Helix: Plague of Ghouls (44 page)

“What do you need?” Buckle asked.

“Skin samples. Bone tissue. Blood samples if you can get any,” Foster replied.

“Can only get them from the victims.” He sounded like a man talking in his sleep.

“It’s a start. But if you can get another one of those jungle punks into custody, punch him in the nose and see if you can get a blood and saliva sample.”

He showed no reaction. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Access to medical supplies and a clean place to use them. You need to be as careful as possible handling those samples. Everyone needs to be.”

“Goes without saying.” Buckle’s voice was low. “Prevent the contamination of evidence.”

“Fair enough. Do you think you can manage to get me some?”

Buckle shook his head. “Not without breaking the chain of evidence. Not without making my superiors ask a lot of questions you don’t want me to answer.”

Ishmael sat forward. “Do you really . . .
really
. . . think this should go to trial?”

“If it’s humans, yeah,” Buckle said. “Especially if it’s more than one human.”

“And if it’s not?” Ishmael asked. “Tell me honestly . . . do you think human beings could do that to another human being?”

“Yes,” Buckle said. He showed Ishmael how sincerely he meant it. “I’ve seen a lot . . .
a lot
. . . of weird shit in my life. More in the last three days than before, but yes. The precedent’s been set. Dahmer, Alfred Packer—hell, what about that guy on the Greyhound bus in Manitoba, who cut off a passenger’s head with a knife and then sat in the back, eating his flesh? How about that man who was stoned on bath salts and started eating that homeless guy in Florida? What about the guy in Montreal who chopped the head off his boyfriend, mailed the head and feet to Ottawa, and ate the rest? What about Robert Pickton, that pig farmer out west, who cut up all those women and fed them to his pigs? Yes, I
do
believe human beings could be involved. And from what I understand, werewolves were humans first, and that scares the hell out of me.”

Ouch
.

After some thoughtful silence, Foster spoke again. “The Padre already confirmed there was at least one non-human bipedal trail.” She sat back, frustrated. “Only one out of what, six trails? You’d think they’d be engaging in Pack behaviour—even the Lost Ones did that—but only one non-human among them? What were they doing, pulling him along on a leash like some kind of . . .” He saw the colour rise up the side of her neck into her cheek. “Padre must hate us.”

“Digger,” Ishmael said, abruptly. “How much do you remember about him?”

Foster shook her head and crossed her arms.

“You weren’t there for long, I know,” Ishmael said. “Holly took over. But
think
. What did you smell on him?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“You and Holly share a wolf in common. One of you has to remember—”

“Are all your conversations this surreal?” Buckle interrupted.

“Just wait until you hear about his love life,” Foster said. “Honestly, Ishmael, I don’t remember. Holly’s a lot closer to that side of the family than I am, if you know what I mean.”

“Digger didn’t
have
a smell. That’s why you didn’t up-cycle right away, even though he did. That’s why none of us up-cycled right away. He was a predator of lycanthropes—”

“Hey, uh . . . if this is your idea of recruiting new members, it’s not working,” Buckle said.

“In order for him to be an effective predator,” Ishmael continued, “he first needed to bypass our senses, and second, he had to negate our self-preservation instinct by not triggering us to up-cycle.”

“Right, so two points to raise,” she said. “One, okay, it’s an interesting thought. It’s harder to sneak up on someone when your very smell makes them automatically armour-up. Get rid of the smell, sneak up on your otherwise very bitey prey. And maybe the Padre’s nose was confused, and
son of a bitch
, this problem will get a lot bigger, if these cannibals all turn out like Digger. But—point two—they
have
been triggering us to up-cycle. Or at least, someone has. You and Bridget both, completely separate incidents. So with luck, they’re just cannibalistic Lost Ones who are really good at disguising themselves.”

“Hey, here’s a thought,” Buckle said. “How about those kids, huh? You know? The dead ones? Can we give a damn about them, too?”

Foster rolled her eyes. “All the more reason to confirm or deny our theory that your killer or killers is one of ours.”

Ishmael agreed with her. “If it is, we track him, we dispatch him, we cover up the evidence.”

“The media will suspect a connection between these murders and Pritchard Park.”

“Let them,” Ishmael said. “Over the next few months, the police will be lambasted by the press for red tape and incompetence. In a year, it’ll become a great unsolved mystery. In five, just another urban legend. Anyone who makes connections between this and Pritchard Park—and any other unsolved werewolf sighting—will be branded a conspiracy nut or a horror fetishist. I know, because that’s what I use the internet for. Feeding conspiracy theorists red herrings, among other things.”

“And if it’s not one of yours?” Buckle asked. “If they’re an all-human cult of cannibals?”

Ishmael rubbed his arms. “Look, at the moment, we’ve got nowhere else to go. Until we can get some idea of what’s going on at Wyrd, we can make use of our time. We help you anyhow. Tracking human beings is just as easy as tracking lycanthropes. Just ask Two-Trees. Or Bridget. They did a great job of relocating just as many grain-fed human beings to quarantine as they did lycanthropes.”

They drove a while longer in silence. Buckle merged onto the highway. The officer looked in the rear view mirror frequently, most often to get a glimpse of Ishmael, who was trying hard to look cool, though his stomach and intestines sounded like a rocky mudslide. He wondered if he had dysentery.

“He said he could fake my death,” Buckle said.

“He’s done it before,” Ishmael answered. “Many, many times.”

“Especially during quarantine,” Foster said.

“He’s a forensic anthropologist,” Ishmael added. “He has access to dead bodies and he knows how to disguise their identity.”

Buckle snorted. “Two-Trees was right,” he said. “You people are a plague.”

Foster sighed. “Listen, with the exception of one or two—”

“One
sight
of you,” Buckle said, “is a death sentence. Any of you. Not a hell of a lot of choice you give us. As soon as we see you, we become a liability. A threat to your . . . ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the rest of mankind.”

“What was your first reaction when you saw the Padre lying naked in his own fur?” Ishmael asked. “You shot him.”

“I shot
near
him.” Buckle was quiet for a second. “So to protect your own asses, what becomes of me? Join you and work for you, maybe on the off-chance become one of you. To make that happen, you fake my death so I can never see my friends or family again—for all intents and purposes, I
will
be dead. Or, I could die for real.”

Ishmael didn’t have a witty comeback for that. Neither did Foster.

“To hell with Wyrd,” Ishmael said. “You want to continue on living your old life? You’re free. There is no Wyrd. There are no more rules. You don’t have to join us. And sure as hell, I’m sick to death of death, so it won’t be me or anyone near me who kills you, if it comes to that. Hell, you don’t even have to keep your mouth shut. Tell the world what you saw.” He picked at his nails. They were loose in the nail bed. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re no threat to us, and you have as much a right to live as we do.”

Buckle watched him. Ishmael hated being stared at, especially in such a weakened state.

“Either way, the knowledge is yours now,” Ishmael said, “and we can’t do anything about it. What you lack is proof. You can go back to your superiors and tell them everything in as much dry detail as you want, but somehow I don’t think they’ll believe you.”

“If they see the bodies—”

“They’ll test the bodies for saliva, and they’ll find it’s human,” Foster said.

Buckle’s face pinched, as if he’d sucked on an invisible lemon. Ishmael figured the police had already tried and came up with that precise result.

“Even if you tested the transferred epithelial tissue,” Foster said, “you’d find they test positive for human DNA unless you know what to look for. And I know what to look for, if you’ll help me.”

“Or you could catch a lycanthrope on your own,” Ishmael said. “They’re going to change eventually, and by then, you’ll either have a hell of a lot more corpses or a hell of a panic on your hands. Or both. Then the military comes running in—Canadian and ill-equipped, if you’re lucky, American and CDC if you’re not. They lock down the entire county, with orders to shoot to kill. It won’t matter who—civilian, police, co-operative or otherwise—if it tries to escape: execution. No fly zones. Helicopter patrols armed with napalm and machine guns. Houses torched and people relocated to holding camps with walls made out of plastic and chain link fence and halogen light bulbs. Then the quarantine expands outside your jurisdiction. Visitors are called up and interned. Family members. Whole office buildings where maybe one of you has gone for a business trip. Anyone who came in contact with anyone during the last six years, since Pritchard Park. Then come the witch hunts. People accused of lycanthropy because they had an outstanding spat with a next door neighbour, or because someone saw some random creepy-looking guy on the street. And then comes the human testing on those who do show positive for lycanthropy, and controlled tests on clean human beings to see just how contagious it is. For all its foibles, Wyrd at least took steps to prevent all that.”

“Except now they’re not doing that,” Foster said.

“Then
I
will be Wyrd,” Ishmael answered, “and I’ll do it myself.”

“Seriously, you guys called it the Weird Circle?”

“Wyrd Council,” Ishmael said, spelling it out for him. “And yes, I actually give a shit about human beings, because I am one. I give a shit about lycanthropes, too, because I’m human. Two-Trees called us a plague?”

“Called you a few more things than that,” Buckle answered. “You, in the broadest sense possible.”

“So he does work for revenge.”

Buckle shook his head. “He did, at the start. He was there when his grandfather was eviscerated and had the jaw slashed from his face.”

“Jeez,” Foster breathed.

“Eleven years old when it happened,” Buckle said. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen Reid’s teeth receding in his face and his claws falling off. Now . . .” Buckle shuddered. “Well, it
had
been just one more unsolved case in a long history of weird shit. By the time we got there, the barn had been burned down with Red Cloud inside. We used to say it was because he was drunk, got in a fight with somebody who had an axe, and the murderer set fire to hide the evidence. Turns out it was Hector’s dad and his friend Michael Crow who set the place on fire. Six years later, Hector’s father was the next to get ripped open.”

“It’s no wonder he was so enthusiastic about bringing people to quarantine,” Foster said, “whether they were human or otherwise.”

Buckle shook his head. He kept his eyes on the road. “Two-Trees told me that for all he’s seen, for all his need for retribution, there were a few people who changed his mind. A few who proved to be more human than humans.” Now he looked at Ishmael. “He told me about what you did for the people in Islamabad, when Wyrd refused to sponsor their visas. He told me about the transgendered man you rescued from a public immolation in Armenia, and how you smuggled him into Canada. He told me about Gil, too. And about what you did for Bridget. He told me about all those people you rescued from that island, just this past September.” He glanced at the road momentarily, to make sure he wasn’t about to drift out of his lane. “He told me that for every Jay, there’s one Gil and one Ishmael. For every Ahab, there’s a Foster and a Two-Trees. I can’t say I know what that means, but I’m guessing he means that for every bad wolf, there’s one person to bring them down, and one more to search for a cure. And I figure, until werewolfism has gone the way of the dodo, Two-Trees will work with whoever it takes, even if it means working with another werewolf. Cure the best, kill the worst, deal with the rest on a case-by-case basis.”

Ishmael didn’t want to be cured. He liked his power. Bridget enjoyed it too, in her own way. Holly—he couldn’t see her happy as anything but a child of the wilderness.

“Holy . . . shit . . .” Foster whispered.

“What is it now?” Ishmael asked.

She had her trembling hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. Why only your shoulder? Who has false starts? Why is Haberman bald? Shit, Ishmael.”

“
What
?”

“Humans, Ishmael! Humans age. Humans go bald.
Humans
have false starts,” she said. “Humans
vomit.
Oh my God, Ishmael—someone’s trying to
cure
you!”