Helix: Plague of Ghouls

by Pat Flewwelling

  Ishmael didn’t know what to think anymore.

  There was another knock at the door.

  Ishmael thought it might be the hotel’s shift manager come to tell them that the credit card had been declined. “Who is it?”

  “Open the goddamned door before I break it down,” Bridget answered.

  The Padre got up to unlock and open the door for her. She went straight to the television while the Padre closed the door behind her. Ishmael kept his arm over his eyes and thought, Dep. His second thought was that Varco Lake had been raided by the government, and his third thought was that someone saw him change outside the mall, and had caught it on video.

  He was wrong on all counts.

  It was a news broadcast, with a bit of backstory about the attack at Pritchard Park in 2009. Someone was talking about twin brothers Luke and John Reid. When the anchor said, “. . . seen in these photos dated in 2008,” Ishmael lowered his arm so he could watch the screen.

  On the left was John Reid, looking fat, beaten up, and hungover. On the right was Luke Reid, looking fat, angry, beaten up, and a little high on drugs. Either of them could have been the Padre.

  Then came a third picture, taken by cell phone and credited only to an Instagram alias.

  It was the Padre shopping at a second hand store in North Elmbury, dressed in the same clothes he was currently wearing.

  Ishmael put his arm over his eyes and wished he was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IT WAS LATE into the night, and Ferox was once again hunting a girl in the throes of another false start.

  Perfect timing, Helen. Perfect timing.

  It wasn’t perfect, but Helen’s timing was a potential life-saver. In false starts, the body rapidly self-repaired. If push came to shove, at least Helen could survive a fight and forget about it by morning.

  But did you really have to lead me through the swamp?

  Here, the terrain was one part exposed rock, one part open water, one part sedge grasses, and two parts lichen. All the wild flowers had gone to seed, the grasses had been bent by a late fall downpour, and there wasn’t a tree in sight. There was almost no place to hide. That should have made it easier to find a weeping, change-addled thirteen-year-old girl, but Helen had been always been a wily child and a skilled survivor in quarantine. Now imbued with Ishmael’s feline instincts and black fur, that girl could hide in an empty concrete room.

  At least I’m not alone this time.

  Nine hours earlier, Ferox had driven along the route Gil had printed for her—directions only, no map. Dep had been in the passenger seat holding his breath and clutching his belly, as if he had to take a massive shit, and as if somehow this clenching would stop him from having another false start. What Gil hadn’t explained was that he was taking them out of Varco Lake by the main driveway, onto the highway, up and down a series of crossroads, and finally onto a logging road and a gas station. The station was closed, but nearby they found a log cabin that smelled of Ishmael, Holly, and Italian coffee. This, Ferox realized, was Varco Valley Station, where Ishmael had spent most of his time, and that pissed her off, because she’d just driven a full hour and only ended up on the far side of the Varco Lake estate. Since they were on the outskirts of Wyrd’s territory, Ferox and Dep had got out of the truck, followed the Nakii River toward the Hollow, found Shuffle and Mary Anne, passed on Gil’s message and the package from the laboratory fridge, and got everything ready to go. They could have made good their escape right then and there, and no one would have known they were gone.

  But they couldn’t leave without Helen, and Helen was nowhere to be found. She’d run off again at first light. By two in the morning, Helen was still on the run.

  In adults, regular flare-ups of the lycanthropic virus worked like a factory reset. A person would change into animal form, run around for a little while, and then a biological timer would ding, hormones would shoot into the bloodstream, and cells throughout the body would then refer back to their original genetic map and reorganize, rebuild, or slough off, depending on their role and position. When Dr. Foster had explained this, Ferox had imagined microscopic construction workers, like those little dudes in Fraggle Rock, running around comparing cell structures to a blueprint and performing demolition, construction, and remodelling where necessary. One would point to an open wound and declare that there was no matching gash in the blueprint, and then the flock of little dudes in their itty-bitty hard hats would gather up digested food and mash it into the wound until it metamorphosed into skin, muscle, and bone.

  A biologist, Ferox was not.

  But she did understand what lycanthropy meant to a girl in puberty. The genetic code defaulted to adult, grown up to their full genetic potential. A girl at thirteen isn’t at her full genetic potential, not in terms of organs, nor in her skeletal structure, but especially not in her brain. A werewolf at thirteen would wake up one morning nearly full grown and starving. That kind of a morphological hijacking took an extreme toll on both body and mind. Not many young inmates at Wyndham Farms made it past puberty. Most threw themselves off cliffs, pulling out their hair—or fur as the case might be—screaming all the way down. The ones who didn’t jump were Lost from the get-go, uncommunicative, anxious, feral. Inhuman. Especially if they’d been turned by Vengeance.

  They had to find her.

  She saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye. A hairy hand sign from Dep. She inclined her head in thanks. She was to run further toward the east, toward the Maachii River. If they couldn’t find her and catch her, then they would flush her out and get her cornered. Helen would fight like a hellcat to get out of the trap, but Ferox and Dep would fight likewise, if only for the girl’s own good.

  She heard motion behind her. She froze, flattening against the earth.

  She couldn’t have got behind me. Too fast! Too fast!

  The motion stopped. Wet grass twisted underfoot. The hunter had become the hunted. These weren’t bare feet. She heard the creak of a hard sole as it bent over rock.

  She prayed for more cloud cover.

  Using only the pads of her fingers and toes, Ferox crawled backwards across the moss and lichen, a little uphill, a lot downwind.

  It wasn’t Jay.

  He carried a dim, red-filtered flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. The filter was there to allow enough light through to shine on trip hazards and sudden drops, but not bright enough to rob him of his night vision nor—presumably—to give away his position.

  No, not a gun . . . The magazine is all wrong. The barrel is too narrow.

  He passed by her, taking his time. He moved more quietly and more cautiously than Jay did. He wore all black, which was almost as bad as wearing all white. Ferox was filthy from head to foot, with twigs and moss in her hair and clothes. He was the shadow of a rifle hunter, smelling of gun oil, shoe soles, detergent, and automobile exhaust; she was landscape, and she smelled that way too.

  There was something missing from his scent, and yet his pheromones were setting her off. Fur prickled and pushed against the material of her fleece sweater and yoga pants. With the palm of her hand muffling the sound, she lowered the sweater zipper to half-mast, giving her chest the room it needed to expand forward while narrowing at the sides.

  But he’s not changing . . .

  The stranger stood in the dip of the earth, head up, nose working. It was the first smart thing he’d done since she’d seen him: in low earth like that, he was vulnerable to an attack from above, but the wind here was channelled toward him from several directions, like the confluence of rivers.

  He found what he was looking for, and with less regard for silence, he struck off north-west, toward Varco Lake. The beam of the red-filtered flashlight rolled like a police cruiser’s siren light.

  Ferox followed, bobbing on bent legs and running on the balls of her elongated feet. When he stopped, she crouched behind a spindly clump of dead grass. She heard him turn. Slowly, she averted her eyes and rai
sed one shoulder higher than the other, disrupting the shape of her human-animal silhouette under the moon, and hiding the point of her growing ear.

  The flashlight beam slid over her back and shoulder, over the moss-softened rocks, and through the wind-blown streamers of milkweed pods.

  He left his trail and came toward her. His flashlight beam jiggled, and she moved to keep up with it, keeping her body in unusual twists and contortions—partly on purpose, to disrupt the man’s perception of a crouching human figure, and mainly because of her quickening change—and she silently lunged from one clump of weeds to another one further downwind. He halted, listening. So did she. He breathed loudly through a dry mouth. She heard him gulp. Why am I changing, if you’re not?

  “I know you’re out there,” he said.

  Experience and instinct agreed: she’d freeze where she was until she was cornered. Even the change paused, leaving her with one ear fox-like, and the other elf-like. She kept her head bowed and turned away. She needed neither eyes nor nose to know where he was. Her ears told her absolutely everything about the world around her, from the burrowing beetle in a clump of lichen to her right, to the sound the man’s fleece hood made when he moved his head from side to side, listening for her.

  She heard his breath hitch. He inhaled sharply. She lifted her hindquarters in an asymmetrical sprinter’s starting position. He ran toward the clump of grass she’d already quit, and when he moved, she did too. Before he crashed through the weeds, she slid into a cold puddle. Her hunched body converted a rocky divot into a soft, earthy mound covered in twigs, leaves, and moss. The dip in the rock gave her ribs enough clearance to angle downward from their usual human configuration into the keel-shaped chest of her other self.

  “Where are you?” he mumbled.

  Don’t scream. Her hands were going. She’d hidden them inside her sleeves to seal in the scent of the change, and she’d laid out her arms in dissimilar angles, making her open jacket bleed across the rock like moss. But now that danger was upon her, now that his feet were within arm’s reach, genetically-coded alarm responses were forcing her to grow her best weapons. Like Ishmael, like true foxes, her claws were retractable and spring-loaded. But unlike Ishmael, whose claws grew through exposed nail beds, her fingernails hardened and lengthened as the last bone of every finger bent 180 degrees the wrong way. The knuckles disintegrated with a barely audible crackling sound, and the phalanges bent backwards before the tendons had fully stretched.

  And once she had her claws, she would have her fangs, both ears, her bright eyes, and an insatiable desire to attack the first thing that moved.

  His feet were so close to her right sleeve that she could have extended her claws and punched holes in the top of his shoes.

  He swept the beam of his flashlight across the bog as if to scan the horizon and not the ground under his feet.

  She could have sprang forward and snapped his shin in half with her mouth, but she heard a tiny voice, hovering inside the man’s ear like a mosquito, asking for his position. He moved his arm. The gun made small noises as he changed his grip and put his flashlight in his pocket. He murmured to the voice in his ear. “I’m being followed.”

  The voice droned.

  “Understood,” he said.

  The voice buzzed a question.

  “Headed toward the lake, between the two rivers.”

  He backtracked, careful to put his feet exactly where they’d been before. He paused beside the clump of grasses. She lifted her head and swivelled it in his direction. Tendons popped as her neck and spine continued the change. She pulled her knees up to her chest, letting more of the change happen. With his back turned and his curiosity roused, she had to move. As she pushed herself up out of the cold water, weight on her fingers made her claws extend and burrow into the lichen. He didn’t hear the kitten-sharp new claws scratch on the rock. With cold water running inside her heavy jacket and down the front of her pants, she crept backwards. Muscle, bone, and tendons crowded at the base of her spine where a bushy new tail wanted to grow. It would have to wait a while longer.

  “How many left?” the man asked.

  Scent blossomed as facial muscles softened and swelled and lengthened. Her eyes watered as rotting pollen tingled cavernous sinuses. The skull always grew first, faster than skin or muscle could keep up, allowing white bone to gleam through tatters of flesh. She cupped her hand-paws under her face to catch the blood as it fell in rivulets from under her eye sockets and along the barrel of her crackling muzzle. She held her breath, because her throat and upper palette burst at the same time, and too often already she’d aspirated her own blood. Muscle regrew along her cheeks and muzzle; tissues and soft new fur grew over that; the last to grow in were her gums, tongue, lips, and nostrils. Stinging pain faded at the back of her throat. She opened her eyes and breathed deep draughts of air.

  The man was wearing a mask, as white as bleached bone but painted over with tribal thorns like cheap tattoos. His ears were shaped like oversized spearheads.

  The patterns of bleach white and black thorn shifted, as if someone was swirling a paintbrush under his skin.

  What the hell are you?

  He smelled human, but also like burning plastic, as the Lost Ones had. But while the Lost Ones had smelled like walking tire fires, his smellier scent came out in concentrated bursts, as if it was only his breath that was foul.

  Bonewalker?

  When he looked her way, she flattened her ears and closed her eyes to hide the reflection. In the time it took him to fish out his flashlight and re-aim his gun, she was long gone.

  Once among the trees, way off her position, she stopped and scraped open the Velcro that held the seat of her yoga pants together. Her emergent tail unfolded and slid free like a bag of raw sausages. It would take up to twenty minutes for her tail to fully dry and reclaim its fluffy glory—one argument for staying half-and-half indefinitely—but for now, even at only half its normal length, that tail helped her to keep her balance as she ran on inhuman legs toward Varco Lake and toward the Maachii River.

  She heard a deliberate snap off to her left. She saw the hand sign again, more desperate this time. Another hand sign followed, unsure but just as urgent. It didn’t look like good news. She nodded and raised her hand-paw. Anything more complex than that would have to wait until she finished her cycle and returned to human form. For now, she was at the halfway point, and for everyone’s sake, she’d stay there. Too much further, and she’d be a slave to instinct; but roll back the change, and she’d lose the advantage of all her acute senses.

  The moon broke through the clouds, though there was a scent of frosty rain drifting in from the northwest—as if she wasn’t already wet and cold enough. Her own smells wafted up like steam clouding a windshield, making it difficult to smell things at a distance.

  But there was nothing wrong with her night vision now.

  A prow of rock split the lake’s drainage into the Maachii and Nakii Rivers, and that same rock cast a shadow like a sundial’s style. Fog crept like smoke over Varco Lake toward the shore. Moving in and out of the moon shadow were no less than five figures, standing upright and walking around as if they were looking for something on the ground.

  Where’s Helen?

  A sixth figure stood up, examining something on his fingers.

  Is she hurt? Son of a bitch, if you hurt my Helen, so help me God—

  They all perked at something Ferox couldn’t hear. One of them put his finger against his ear. These men aren’t Lost. Another put his hand to his throat and spoke. They’re more than Pack, too.

  A seventh stood up and joined the others, listening. As if on command, all seven moved away from the rock, then headed quickly and incautiously toward the swamp where Ferox had been hiding a few minutes earlier.

  Something had attracted their attention at the headwaters. Her guts told her it was Helen. Her nose told her it wasn’t human. It was definitely lycanthropic. With her legs that much shorter and wi
th her tail acting as a counterbalance, she could run almost comfortably on all fours.

  A branch snapped off to her right. She flattened on the ground like she’d been shot at. A second branch snapped, this one more quietly. She perked her ears, turning one to the right and leaving one pointed straight ahead. Instincts took over again, and her ears began to work on their own, twitching this way and that as they triangulated on whatever had drawn her attention. She heard the deep, husky breath of another lycanthrope blowing a warning note like the bluffing of a bear. She lifted her head just high enough so that she could peer between the tops of the swamp weeds. She saw Dep far off in the distance, his silhouette bulging and curving against the wall of the boat house.

  An eighth man rose out of the grass, and Ferox’s ears slapped backwards, streamlining the shape of her head. This smell she knew.

  Her lips curled back in rage and terror.

  Jay put his finger to his throat and murmured in his light English accent, “Take care of it. Now, while they’re scattered.” He put his hands in his leather jacket pockets. “Like a jackal to the corpse, eh?” he said. Ferox heard the slide and click of a gun, though it was a weak sound, too light for a real gun. “This is good training for them, isn’t it? Not at all like learning the hard way, say in quarantine, though, is it?” His charming London voice had a slimy edge of scorn. “Because clearly, they’re not ready for the likes of you yet.”

  Feet walked confidently through the grass toward her. Jay was pointing a gun directly at her fox-like head. He looked sad, but very focused.

  “I rather liked you.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  The dart went spiralling up into the air. Jay hit the ground sideways, laid flat out by a long, black shadow. White claws flashed under the starlight, and leather ripped. Claws slashed again. Jay thrust the creature away with his feet, sending her flying.

  Helen squatted, arms curled by her sides. Round ears flattened, fangs exposed, green eyes no more than angry slits, and she hissed.