Helix: Plague of Ghouls

by Pat Flewwelling

  “Blind luck,” Two-Trees said. He scratched his nose. It always itched when he lied. Disaster had been narrowly averted by abduction, pyromania, and murder. It had nothing to do with luck. For that matter, he wasn’t sure they’d averted anything at all. Six years on, they were finding new bodies, and quite likely, new disease vectors.

  “What about Brother Luke?” She tapped her lips with her fingertips. “Is it possible he followed Catherine and Sydney out west, after his treatments?”

  “No, he stayed in Ontario.”

  “Right,” Bridget said. “He’d been remanded to a halfway house in Toronto, hadn’t he? Or just got out after a couple of months in prison on an assault charge, right?”

  “House arrest, thank God, or we’d have had to put the whole prison in quarantine.”

  She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Look, I know we’ve got to find her, but this isn’t helping us figure out who died, how, or why. I mean, we came here to find a murderer.”

  “Or murderers. Bridget, two bodies show up and Sydney goes missing, all in the same week. Sydney, who’s had prior contact with both Reid brothers. Sydney, who might have had contact with at least one of our dead kids. Hell of a stretch, I know, but I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Damn it,” she said, by way of agreement. “If she was living on the street, she might have got involved in some kind of gang. Is jungle punk like a gang?”

  “Is ‘Goth’ a gang? You must have been one of the most unhip, white-bread moms—”

  “Hector. Focus, damn it.” She smacked the back of his head for good measure. She sat at the computer again and typed “jungle punk Ontario” into the search bar, while Two-Trees searched for traces of war paint on Sydney’s missing persons pictures. There was no sign of tan lines.

  Bridget’s search results led them to fan sites dedicated to some of the more popular jungle punk bands, most of which were based in Oregon and Washington State. There were a couple of news articles about riots following cancelled shows; in both cases, the concerts had been cancelled due to fire hazards and other safety issues, since the bands and the fans tended to congregate in abandoned buildings that had been reclaimed by nature.

  Bridget snorted. “Throw them in Wyndham Farms, and they’d have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Place was nothing but condemned buildings. But this might give us something to work from. Jungle punks like modern day ruins.”

  “Sure.” Two-Trees nodded. “But do you have any idea how many abandoned farms there are in this county? How many condemned foundries, factories, and mines? You wouldn’t catch me dead in one of those mines.” It was a poor choice of words, but Bridget let it slide by. “The paper mill’s derelict too, and it’s been a hang-out since Superman III. That’s why I was trying to poke around there, before Palmer got ahead of me.”

  Bridget wowed at a picture she’d stumbled across. “Look at this one.” It was a stunningly artistic portrait of a young jungle punk crouching on a low tree branch as if he’d either just leapt onto it or was about to pounce from it. He’d pasted on long black nails, painted curling thorn branches on his cheeks, donned a wolf-pelt vest and a tattered deer skin shirt, put on a pair of oversized black contact lenses, highlighted his eyes with mascara, and he’d mussed his hair into loose, curved spikes, like something out of anime cosplay.

  Two-Trees blushed. It looked exactly like his own Boy Trickster costume.

  Grandfather predicted an entire subculture fifty years before its time.

  On the next page, he expected to see a girl with a mane of matted white hair, with matching fur bracelets and anklets. White hair, pale skin, but not albino. Blue eyes. The moon’s granddaughter.

  “What about Holly?” Two-Trees asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Instead of the Padre posing as a cadaver dog, could Holly do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, is she like you? Or could she pass? Given a choice, I think I’d rather work with her. She doesn’t look half so likely to bite my balls off.”

  “He does hate us,” Bridget said. She rocked her chair onto its back legs.

  “Can you blame him?”

  “Nope. We dragged him from church and threw him into hell.”

  Her cell chirped on the hotel dresser.

  “Do you think your friends at the OPP could loan us a helicopter or something?” Bridget asked, reaching for the phone.

  “I doubt that,” Two-Trees replied, as she answered the call. “Any idea how much that costs?”

  “Hey Holly,” she said into the phone. “What’s wrong with you? You sound like you’ve got a cold or something. What’s wrong with your voice?” She listened for a moment before interrupting with more questions. “Listen, you guys on your way back yet or what? We’re going to need a topographical map, the most updated we can—”

  She may have stopped speaking, but her lips kept moving. Colour rose between her freckles and dark spots. She sat forward very, very slowly, setting the front feet of her chair on the carpet.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” she said.

  Two-Trees watched the one-sided conversation unfold.

  “Is he insane?” she asked. Bridget was curling and straightening the fingers of her left hand. She often did that before a hunt. Two-Trees stood up. “In town?” she blurted.

  He kept a hard-sided briefcase under the bed, locked with both key and combination. He put this on the bed and began to open the combination locks. Bridget held up her hand, then metronomed a forefinger. She wanted to hear the rest of the story before pulling any triggers.

  “God, as if that wasn’t the worst possible thing that the Padre could have—”

  Bridget’s mouth fell open. Something creaked in her hand. Two-Trees wasn’t sure if it was her phone or the arm of the chair.

  “What do you mean ‘It was Ishmael’?”

  Screw this. Two-Trees opened the other combination, then dug around in his pocket for his keys.

  “Holly, are you sure it was Ishmael?” Bridget asked. “No, he doesn’t do that! Especially not when he’s on a job. Did you go back to that HoJo or something? Is that why you sound like you’ve been chain-smoking since the ’70s?”

  For the moment, Two-Trees decided to keep his guns in their case with the trigger locks fastened. Elmbury was too heavily populated with potential witnesses, and with two freshly discovered cadavers, all of Halo County would be crawling with reporters, amateur and professional. Wyrd couldn’t risk drawing more attention to an already shitty situation. He closed the gun case again, but he wouldn’t go unarmed. “Well, that’s good at least,” Bridget said. “God, that makes no sense. Why would Ishmael . . . ?” She dug her fingers into her knee and listened a while longer.

  Beside the gun box, in the same briefcase, was a pair of sheathed KA-BAR military grade knives. All he needed was a belt to thread through the sheath loops, and he was ready to go.

  “Where is he now?” Bridget asked.

  Two-Trees watched the set of her shoulders, the way she leaned over her knees, the way her short hair seemed to stand on edge. She looked ready for a sprint through the woods, even if it meant running in sock feet. She had the speed and the aggression, so whether they were chasing a rogue or one of Grey’s victims, she’d always been the one to flush out prey and herd him toward Two-Trees, where he’d be waiting with guns and knives.

  “Who?” Bridget asked. “They’re what?” On hearing the answer, Bridget loosed a torrent of inventive curses.

  Two-Trees never had to tackle someone as skilled, as fast, or as silent as Ishmael. Around Wyrd watercoolers worldwide, Ishmael was a legend. He’d take on an assignment, put on his best Italian suit, board a plane, and come back either with a new due-paying Wyrd member, or with a box full of body parts. Either way, he’d come back as neat and disinterested as when he’d left, not a hair out of place. It never mattered how big the target was, or how experienced, or how resourceful. If Ishmael wanted to capture som
eone alive, they’d be at Varco Lake inside of a week. If Ishmael wanted someone dead, that was the end of that. Even Jay had expressed begrudging respect for him.

  And now he’s losing control.

  Two-Trees strung his belt through the second sheath.

  He hadn’t heard the rest of Bridget’s conversation. She threw the phone onto the bed. “He had an accident, didn’t he?” Two-Trees asked.

  She stood and scrubbed her face with both hands. “And here we were worried about the Padre.”

  “Wyndham broke him,” Two-Trees said.

  “He’s never had an accident while he was in charge of a team. There must have been something at that HoJo. It was setting us all off. Maybe he got it on his clothes, maybe he’s more sensitive to it, I don’t know. With a six-day cycle, accidents are inevitable, I guess. He was on day five, I think . . . Maybe he just lost count, I don’t know.”

  “He’s had accidents before?” Two-Trees asked. “In cities?”

  “Once in a crowded elevator, though he dragged out the change for almost five hours, so no one noticed what was happening. As soon as they got him out of there, he made a run for it, changing en route, jumping from one rooftop to another until they lost him. But this? At a strip mall?”

  Two-Trees saw a kinder, softer woman in her side profile. Rays of filtered sunlight fell against her face, adding an extra shade of tanned red to her dappled skin. Her short, bulbous nose didn’t fit the face, as if it was a prosthetic she’d glued on to hide Claire.

  She studied him as closely as he’d been watching her. “What if he’s sick?”

  Two-Trees held the knife belt between his hands. “Define sick.”

  “I’ve seen his scars. Scars, Hector. How does that even happen? I mean, what if that’s the lycanthropic version of necrotic flesh?”

  Two-Trees snorted. “Or what if he picked something up from the refugee he’s sleeping with?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her hand shook when she rubbed her forehead.

  If Ishmael could pick up a disease from the inmates of Wyndham Farms, that meant Bridget was susceptible too. For the first time since her initial assault, Bridget was vulnerable.

  “How long do you think he can go before he starts going rogue and adds to our body count?”

  She shook her head. “He’s not that far gone. Besides, he’s not like that. If he’s going to go crazy, he’s gonna go to ground, hide, run away—that’s his nature. Hide. Blend into the shadows. Disappear. Prowl after easier prey far, far away from human noise. He wouldn’t risk staying so close to civilization.”

  “And yet, there he was at a strip mall—”

  “They were at the edge of town, at an electronics shop. I mean, at least he was outside, behind a building. And then he made a break for it to the nearest shelter.”

  Two-Trees canted his head. He tried to remember the layout of North Elmbury, where the Big Box stores had gone up in the late nineties. “Near the highway, off the Beechgrove exit?”

  “I don’t know. North, that’s all she said. She didn’t know the route they took to get there.”

  He referred to his street map. If he remembered correctly, there was a large culvert nearby, which was supposed to drain water away from the plaza parking lot. Across the highway was a stretch of ground that was marked as a clean landfill depot. With luck, it had gone to seed and might afford a lycanthrope some cover until he got his shit together.

  “Witnesses?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Holly didn’t see any.”

  “Surveillance cameras?”

  She’d mashed her lips together so tightly they’d turned white. “Dunno,” she said. Sardonic humour had returned, added a serrated spine to her voice. “Now, would you like to hear the bad news?”

  “Hit me.”

  “Dep and Ferox are en route.”

  “And this is bad because . . . ?”

  “You do remember Dep, don’t you?”

  “Sure. Homeless kid we picked up from under the highway in Montreal. As soon as you got him onto the island, he punched you in the teeth and laid you flat.”

  “Yeah. Him. And then what does he do, after he breaks my face? Runs from the truck with me in hot pursuit—I could barely see one damned thing—and who does he run into? No, not just any old werewolf. Naw. Dude runs into Vengeance. This lanky brat, who’s never seen a werewolf before in his life, realizes he’s just run full tilt into the ass end of one of the biggest, meanest ways to die . . . and he kicks the son of a bitch between the legs. Dep ducks and I take Vengeance’s claws clean across the chest. Double mastectomy in one second flat. God, if I wasn’t already in fur, Vengeance would have swiped my head from my shoulders. If it hadn’t been for Shuffle and Turkey coming to the rescue, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And this idiot child—does he cut and run when the going’s good? No! Of course not! The son of a bitch grabs the rifle Turkey dropped and jumps back into the fray—while the rest of us are up-cycling around him!”

  Two-Trees smiled a little. “At least we know he can handle himself.”

  “Yeah. Fantastic. Except that now, after four clean years in quarantine, he’s going through his first false starts. And since he’s got some mixed up, messed up version of Dr. Grey’s infection, with a healthy dose of Ishmael thrown in, nobody knows what the hell this guy is going to turn into once he gets the hang of it. And now he’s on his way here, where his false starts can set us all off. Unless of course, he’s got the wendigo strain, in which case, instead of being a trippy version of Vengeance, he’ll end up eight feet tall with antlers and a craving for lycanthropic flesh.” She pointed at the knife belt Two-Trees held. “Do me a favour and stick one of those in my eye, would you?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  THERE WAS AN advantage to having one true-blooded human being in their party, even if that human being was furious with the whole lot of them. At least Two-Trees could walk into a pet store without having every animal shriek at the first whiff of him. Bridget had sent him in to buy a leash and collar for the Padre. Meanwhile, Dr. Eva Foster—presumed dead by Wyrd—was at the far end of the strip mall trying to connect to the free Wi-Fi in Starbucks, so she could order medical supplies. That left Ishmael and the Padre alone with Bridget with a lot of explaining to do.

  Bridget turned sharply in the front passenger’s seat, looking angry and as if about to speak. Her gaze warmed. “Aw, Ishmael.” He sat shivering on the middle seat of his truck. “Just talk to me.”

  Better to explain it to Bridget first, Ishmael thought. She’ll throw a fit. When Two-Trees comes out of the pet shop, he’ll try to calm her down. She’ll explain it to him, they’ll both have a fit, and then they’ll get over it. Or plot to kill us all.

  The Padre coughed where he sat in the backseat.

  I don’t want to break it to her. You break it to her. You’ve known Foster longer than I have. You protected her this long—hell, it was your fault Foster ended up in quarantine!

  “Is it true? You’re sick?” Bridget had the fan running to keep the truck interior warm.

  The gland at the base of Ishmael’s skull already felt full and ready to trickle hormones. “I don’t know.” His fever had returned.

  “How about everyone else?” Bridget asked. “Holly. She sounded awful on the phone.”

  They expected Foster back at any moment.

  “Is it catching?” Bridget asked.

  “Bridget . . .”

  Ishmael couldn’t find the right words either. His head was swimming with shame and self-loathing. He picked at the tattered ruins of his jeans. It’s like I’ve shit my pants in public. Bridget hadn’t been able to find him a spare pair, because all his luggage was in a room that she didn’t have a key for. I thought I was past all this. I thought I’d learned something new in Wyndham Farms . . .

  “We need to know,” Bridget said, “so we can all avoid accidents. Ishmael, I’ve been dealing with these people a hell of a lot longer than you! I’ve taken my
fair share of bites and scrapes too. You’ve got to let me know what I’m up against!”

  Ishmael shook his head. “I should have been able to stop it. I wasn’t far into the up-cycle. I should have been able to stop it . . . I should have . . .”

  “It’s this town,” the Padre said. “I keep telling you.”

  “You’re feeling it too?” Ishmael asked.

  The Padre nodded.

  “You ever wonder why?” Ishmael asked.

  “Ishmael,” Bridget interrupted, “now is not the time.”

  “Really?” Ishmael asked. “When would be the best time?”

  “I felt it in the Goodwill store, too,” the Padre said. “Like at the hotel.”

  “And yet you could control it,” Ishmael sighed. “Shit, even the guy with only six years’ experience is better at this than me. I’ve been this way for what, thirty-three years? Thirty-three years, and it’s like I’m brand new at this, all over again.” He turned to the Padre and spoke before Bridget could stop him. “This is where they found you.”

  The Padre tilted his head curiously.

  “This town,” Ishmael began. His mouth was on autopilot. “It’s where it all happened. It’s where they picked you up. It’s where you killed your brother. That’s why Two-Trees and Bridget are trying to get you to hide your face. It has nothing to do with your resemblance to Sydney Mission. It has everything to do with you. Right here.”

  Bridget swore and got out of the truck, slamming the driver’s side door with such force that the truck rocked.

  And we still have to tell her about Eva.

  “This is where I killed my brother,” the Padre said, softly.

  “I don’t know all the details, but that much I do know.” Ishmael watched the Padre’s face for any signs of recollection. But the Padre could only frown and shrug.

  Ishmael remembered their first meeting in Wyndham Farms. The Padre had driven the butt of his rifle into Ishmael’s feline nose, then nearly knocked his brains out the side of his head with a second swing. But he hadn’t put a bullet in Ishmael’s head, and the only time the Padre was ever aggressive was in a fight provoked by someone else. Even then, he kept his wits about him, saving his ammunition, up-cycling or down-cycling in the middle of a fight, whichever gave him the greatest advantage.