Helix: Plague of Ghouls

by Pat Flewwelling

  We did this. A man made this virus.

  The wendigo opened its mouth, and pieces of teenager fell out. “Kill,” it hissed. Dull, dead eyes blinked. “Me.”

  “Hector, move!” Ishmael screamed. “Help me!”

  A tsunami of bonewalkers crashed over Ishmael. A second later, a black and brown paw shot to the surface, curled over, latched onto a spine and pulled a body away. The wendigo reached in and picked another tender vittle off the maggot pile and began to eat.

  The more it eats, the hungrier it gets.

  Two-Trees’ hand wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t fold. There was too much flesh. It was bloated from tapping all those innocents on the shoulder, or shoving them into vans, or helping them up into military transport vehicles. It was engorged with all the blood of lycanthropes and humans he’d killed.

  He folded his thumb toward his pinkie finger.

  The wendigo lifted its mouth and wheezed a wintery scream. He heard bones break and organs rupture. Blood splattered into the water.

  Two-Trees slammed his upper body against his hand. He tried again. Nothing but pain, no dislocation. He tried again to hit his thumb to break it, using his chest, his shoulder, his head, anything.

  The wendigo’s voice was like nails on a blackboard. She reached down and picked Ishmael off the floor and threw him aside. Two-Trees cringed as the man’s body hurtled toward him. They slammed against the wall, with Two-Trees’ hand pinned between stone and their combined weight. Ishmael righted himself—half in and half out of fur, one leg longer than the other, one arm at a bizarre and unnatural angle to the rest of his body—and Two-Trees pulled on his hand. His thumb stretched upward, separating from the rest of his hand. It was Two-Trees’ turn to scream.

  Skin rolled up, bleeding. He could see the layers of subcutaneous fat and the tendons underneath. The manacle passed over his widest knuckles. He was free.

  Eight bonewalkers nibbled and slashed at the legs of the wendigo, who fought back without much enthusiasm but with a lot of power.

  “Go,” Ishmael growled. One eye was bigger than the other, and his fangs were receding. “I’m right behind you.”

  Two-Trees curled his arm toward his chest and he ran—changed his mind and ran back from the door, ducking under a bonewalker’s body as it sailed by—picked up the fallen camera out of the water and sprinted for the door. Ishmael followed and tried twice to get the door open. He had no thumbs. He cursed at the top of his lungs, clutched his head between both hands and sagged on his bending knees. Skull bones clicked into place. Claws fell out, hair grew in, teeth fell out, his jaw stretched like putty—and for one precious second, he had thumbs and strength and fury, and he pulled the door with such force that it bent vertically inward.

  “Go.” Ishmael leaned against the door, keeping it open. “We have to find a way. Kill ’em all.”

  Ishmael was a dead man on two feet, toggling between two forms before any one cycle was done. His eyes were green—not honeydew green, but hazel, natural. Human.

  “Let’s go,” Ishmael said again, with a weary nod.

  The wendigo was pulling apart Laura Maurelli, whose eyes stared at nothing. They both looked strangely relaxed.

  “She won’t stop,” Ishmael said. “We have to do it. Let’s go!”

  Two-Trees nodded and headed upstairs toward only God knew what.

  God, and Wenabozho.

  Twice Two-Trees dropped the camera. Upstairs, the place was cluttered with green debris. Doors were left open. Medical equipment had been scattered everywhere, broken, aged, and soiled. Cradling his broken hand, he splashed through black puddles carved by decades of rain coming through the broken roof.

  “Come on, Ishmael! It’s not far. I know the way. You can make it.”

  “Go!” Ishmael’s voice was behind him, but in that stairwell, he sounded far away.

  Two-Trees heard voices. Animal voices. Bridget’s voice.

  He climbed through one of the empty windows onto the reclaimed land around Pouch Lake, stumbling and jumping one legged when his foot caught in a vine. There were more bonewalkers out here too, in plain public view under a bright, sunny sky. They were running north, toward Pritchard Park, toward town.

  “Come on,” Two-Trees said. “All I need you to do is keep them off me long enough so that I can get into the hydro building. All right? I have an idea.”

  There was no one behind him.

  She’s eaten him. I’m on my own.

  There was a town of sixty thousand people outside that paper mill, with thirty thousand more scattered across the county, every one of them armed with a video camera. Every one of them was edible. Every meal would pique the devil’s hunger.

  He tucked his bad arm in, keeping the digital camera snug in the crook of his elbow, and he ran up the steep incline beside the spillway, sliding wherever the mud was wet, or where roots were loose from too much traffic.

  A bonewalker tore across the south end of Pritchard Park, leaping over the fence as if it was a kiddy-gate. An enormous, grunting, huffing, animal body ran the same way and flung himself at the fence, and for a moment, he balanced on its top, his tail whirling behind him. The fence posts creaked, leaned, and suddenly bent like cheap straws, and the Padre went with it. He leapt from the bent fence like it was a diving board, and he landed, breaking something on impact. He ran on down the river after the bonewalker with two front legs and one back paw, with no sacrifice to speed.

  Two-Trees had bigger demons to drown. His head swam. Still, a broken fence was a hell of a lot easier to escape than manacles. He squirmed up the last bit of mud and was on the path. He picked himself up.

  Bridget wore nothing but tatters, and she was laughing in that yipping, piss-inducing hyena way. Her triangular torso was precariously balanced on short, spotted legs, with one bulging, furry arm flexed and a throat in one hand; the other arm extended, reaching for a second neck. When she had them both, she smashed the two bodies together with inhuman speed. One head broke loose and hung by skin like a polyp. Growling, with her Mohawk bristling from her forehead to her docked tail, Bridget waded out into Steeper Lake and held them both under water. She looked up suddenly, blunt nose working, button eyes blinking. She uttered three shrill yips, acknowledging Two-Trees’ scent.

  Two-Trees sprinted for the bridge to the far side of Steeper Lake. How he’d get into the hydro building was another question. How he’d open the spillway gates, he had no idea. For now, it was just a matter of getting there.

  At the far end of the bridge was a girl on a mountain bike. She got off. Two boys joined her.

  Foot falls echoed on the planks behind him.

  Shit. No. Not now. Not this close.

  He saw white out of the corner of his eye, and he leapt against the rails of the covered bridge to get out of its trajectory.

  But this time, it wasn’t bone he saw.

  She was only shoulder high to him, owing mainly to her stance, but she had a head and face that was 100 percent, dyed-in-the-wool wolf, with white-blonde hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. Blue eyes blinked up at him, not a trace of malice or fear or wrath; it was just a quick check to see what his plan was.

  “We need to get to the hydro building,” Two-Trees told Holly. “Over there. We need to open the spillways. Let Steeper Lake drain into Pouch Lake. We need to flood the mill with enough water so it’ll fill the basement.”

  She tilted her wolf-like head, seemingly unconcerned by the three bonewalkers striding toward them, shedding their skins and growing out their ears and claws as they approached.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Two-Trees asked.

  She tipped her head forward in a gentle kind of nod.

  “There’s a wendigo down there! And the only way to make the hunger stop is by filling its belly with an inexhaustible supply of water.” Two-Trees fixed his sweaty grip on the digital video camera. “Can you clear the way for me?”

  She blinked innocent eyes at him. Her nostrils mo
ved, and whiskers twitched.

  “Do it,” he said, “Sister—”

  He saw the planks of the bridge come up under his shoulder. He’d twisted away and fallen prone, facing the way he’d come. Someone had punched him in the chest with atomic force.

  Wood turned red.

  White fought white—bone claws against fur—a hundred feet trampled the bridge beside his face, getting farther and farther away, the wrong way, toward the paper mill and not toward the hydro building. And meanwhile, the sun-bleached planks under his chest were turning bloody.

  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. His chest was on fire. The whole bridge was on fire with his blood.

  He rolled over onto his back. On either side of the covered bridge’s roof, the October sky was June-blue. He put his hand on his chest and felt the width of the burning, punctured bruise.

  Boards shifted under his body as someone walked up to him.

  Not fair. No. Not now. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. This isn’t how the story ends.

  Detective Sergeant Palmer stood over him, gun smoking. He knelt and picked up the video camera. He stood again. “Traitor.”

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Thirty

  THIS IS BURNOUT.

  The wendigo was licking the wall. Her spine bent in the middle, as steeply and sharply as the hump of a camel’s back.

  Why isn’t she eating me?

  Ishmael crouched, wedged in the broken door, unable to go any further. Every body part was in a different form, except for his face, which was trying all configurations at once but never in the same place twice. He was like stiff clay being moulded and kneaded by brutal cosmic fingers, with all his organs being mashed and rearranged under the pressure.

  Oh, right . . . I’m too human for her tastes.

  There was nothing left of the bonewalkers except what was stuck between the wendigo’s teeth.

  With luck, Ishmael thought he’d die before she remembered he was still there.

  His hands were deflating, flattening, softening. There was no fur left now. No great paws, only someone else’s hands. They didn’t look like his. They didn’t feel attached to the whole. Nothing felt assembled. Just random bits of corpse revivified in a newly cobbled whole.

  I’ve dreamed of a thousand ways I could die in this job. This wasn’t one of them.

  Becoming human again first had never figured into it. Even when he knew Foster was developing weapons against lycanthropes—the counter cyclical agents, the spiral serum—he knew it’d only be used to destroy the lycanthrope, as in “to render them dead.” Never, ever, did he think a cure would be possible. Lycanthropy was something people contracted, lived with, and died with. People were infected and left their human lives behind, then they’d run around causing trouble for a hundred years or so, and after that, they’d lose their minds and get bat-shit rabid and kill a bunch of people. In the end, they’d either exhaust themselves, get burned at the stake, or die under the claws of a Wyrd field agent.

  Well, maybe once I dreamed some implausible happy-ever-after for Bridget, where she becomes Claire Bambridge again and returns home like an amnesic good-twin, like on one of her old soap operas.

  He had chest hair now, curly and reddish-brown. His ribs were deflating, leaving behind only a man’s upper body where a glorious feline heart once beat.

  But cured? Not in a million years.

  His feet were still feline. It seemed so strange to see them now. Usually, when he was in fur, he was looking at himself through cat’s eyes, with a proud, forest mind. Now he was pathetically human, except for the cat’s paws at the end of his brown-haired legs, like a pair of novelty slippers.

  Is this who I was before infection? I always thought I was more . . . lean.

  The wendigo’s foot claws scratched the floor. The tail swept tainted water. “Syd . . .” she said. “Neeee.” She wheezed air into her lungs. Colour returned to her eyes for a moment. “Help. Syd. Neeeee.” She patted her hollow chest. “Syd. Neeeeeee.” Her stiff, broken speech reminded him of Icepick. “Help.”

  “I will,” he said.

  He couldn’t move. Things were swelling and shifting and cracking, but nothing wanted to move. He was so utterly worn out.

  He wondered how many more bonewalkers were out there. How many more children would never be recovered.

  “They . . . fed . . . me . . .” she said.

  She reminded him of Icepick, and not of Digger.

  “Chil . . . dren . . . and . . . I . . . felt . . . nuh . . . thing.”

  Thick, cataract clouds moved across her eyes, absorbing the flickering kerosene light without reflecting any of it back. She gripped her horns and wailed with Digger’s nor’easter voice, and retreated from the light.

  “Kill,” she said from the dark. “Meeeee . . .”

  “I’ll try,” Ishmael whispered, though his body and soul were melting into the water, the concrete, and the door.

  “Fat . . . chil . . . dren . . . They . . . smelled . . . like . . .”

  “Plastic?” he asked.

  “Yesssss . . .”

  “Like garbage?”

  “Yeeeesssss . . .”

  He could hear her moving in the background, clattering and clicking and hissing and wheezing.

  “Hungry,” she moaned.

  Human or not, he’d be next.

  He didn’t care. If it bought Two-Trees another few minutes, then it would be worth it.

  He didn’t want to die human.

  No. It’s not about dying human. I don’t want to live as a human. I was something more. Something better. Something strong. And they took it away from me—they took it—

  Hormones rushed down the back of his neck into his bloodstream like ice. He could feel them moving toward his heart, the way he could feel ice water sinking into his stomach on a hot day. He felt the rush surge in all directions, pushing and dragging with it another up-cycle, for whatever it was worth. Aside from stealing his breath, it didn’t seem to change him at all. Muscles tensed, hair stood on edge, senses brightened. But his lip didn’t split.

  A few hours ago, I was bitching that it was happening too much.

  He closed his eyes. He didn’t even know what colour they’d be—still mismatched green and brown, or both brown, or both green, or maybe something else entirely. He wondered if he’d still go out and buy contacts anyhow, just to keep those big brown irises that freaked Bridget out so much.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not even getting off this floor.

  “They . . . tasted . . .”

  She was coming closer.

  “Good!” she roared. “Jay . . . says . . . feed . . . the . . . Bone . . . Tribe . . .”

  It got cold, quickly. Air rippled down the stairwell and through the door, stirring up his fur-hair. Something was gurgling. Something tall. Something above him.

  “Kill . . .”

  Her hands found his shoulders. He opened his eyes and willed the change over him one more time. If he could grow claws long enough, or gather enough strength to break her neck . . .

  “Me . . .”

  Water rushed down the stairs with a burbling roar. Then it came in a blast, booming open the broken metal door and shoving Ishmael against the wendigo. She screamed and raised her hands, as if the water was acid. Fangs angled out from her jaws like the legs of a lobster. Ishmael fell into the churning, filthy water and stumbled, sloshing after her. Another wave knocked him off his feet, and he went whirling after her.

  Drown. Change to self-repair. Drown again. Change to self-repair. Drown again. Change—

  He took a deep breath as the water rose chest high, and he dove under, frog-kicking against the current, clawing at the back of her legs to bring her down. He missed and ran out of air, so he rose and broke the surface for another quick breath. Her face was right there, blind, enraged. He could see the back of her mouth.

  Water floated Ishmael higher, toward the ceiling.

  Hol
d her mouth open, and she’ll drown faster.

  Branch-like arms swished through the water, trailing shaggy fur. Ishmael pushed off from her hand and turned himself around. He didn’t want to see this part.

  As if obliging him, water licked the bottom of the last kerosene lamp, sizzling.

  The light went out.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  DEP MADE A noise somewhere between “Hey” and “Whuff.” Ferox looked up from her engine work.

  “Oh my God!” Ferox said. She lost the screwdriver somewhere in the engine block and didn’t care. She ran toward Mary Anne and crushed her in a hug so fierce and abrupt that both women nearly fell over. “You’re all right! Where have you been?”

  “Hiding,” Mary Anne said. She’d lost some of her fur, and although her skeletal structure and muscles were still out of whack, she looked no worse than she had when she’d left quarantine. Gil’s miracle cure seemed to be doing the trick. Well . . . it’s doing something, at least. Mary Anne was staring warily at Dep, who was nearly six inches taller than the last time she’d seen him.

  “But where have you been?” Ferox asked. “We’ve been looking for you for two days straight!”

  Mary Anne smiled. “If I can hide from the Lost Ones, I can hide from Jay and his . . .” She shuddered. “Whatever those things are.”

  “Bonewalkers,” Ferox said. “That’s what Angie called them.”

  “But what are they?”

  “They smelled like Lost Ones,” Ferox answered, “only dustier. And they’re smarter.”

  “They have no hunting instinct,” Mary Anne said.

  “Yeah, which makes me super glad. Dep found one creeping around the Hollow. He tried everything to kill the damned thing. He broke its neck, he crushed it under a rock, he threw it on the fire—and damned if the bonewalker didn’t just traipse back out again, dusting himself off. No clothes left, just . . .” Ferox squinted, trying hard to piece together and translate Dep’s description, which he’d given in a series of charades and grunts. “Armour. It’s like instead of growing hair, they grow plates of bone, all over their bodies. If a bonewalker had hunting experience to go with that, we wouldn’t stand a chance. Dep had to ambush him, break his back, and then tear his head off before he could regenerate his spine. Even then, the head kept opening and closing its mouth, like one of those wind-up teeth toys.”