Helix: Plague of Ghouls (10 page)

“You might not have any choice in the matter,” Burley said.

“He’s going through his first false starts,” Ishmael said.

“What? Already?” the Padre said, aghast, then, his chin jiggling, added, “Oh . . .
shit.
He’s going like Digger, isn’t he?”

Burley held up her hands. “Time out.” She made a T with her hands. “We need Grey at hand. With Dr. Foster dead ‘n’ all, Gil’s going to need someone to lend a hand with analysis to figure out whether or not we’re
dealin’ with a new outbreak.”

“He has to stay with Mary Anne—”

“Why don’t y’all just shut yer damned pie-hole an’ let me finish?” She cocked an eyebrow. Ishmael sighed through his nose. “I’m gonna make a case with Haberman to tell him that where we need Grey is in the lab, where the equipment is. Y’all can trust him there? Let him be at Gil’s beck and call. He can stick around close to the lab and when Gil needs him, he goes there, and when Mary Anne needs him, he can go ahead and help her.”

“Agreed,” Ishmael said.

“As for Helen, she can stay with me awhile. Hell, I might even start weaning her off Varco Lake and into a beauty parlour or something. I don’t know. But you let me worry about her.”

“Done,” Ishmael said. Burley he could trust with Helen. She’d taken many, many other young lycanthropes under her wing and body-slammed males left and right until the women were under their own power again. She could have thrown Ishmael to the lions, but Helen? Not a chance. Even if it meant giving Burley and Haberman a chance to turn Helen against him, Ishmael was satisfied, because he’d know Helen was safe.

Unless she goes like Digger.

“We have to leave Dep here,” Ishmael said. “We . . .” He sighed. “We don’t know how he’s going to turn out, but the process has already begun, and we
can’t
—” Burley had already begun to protest. “We can’t risk that in a populated area! That’s why we founded Wyrd in the first place, Angie! Varco Lake was established for
exactly this reason
!”

“Ishmael—”

“It’s not even about him wreaking havoc on innocent human beings. Populated areas mean surveillance cameras, cell phones, social media—we take Dep into Halo County, and we blow away two hundred years of secrecy. And there will be hell to pay, especially if he kills somebody.”

“Ishmael.”

“We’ve
already
got hell to pay,” the Padre said, mostly to himself. “What with one dead body torn up and eaten in Halo County, and a shitload of questions people are bound to ask.”

“Dep stays here,” Ishmael said. “At least until he’s finished his false starts, and definitely until we know what he’s become.”

“Ishmael!” she shouted. “God damn it!”

Ishmael shut up at last.

“Don’t tell me!” She let her hands fall to her hips. “Tell
him
.” With a dramatic roll of her head, she turned and looked at Abram Haberman, who was standing in the doorway, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent light, with his hands clasped behind his back.

“HE
GOES
?” BRIDGET
asked. For a woman with such short legs, she could keep up and outrun Ishmael as easily as strolling down a boardwalk. She stopped in front of him, forcing him to halt on the gravel walkway between the dormitory and the barn-sized garage. Her hair seemed incandescent under the rustic-looking street lamp. “What do you mean, ‘he goes’?”

“It was the best compromise I could get,” Ishmael said. He checked his pocket for the fourth time. Two USB keys were safely hidden inside: his ongoing analysis of the kitten video, and six years of Dr. Foster’s research. He’d meant to give the latter to Gil, but he wasn’t at his desk, and not in his dorm room. He was afraid and annoyed, because at nine at night, there weren’t many places Gil could be. “Would you move? We don’t have a lot of time.”

Bridget let him pass so he could dump the first load of gear into the back of the truck. “Ishmael, I don’t think you have any idea what kind of trouble this puts us in.”

Ishmael brushed past her, and she chased after him. “It’s the Padre,” he said. “He’s stable, he’s smart, he’s self-aware in fur, he’s got a cycle that’s nearly as long as yours—he’ll be fine.”

“Dude. Not in Halo County,” Bridget insisted. “Anywhere but there. Ishmael, that’s where we picked him
up
, not twenty-four hours after he’d eviscerated his own twin brother.”

That made Ishmael slow in his tracks.

But at least it’s not Dep.
He picked up his pace again, thinking,
It’d serve them right if Dep went all wendigo on their Wyrd asses.

Ishmael continued on his way, with Bridget still at his heels. “And how far into his full transformation was he?” Ishmael asked.

“Far enough to eviscerate his own twin brother.”

He puffed a plume of white air. “That’s not what I meant.”

Before infection, Bridget Carnegie had been a pudgy-petite, stay-at-home mother of three, quick of step, harried of schedule, irreverently funny at the bar with her girlfriends. She’d had long brown hair then, and dull olive green eyes, a tan complexion, and full red lips. She’d been so normal and so busy, happy as a mother, miserable as a wife. Now, she had brush-cut blonde hair that was mottled with brown and black, as if it had been splashed by paint. Likewise, her skin was covered in dime-sized freckles, which she had to cover with scar-concealing make-up in public. After infection, her whole human frame had changed, leaving her with too-long arms, too-short legs, a stunted nose, large round ears, and a barrel but barely endowed chest. Even her eyes had changed colour, though for the better: now they were uniformly caramel, darkening to a ring of chocolate around the pupil. And no matter what form she was in, she had inhuman strength all over, including in her jaws. In a fit of rage one day, she bit down on an Allen key and bent it ninety degrees the wrong way. But neither the shape nor colour of Bridget’s mouth had changed. Even Bridget’s voice was an affectation of manliness; when she was surprised or tired, Ishmael could hear Mrs. Claire Bambridge speaking from Bridget’s mouth. She could pass for Claire Bambridge’s sister—and she often did, as a means of keeping in touch with her own children, in direct violation of Wyrd protocol—but never pass as Claire herself.

“I mean, had he finished his false starts?” Ishmael asked. “Had his
human
face changed by then?”

She shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know. He was somewhere in the middle of it, I guess.”

“Has he changed a lot since you first picked him up? I mean, I know what he looks like now. When I first met him, he was more Cowboy-Quasimodo than man of the cloth. So what did he look like before infection?”

“Honestly, Ish, I don’t remember. But there’s a chance that maybe someone
else
will recognize him. God,” she sighed. “Even he doesn’t know which twin he is, beyond ‘The One That Survived’.”

“No one will even see him,” Ishmael swore. “For right now, we just need to get there, find out information from Maple . . . Chances are, he’ll stay in the truck the whole time. And if I ask him to come out, it’ll only be with a very, very good reason.”

“Maple’s going to shit bricks when he finds out about this,” Bridget said.

“Then give him a trowel to wipe with.”

“Oh, haw.” She turned and swore. “Fine. If he comes, you don’t say a word. If he remembers anything about Elmbury, he’s going to freak out.”

“He’s not going to freak out.”

“You don’t know him like I know him, Ish. I look at him and I still see the crazy. He still had a mouthful of his brother’s blood when we picked him up.”

“Listen, let’s argue about it in the truck, all right? You’ve got to pack, I’ve got to find Holly—God, I thought you’d be happy to hear you were back on active duty.”

“I
am
happy,” she said, angrily. “If it was you, me, and Maple, yes. But not him! And not Holly.”

“Why not Holly?”

“Because she’s soft,” Bridget answered. If there was one thing Bridget hated, it was soft women. Claire had been soft. Claire had been too quick to trust, too polite to run, too slow to make it out of the park alive. As Dr. Eva Foster was Holly’s armour, so Claire had taken to wearing Bridget. Only, unlike Holly and Eva Foster, Claire would never—and physically couldn’t—come out of Bridget’s shell.

“Ah, but you’ve never seen Holly in a fight,” Ishmael said, with a wry smile.

“Soft in the head,” Bridget said. “Easily distracted. Out in outer space. The last thing we need is someone wandering off to smell flowers, just when we need her most.”

“She’s good in a fight,” Ishmael insisted, “and that’s the
only
reason why she’s going. Maple’s going to handle the rest. We’re going as backup. Nothing else. I mean, hell, if you want to help him in his investigation, and if you think you can get away with it, go for it. As for me, Holly, and the Padre, we’ll wait until you call. Until then, we lay low, we watch TV, and we eat.”

Bridget shook her head. “I hate this.”

“I know.”

“This is a very, very bad idea.”

“I know. But there’s beer on the outside.”

She stood on the walkway at the bottom of the main house stairs. “Oh, don’t you think you can tease me like that, Shmiley. You’re not out of the doghouse yet.”

ISHMAEL FOUND THE
Padre almost half an hour later, not in the library or anywhere in the main house, not in the lab, not even on the first or second floor of the dormitory, but on the third floor, where the women’s rooms were. As he approached one of the doors, Ishmael heard the Padre’s voice.

“I don’t know what I can do,” the Padre was saying, “but I’ll try.”

Ishmael knocked on the door frame. The door drifted open wider. The red-headed Ferox—Danielle Smith—was sitting at her standard issue dormitory desk with a web browser open. She blushed and shut the lid on her computer. And how she could blush. Even her freckles turned pink. She fixed the collar of her shirt to cover the splotches of red rising up her narrow neck. If he didn’t know the Padre as well as he did, Ishmael would have sworn they’d been downloading porn.

“Hi, sorry to interrupt,” Ishmael said, but walked in anyhow.

The Padre took a page off the printer and stuffed it into his army surplus duffel bag on top of two textbooks and a Bible. There wasn’t much else in the bag, because there wasn’t much else the Padre owned. Three shirts, two pairs of pants, and a shaving kit were all he’d been able to pick up at the commissary. He had no work-credits to his Wyrd member number, since no one on-site would employ a Tiger Dog. “You ready?” the Padre asked.

“Almost,” Ishmael said. “You might want to get some sleep. We leave before dawn.”

Ferox looked him up and down, a little horrified. “Wow, Ish. You’ve put on a little weight there, haven’t you?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Are you feeling okay, Furnace-boy?” She fanned herself.

“Ferox—” He had second thoughts about what he’d ask next, but he asked it anyhow. “When was the last time you were out at the Hollow?”

Her colour stayed high, but now for a different reason, it seemed. “I needed some time away.”

The Padre picked up his duffel. “What time tomorrow? Five? Six?”

“Six,” Ishmael said. “Do me a favour? See if you can find Holly. Tell her when we’re leaving.”

“Right.” And the Padre left.

Ishmael shut the door softly behind him. “Listen. About Dep . . .”

She stood up and pretended that a bucket of dirty laundry urgently needed folding. “I don’t think I want to talk about it right now.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“A couple of days ago,” she said. “I haven’t been back since.”

“I uh . . .” God
, how do I phrase this?
“I think he needs . . .” What
am I doing? I can’t just send her out there again, in case he does go wendigo. Maybe between her and Shuffle . . . No—it took five of us to kill Digger. Shuffle, Padre, Holly, me, and Icepick—and even then it was close odds who’d walk away.
“I think he’s getting his false starts.”

She went from blush to pale.

“His teeth are dropping already. And he’s . . .” Ishmael cleared his throat. “He’s having seizures. Like Digger did.”

She covered her mouth.

I’m an asshole
. “I know he means a lot to you, but I think maybe you should—”

“Is that why he was so rough?” she asked. “He said . . . things . . .”

“Did he hurt you? Physically?”

“No, of course not.” Her chin trembled. She looked distraught. “He’s not all right, is he?”

“For now, he’s okay,” Ishmael answered. “Distracted, but okay.”

“But when you reinfected him . . .”

“Maybe it took. Maybe he won’t end up like Digger. He probably won’t—I mean look how the reinfection helped you! It should do the same for Dep.”
I hope. Because clearly it didn’t work for Mary Anne.
He rubbed his eyebrow, where a brand new headache was growing.