Helix: Plague of Ghouls (47 page)

“So, something happened
before
I went into quarantine,” Ishmael said. He shook his head. “I’d have remembered if I’d been bitten by a radioactive human being.”

“Well, there is a blank period in your memory,” Foster said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. His stomach churned. It had been four hours since the last time he vomited, and he hadn’t eaten since, but that didn’t make the cramps go away. “Most of the early ’80s are a wash.”

“No, more recently than that,” she said. “You came in to Wyndham Farms loaded with sedatives. What’s to say they didn’t load you up with the cure at the same time?” She pointed to his arm. “What’s to say they didn’t inject you with it, right
there
, in your shoulder? What’s to say that area had become so human that it was susceptible to the Lost One’s retrovirus?” She threw out her arms. “Ishmael, why do you think they didn’t kill you as soon as you walked out of quarantine? Why let you bum around Varco Lake, making up stories about a tribunal and disciplinary action?” She pointed again at his shoulder, poking words into the air. “Because they needed their test subject
alive
until they had proof of concept, proof that their cure worked.”

Ishmael’s sweaty cheeks and forehead burned.

“So there’s a cure?” the Padre said.

“Maybe,” she replied. “I won’t know until I can start analyzing some of Ishmael’s samples.”

Ishmael didn’t want to think about being cured. For all of its annoyances, its threats, and its hassles, shape-shifting
was
Ishmael. His feline form was the shape of
him
, the truest form of Owen Ishmael Chase. It was power, and life, and a cure was the last thing he wanted. A cure would kill him.

“He’ll start ageing,” she said. “Maybe he’ll go bald.”

“Oh God,” Ishmael groaned.

“I wonder if that
is
why Haberman’s bald,” she said.

Have you ever seen him in his furry pyjamas?

“You think he’s becoming human?” Ishmael asked. “You think someone experimented on him, like they did on me?”

“Or, maybe it’s happening spontaneously. Maybe it’s what Gil was using to cross-reference genetic markers in the creation of your cure. I don’t know, maybe spontaneous getting-better-itis is something that comes to all werewolves, eventually,” she said. Her voice was sad. “That could be another reason why there are no two-hundred-year-old werewolves.”

“I never wanted a cure,” Ishmael said. “I can do so much more for the world . . .”

“Two-Trees does a hell of a job,” the Padre interjected. “And he’s human.”

“Since you’re still changing, then you’ve still got the gland, you’ve still got the pheromones, and you probably have an adequate sample of your original retrovirus in your organs or your bones. Concentrate that, and I can make it into a kind of reverse booster shot.”

“Hey,” Bridget called, from outside the truck.

“Hey,” Foster echoed. “Wow, are you all right? What did you do to your shirt?”

Bridget’s voice grew louder as she approached the open side of the truck. “Where’s Two-Trees?”

Ishmael sat forward and stuck his head outside the truck. “I thought he was with you.”

“He was headed back here with Buckle,” Bridget said.

“Why didn’t you stick with him?” Ishmael asked.

“I was busy trying real hard not to break out in fur,” she said.

Foster’s spine stiffened. “A trigger?”

“A live one,” Bridget replied.

“That
kid
he ran after?” Foster asked.

“Didn’t just trigger,” she said. “He smelled like Grey’s pups. Like burning plastic. No outward change that I saw, but there was no mistaking it. He was up-cycling.”

“Sheeyit,” the Padre said.

“And you
left
him?” Foster demanded. “With two humans?”

“My knees,” Bridget shot back, “were
breaking
, and I was
this close
to putting my teeth around that brat’s head. And before I could stop them, they took that punk and went for a walk, headed here. I figured you’d see them! Why the hell weren’t you watching for them?”

No one had an answer.

“You see Two-Trees book it out of that hotel, you watch me throw down my coffee, you see all three of us running after that kid—why the hell—”

Ishmael moved her aside and got out to take a look. His knees knocked, and all the blood rushed from his head. Bridget caught him.

“Now?” Bridget demanded. “Seriously, now, of all the times, you have to faint?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” the Padre said. He moved everyone out of the way, taking off his coat and hat, and to hell with surveillance cameras. “Where’d you lose them?”

Bridget passed Ishmael over to Foster, and she pointed in the direction of the driveway, the service road, and the river beyond. “The slope was too steep for them to carry the kid up, so they went that way. I think there’s a bridge or something.”

“Padre, you
can’t
—we have big enough problems on our hands,” Foster said.

“The kid’s a trigger, right?” the Padre asked. Bridget nodded. He undid his jacket. “Great. I can follow faster on four feet anyways.”

Foster had her hand on Ishmael’s chest. “God, you’re burning up.”

His head was aching, too. “Go with them,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to keep up. If Two-Trees’ has a Lost One on his hands, he’ll need all the help he can get. They don’t lose easy. Just go!” He pushed her away. “Get down there, find the trigger. And once you catch up, you give ’em hell, or give ’em Holly.”

She smirked, and he saw Holly’s twinkling eye.

He watched them jog off in the direction Bridget had been pointing. Then he closed the truck’s side door and came around to the front. His heart was racing by the time he was in the driver’s seat with the ignition key turned.
Is this what it feels like to be human?
When the engine caught, he put the truck into gear and drove toward the service road and the grassy river bank beyond. He’d already lost sight of them.

He parked near the foot bridge, and there he caught sign of a flash of brown fur bounding downriver toward town. He moved the truck forward, crossed a deserted intersection, and continued down the street, with nothing but undeveloped fields, a house, and a dump to keep him company. He lost sight of the river too, until he was past the dump. The watercourse switched back under the road through a wide culvert, and he continued to follow the flow, though it was now on his left. He saw another glimpse of a large animal bounding over rocks, not quite running, but more than walking, in hot pursuit of something he was following on the ground. Ishmael eased off the brake and continued further south toward Elmbury.
Shit . . . they’re leading us into town, in broad daylight!

He raced on ahead to the next major intersection, crossed over, and parked on the side of the road, not far from someone’s mailbox post. He got out of the truck and took the keys with him. With a sweaty hand on a sweaty chest, he trotted across the road to the other side, cutting through a landscaping company’s property to get to the river beyond. He ran north, hoping to intercept the Padre. Two-Trees was right: the Padre couldn’t pass for a dog, and it had been a dumb idea to try.

No one was there.

He waited.

No one was coming. Water ran over rocks, autumn-coloured trees waved, and a car passed by on the road behind him, but no one was coming.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and called for the Padre. No one answered, neither human nor inhuman. He wondered if the Padre had left Bridget and Foster in the dust, and if the Padre had followed a trail away from town. He wondered if Bridget had up-cycled, lost her mind, and was presently chewing on Foster’s oversized head.
Maybe the Padre went back to check on them.

Sweat rolled down the side of his face. He wiped his forehead.

For a second, he thought he was wearing gloves.

The effect had been so subtle, he hadn’t even felt the hormones trickling down the back of his neck. His fingerprints had turned leathery and rough, the fingernails were loose, and his knuckles were already darkening one follicle at a time.

It’s this whole county
.
Even outside, it’s triggering me.

But in some ways, it was a relief. At least he was still something other than human. He wasn’t ready to go back.

Mortality scared the shit out of him.

He got into the truck and put his key in the ignition.

The passenger’s door opened.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “There you—”

It wasn’t Foster.

It wasn’t Bridget.

It was a woman, but it was no one he’d ever met before. She got in the truck like she owned it. She held a dart crossbow and pointed it at him. “Hands on the steering wheel.” She smelled like Lost Ones, only dustier, and bathed in coconut oil. Her cheek look banded, dark between the taut muscles and tendons. Her skin was glossy, papery, and white.

“Eyes on the road,” she said.

“Look, I don’t know—”

“Eyes on the road, Ishmael,” she said, her voice as tight as the muscles in her face. “Drive on.”

He carefully moved the shifter into drive and took his foot off the brake.

“I’m in a real precarious state right now,” he warned her. His knuckles and fingers were turning very dark, and his fingernails had come loose. “If you try to hurt me with that—”

“Spiral serum,” she said. “I think that’s what your girlfriend called it. Right? One shot, triggers up-cycle and down-cycle at the same time? Causes burnout?”

Ishmael measured his words and balanced his voice. “You’ll die in the crash.”

She laughed, then stopped suddenly, pressing her free hand against a bloodless rip in her cheek. She stared at him, hating him, laughing at him with her eyes. “And wouldn’t that be a kindness?”

He drove past the sign that said “Elmbury, 2km.”

“Besides, you want to know who those kids were, right?” she asked. “You want to know where the missing kids went?”

He didn’t answer.

He just kept driving.

I WONDER IF
I’ve had a heart attack
. That was first thing Two-Trees thought as he began to surface.

“Trees,” someone said.

All that running. All those donuts.

“Two-Trees.”

Sitting on my ass for six years, driving in nationwide circles, eating nothing but gas station snacks . . .

“Hector.”

“Mm,” he answered.

Short bursts of energy. Short fights. Mostly a lot of break-and-enter. Sneak in, 3:00 a.m. Drug them up. Carry them out.

“Hector, wake up.”

This is my penance. For making people disappear. I have disappeared.

He couldn’t answer. His head throbbed, and his arms ached. His legs were waterlogged and freezing. He felt like he was kneeling in a river.

We tried to negotiate them out,
he said to no one.
Didn’t we try to save as many lives as we could? Convince them that quarantine was the way to go? Convince them that it was safe there? That we’d notify their families? Give them protection? Give them medical attention? Find them a cure?

“Two-Trees, come on. Stay with me.”

A metal door opened, and that did more to rouse him than Buckle’s voice did. The door screeched as it grated against a concrete floor and rusty, unbalanced hinges. A moment later, cold water lapped against Two-Trees’ thighs.

“Demons,” Two-Trees said, though he wasn’t sure why. While he’d been out, he’d had a dream about squatting on a tree trunk, smiling a devilish smile at Holly. He’d been eleven years old, and thousands of years old at the same time. He’d been possessed by Wenabozho, and Holly was terrified. He’d been trying to tell her to trust him, that he had all the power of the Trickster spirit, that he’d use it to destroy their enemies and set her free.

“Two-Trees. Hector, damn it, snap out of it.”

Then a woman spoke. “Where is he?”

Two-Trees peeled open a crusty eye. Buckle was kneeling on the flooded concrete floor beside him, his hands bound in manacles, which were bolted to a fieldstone wall behind him. One of the lenses of his glasses was cracked. Buckle was watching the door and the people coming in.

I know this place. The manacles are new, but I know this place.

“Then find him!” the woman said. “He said he wanted to be here for this.” He knew the voice. A smoker’s voice. Not like Foster. This was a papery, vicious voice.

“He left,” another voice said, this one male, and as reedy as the first.

It was dark except for the light coming in through the metal doorway. Buckle had gone quiet, but it was good to know that he was there, alive, and that he had his wits about him.