Helix: Plague of Ghouls (6 page)

He didn’t want to leave her alone with her demons. Holly needed someone to hang onto. She needed someone to watch her back, if she slipped and Eva broke through.

Ishmael opened the bottom desk drawer. Inside was a clean USB memory stick on a lanyard. He’d snuck the original USB out of quarantine, but it didn’t have a case to keep dirt out of the connector, so, to protect its data, Ishmael had copied everything onto a standard, unmarked USB key indefinitely borrowed from the Wyrd stock room. Foster’s research had already been pirated once by persons unknown, but Ishmael felt safer knowing that he’d secretly cloned and destroyed the original, and kept the copy away from anyone else at Wyrd.

“How are they doing?” Ishmael asked, meaning the Tiger Dogs.

Holly didn’t answer. Like someone distracted by distant music, she dumped the towel on the dining room floor and walked over it. She didn’t bother closing the bedroom door. She dressed unselfconsciously. Like Ishmael, she’d been eating a lot of healthy food and had completely recovered from six years of famine; and like Ishmael, it was all muscle that she’d added. She moved like a circus acrobat, lean but hard, and full of powerful curves without busting seams. The skin of her back moved like silk over river-rock formations. “You should be coming out to check on them yourself,” she said at last. She pulled a sweater over her head, disguising her swimmer’s body. “Even Mary Anne. They miss you. They’re worried about you.”

“As bad as this sounds, Holly . . . I’ve got bigger things to worry about at the moment.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled on a pair of jeans over legs that could have been used as the “After” picture for a top-of-the-line protein regimen. “You spend all your time fixing something you didn’t do, just so you don’t have time left over to deal with something you
did
do.”

“Holly—”

“I never said you were doing anything wrong,” she retorted. “I’m saying . . . please . . . don’t ignore them anymore. They need all the help they can get, and you’re the only friendly face they know at Wyrd. Don’t turn your back on them just because you think you did something to make matters worse. Don’t run away from your own Pack.”

He snorted. “I don’t travel in packs, Holly.”

“Then don’t run away from your own Pride,” she said, throwing a dirty pair of underwear at him.

“I have no pride, either.”

“They don’t hate you. Just . . . show up. Show them that you didn’t just infect them and leave them to their own devices, all right? That’s already happened to them once.”

“I’ll give you a lift out that way, and if they’re there, great. I’ll say hi, and I’ll ask Shuffle if he’ll stop by and see Gil. Just . . . be careful when you’re out there,” Ishmael said. He picked up the towel and draped it over the dripping shower curtain rod in the bathroom, wondering how hard it was for some people to pick up after themselves. “Too many blind spots.” He fixed the mat so that it was flat and parallel to the tub.

“We can handle ourselves.”

“I mean you,” he said. “Both of you.”

She quit the bedroom. She never used a brush. Her fingers were enough to shake out the knots in her hair, and if any remained, she ignored them. She lowered her blue eyes as she walked past. “We’ve gone this long without being caught.” She waited for him in the hall. “Even in the bunker.”

He had to give her that. She—or rather Eva Foster—had gone for six years without Wyrd suspecting she was something other than human. Six months of that had been spent right under Gil’s all-seeing eye. No one even knew she was a lycanthrope, let alone how unique a lycanthrope she was. Still, she had a regular lycanthropic cycle like everyone else, and she was due to change any day. But in her case, she had a choice: become a wolfling, or become Eva Foster.
And Foster’s the greater of two monsters, isn’t she?

“I’m more concerned about you,” she said. “You’re the one walking into the lion’s den, not me.” Holly went into the front room and over to Ishmael’s computer. It didn’t matter what he had on his screen; she did a web search for the local weather and left it in the browser. “How long will you be up at the main house?”

“A day or two, maybe,” he answered.

She was visibly startled. “But I thought you preferred being out here.”

“I do,” Ishmael said. “You know I do.”

“What about
this
?” She pointed to the dual monitor set-up. Over the previous few days, she’d been helping him analyze the kitten video, frame by frame; she’d left the editing software untouched on the screen. He moved her out of his way, saying that the work would have to wait. He saved his progress to a second, high-capacity thumb drive, stuffed that in his pants pocket, then ran a script that flushed all temporary files, browser histories, everything, defaulting the computer back to its installed programs as if it was the first day it had been booted up. Only a forensic technician would be able to restore faint traces of previously stored files, and even then, he’d need to translate them from Cyrillic.

“Just because I’m not working on it, that doesn’t mean it’s not being worked on,” Ishmael said. “I’ve got a friend looking at a few angles for me. It’ll take him time to run the analysis anyhow, so I don’t expect to hear from him for a couple of days.” He warmed her shoulders with his hands. “Are
you
going to be okay?”

She put her fall coat on and tugged wet hair out from under the collar. “You barely slept last night,” she said.

“I kept you up?”

She shrugged like it was no big deal. “It was the hamburger dream again,” she said, smiling. “I’ve never met a guy with a fast food phobia.”

Ever since quarantine, his number one recurring nightmare involved being trapped between two halves of a bun before being dunked into Digger’s mouth.

“Although,” she said, sidling up closer to him and running her hand across his chest, “it’s the first time I’ve admired what a phobia can do to a guy.”

He kissed her on the head. “Are you
sure
you’re going to be okay?”

“You’re not going to be gone that long, are you?”

“Burley’s the one who gives out field assignments,” he said.

She canted her head to the side. “They’re sending you out?”

“I don’t know yet. She only said she had a job for me.”

“That’s a funny way of punishing someone,” she said. “Maybe they’ve exonerated you.”

He doubted that. “For all I know, someone’s deleted an email and they need me to recover it.”
Like Gil said, they’re looking for an excuse. They’re waiting for me to fail.

“Right,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. “Well, if it took you more than one day to fix an email problem,
I’d
fire you.” She smiled at that. “Come on. You’ve got business to deal with, and so do I. The least we can do is enjoy the ride together for a while.” She handed him his fleece-lined fall jacket. “We’ll be fine.” She smiled again, this time careful to hide her vestigial fangs by not smiling too broadly.

“
We”, as in you and me and the other inmates? Or “we” as in you and Dr. Foster?

THE FOUR-WHEELER
was obnoxiously loud and the trail was in dire need of a good grooming. Fortunately, the bumpy ride gave Ishmael plenty of reasons to cling close to Holly’s hips. Unfortunately, he’d begun to second-guess his offer to let her drive. Not only would masculine hunger drive him to distraction during his meeting with Burley, but he’d just about had enough of Holly’s blonde hair in his mouth. With filthy headlights doing little to illuminate the trail, they splashed along the banks of the Nakii River, over a series of ridges, up a moraine, and down into a tightly-packed forest so swampy that it was hard to breathe, even in fall. A deep frost had killed off the mosquitoes, but in summer, no one went near the place for fear of contracting any number of jungle-like diseases. The Hollow smelled of mud, rotting wood, pine, frost, and sawn lumber. Holly decelerated, and Ishmael clung to the luggage rack behind him to keep his balance as she guided the ATV over a bank of loose rocks and deep mud, one wheel at a time. When they started to sink, he got off and walked, following the smell of the lumber and the sound of sawing, while Holly drove on in search of some place to park the ATV without losing it in the swamp. Uphill, trees gave way to scrub, and scrub to a small bowl of grasslands rimmed in the west by a deep purple dusk, and illuminated by pockets of yellow, artificial light. The sky was clear and salted with stars. With luck, they’d see the Northern Lights that night.

Shuffle—Dr. Daniel Grey—was well over six foot nine, with an enormous torso, and arms thicker than Ishmael’s legs.
God, I hope I don’t end up that big,
he thought. In Wyndham Farms, the old man had been salt-and-peppery, hunchbacked, and asymmetrical. After his reinfection, his spine was rigid and straight, his shoulders proud, and except for the grey racing stripes, the old man’s hair now had the same colour and texture as Ishmael’s. Over one of those immense shoulders he had a stack of wooden boards six feet long, and he swung them around like they were bamboo. “Hey,” he said. He didn’t stop to chat, but he didn’t refuse the company when Ishmael followed.

“Hey yourself. Tell me you’re not building a permanent shelter out here.”

Shuffle shrugged and belched. Despite his fat-free physique, he walked like a man with a beer gut and chafing thighs. “Why not? Beats trying to squeeze into the dormitory.”

Even Ishmael found it hard to stretch out on the dorm beds without his feet hanging over the edge, and he was almost a foot shorter than the old man was.

“No rules against building,” Shuffle said. “Hell, Haberman chipped in for the lumber and tools and practically kissed us goodbye.”

“Shuffle, you’ll hate it in summer,” Ishmael warned.

“In summer,” Shuffle said, “we won’t need a shelter.”

“No, but you will need a canoe and a shitload of mosquito repellent. You’re right between the Nakii and Maachii Rivers. In spring, this place floods like you wouldn’t believe, and then it never drains until August. It just goes stagnant and filmy. And this?” He stamped his foot. “A bog in spring. No foundation. There are a hundred better places for you to build on.”

Shuffle shook his head. “Too much game elsewhere.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Game brings traffic through, and traffic means competition. Competition means . . . Well hell, Ishmael, don’t you think we’re sick to death of fighting for every scrap? We’ll stick to the swamp.”

I should never have recommended you guys stay away. It’s me who should be out here, and you guys closer to the cafeteria.
Then he remembered Holly’s back, arms, and thighs from that morning. She’d put on nearly sixty pounds—twenty a week—and Ishmael knew what the digital scale had coughed up when Ishmael weighed himself. Shuffle was already crowding three hundred pounds. Any more food, and he could blow out the tires of an ATV. If Ishmael relocated the whole Pack to the main house, they’d eat the equivalent weight of a truck, twice, weekly. Even Wyrd couldn’t sustain that for long. “I hope you’re building some place high uphill,” Ishmael said.

Shuffle rounded a grassy embankment and pointed at the hut he’d been building, well away from the river’s banks. Chances were that in spring they’d wake up floating downriver, but during the other seasons, it would be serviceable enough. It wasn’t particularly tall—Shuffle would have to duck to get in through the door he was building—but it was spacious in other dimensions. So far, the walls and roof were only a reinforced framework, with a couple of tarps thrown over it to keep the rain out. Kerosene lamps hissed and glowed. A cooking pit had been built inside and a small fire was softly snapping and popping whenever flames licked the resin of salvaged wood. Shuffle had built an octagonal dome for a roof, which helped funnel smoke outside. Hooded sleeping bags had been thrown down on thick foam mats. There were no cots. Compared to Shuffle’s old digs at Wyndham Farms, this hovel was a palace.

There was no sign of Ferox, Mary Anne, Helen, or the Padre. For that matter, Ishmael wasn’t even sure where Holly had gone.

“Well,” Shuffle said, “it’s no hill fort, but it’ll do.”

Ishmael opened his ill-fitting jacket. He’d begun to sweat again, and his arm burned. Something felt wet, as if he’d cut himself. The wind was cold against his damp, clinging shirt.

“Good lord, man,” Shuffle said. “How much have you been
eating
?”

“Too much,” Ishmael replied. He pushed up his sleeve. The scars were so hot he’d have sworn they were glowing. They weren’t. They weren’t bleeding, either. He scratched at the pale, finger-wide valleys wrapped around the contour between his shoulder muscles and his triceps. “Gil’s hoping you could help him in the lab.”

Shuffle laughed at that. He leaned his planks of wood against the frame of the yurt. “He’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“He can’t figure out why my six-day cycle is now a four-day cycle.” Ishmael draped his jacket over his burning shoulder. “Actually, four is a new record for me, since I landed at Wyndham Farms.”

Shuffle shrugged. “Better here than at the Farms. At least here, there’s food. But uh . . . maybe you should scale back for a while, huh? Leave some for the rest of us?”

“He knows there’s something wrong with me, but he could use the help of an expert.”