“They announced it last night, and they’re moving in right now.” The man’s voice was vaguely familiar. “It’s not just medical personnel anymore, Bridget. We’re talking military presence.”
“Shit. Really? How big is the perimeter?”
“All the roads into and out of Elmbury are shut down, and there’ve been four bonewalker sightings since we left.” Skinny guy with glasses, in the basement, with us . . .
“Christ,” Bridget sighed.
“My children are in there,” the man said. Buckle. Detective Buckle. “So are we actually going to go and do something about this, or hide underground for another four days?”
Four days? Ishmael’s eyelid opened like a gluey zipper. He made a noise against the feeding tube that sounded a little like “Wavug?”
Suddenly everyone was moving, Foster first, followed by Mary Anne, followed by a half dozen heads swirling above him. Bridget played traffic cop, clearing the space for Foster and Mary Anne, who hovered over him, moving wires and tubes and touching his forehead. They talked in medical jargon. Someone finally pulled the tube from his mouth, provoking a gag reflex. Foster snapped her fingers beside his ear, ran a pen up the arch of his foot, touched his sides—countless annoying little checks to confirm that yes, Ishmael was alive, and yes, he was awake.
“Four days?” Ishmael croaked. He tried to roll off the gurney. Bridget pinned him down. His throat was raw.
“Take it easy,” Foster said.
“Is she dead?” Ishmael asked.
Foster rolled her eyes. “Which one?”
“Wendigo.”
“Yes,” Foster said. “And we haven’t extracted the body from inside the mill yet.”
“Reason number eighty-two why we should be leaving now,” Buckle said.
Ishmael tried again to get off the gurney, despite the IV needle taped to the crook of his elbow and the IV stand he pulled off balance. Mary Anne caught it before it fell. “We’ve got to go back.”
“You’re in a bunker in Nova Scotia, and you’re in no condition to travel,” Bridget said.
“You’ve been in a coma,” Foster explained.
“Coma? How long was I out?”
Foster hesitated before replying. “Six days.”
“Six days?”
“Took us two days to get here,” Mary Anne said, from the other side of the gurney. “Back roads the whole way. Buckle thinks we were followed.”
“And I’m telling you,” Buckle said, “someone is maintaining a stakeout just out of the angle of our cameras. We can’t stay here.”
“He’s awake for the first time in a week,” Foster snapped. “For God’s sake—can you give us a minute to see if he’s even stable enough to move?”
“What happened to Dep and Ferox? Helen?” Ishmael asked Bridget. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Dep and Ferox are safe,” Bridget answered. “They’re here with us.”
“And?” Ishmael stressed. “Dep is . . . ? Is he . . .”
“Dep is . . .” Foster blew hair from her face. “Not a wendigo.”
“He looks like goddamned Vengeance,” Bridget said. “And he’s stuck that way.”
“Guys, stop,” Mary Anne said. “Patient first. Panic later.”
“Agreed,” Foster added. “Bridget can stay. Everyone else, clear the room.”
Ishmael heard Ferox ask a question, Buckle swore, and boots stomped across the floor. Seals hissed as a door opened.
“What do you remember?” Mary Anne asked Ishmael.
He wasn’t sure if he drowned first, or if he was eaten first. If he’d been eaten, the wendigo would have drowned with him in her stomach anyhow. “Water.”
“Anything else?”
“Does the Padre know?” Ishmael had killed the Padre’s last living relative, either daughter or niece. He’d never know which she’d been. “About the wendigo. Does he know?”
“He knows,” Bridget replied.
“Ishmael, focus, please,” Mary Anne said.
Foster checked vital signs and performed more reflex tests. Ishmael’s brain felt slow and dull. He lifted his hand, not because he wanted to see how much or how little his fingers had changed, but because he felt like something was missing. A ring. Aren’t I supposed to be wearing a ring?
“Anything else you remember?” Mary Anne asked. “Do you remember anything about the bonewalkers, any clue where they might go if they escaped?”
Ishmael shook his head. “I don’t know. They were supposed to have waited for somebody before they came out of hiding . . . Revenge or something, against . . .” Against who? “They were planning with somebody . . . somebody I . . .”
He hadn’t lost his memory—he knew the man’s name, he knew there was a connection between him and this conspirator—but it was as if his memories had been stored in a soundproof glass room. He was locked out of his own mind. For that matter, he knew he’d been to Elmbury, stayed in a hotel, and had been sick most of the time, but he couldn’t remember what had brought him to Elmbury.
“I don’t think they ever planned on escaping.” He winced. “Six days, I’ve been out of it?” Mary Anne asked him to try and sit up, and with Foster’s help, he swung his legs over the side of the gurney and sat up. His head spun, but he was more hungry than nauseated. He was exhausted. “And Elmbury’s . . . what, under quarantine now?”
“Padre’s looking into that now,” Bridget replied. “But yeah, it looks like someone’s organized a militarized quarantine. They’re calling it some kind of airborne respiratory disease, but somebody’s got to know there’s more going on, or they wouldn’t have called in the army.”
After all that . . .
Ishmael hung his head. “Buckle’s right, we shouldn’t have stayed.” He opened and closed his hands, as Mary Anne asked him to, while Foster shone a light in his left eye, then his right.
“We stayed, because we were hoping to regroup,” Bridget said. “It was the only place I knew most Wyrd agents could find, and it had all the equipment Foster needed to keep you alive.”
“Regroup,” Ishmael echoed. He knew he had allies, but he was damned if he could remember a single name. He was too tired to beat on the barrier between himself and his memories. “With who?”
“Anders and Chloe, at least,” Bridget said.
Those names he remembered, though from ages ago. A lifetime ago.
Bridget ran her fingers through her short hair. “I was able to get emails out to them a few days ago. Now I’m getting error messages saying those addresses don’t exist.”
“Phone?” Ishmael asked.
“Their phones were shut down at the same time as ours,” she said. “Tried calling from payphones. Number out of service. Bunker’s got WiFi, and I’ve kept my non-Wyrd email going, but no one’s replying.”
Ishmael rubbed his face. The cheekbones were too low and too round, and his eyebrows felt swollen. His skin and fingers both felt numb.
“I don’t know who else to contact,” Bridget said. “Haberman’s missing, Angie Burley’s dead. Helen’s missing, along with Shuffle and Gil. Varco Valley Station, Varco Manor, Gil’s lab, it’s all blown to shit. Our phones are dead, our credit cards are flagged for fraud, and if Buckle’s right, cops are out looking for two big black trucks with Manitoba license plates, and they probably have us under surveillance right now. I don’t know who else we can trust. Anyone I ever worked with during quarantine is either dead or MIA, and of the living, I don’t know who might belong to Jay’s camp.”
“What’s wrong with my face?” Ishmael asked.
Foster moved Bridget aside. “You’re probably going to feel strange for a couple of days. God help you, it was that damned cure that saved your life, but it’s had some . . . side effects.”
Mary Anne caught him from falling forward. Aside from a broken nose and an asymmetrical face, Mary Anne had never looked so healthy.
“The mammalian dive response,” Foster said. “It slowed your breathing and your hear
t rate. And because you were just barely a lycanthrope, you couldn’t burn out and die. Once we took you out of the water, well, that’s when things got interesting. By the way, brown doesn’t become you.”
“It’s true,” Bridget said.
Ishmael’s hand floated up as if tethered to half-inflated helium balloons, and then it flopped on his head as if the strings were cut. His hair felt coarse and unwashed.
“The real problem was that you were stuck,” Foster said. “And I don’t mean between forms. I mean you were literally wedged between the wendigo’s teeth, holding up the roof of her mouth like Atlas holding up the world.”
He didn’t remember that.
“When she died, instant rigor mortis. It took three dives for Buckle to pull you free, and we didn’t know how long you’d been under. And Buckle had a hell of a time bringing you up to the surface without drowning himself. Your brain suffered massive damage from oxygen deprivation.”
“Buckle pulled me out?” He couldn’t recall the name. “No.”
Foster stopped talking.
“You mean Two-Trees,” he said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Bridget said.
“You mean—”
“He went down fighting,” she said, biting off the words.
“Shit, Bridget . . . I’m so sorry . . .” Ishmael folded his hands into fists. “I’m sorry.” Everything tingled, but he was in one piece. Foster took a pin and prodded his fingertips to measure how much sensitivity he had lost. “Still human?” he asked Foster, mumbling.
“As the day he was born,” Bridget replied.
“I meant me,” Ishmael said.
“It’s too soon to tell.” Foster’s face reddened. “But we don’t think so. Reinfection was the only way to reverse the brain damage. But your old virus wasn’t taking the way it should so . . . we . . . I . . .”
“Did what we could with the tools at our disposal,” Mary Anne added, as she took his blood pressure. “But between reinfection and whatever detritus you inhaled in that flood, you went into septic shock, and your white blood cell count went through the roof. And I can say from personal experience, the first thing Gil’s cure does is put your immune system into overdrive. You’ve been fighting off reinfection.”
“Gil,” Ishmael whispered.
“He told Ferox everything,” Bridget said.
I can barely remember what he looks like. Curly hair? That’s all I’ve got left of him.
“Gil did this to me?” Ishmael asked.
“Jay wrote the code that pirated my offline research,” Foster said, “but it was Gil who used it. It was Gil who replicated my countercyclical agents and the cycle-blockers. And it was Gil who tinkered with the off-switches on the lycanthropic virus, because Gil was looking for a way to cure himself.”
Ishmael closed his eyes and hung his head.
“Gil’s first attempt was a catastrophic failure,” she said. “He shut off the wrong genes and created something brand new.” Foster ran her fingers across her forehead. “Bonewalkers.”
Ah hell, Gil. You were trying to warn me all along.
“On the upside,” Foster said, clearing her throat, “even after that disaster, he kept trying to find a cure. Not only did he have the Wyndhamites to worry about, but he had the bonewalkers to deal with too. Gil had a treatment ready for the last five months, but—at the time—he had no willing test subjects. And Jay wouldn’t let him test it on the bonewalkers, not until he saw it work on a real therianthrope.”
“Me,” Ishmael said.
“When Harvey sent out that kitten video,” Bridget said, “Gil was convinced you’d flipped your lid. He loved you too much to kill you, but he hated you enough to cure you.”
Because Gil knows how much I love my own power. He knew that was the best way to get revenge. The only way.
“That’s why he asked Wyrd to send you into quarantine,” Bridget said. “To keep Wyrd from executing you, at least until he had proof his cure worked.”
“Except while you were on the island, you just had to keep sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong,” Mary Anne said, ripping off the blood pressure cuff. Ishmael tried to pick off the tape holding the IV in place, but she smacked his hand and told him to leave it alone.
“Jay figured you’d found out what he was up to,” Foster said, “and he thought you were trying to tell Haberman. He had to stop you ASAP, and to hell with testing the cure. That’s why he bombed the shit out of Wyndham Farms.”
Mary Anne hung up the blood pressure cuff. “Still don’t know where he got those planes from.”
“However,” Foster said, after a fortifying breath, “before you were taken into quarantine, Gil had a crisis of conscience. Just in case he was wrong, he wanted a way to reverse the process. Shortly after Bridget knocked you out in LaGuardia Airport, and while you were en route to Wyndham Farms, someone took blood samples before administering the cure. Using those samples, Gil isolated your retrovirus—the purest form, before all this shite happened during quarantine and after. He concentrated it, made more of it. He wanted something on hand to compare against, if and when your supposed kittens were caught. He wanted some way to prove your guilt, or to absolve you once and for all. After quarantine, Gil guessed what Jay and his Bone Tribe were up to. So he sent your viral samples to a lab near here, to hold in storage until we arrived.”
“A booster shot,” Ishmael said. He ran his hand over his arm. The scars were fading.
“Something like that,” Foster said. “But it wasn’t enough to stimulate the change. It wasn’t working fast enough, and you were suffering organ failure. So I . . .” Foster covered her eyes and sighed. “I tinkered.”
Ishmael was too long in the torso, too short in the leg, too wide in the shoulders, too everything. He put his hand on Bridget’s shoulder and got off the gurney.
Shit. I’m taller.
He glared at Foster. “What the hell did you do to me?”
To Be Concluded in Helix: Scourge of Bones
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Biography
Having written her first story at 7 years old, first novella at 10 and first novel at 11, Pat is an emerging, multi-genre author with full length non-fiction and science fiction credits, and an enormous backlog of ideas, characters and stories to share in the years to come. She is also an avid support of independent and emerging talent, whether they are writers, musicians, web designers or fine artists. She participates in an annual novel writing marathon to raise funds for literacy programs in Ontario. You can find out more on www.ninedaywonder.com.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Cha
pter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Biography
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 39