Bridget’s eyes flashed open at a sudden motion.
“Shit, Bridget,” he whispered.
“What?”
Without another word, he gave her the donut, moved the plate, crumpled the map and began to leave. He nearly left without his coat. Bridget knew better than to ask why he was leaving in such a rush. She simply threw on her coat and went outside. Once into the cold air, she took a deep breath, as if relieved. She touched her face. “Shit!” she said. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
She jogged across the parking lot to the truck, opened the passenger’s side door, and looked in the make-up mirror. There wasn’t enough light to confirm or disprove her suspicions. He tapped her on the shoulder and turned her around. He couldn’t see if she was doing better now either, so he pulled her into the circle of the streetlamp glow. She turned her face up so he could get a better look at her eyes.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “What the hell, Bridget!”
She wiped her mouth with the full length of her forearm. “Padre was right. It is this town.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s something more than that, Bridget. You’ve never slipped up like this in public. Never once. I’ve seen you take a pick axe to the thigh and you didn’t change. But seriously? Donuts?”
“Yelling helps, Hector, keep going,” she retorted.
“Are you going to cycle?”
“No,” she insisted. “I’m fine! Seriously, I felt aggressive when I was in there, but I thought it was because those bitch-puppies were pissing me off with all their noise. Now I feel fine.”
He shook his head. “Bridge, you never slip up.”
“I know!”
“What happened up there? Tell me honestly.”
“Up where?”
“At the Farms.”
She put her fists on her hips. “Just what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ishmael went up there, and a month later, he comes back vomiting and having ‘accidents’ in town. You went up there, and a month later—”
“I didn’t pick anything up,” she interrupted. She opened her mouth to fire back something else.
“Yeah,” Two-Trees said. “A little blood transfusion, maybe? He’s bleeding, you’re cut up—”
She shook her head. “No, nothing of the—” Her mouth fell open.
“What?”
She listened closely to her own thoughts for a moment. “I’d been shot,” she said. “On our way out, Uriah shot me three times. And Ishmael was torn up from getting blown out of a building.”
“So you could have picked something up. Open wounds. Blood transfer.”
She shook her head vehemently at that. “We beat the shit out of the Padre when we brought him in, and he cut me up some too, you remember?” She smiled, showing off the points of her wide fangs. “No change after four years. Sarah and Gina Peterson? I had a throat in either hand, you remember? They tore my arms to shreds, and you had to put them down, because I couldn’t let go or they’d kill you—and they were clawing and salivating and I was drenched. Five years after that? No change. Hector, for all that, none of the trackers—” She quickly amended the thought. “None of the lycanthropic trackers caught whatever Grey’s patients had. We were immune! Are immune.”
“Unless someone’s so unique he doesn’t share your immunity, and he managed to mutate the virus in himself. Bridge, there are chicken viruses that mutate in order to make the jump to human beings. Why is it so hard to believe that Grey’s virus couldn’t make the jump to you by way of a cat?”
She thought about it, long and hard. Then she firmed up her jaw. “And as soon as I walked out of that donut shop, I was fine. If I was going like Ishmael, I’d be cycling through all the way.” She shook her head. “That was just a superficial change.”
“Your eyes turned bright orange, Bridget. Like jack-o-lantern orange. I don’t call that superficial.”
“Did they see it?”
“Who, those girls?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think they saw anything past the frame of their Facebook profile.”
She massaged her face and asked him again if she looked all right.
“That was a close call,” he said.
“It’s like back at the Howard Johnson! We’ve been looking at this the wrong way! We’ve been looking for the bodies, not the perpetrators. What we need to do is . . .” She shrugged. “Use me as a canary.”
“What?”
“Like in the old mines. Take a canary down the mineshaft with you. If the canary dies, you’ve hit a gas pocket, and if you don’t get out, you’re going to die too.”
He frowned. “What, pheromones?”
She nodded. “We figured there was something wrong at that HoJo, and then we all got distracted one way or the other, and we didn’t follow through. Get your map out. Let’s mark the hot spots.”
“You know, I’m starting to think maybe this global cold has nothing to do with Styroforma.”
“What?”
“Everybody’s sneezing and wheezing around here. Maybe it’s not pollution. It’s environmental, yes, but it only seems to affect us indoors.”
“So, you think whatever’s setting me off . . . it’s setting you off, too?”
“Some people are allergic to dogs. Maybe this is no different.” He got in the truck on the driver’s side. “You’re sure you’re going to be able to handle this? I mean, how many superficial changes can you tolerate before you grow a full length beard?”
“We’re about to learn, I guess.”
AROUND FOUR THIRTY, Two-Trees and Bridget arrived at the Marigold. He’d had to give her his keys, because he couldn’t see straight anymore. He should have been more accustomed to sleep deprivation, but now that they were onto some actionable plans, his frustrated brain could finally relax, and his whole body gave out. He crashed on his bed fully dressed while Bridget made detailed notes for follow up in the morning: the donut shop, the Howard Johnson downtown, the electronics store, and especially the second-hand store, where the Padre’s picture had been taken. Each site was a confirmed or suspected trigger, meaning that someone had been farting out change pheromones in each of those locations.
Two-Trees mumbled about adding Laura Maurelli’s school to the list, but Bridget argued against it, since it was too populous. She yawned and insisted that there was some common factor to all four sites. She wanted to know who worked at each. Drowsily, he reminded her about the convention that had booked up every room at the Howard Johnson, and how crammed full the lobby had been. She insisted that the trigger source was local, and not customers, because it was bloody unlikely that some random guest at the Howard Johnson was going to all the same stores hours before Bridget and the others arrived. Then she rebutted her own argument, because if lycanthropes had been exuding change pheromones in all those locations, then someone had to have noticed a fully furred werewolf loitering about. Lycanthropic changes were big, noisy events, involving lots of hair and screaming. Then she asked something about a lycanthrope having a cycle no more than twelve hours long.
Two-Trees didn’t hear much after that, except for the occasional rustling of papers and a distant bing of an email notification. He let the sounds wash over him, and he slept.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TWO-TREES GRUMBLED when someone poked him in the back, over and over, calling his name.
“Hector,” Bridget was saying. “Wake up. Come on. We’ve got to move.”
“Whattimeuzzut?” he asked.
“It’s time to get up. Come on. We’ve got minutes at best.”
He rolled over, feeling shaky and sick to his stomach from such a sudden interruption from deep sleep. “What?” he whined. She was helping him put on his shoes. “Is the hotel on fire?”
“Get up,” she said. When he was too slow, she threatened to carry him. “The bad news is that room is now off-limits for a while. The good news is we have
a nose, but it’s on a real short timer.”
Two-Trees followed after his hand, since Bridget was tugging on it hard enough to rip it away from the wrist. He snapped free and went back into the hotel room, barely aware of what he was doing. He didn’t even have both eyes focused yet, and his face was slack with sleep, but physical memory remembered where his knife belt and gun case were. She didn’t argue with him about the weapons this time. Instead, she took the gun case from him so he could check for the hotel pass card and do up his belt. Holly met them partway down the hall—Holly, not Eva Foster. She pointed at the door to the stairs. The elevator was too slow, Bridget agreed, so Two-Trees stumbled after them. He miscounted the stairs and nearly went skidding after them, but he caught the rail and righted himself, blinking bleary eyes as he went. He followed Bridget, who followed Holly out through a back door.
Outside, it was still dark. He had no idea what time it was. He only knew that they were running toward Two-Trees’ truck, and that Bridget had his keys.
There was a man standing near the truck, his face hidden in shadow where he stood under the street lamp light, wearing a hoodie.
A giant black-striped sabre-tooth wolf stepped out from in front of the truck cab, claws clacking on the pavement, bushy tail low, head low. He sat and squinted at Two-Trees, who skidded to a sudden stop. Bridget and Holly ran on toward the truck as Bridget hit the remote unlock and starter.
The Padre was enormous. Seated on his haunches, the Padre’s animal head came up to the bottom of Two-Trees’ rib cage. Standing up on his hind legs, he could have crunched through Two-Trees’ face with his teeth.
“Hold it,” Two-Trees said, grabbing Holly by the collar. “There’s not one damned way in hell that counts as passing.”
Holly extracted Two-Trees’ fingers from her shirt. “We could get you on all fours, sniffing around.”
“I’m not kidding! Look at the size of him!”
Holly opened the side door and let the Padre in—all one hundred and fifty pounds of leg and raised fur and striped chest, with claws, a tail, and fangs almost too big for his muzzle. He couldn’t pass for a dire wolf, let alone a cadaver dog. It took several attempts for the Padre to figure out which of his snowshoe-sized feet should go in first. “He can’t stay like that for long,” she said. “Get us to the most recent dump site.”
And if the Padre wasn’t bad enough, there was Ishmael, with his shining, black, and very feline muzzle poking out from the edges of his hood, with enormous black pupils contracting within the thin circles of honeydew-green. A car passed, and though Ishmael turned his head, his eyes glowed yellow.
“This—no,” Two-Trees said. “Hell no. Hell no, Bridget.”
“Causing a scene is going to make matters better?” Bridget asked, from the driver’s seat.
“You never said they came as a package deal!” Two-Trees said. “Damn it, Bridget, he’s sick, he’s contagious—” And he can barely fit sideways through the door. Ishmael was easily four inches shorter than normal, and his crouch was made only worse by the dramatic bends in his knees and elongated ankles. He wore no shoes. His feet were as big as Two-Trees’ hands, and almost completely round, with brown strips to show where black claws had retracted. Ishmael’s shoulders were wide, which only accentuated the narrowness of his waist; stitching pinched in the sleeves, and his neck was as wide as his big head, so wide that he’d torn his collar. Ishmael moved Two-Trees out of his way and sat on the floor between the front seats and the middle bench. Somebody’s claws tore through upholstery. Two-Trees clapped his hands to his mouth.
“Get in the truck and get us to the body dump site, now!” Bridget ordered.
“Which one?” asked Two-Trees.
“The most recent one!”
“He doesn’t have a lot of time,” Holly said. “He can’t maintain this form for very long.”
“Who?” Two-Trees asked. “God, please tell me you mean him.” He pointed at Ishmael, who couldn’t fit on the floor no matter which way he positioned himself. Ishmael snarled and crawled from the middle bench to the back, making the Padre shout-bark at him for stepping on some body part.
“Two-Trees, I will leave you here,” Bridget warned. “And then I’ll come back and shoot you. Get in the damned truck!”
“Please,” Holly said. She opened the front passenger’s door for him. “We’re all worried too, okay? But there are a lot of cameras, and the safest place for any of us to be right now is away from here.”
Two-Trees got in the truck. Bridget put it into reverse before he even had the door closed. “Shandley River exit,” he managed to say.
“I remember it,” Bridget said.
“It’s a twenty-minute drive,” he added, looking into the back seat.
In order to extricate himself from the rear seat, the Padre had to climb over the middle bench, balancing precariously for a moment, before Bridget turned a corner and the enormous canine fell against Holly’s face and into Ishmael’s lap. More growling, more snarling, and one short, loud hiss.
“Shit,” Two-Trees said. “What happened? Why couldn’t—”
“We don’t know,” Holly said. “We won’t know until Eva can gain access to a proper lab. All we can do is make the best of a bad situation, and—”
The Padre spun around and snapped at Ishmael, who extended his claws and boxed the Padre across the striped muzzle before flattening his own ears against his head, wrinkling his nose, splaying yellow-white whiskers, and hissing through fangs as long as Two-Trees’ forefinger.
Two-Trees wished he’d shat before he got in the truck.
“And maybe we should all just shut up for a little while,” Holly said, her voice as terse as Eva’s. She knelt on the middle bench, grabbed the Padre by the scruff of his neck and hauled the lycanthrope, kicking as he was, onto her side of the seat. Claws struck the back of Two-Trees’ seat, and he jerked as far forward as the dashboard would allow. Bridget extended her arm to keep the Padre where he was, away from Two-Trees, who had awfully thin skin. “All of us should shut up for a while,” Holly said to Ishmael.
Ishmael didn’t have a human physiology. He may have been able to approximate a bipedal stance, but even without a tail, he just couldn’t sit. Finally, his head disappeared from Bridget’s rear-view mirror. Carpet ripped. Two-Trees guessed that Ishmael had one hand on the floor, and that he was lying half-on and half-off the furthest bench. The pinkish-brown pads of his feet brushed against the truck’s interior. That wasn’t comfortable either, so he thrashed again, making the truck rock as it drove on. The corners of Bridget’s jaw were so angular he could have used her face to punch holes in an oil drum. Her nostrils flared when she breathed. Judging by the speedometer, their twenty-minute trip would take about twelve.
“Tell me you’re not going to change,” Two-Trees said. “If you are, pull over. Gimme the keys.”
Bridget kept looking in the rear-view mirror, especially whenever the truck rocked on its axis. “Shit,” she said. Two-Trees turned around.
There was a car behind them, matching their speed.
“It’s a big highway,” Two-Trees said. “Slow down. Let them pass.”
The Padre crouched on his elbows, his dog-like hind legs curled under him. He took up the entire width of the truck like that, with no room left over for his tail. Down his spine and following the contours of his ribs, the Padre had cat fur, the same colour and texture as that covering Ishmael’s face. This was not the same cursing, crazy-laughing, fang-face that Two-Trees had discovered in the confessional that day so many years ago. This wasn’t human. This wasn’t werewolf. This was a fully-formed predator from the Ice Age.
And nothing like the man who killed my grandfather. The very idea loosened the band of tension across Two-Trees’ chest, allowing him to breathe for what felt like the first time in hours.
“Hang on to it, Padre,” Holly said. “Please, just a little while longer.”
The truck smelled of blood, wet dog hair, and a little like bi
le.
Two-Trees’ nose wrinkled. “What the hell happened back there, at the hotel?” he asked, softly.
“All I know is that one of them set the other off,” Bridget said. “We’ll have to wait until one of them can speak English again before we know for sure what happened. Foster must have heard wild animals fighting each other, so she ran to their room. Holly says the first thing she remembers was standing outside their door.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Two-Trees asked. “I mean after the donut—”
“Don’t start with me, Hector,” Bridget said. She glanced at him, underscoring the threat in her voice. Her eyes glowed a shade of copper in the dashboard lights. “Just . . . not right now. You harsh my mellow, and—”
“I get it,” Two-Trees said.
And Dep survived how long, surrounded by people like you . . . and he stayed human until the day he left quarantine?
Bridget opened the windows with a click of four buttons. Wet, cold pellets of freezing rain peppered Two-Trees’ face. Bridget switched on the wipers as the first sheen of rain speckled the headlights’ glow. They passed a sign for Shandley River, and Two-Trees told her to take the exit.
“How long can he stay like that?” Two-Trees asked.
Bridget didn’t answer his question. “Left or right?”
“Right.”
She merged onto the off-ramp’s right-hand lane and slowed as she approached the stop sign.
Two-Trees turned in his seat and was surprised to see that the Padre had his big head on Holly’s lap, and she had her fingers in the fur between his ears.
The following car took their exit. Wonderful. The press?
“How long?” Two-Trees asked again.
“It depends on the level of threat,” Holly said, on Bridget’s behalf. “You stay in battle-mode until the battle’s done. If there’s no battle . . .”
There was also a good chance that the car following them was an unmarked cruiser.
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 28