Two-Trees made his way through the slippery grass, across the damp wooden planks, and down the gravel shoulder to his truck. Once there, he collapsed his umbrella, got in the truck, and considered speeding away. He picked up his cell without disconnecting it from the charger and placed his first call.
“Maple, calling in, ID is HTT1963,” he said. “Yeah, that’s me. Yeah, they’ve granted me access to the site, no problem.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “No, of course not yet. It’s too early for any kind of DNA testing. Hell, the medical examiner hasn’t even arrived yet.” Rainwater warped the scene outside. Another OPP cruiser drove up from town and parked at the head of the line. “Yeah, it won’t be long before the press arrives. Halo County may have grown in the six years since I was here last, but it’s still the small town I knew thirty years ago. We’re not going to be able to keep something like this a secret, press or no press.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“But if you ask me to go on instinct? Then yes, we do have a big problem on our hands. I’m going to need backup, preferably a well-trained canine unit.” He wiped his face. “You’ve gotta send me Bridget on this one. No—I . . . No, listen to me. Hey! Listen! I know what she did, and I don’t agree with it either, but I know why she did it, and we’ve got a hell of a lot more on our hands than what did or didn’t happen at Wyndham Farms. It’s Bridget or nobody, not even me. I’m not equipped to deal with . . . Yes, I realize that, but—but I . . .” He sighed and nodded, though the nod was useless on a voice call. “I understand. See what you can do for me, all right? And we’re going to need some help on the inside, because guaranteed, they’re going to run tests, and that’s going to give us a whole new level of grief.”
Could be in Venice right now, standing on the Bridge of Sighs. Sailing around Corfu. Checking out the nudist beaches on the Côte D’Azur.
“Either way, we need the experts on this one,” Two-Trees said.
Can’t believe we’re back to this. We were supposed to be finished with this three years ago.
“No, I don’t mean Gil. Leave him where he is.”
Can’t believe I’m saying this.
“We need Daniel Grey. He started this. He ends it.” He saw figures moving past the escaping light of the evidence tent. “No, because it isn’t just one. Listen to me. There are parts of a very large corpse that have gone missing, and either they were sliced off and taken away in bags, or they were sliced off and taken away in stomachs—either way, there would have been more than one stomach could handle, even one of theirs. This kid was huge.” The insides of his windshield and windows were fogging up, and humidity clung to him, amplifying the smell of exposed intestines and muddy, clotting blood. “I don’t know. More than two.”
It was going to be a long night and a longer week ahead.
“Yeah, which means either we missed a few . . . or we’re dealing with a new strain.”
Chapter Three
THE SUN WAS setting behind the expansive log house near the Varco Valley gas station, when the phone rang. On the first ring, Ishmael thought, The tribunal has convened. He sat back, staring out the dewy window at the frosty grass and the highway beyond. He’d just sunken deep into the body-hugging office chair, he’d barely sipped his espresso, and he knew that time was officially up. The phone rang a second time, and he thought, Time to pay the piper. Holly shut off the shower; by then, every window had steamed up with shampoo-scented clouds. She hated closed doors, except for those that kept out the encroaching winter. On the third ring, Ishmael uncurled his middle finger from his fist and showed it to the handset, and on the fourth ring, he finally picked up the phone.
“Varco Valley Station, how can I help you?” Ishmael answered, in case it was an outside call. It wasn’t. It was Angie Burley, the Wyrd senior field assignment handler. She was one of the less obnoxious Council members, but she could complain as proficiently as the rest of them. She’d been promoted a year and a half earlier, and she hated the job, primarily because it meant quitting her home in South Carolina and relocating to “The Devil’s Frozen Ass Boil, Purgatory State, Canuckistan”.
“Ishmael?” Burley asked.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he answered.
“Can y’all come on up to the main house?” Burley asked. “Got a job for you.”
“Uh . . . what?”
“We’ve got a job, you’re the best qualified, and I’m low on personnel.”
“Does Haberman know?”
“Jess git yer ass on up here, Ish, so we all can talk about it face to face, all right? Can’t stand that dayummed static on the line. Gawd, tired of all this backwater bullshit—” She hung up.
Ishmael sat at his computer, feeling numb, worn out, terrified, and a little amused.
Holly stood in the doorway, rubbing a towel across her hair. “Who was that?”
“Burley,” he answered. “I have to go up to the main house. You want to go up there with me?”
She was staring out one of the picture windows. The sun had gone behind the hills. Sky and lake both glowed in shades of rust and fire. She moved like a figure skater on dry land, smoothly and silently, mastered by graceful self-control. “No,” she said softly. Even her voice had an edge-free quality to it. She slid her hand across his shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. “But you can drop me off at the Hollow.”
He didn’t want to go to the Hollow. Mary Anne was there. So was Dep, who had in his veins the same backfired vaccine that had turned Digger into a long-horned wendigo. Whether Ishmael’s virus had helped to counteract Digger’s less attractive qualities or not still remained to be seen.
Helen was out there too. Little Helen, who’d entered quarantine at age seven. When she was nine, there’d been an explosion and fire at the abandoned hotel where she and dozens of families had taken shelter. While other parents held their children to the flames, Helen was rescued, disfigured but alive. Until she turned twelve, she spent every day and night hiding from lycanthropes, including her own mother. Then one day, Ishmael arrived. Not a week later, Jay flew over and dropped huge incendiary bombs on the quarantine, Helen’s mother was murdered before her eyes, and then Ishmael dragged Helen through a firefight and dumped her into this new morass of frontier justice. Cross-infected, mute with despair, she now had to adapt to life as a lycanthrope, reviled and under suspicion, at Varco Lake.
The last time Ishmael had seen Helen, she was sitting in a corner in Ferox’s dormitory room, knees pulled up to her chin, hands lifeless on the floor beside her, mouth open, eyes unfocussed. Mottled brown skin was regaining its even complexion. Her burns were healing at a superhuman rate.
Helen had been given the same faulty vaccine as Dep and Digger.
Holly slid her hand across his back, making him jump. She tossed wet hair over her shoulder and regarded him with a gentle but worried expression. “What did Gil say?”
“He said I’m fine,” he said. “It’s all in my head.”
She rubbed his fingernails, turning his hands over to feel the ligaments and bones in the palm. She looked alarmed. “Ishmael, are you running a fever?”
“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling away. She pouted. “I run hot when I’m pissed off and anxious. It’s been too long since I’ve heard from the Council. They were supposed to hand down a decision two weeks ago, and they still haven’t made up their minds what to do with me. What to do with us. And now Burley says she’s got a job for me.”
Holly stared out a window, mouth slightly open, as if listening to birds no one else could hear.
“Gil needs help, and he thinks Foster’s gone. He wants Shuffle. He wants Dr. Grey.”
Holly didn’t answer for a long while. “I’ll go as far as the Hollow,” she said. She looked confused, angry, as if wrestling with herself. Not far from the truth, I’ll bet. When she slept, she talked to herself—or rather, to Eva Foster. Ishmael would sit on the edge of the bed, watching over her, listening to the one-sided shouting match. Some mor
nings, she’d wake up with her arms and hands full of bedclothes, growling and swearing as if she were trying to strangle a ghost in the sheets. But, morning after morning, it was Holly who gained supremacy and emerged, though she’d have to endure thirty minutes of disorientation, distrust, and despair before she began to remember who and where she was. He’d begun to understand why Eva and Holly had slept so little in quarantine; the nightmares were there waiting for them when they fell asleep, and then again when they woke up.
And since Ishmael had been getting sicker, Foster was waking more often, and shouting more loudly inside Holly’s head. Sometimes, Holly would stumble with her fingers pressed to one side of her head, as if Foster had stabbed her there. When the pain passed, Holly always had a question to ask, yet it usually sounded as if she was translating it from a language she barely knew. “If you’d been masticated in your gluteal, why don’t you fibrous your collagen . . . ? In your arm?” or something equally convoluted. He’d give her some kind of answer, but by the time he’d said it, Holly was blinking like someone coming out of a mescaline trance, and she’d forget both his answer and the question she’d asked.
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.
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 4