Helix: Plague of Ghouls (51 page)

Eight bonewalkers nibbled and slashed at the legs of the wendigo, who fought back without much enthusiasm but with a lot of power.

“Go,” Ishmael growled. One eye was bigger than the other, and his fangs were receding. “I’m right behind you.”

Two-Trees curled his arm toward his chest and he ran—changed his mind and ran back from the door, ducking under a bonewalker’s body as it sailed by—picked up the fallen camera out of the water and sprinted for the door. Ishmael followed and tried twice to get the door open. He had no thumbs. He cursed at the top of his lungs, clutched his head between both hands and sagged on his bending knees. Skull bones clicked into place. Claws fell out, hair grew in, teeth fell out, his jaw stretched like putty—and for one precious second, he had thumbs and strength and fury, and he pulled the door with such force that it bent vertically inward.

“Go.” Ishmael leaned against the door, keeping it open. “We have to find a way. Kill ’em all.”

Ishmael was a dead man on two feet, toggling between two forms before any one cycle was done. His eyes were green—not honeydew green, but hazel, natural. Human.

“Let’s go,” Ishmael said again, with a weary nod.

The wendigo was pulling apart Laura Maurelli, whose eyes stared at nothing. They both looked strangely relaxed.

“She won’t stop,” Ishmael said. “We have to do it. Let’s go!”

Two-Trees nodded and headed upstairs toward only God knew what.

God, and Wenabozho
.

Twice Two-Trees dropped the camera. Upstairs, the place was cluttered with green debris. Doors were left open. Medical equipment had been scattered everywhere, broken, aged, and soiled. Cradling his broken hand, he splashed through black puddles carved by decades of rain coming through the broken roof.

“Come on, Ishmael! It’s not far. I know the way. You can make it.”

“Go!” Ishmael’s voice was behind him, but in that stairwell, he sounded far away.

Two-Trees heard voices. Animal voices. Bridget’s voice.

He climbed through one of the empty windows onto the reclaimed land around Pouch Lake, stumbling and jumping one legged when his foot caught in a vine. There were more bonewalkers out here too, in plain public view under a bright, sunny sky. They were running north, toward Pritchard Park, toward town.

“Come on,” Two-Trees said. “All I need you to do is keep them off me long enough so that I can get into the hydro building. All right? I have an idea.”

There was no one behind him.

She’s eaten him
.
I’m on my own.

There was a town of sixty thousand people outside that paper mill, with thirty thousand more scattered across the county, every one of them armed with a video camera. Every one of them was edible. Every meal would pique the devil’s hunger.

He tucked his bad arm in, keeping the digital camera snug in the crook of his elbow, and he ran up the steep incline beside the spillway, sliding wherever the mud was wet, or where roots were loose from too much traffic.

A bonewalker tore across the south end of Pritchard Park, leaping over the fence as if it was a kiddy-gate. An enormous, grunting, huffing, animal body ran the same way and flung himself at the fence, and for a moment, he balanced on its top, his tail whirling behind him. The fence posts creaked, leaned, and suddenly bent like cheap straws, and the Padre went with it. He leapt from the bent fence like it was a diving board, and he landed, breaking something on impact. He ran on down the river after the bonewalker with two front legs and one back paw, with no sacrifice to speed.

Two-Trees had bigger demons to drown. His head swam. Still, a broken fence was a hell of a lot easier to escape than manacles. He squirmed up the last bit of mud and was on the path. He picked himself up.

Bridget wore nothing but tatters, and she was laughing in that yipping, piss-inducing hyena way. Her triangular torso was precariously balanced on short, spotted legs, with one bulging, furry arm flexed and a throat in one hand; the other arm extended, reaching for a second neck. When she had them both, she smashed the two bodies together with inhuman speed. One head broke loose and hung by skin like a polyp. Growling, with her Mohawk bristling from her forehead to her docked tail, Bridget waded out into Steeper Lake and held them both under water. She looked up suddenly, blunt nose working, button eyes blinking. She uttered three shrill yips, acknowledging Two-Trees’ scent.

Two-Trees sprinted for the bridge to the far side of Steeper Lake. How he’d get into the hydro building was another question. How he’d open the spillway gates, he had no idea. For now, it was just a matter of getting there.

At the far end of the bridge was a girl on a mountain bike. She got off. Two boys joined her.

Foot falls echoed on the planks behind him.

Shit. No. Not now. Not this close.

He saw white out of the corner of his eye, and he leapt against the rails of the covered bridge to get out of its trajectory.

But this time, it wasn’t bone he saw.

She was only shoulder high to him, owing mainly to her stance, but she had a head and face that was 100 percent, dyed-in-the-wool
wolf
, with white-blonde hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. Blue eyes blinked up at him, not a trace of malice or fear or wrath; it was just a quick check to see what his plan was.

“We need to get to the hydro building,” Two-Trees told Holly. “Over there. We need to open the spillways. Let Steeper Lake drain into Pouch Lake. We need to flood the mill with enough water so it’ll fill the basement.”

She tilted her wolf-like head, seemingly unconcerned by the three bonewalkers striding toward them, shedding their skins and growing out their ears and claws as they approached.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Two-Trees asked.

She tipped her head forward in a gentle kind of nod.

“There’s a wendigo down there! And the only way to make the hunger stop is by filling its belly with an inexhaustible supply of
water
.” Two-Trees fixed his sweaty grip on the digital video camera. “Can you clear the way for me?”

She blinked innocent eyes at him. Her nostrils moved, and whiskers twitched.

“Do it,” he said, “Sister—”

He saw the planks of the bridge come up under his shoulder. He’d twisted away and fallen prone, facing the way he’d come. Someone had punched him in the chest with atomic force.

Wood turned red.

White fought white—bone claws against fur—a hundred feet trampled the bridge beside his face, getting farther and farther away, the wrong way, toward the paper mill and not toward the hydro building. And meanwhile, the sun-bleached planks under his chest were turning bloody.

This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go
. His chest was on fire. The whole bridge was on fire with his blood.

He rolled over onto his back. On either side of the covered bridge’s roof, the October sky was June-blue. He put his hand on his chest and felt the width of the burning, punctured bruise.

Boards shifted under his body as someone walked up to him.

Not fair. No. Not now. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. This isn’t how the story ends.

Detective Sergeant Palmer stood over him, gun smoking. He knelt and picked up the video camera. He stood again. “Traitor.”

And then he pulled the trigger.

THIS IS BURNOUT
.

The wendigo was licking the wall. Her spine bent in the middle, as steeply and sharply as the hump of a camel’s back.

Why isn’t she eating me?

Ishmael crouched, wedged in the broken door, unable to go any further. Every body part was in a different form, except for his face, which was trying all configurations at once but never in the same place twice. He was like stiff clay being moulded and kneaded by brutal cosmic fingers, with all his organs being mashed and rearranged under the pressure.

Oh, right . . . I’m too human for her tastes.

There was nothing left of the bonewalkers except what was stuck between the wendigo’s teeth.

With luck, Ishmael thought he’d die before she remembered he was still there.

His hands were deflating, flattening, softening. There was no fur left now. No great paws, only someone else’s hands. They didn’t look like his. They didn’t feel attached to the whole. Nothing felt assembled. Just random bits of corpse revivified in a newly cobbled whole.

I’ve dreamed of a thousand ways I could die in this job
.
This wasn’t one of them.

Becoming human again first had never figured into it. Even when he knew Foster was developing weapons against lycanthropes—the counter cyclical agents, the spiral serum—he knew it’d only be used to destroy the lycanthrope, as in “to render them dead.” Never, ever, did he think a cure would be possible. Lycanthropy was something people contracted, lived with, and died with. People were infected and left their human lives behind, then they’d run around causing trouble for a hundred years or so, and after that, they’d lose their minds and get bat-shit rabid and kill a bunch of people. In the end, they’d either exhaust themselves, get burned at the stake, or die under the claws of a Wyrd field agent.

Well, maybe once I dreamed some implausible happy-ever-after for Bridget, where she becomes Claire Bambridge again and returns home like an amnesic good-twin, like on one of her old soap operas
.

He had chest hair now, curly and reddish-brown. His ribs were deflating, leaving behind only a man’s upper body where a glorious feline heart once beat.

But cured? Not in a million years.

His feet were still feline. It seemed so strange to see them now. Usually, when he was in fur, he was looking at himself through cat’s eyes, with a proud, forest mind. Now he was pathetically human, except for the cat’s paws at the end of his brown-haired legs, like a pair of novelty slippers.

Is this who I was before infection?
I always thought I was more . . . lean.

The wendigo’s foot claws scratched the floor. The tail swept tainted water. “Syd . . .” she said. “Neeee.” She wheezed air into her lungs. Colour returned to her eyes for a moment. “Help. Syd. Neeeee.” She patted her hollow chest. “Syd. Neeeeeee.” Her stiff, broken speech reminded him of Icepick. “Help.”

“I will,” he said.

He couldn’t move. Things were swelling and shifting and cracking, but nothing wanted to move. He was so utterly worn out.

He wondered how many more bonewalkers were out there. How many more children would never be recovered.

“They . . . fed . . . me . . .” she said.

She reminded him of Icepick, and not of Digger.

“Chil . . . dren . . . and . . . I . . . felt . . . nuh . . . thing.”

Thick, cataract clouds moved across her eyes, absorbing the flickering kerosene light without reflecting any of it back. She gripped her horns and wailed with Digger’s nor’easter voice, and retreated from the light.

“Kill,” she said from the dark. “Meeeee . . .”

“I’ll try,” Ishmael whispered, though his body and soul were melting into the water, the concrete, and the door.

“Fat . . . chil . . . dren . . . They . . . smelled . . . like . . .”

“Plastic?” he asked.

“Yesssss . . .”

“Like garbage?”

“Yeeeesssss . . .”

He could hear her moving in the background, clattering and clicking and hissing and wheezing.

“Hungry,” she moaned.

Human or not, he’d be next.

He didn’t care. If it bought Two-Trees another few minutes, then it would be worth it.

He didn’t want to die human.

No
.
It’s not about dying human.
I don’t want to
live
as a human. I was something more. Something better. Something strong. And they took it away from me—they took it—

Hormones rushed down the back of his neck into his bloodstream like ice. He could feel them moving toward his heart, the way he could feel ice water sinking into his stomach on a hot day. He felt the rush surge in all directions, pushing and dragging with it another up-cycle, for whatever it was worth. Aside from stealing his breath, it didn’t seem to change him at all. Muscles tensed, hair stood on edge, senses brightened. But his lip didn’t split.

A few hours ago, I was bitching that it was happening too much.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t even know what colour they’d be—still mismatched green and brown, or both brown, or both green, or maybe something else entirely. He wondered if he’d still go out and buy contacts anyhow, just to keep those big brown irises that freaked Bridget out so much.

Who am I kidding? I’m not even getting off this floor.

“They . . . tasted . . .”

She was coming closer.

“Good!” she roared. “Jay . . . says . . . feed . . . the . . . Bone . . . Tribe . . .”