“Because he was fricking Buddha,” the Padre said. “And in the end, he had boneless flippers instead of legs. The point is, with the exception of Odysseus, most of them burned out and died within a year and a half of infection, if they didn’t throw themselves off a cliff first. And you’re telling me that someone has survived this long . . . there?” He pointed at the map.
From above, Halo County looked like a series of bacterial colonies in a roughly circular petri dish, surrounded by farmland, forestry, and the odd quarry. In the centre of the petri dish was a pair of lakes, making a shape that resembled a crooked hourglass; one was called Steeper Lake, and the other was Pouch Lake. Rivers fed into Steeper Lake from two different angles. The Deer Jump River looped around hills and suburbs before cutting through Elmbury, the biggest of the towns in that county. The other river, which had a Native name eight syllables long, cut through a First Nations Reserve, around a municipal airport, through a small provincial park, between mirrored suburbs, around the south-western edge of Elmbury before finally spilling into Steeper Lake. Between the airport and the provincial park, there were several industrial complexes and the makings of an expansive residential project, by the look of it. Subdivisions had been carved into the landscape like fingerprints. Ishmael didn’t know how old the satellite picture was, but it looked like the suburb was still under construction. The “x” marked the latitude and longitude of a murder scene, Burley said. It was on a stretch of highway between the two rivers, with fallow farmland on one side and forestry on the other, not too far from one of the denser residential areas.
“Looks pretty built up, to me,” the Padre said.
“You’d be amazed where people can hide,” Ishmael pointed out.
“Which is why I wanted you in on this one,” Burley added.
“You sure about that?”
“Jay’s not around anymore,” Burley said, “so it’s not like I can ask that son of a bitch to do it. Fisher’s out looking for a rogue in Myanmar, Alex is in Turkmenistan, and B.D. is out somewhere in New York, hunting your kittens.”
“Kittens?” the Padre asked.
“Later,” Ishmael answered quickly.
“So all I’ve got left is you,” Burley said. She sniffed and peered down the length of her nose at the Padre. “You, and all yer damned Tiger Dogs.”
“You know, you people keep using that term as if it’s supposed to be an insult,” Ishmael said, “but the more often you say it, the more metal it sounds.”
The Padre agreed. “Dangerously close to liking it myself. Tiger Dog. Rahr.”
“When was the attack?” Ishmael asked.
“It’s been about eighteen to twenty-four hours, Maple said,” Burley replied. “He says there was at least one victim, sex unknown, age unknown—hell, everything unknown including cause of death. Chewed, eaten, digested, leftovers packed in doggie bags, easily a hundred pounds of man-meat, he says. There might be multiple perpetrators, he says. I say, ‘God, I hope not.’ Anyhow, Maple can handle his own, most times, but if he’s outnumbered, I’d rather not leave his messy corpse for the locals to try and puzzle out, y’know-what’m-sayin’? Maple’s begging for backup, and I need to give it to him.”
“And the tribunal?” Ishmael asked.
“Hell, Ishmael, you ever think maybe this might be your get out of jail free card?” Burley replied. “Prove you’re still some use to Wyrd, maybe they’ll think twice before drowning your ass.”
“Even if it isn’t one of us,” the Padre suggested, “someone’s been eaten and the local police are probably ill-equipped to deal with it. Maybe even Wyrd realizes there are bigger problems at hand than how many lives you saved.”
The Padre didn’t know about the kittens, nor about Moldova.
“Sure,” Burley said, impatiently. “And I told Haberman about the situation, and I requested Bridget on this one, because Maple and Bridget are a good match-up. I’ve seen ’em together in action myself. They’re a good pair, quick, each acting on the other’s reactions without a question between ’em, like one big brain spread out across two bodies. I told Haberman I was gonna dispatch Bridget and he told me to shove that idea where the sun don’t shine. So I told him I wanted you on it ’cause you’re the best damned tracker we got, and boy, he had some choice words for me right there, I can tell you that. So I called up Maple and handed the damned phone over to Haberman and let them hash it out. Next thing I know, Haberman gives me a full damned roster.” Her lips were pursed. “An’ I told him to shove that roster where the sun don’t shine, and that did not go over well. Closest I ever seen him get to fur-and-fangs.” She tilted her head suddenly. “You ever seen him in his furry pyjamas?”
Ishmael shook his head.
“Then how do you know he’s a lycanthrope?” the Padre asked, slowly.
She gave him a look, one of the variety that had earned her the name Surly Burley. The Padre shrugged helplessly. “Same way we always identify a lycanthrope in a crowd.”
“So I’m going?” Ishmael asked. “Are we going, the Padre and I?”
“All y’all are goin’,” she answered.
Ishmael closed his eyes. “Could you quantify ‘all y’all’?”
“Your whole damned pack of Tiger Dogs, Ishmael,” she answered, “and it stinks to high heaven.”
“Look,” the Padre said, “I realize we don’t smell the same as you classier lycanthropes—”
“She’s right,” Ishmael said.
“Well, excuse me.”
“The roster,” Ishmael said. “It’s the roster that stinks.” He turned to Burley. “I mean, Padre can probably handle it, but—”
“Holly, Bridget, you and Padre, Dr. Grey, Andre, Danielle, and your li’l sweet’ums, Helen. Least he said that Mary Anne can stay, if she’s too damned broken.”
“Andre and . . .” Ishmael’s mouth fell open. “No. Nuh nuh—no.”
“That’s what I said,” Burley replied, “word for word!”
“I am not taking Dep and Ferox with us. Hell no. No—I can’t even take Shuffle with me.”
“Shuffle’s the Jolly Grey Giant,” the Padre agreed. “He’ll stick out like a seven-foot tall thumb.”
“And he needs to be with his wife right now,” Ishmael said.
“Frankly, I don’t give a shit about whose wife needs what –”
“The reinfection didn’t take, Angie,” Ishmael said, interrupting her. “Mary Anne Grey is about to go feral on us—feral like you’ve never, ever seen.”
“Ain’t nothing we—”
Ishmael thrust his hand up his sleeve, shoving the material up to his shoulder. “Scars, Angie. When was the last damned time you saw a lycanthrope with brand new scars?”
She fidgeted and crossed her arms.
“I took that from a Lost One. I was able to beat the infection, but I could have been lucky, and there’s still a chance I’m a carrier of their virus. Mary Anne is viral, Angie, in a way that could kill one of us. Or worse, turn us Lost. And Mary Anne is about to get Lost.”
Burley was quiet.
“It’s a death sentence,” Ishmael said. “If she has to die, then it . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
The Padre did it for him. “It should be her husband, for lots of reasons. For one, she’ll trust him, even when she’s Lost. She’ll let him get close enough. For another, there’s no one strong enough to put her out of her misery as quickly as Shuffle can.”
“And for a third,” Ishmael said, “he’s already been inoculated against her disease, same as me, same as the Padre. Anyone else . . .” He shook his head and rolled down his sleeve, and hoped he had been inoculated. For now, the fever was low grade, but the itch in his blood was still there, and dinner was not staying down easily.
“What about Helen?” the Padre piped up. “I mean, she’s only thirteen, and she’s got practically no memory of the world outside Wyndham Farms. We can’t take her with us, infection or otherwise. I mean, jeez, she’s barely coherent after Wyr
d bombed the shit out of that island—”
After she watched you and Dep kill her mother, you mean. “If Mary Anne gets Lost, she may end up attacking Helen, the same way Penelope did. Without the rest of the Pack to protect her . . .” Ishmael said. “And no, we can’t take Dep with us!”
“You might not have any choice in the matter,” Burley said.
“He’s going through his first false starts,” Ishmael said.
“What? Already?” the Padre said, aghast, then, his chin jiggling, added, “Oh . . . shit. He’s going like Digger, isn’t he?”
Burley held up her hands. “Time out.” She made a T with her hands. “We need Grey at hand. With Dr. Foster dead ‘n’ all, Gil’s going to need someone to lend a hand with analysis to figure out whether or not we’re dealin’ with a new outbreak.”
“He has to stay with Mary Anne—”
“Why don’t y’all just shut yer damned pie-hole an’ let me finish?” She cocked an eyebrow. Ishmael sighed through his nose. “I’m gonna make a case with Haberman to tell him that where we need Grey is in the lab, where the equipment is. Y’all can trust him there? Let him be at Gil’s beck and call. He can stick around close to the lab and when Gil needs him, he goes there, and when Mary Anne needs him, he can go ahead and help her.”
“Agreed,” Ishmael said.
“As for Helen, she can stay with me awhile. Hell, I might even start weaning her off Varco Lake and into a beauty parlour or something. I don’t know. But you let me worry about her.”
“Done,” Ishmael said. Burley he could trust with Helen. She’d taken many, many other young lycanthropes under her wing and body-slammed males left and right until the women were under their own power again. She could have thrown Ishmael to the lions, but Helen? Not a chance. Even if it meant giving Burley and Haberman a chance to turn Helen against him, Ishmael was satisfied, because he’d know Helen was safe.
Unless she goes like Digger.
“We have to leave Dep here,” Ishmael said. “We . . .” He sighed. “We don’t know how he’s going to turn out, but the process has already begun, and we can’t—” Burley had already begun to protest. “We can’t risk that in a populated area! That’s why we founded Wyrd in the first place, Angie! Varco Lake was established for exactly this reason!”
“Ishmael—”
“It’s not even about him wreaking havoc on innocent human beings. Populated areas mean surveillance cameras, cell phones, social media—we take Dep into Halo County, and we blow away two hundred years of secrecy. And there will be hell to pay, especially if he kills somebody.”
“Ishmael.”
“We’ve already got hell to pay,” the Padre said, mostly to himself. “What with one dead body torn up and eaten in Halo County, and a shitload of questions people are bound to ask.”
“Dep stays here,” Ishmael said. “At least until he’s finished his false starts, and definitely until we know what he’s become.”
“Ishmael!” she shouted. “God damn it!”
Ishmael shut up at last.
“Don’t tell me!” She let her hands fall to her hips. “Tell him.” With a dramatic roll of her head, she turned and looked at Abram Haberman, who was standing in the doorway, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent light, with his hands clasped behind his back.
Chapter Five
“HE GOES?” BRIDGET asked. For a woman with such short legs, she could keep up and outrun Ishmael as easily as strolling down a boardwalk. She stopped in front of him, forcing him to halt on the gravel walkway between the dormitory and the barn-sized garage. Her hair seemed incandescent under the rustic-looking street lamp. “What do you mean, ‘he goes’?”
“It was the best compromise I could get,” Ishmael said. He checked his pocket for the fourth time. Two USB keys were safely hidden inside: his ongoing analysis of the kitten video, and six years of Dr. Foster’s research. He’d meant to give the latter to Gil, but he wasn’t at his desk, and not in his dorm room. He was afraid and annoyed, because at nine at night, there weren’t many places Gil could be. “Would you move? We don’t have a lot of time.”
Bridget let him pass so he could dump the first load of gear into the back of the truck. “Ishmael, I don’t think you have any idea what kind of trouble this puts us in.”
Ishmael brushed past her, and she chased after him. “It’s the Padre,” he said. “He’s stable, he’s smart, he’s self-aware in fur, he’s got a cycle that’s nearly as long as yours—he’ll be fine.”
“Dude. Not in Halo County,” Bridget insisted. “Anywhere but there. Ishmael, that’s where we picked him up, not twenty-four hours after he’d eviscerated his own twin brother.”
That made Ishmael slow in his tracks.
But at least it’s not Dep. He picked up his pace again, thinking, It’d serve them right if Dep went all wendigo on their Wyrd asses.
Ishmael continued on his way, with Bridget still at his heels. “And how far into his full transformation was he?” Ishmael asked.
“Far enough to eviscerate his own twin brother.”
He puffed a plume of white air. “That’s not what I meant.”
Before infection, Bridget Carnegie had been a pudgy-petite, stay-at-home mother of three, quick of step, harried of schedule, irreverently funny at the bar with her girlfriends. She’d had long brown hair then, and dull olive green eyes, a tan complexion, and full red lips. She’d been so normal and so busy, happy as a mother, miserable as a wife. Now, she had brush-cut blonde hair that was mottled with brown and black, as if it had been splashed by paint. Likewise, her skin was covered in dime-sized freckles, which she had to cover with scar-concealing make-up in public. After infection, her whole human frame had changed, leaving her with too-long arms, too-short legs, a stunted nose, large round ears, and a barrel but barely endowed chest. Even her eyes had changed colour, though for the better: now they were uniformly caramel, darkening to a ring of chocolate around the pupil. And no matter what form she was in, she had inhuman strength all over, including in her jaws. In a fit of rage one day, she bit down on an Allen key and bent it ninety degrees the wrong way. But neither the shape nor colour of Bridget’s mouth had changed. Even Bridget’s voice was an affectation of manliness; when she was surprised or tired, Ishmael could hear Mrs. Claire Bambridge speaking from Bridget’s mouth. She could pass for Claire Bambridge’s sister—and she often did, as a means of keeping in touch with her own children, in direct violation of Wyrd protocol—but never pass as Claire herself.
“I mean, had he finished his false starts?” Ishmael asked. “Had his human face changed by then?”
She shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know. He was somewhere in the middle of it, I guess.”
“Has he changed a lot since you first picked him up? I mean, I know what he looks like now. When I first met him, he was more Cowboy-Quasimodo than man of the cloth. So what did he look like before infection?”
“Honestly, Ish, I don’t remember. But there’s a chance that maybe someone else will recognize him. God,” she sighed. “Even he doesn’t know which twin he is, beyond ‘The One That Survived’.”
“No one will even see him,” Ishmael swore. “For right now, we just need to get there, find out information from Maple . . . Chances are, he’ll stay in the truck the whole time. And if I ask him to come out, it’ll only be with a very, very good reason.”
“Maple’s going to shit bricks when he finds out about this,” Bridget said.
“Then give him a trowel to wipe with.”
“Oh, haw.” She turned and swore. “Fine. If he comes, you don’t say a word. If he remembers anything about Elmbury, he’s going to freak out.”
“He’s not going to freak out.”
“You don’t know him like I know him, Ish. I look at him and I still see the crazy. He still had a mouthful of his brother’s blood when we picked him up.”
“Listen, let’s argue about it in the truck, all right? You’ve got to pack, I’ve got to find Holly
—God, I thought you’d be happy to hear you were back on active duty.”
“I am happy,” she said, angrily. “If it was you, me, and Maple, yes. But not him! And not Holly.”
“Why not Holly?”
“Because she’s soft,” Bridget answered. If there was one thing Bridget hated, it was soft women. Claire had been soft. Claire had been too quick to trust, too polite to run, too slow to make it out of the park alive. As Dr. Eva Foster was Holly’s armour, so Claire had taken to wearing Bridget. Only, unlike Holly and Eva Foster, Claire would never—and physically couldn’t—come out of Bridget’s shell.
“Ah, but you’ve never seen Holly in a fight,” Ishmael said, with a wry smile.
“Soft in the head,” Bridget said. “Easily distracted. Out in outer space. The last thing we need is someone wandering off to smell flowers, just when we need her most.”
“She’s good in a fight,” Ishmael insisted, “and that’s the only reason why she’s going. Maple’s going to handle the rest. We’re going as backup. Nothing else. I mean, hell, if you want to help him in his investigation, and if you think you can get away with it, go for it. As for me, Holly, and the Padre, we’ll wait until you call. Until then, we lay low, we watch TV, and we eat.”
Bridget shook her head. “I hate this.”
“I know.”
“This is a very, very bad idea.”
“I know. But there’s beer on the outside.”
She stood on the walkway at the bottom of the main house stairs. “Oh, don’t you think you can tease me like that, Shmiley. You’re not out of the doghouse yet.”
ISHMAEL FOUND THE Padre almost half an hour later, not in the library or anywhere in the main house, not in the lab, not even on the first or second floor of the dormitory, but on the third floor, where the women’s rooms were. As he approached one of the doors, Ishmael heard the Padre’s voice.
“I don’t know what I can do,” the Padre was saying, “but I’ll try.”
Ishmael knocked on the door frame. The door drifted open wider. The red-headed Ferox—Danielle Smith—was sitting at her standard issue dormitory desk with a web browser open. She blushed and shut the lid on her computer. And how she could blush. Even her freckles turned pink. She fixed the collar of her shirt to cover the splotches of red rising up her narrow neck. If he didn’t know the Padre as well as he did, Ishmael would have sworn they’d been downloading porn.
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 7