and the sun had cleared the horizon, but it was miserable and dim outside.

“I’ll stay here with Ishmael,” Holly said.

Bridget tossed her the keys. “Move the truck out of sight. Be back in one hour.
One . . . hour.
”

“Stay human,” Holly told her. A second later, she was in the truck, starting the engine.

“Come on,” Bridget said to the Padre, giving his leash a slap. The Padre turned and nipped her. “Ouch! Bastard!” The Padre ran on a few steps—now he seemed more in his element—before stopping, dropping his tail, lifting his ears, and looking over his shoulder at Two-Trees. “Let him run on?” Bridget asked, offering him the other end of the leash.

“Let him go,” Two-Trees said. “We’ll tell them you lost your grip on the leash.”

“We’ll catch up,” Bridget said to the Padre. “Go on. Toward the cars.” She pointed south-west. “Try not to be seen.”

Through crunching, ice-tipped grass, Two-Trees and Bridget jogged after the Padre, neither saying a word. There was nothing between them and the police but wide open fields, interrupted by shallow creeks and short wire fences. Where the grass gave way to marsh, they lost sight of the Padre in the pussy willows.

Bridget said she heard something behind them. She slowed to a backward walk. “Hector,” she said. He turned around too. There was a man running toward them. Twice, the man stumbled and fell forward onto his hands, disappearing momentarily into the grass.

“Is that Ishmael?” Two-Trees asked. The man was too far off.

“If it is, where’d he get the coat from?” Bridget was wearing Ishmael’s hoodie under her coat, and they hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes for either Ishmael or the Padre.

Two-Trees spotted a blur of brown out of the corner of his eye. He grabbed Bridget’s arm and swung her around. The Padre was running away from the scene of the crime, but his back legs were stretching longer and his arms were shrinking. Fur fell off in patches, leaving pale skin visible even from that distance, but still he ran with his nose to the earth, switching from one side of a trail to the other like he was slaloming across flat land. He gave up trying to lope on all fours and began to run crouched over. His legs tangled under him, and he crashed.

“Shit,” Bridget said. She turned and bolted toward the Padre, leaving Two-Trees to confront the man running toward them.

“Shit,” Two-Trees agreed. Before Bridget could reach him, the Padre was on his warped legs again, running toward the east, his pointed ears perked forward and muzzle gaping open.

The man who’d been running toward Two-Trees now stopped, looking toward the Padre instead.

“Shit!” Two-Trees spat, and he charged to intercept.

It was DS Buckle, and he had a hell of a lot better track-and-field physique than Two-Trees did, but Two-Trees was closer.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Two-Trees muttered. “Bridget!” he screamed. His teeth clattered and his belly shook with every pounding step. His foot went over a stone and he crashed, but he pushed himself up and ran from a sprinter’s starter position. Without thinking, he wheeled left after Buckle, who’d passed him, and poured on what last spurt of speed he had left. He tackled Buckle to the ground just as the Padre fell and Bridget slid across the grass toward him. Two-Trees and Buckle rolled, with Buckle gaining the upper hand. He punched Two-Trees across the mouth. Buckle struggled to his feet, but Two-Trees wrapped his arm around Buckle’s lower leg, yanking it out from under him. Buckle fell to his hands and knees. “No,” Two-Trees managed to say. Buckle donkey-kicked Two-Trees in the teeth, and Two-Trees lost his grip. Buckle scrambled to his hands and feet, then into a clumsy run, reaching for his gun belt, which had come loose in the struggle. Two-Trees squirmed to get onto his feet, cursing his beer belly. He dove after Buckle again, catching him by the shoulders and spinning him around, but Buckle had already seen what he’d come to see.

Surrounded by cast-off grey, black, and brown fur, there was a man wearing a dog collar and a dangling leash, whose face had been spotted by a concerned citizen, and who bore a perfect resemblance to either John or Luke Reid, suspected murderer and cannibal, and who’d just been spotted by a cop, while racing naked from a body dump site.

Breathless, wide-eyed behind his glasses, neck tendons standing out like guide wires, Detective Sergeant Buckle drew his weapon and aimed.

FOSTER’S FACE WAS
very close to his—so much so that Ishmael recoiled in his seat with a startled gasp. “The
hell,
woman.” He sounded groggy.

She looked deeply but quickly into one eye, then into the other. She held her hand over one of his eyes, then moved it aside. She repeated this with the other eye. “Pupil dilation’s good,” she said to herself. She snapped her finger beside his ear, making it ring.

“I can hear you just fine,” Ishmael said.

“Latent twitch response in the ears,” she mused. She lifted his upper lip and inspected his fangs. He pushed her away. She frowned and went back to the middle bench, where she knelt on the seat, watching him. “Sensory check. You have all your toes?”

He moved them. He wore no shoes, and fur clung to the knuckles. She had him check his fingers, his reflexes, his coordination, and so forth, until she declared that he could pass for a mostly healthy human being again. He was so cold his movements were sluggish. “Where’s my jacket? Didn’t I have a jacket?”

“Would you mind telling me
why
the hell the two of you decided to change like that, off-cycle and in a
hotel
room?”

Ishmael shivered and asked her to close the truck doors. “I don’t know who went first. I was fast asleep. It was the Padre’s crunching bones that woke me up, and that’s when I realized I was already in cycle too.”

“You must have set him off.”

“I don’t
know!
I’ve never, ever had it happen while I was asleep. Not even during the worst nightmares. Just ask Holly.”

“It’s not outside the realm of possibilities,” she said. “It used to happen in quarantine. And you haven’t been yourself lately.”

He brushed fallen hair off his arms.

“Oh, don’t do that in the truck,” she whined. “Take it outside. Do you have any idea how hard it is to detail fabric upholstery?”

“Where are we?”

Now she looked puzzled. “Well, as far as I can tell, we’re in the middle of a field, staring at nothing, surrounded by no one.” She then spoke more seriously. “It was Holly who rode here. And as soon as you down-cycled, she took a deep breath and here I am. All I know is she asked me to look you over to find out how much more broken you are today. What day is it, do you know? Have my supplies arrived yet? Where is everyone? See, this is why she told you to get me a voice notes recorder.”

Ishmael was covered in loose fur. He took Foster’s suggestion and went outside, where the air was frosty and wet. His feet ached, like they had at Wyndham Farms. “I’d sworn that I’d never go topless in fall again,” he said to Foster, who also stepped out of the truck to get her bearings. “And here I am, naked but for my pants, as if we’re right back where we started from.” He ran his hand over his left arm. “Aw, Christ.”

The scars were deeper than before, and wider. He moved his arm around. It was still sore and weak. Foster pinched the flesh. “You’re losing muscle tone,” she said. “It seems to be spreading.”

“I’m rotting?”

“Too early to say if you’re atrophying or just getting flabby. We won’t know one way or the other without a full medical work up.” She scratched her brown hair and tapped her fingers to her lips. “Are you still feeling feverish?”

Any colder, and he could have cut glass with his nipples.

“Well, you’re fighting something,” she said. “God, I can’t wrap my head around this. Even the Lost Ones took months to deteriorate. And you’re not entirely deteriorating, either—only in this one spot. I’ve never seen anything like this with the Lost Ones. I mean, yes, they started to deteriorate, but it always began with the extremities—fingers and toes falling off, hands failing to regenerate after cycle, noses—”

“Thanks,” Ishmael said. “I get the picture.”

“But not so high up on a limb, not so close to the torso! And meanwhile, the rest of your frame is . . .” She waved her hands helplessly around his body, as if trying to scramble some foul aura. “
Not
deteriorating. Just the opposite. What the hell is
wrong
with you? And where’s all my gear?”

“If it’s coming,” he said, “it’ll be in town, where we should be. Where’s my phone?”

“In my hotel room, dead,” she answered, “along with Bridget’s and Two-Trees’.”

“God, this is a mess,” Ishmael said. “What the hell happened? One day I’m a perfectly respectable tracker, sipping on a latte after an intercontinental flight. Next day I’m an amateur and I’m having false starts!”

Which reminds me.

“Listen to me. I don’t know the answers, but maybe the questions were never meant for me in the first place.”

“What?” Foster asked. “What questions?”

“Right before I cycled through at the electronics shop, I was on the phone with Gil. He was in a panic, and I think someone was listening in on our call, so he had to talk in vague terms. He asked me three questions. Why only my shoulder? Who has false starts? And why is Abram Haberman
bald
?”

Foster canted her head. Her lips moved, as if she was repeating his questions word for word. She seemed to search the clouds for the answers.

“I keep thinking this
rot
is only my shoulder because that’s where the most blood and gore from the Lost Ones got under my skin. The infection’s spreading from there.”

“It’s possible,” she said. “But I doubt it. Lycanthropy’s not like necrotizing fasciitis or gangrene. It’s more like HIV. It spreads through the whole body, altering DNA in white blood cells.”

“Fair enough.”

“Why would he ask you questions about false starts? He knows more about false starts than anyone else. So why would he ask you who gets them?”

Ishmael shrugged, though it made his whole arm burn. “I asked him if he was safe, and he said no,” Ishmael said. “He must know something he wants us to figure out. There’s got to be a connection between those three questions.”

She tilted her head, puppy-like. “Then what’s the common denominator?” Then she cocked her head the other way. “And why
is
Haberman bald?” she asked loudly.

“He always said that after he cycled through, his hair grew back in patches, so he’d just shave it all off,” Ishmael answered.

“No, there’s more to the question than that. Why is he
old
? He shouldn’t be old. He should look
your
age. Or like Bridget.”

“Or like you,” Ishmael said. “I don’t know. Some lycanthropes just look older than others. Harvey looks like he’s in his forties, as does Angie Burley. And Haberman still looks pretty sharp for a hundred-and-thirty-year-old man. He served in the Boer War, for God’s sake, he’s allowed to lose some hair. Meanwhile, Jay’s over a hundred himself, and still gets carded at the door.”

She blinked at him.

“What?” he asked. “Well, how old are you?”

“First memories I have are from the sixties, in university. But I’m a late addition. I’m the accidental by-product of LSD and alcohol.”

“Then how old is Holly?”

“Her first dated memory is from 1912,” she answered, gravely. “But she’d been around a lot longer than that.”

Same as Chloe
.

“But look at us,” she said. “Holly’s the exact same flower child she was in 1968. So why, then, is Abram Haberman bald? Why is he old? For that matter, who’s the oldest lycanthrope you’ve ever met, and how old are they?”

“Anders Jewell Anderson,” he replied. “Infected in 1837.”

“Does he look old?”

“In his late forties, maybe.”

“Bald?”

“No.”

“What kind of lycanthrope is he?”

“Wolf-like,” he answered. “As classic as they come. Bipedal, big head, opposable thumbs, tail. White in winter, grey-brown in all the other months.”

“Only a hundred and seventy-seven years old. Why not any older?”

“He got a late start in life, I don’t know.”