Helix: Plague of Ghouls (49 page)

Maurelli curled a lip and tore more coconut-smelling skin. “Sydney’s just a means to an end.” She turned to her son. “Get Skinny-Ass moving. Drug him if you have to, I don’t care. Just get him upstairs and get the process started. We’ll need to feed before we can move.”

“But Jay—” her son began to say.

“Ask me if I give a shit about Jay!” Maurelli said. She wrenched the keys from her son’s hand. Skin turned to dust and fell off the back of her hands, off her face, off her neck, leaving tendons and blanched muscles exposed to the air. “Try it, Buckle. Please.” Her voice was changing, as if someone was punching holes in her larynx to let in more air. “Just try something. Because I’m
starving
and I might not wait long enough for the process to take, you get me?”

Behind her, Ishmael shouted in pain and collapsed again. Maurelli watched him fall, grinning with all her shark teeth. “Go! Get that camera going,” she said, unlocking Buckle’s right manacle without watching what she was doing.

The instant his hand was free, Buckle rabbit punched the back of Maurelli’s head. She reeled, and Buckle wrapped his legs around her waist, pulling her close enough to reach for her keys. When she spun in his grip to fight back, he drove a finger into her eye, making her scream—a hissing, white-hot scream—and he pulled the key ring from her hands as if he meant to break all her fingers in the process. Maurelli’s son caught Buckle by the throat and hoisted him bodily and awkwardly, slamming him against the wall. The boy squeezed Buckle’s throat between thumb and forefinger. Buckle’s face turned red and purple, while the younger Maurelli shed skin. His eyes widened and turned the colour of separated milk. The boy’s hand squeezed Buckle’s throat up into second, third, and fourth chins. Buckle scraped at the boy’s wrist. Maurelli reached in and enveloped Buckle’s hand with her own. She bared her teeth. Two-Trees heard something crunch, as if she’d crushed a crystal goblet under her heel. Tears sprang from Buckle’s reddening eyes when he tried to scream. The boy let him go, and Buckle fell to his knees, with one chained arm dangling above him to keep him from curling up on the floor. His broken fingers twitched like the legs of a dying bug. He gagged for breath and tried to hold his throat, but the digits of his free hand were bent the wrong way.

“Oh God,” Maurelli said, breathless with erotic anticipation. “Do that again.” Her voice was like the whistle of storm winds through the pines. Buckle coughed sickly. Seeing that everyone’s attention was on Buckle, she panted. “Get that camera going!” she shouted.

People moved. Buckle was coughing and his teeth were chattering. Maurelli unlocked his other manacle. Buckle didn’t try to fight this time.

“God, how you people are going to pay,” she said to Ishmael. She laughed and slobbered clear saliva. “Look at what you’ve done to us.” She daubed at the corners of her nearly skinless mouth with her sleeve. “You promise to cure us of cancer and disease? You promise our children power and strength, and this is what you give us instead? And then you abandon us?” She kicked Ishmael in the ribs.

One of the bonewalkers had the video camera pointed at Ishmael.

Shit . . . no . . . No no no!

Maurelli pulled open the screeching door and swore at her band of jungle punks to get them started on moving Buckle up the stairs. She went with them.

Ishmael shook his head, grunting, keeping his face averted from the camera. The boy crouched down, trying to aim the lens into Ishmael’s face for an extreme close-up.

“Too dim in here for a shot that close, dumbass,” Two-Trees said.
Fight it, Ishmael. Fight it, damn it, or we’re all toast.
“You’re going to need more light or a better camera.” The punk flipped him the bird without looking up from his work.

“Tell me,” Ishmael grunted. His voice rose and fell like he was going through puberty all over again. “How it ends.”

Blood trickled down the side of Two-Trees’ face.
Badly. This ends badly
.

“She went to the lakeshore,” Ishmael began.

“She went to the shore with all the weapons the chief had given her,” Two-Trees said. “She knew she could destroy the monster, because Wenabozho said she could. But she didn’t know how. She said, ‘I don’t know how to fight with bow and arrow,’ so she put down her bow and arrow.”

Joints popped, and Ishmael groaned—out of relief or out of pain, Two-Trees couldn’t tell.

“Then she said, ‘I’m not strong like Bear, I’m not fast like Wolf, and I have no talons like Hawk.’ So she dropped her club and axe. She said, ‘I’m only a little girl who likes to paint.’”

Ishmael coughed up blood and spat it on the floor. Two-Trees made a mental note to avoid that spot, if he ever got free. The problem was, the blood was leeching into the water and spreading in all directions.

“Are you getting all this okay there, son?” Two-Trees asked. “I’ve been thinking of vlogging all of Grandfather’s stories, so send me a copy, will you?”

The boy didn’t acknowledge him. He only pushed Ishmael’s shoulder back with the prod of his knee. Ishmael rolled with it, smiling up at the camera with a very bloody but very human face.

Brown had crept into Ishmael’s black hair, like he’d walked under a torrent of coffee-coloured paint. “Go on,” Ishmael said. “It’s a good story.”

Two-Trees continued. “The Trickster tells her, ‘This is a hungry spirit. That’s why it eats your people’s food. The more he eats, the hungrier he gets. So give him something to eat!’ And she said, ‘But all I have are my magic paints.’ He said, ‘And you have Pouch Lake.’ So then she began to paint thousands of trout and pike in the water, big and fat every one of them, and as soon as the last stroke on the last fin of the last fish was painted, they all came to life, splashing and jumping out of the water. Then she sang to the evil spirit, saying that there were so many fish you could walk across Pouch Lake without getting your feet wet. The evil spirit saw all the fish, so he dove in and tried to eat them. But they were only illusions painted on water, so all he did was drink and drink and drink until his belly was ready to burst. Then the Trickster went up the rapids to Steeper Lake, and he asked Beaver to move his lodges. As soon as the dam was broken, all the water of Steeper Lake fell down the rapids and crushed the evil spirit at the bottom of Pouch Lake, where he lives today, eating all the magical, painted fish.”

“God, this is pointless,” the punk said, at the end of the story. He put the camera on pause and went upstairs, because Ishmael wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do.

“And then in 1972,” Two-Trees added, “they dammed Steeper Lake, reducing Pouch Lake to a third of its original size.”

The boy muscled his way through the iron door.

“That’s why the spirit of hunger got loose,” Two-Trees said, “and that’s why we’re in this predicament.”

And just like that, Two-Trees understood what had to be done.

His stomach felt as if it were full of snakes.

He knew what he had to do.

There was no way in hell they could quarantine so many people, so fast. Not without assistance from Wyrd. And Wyrd was no more.

“So what do you think?” Two-Trees asked, as the door opened again.

“Damned fine story, Dr. Two-Trees,” Ishmael said. “Ugh, God, you people smell,” he said, as Maurelli entered once more. She tried to snap her fingers, but she had no skin on her fingertips, only a shell-like surface. She pointed at her son, and then at his camera.

“You can’t fight it forever,” she told Ishmael. “The world
will
see what you are.”

“You’ll only expose yourself in the process,” Two-Trees said. He had to find a way out. He didn’t have Ishmael’s flexibility, he didn’t have Bridget’s bite strength, and he didn’t have Sister Whitehair’s magic paint brush. At the moment, all he had was his big mouth.

“That’s the whole
point
,” Maurelli said. “For months, Jay kept telling us,
Be careful. Don’t show yourself in public
.
If you get caught, they will come in here and kill this whole town. Wait until the bonewalkers are at full strength. Wait until we can assemble the whole Bone Tribe
. Well, you know what? Bring it. Look! Look what he did to me. Look what he did to my son, to all those boys and girls! Luring them. Bargaining with them. Promising a home and a family they could trust. Runaways, all of them, and no one cared to look for them. Castaways. Throwaways.
Come to me,
he says,
and I’ll give you the power to strike back at your enemies. I’ll give you new life! Come to me and wreak a new apocalypse on this fat, sick earth!
Come to me and live! All the perks of werewolfism with none of the hair!
Boy, he wasn’t kidding, now was he?” She put her fingers into her hair and pulled. The wig came off. When the thing fell in front of Ishmael, he shouted and cringed, as if it had been made of mustard gas. He sat back on his heels and all his ribs cracked outward, expanding his chest. Swearing, panting, he shook his head violently and leaned forward as if trying to compress his ribs back into human form again. The wig bobbed on the waves he made, rubbing against his legs.

The camera was right in his face now. More kids came in, each with bay-leaf ears and wigs.

“Seventy children!” she wailed. “Boys and girls he recruited from all over the god damned country. Runaways. Trash children. Punks. And he brings them all here.
Here
. To my town. Says they can hide in all the rundown houses, says they can crash on the farms and in the old factories. He recruits my own son, saying he’ll be a great right-hand man someday. And then he infects
me
, saying he needs a scientific mind on his side, someone who knows how to keep kids in line, someone who knows how to give them direction in their lives—and what direction do I give ’em? Straight to hell.”

Ishmael shook his head again. Brown hair was creeping up over his scalp, like he was slowly drowning in paint. “I . . . will not . . . help you,” he forced out. He glanced at the camera. Another spasm hit him, and his spine arched. The shell-like caps on Maurelli’s fingers shot forward and merged with her chalky fingernails, encapsulating her fingertips in sharp bone in place of claws. One swipe, and she had Ishmael’s jacket torn open from the hood down.

Three more kids came in. She pulled them over to stand near Ishmael, though they got in the way of the camera angle. One by one, they got taller and lost their skin, and Ishmael twisted away from them. Where Two-Trees had assumed were tan lines, skin darkened and ruptured. Black tribal thorns moved on each face like a nest of snakes. They were suffocating him in change pheromones.

Fight it, Ishmael.

Maurelli ripped away his sleeves, sliding them down his arms to his manacles. He lurched to his feet to head-butt her, but she was fast and prepared. He stopped, belly cinching. He dropped to his knees again, breathing hard through his nose.

Fight it, or everything you’ve fought for is lost.

“And then one by one,” Maurelli continued, “they all started dying off. Kids, with their whole lives ahead of them. Does Jay give a damn? No. He tells me to save the ones I can. He’ll only be taking the strongest ones anyhow. So I try to save them, and what do I do? I only make them worse! Hungrier! They start going off on their own. Luring more kids into their little games, infecting them with Sydney’s blood, turning them, fattening them up, promising them all the same damned things Jay promised them, and when the time is right . . . ?”

“They’ve been eating away from the pantry,” Two-Trees said. “And the more they eat, the hungrier they get.”

Come on, Ishmael, keep it together. Figure something out. Get us out of here before she realizes I’m stringing her along.

“Except human meat doesn’t satisfy their hunger, does it?” Two-Trees asked. “They crave werewolf flesh.”

Ishmael was retching, but nothing was coming up. He strained against the chains. Two-Trees could see just what all that extra food had been doing for Ishmael. His neck had widened, his face had gone square, his shoulders and pecs made his shirt stretch thin. Metal groaned.

Oh shit. Distraction . . . We need a distraction . . .

“Is that what the ‘process’ is?” Two-Trees asked. “Your children need werewolf flesh to keep their cravings at bay, to let them continue passing in public like ordinary teenagers.”

Her breath whistled through the holes in her cheek. There was a film over her eyes.

“Take a victim. Plug him full of lycanthropic blood and pray the infection takes. Once you get confirmation, you feed the sorry sons of bitches until they’re ready to burst, and once the calf is fattened, then comes the feast.”

She might have smiled, but it was hard to tell without any cheeks or coloured lips. “Jay says there’s something wrong with our virus. Something missing. That’s why we didn’t become werewolves like
him
. That’s the way we were
designed
, he said, by Wyrd! Our infection comes out of a lab.” She laughed bitterly. “Manufactured.
Plastic
. Sydney . . . Sydney is the by-product of all that experimentation—her father’s daughter. I knew. And I’m the one who kept her alive. I’m the one who understood what she needed to survive. Jay says we need something to plug up the holes in our DNA. And I know what it is!”