Helix: Plague of Ghouls (16 page)

“You’re sure it’s not hives, though?” she asked.

“I’m not allergic to anything,” he said. More to the point, he’d spent the last thirty-five years associating with werewolves. He’d developed a tolerance against all allergens.

A young woman in a skirt suit appeared beside the receptionist. She was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, and she looked like she lorded a hotel management diploma over everyone’s head. “Well, those
aren’t
bed bug bites,” she said. She sneered at him over her glasses. “Those are
flea
bites. You probably brought them in with your dog.”

“But . . . I don’t have a dog,” he said, flatly.

“I know the difference between a bed bug bite and a flea bite, okay? We studied them in school.”

“Miss, trust me,” he said, smiling. “I’ve had my fair share of flea bites.”

“Janice,” the larger, older woman remarked, “why don’t you let me handle this one, huh? If you want, maybe you can head upstairs and take a look for yourself?”

“Uh, hello,” Janice said, pointing to herself. “Sorry, which one of us is the shift manager?”

The other woman looked like she’d suddenly contracted an ice cream headache, and that a chunk of pecan had struck a dental nerve.

“God,” Janice huffed. “I have to do everything myself around here.” She flounced across the lobby and slammed open the door to the stairs. Her shoes echoed all the way up the stairwell.

Two-Trees took the dry cleaning voucher and put it into his wallet. “I’m getting old. I’m getting old! That’s all it is.” He raised a pointed finger in an
aha!
manner. “I am allergic to old age.”

“You and me both,” the older woman said, with a laugh. “Some people’s kids, eh?”

Two-Trees thanked her for all her help. Much as he wanted to check out and go to another hotel, he didn’t want to spread the bugs all over Elmbury. “Can you tell me where the nearest pharmacy is?”

“Landale’s,” she answered. “Go out on the street, turn left, three blocks down, cross the street, and it’ll be on your right.”

“
Muchas gracias.
” He tapped his wallet on the counter, winked at her, and left.

Elmbury, like the other towns in Halo County, was a multi-industry town in the throes of rapid evolution. Once upon a time, it had been a paper milling town, situated as it was so close to the Precambrian Forest of Northern Ontario. It was also a feeder community for a few mining plants, thanks to the rich nickel and copper deposits exploited in the ’50s and ’60s. The paper mill had much improved its equipment, so fewer people were needed, and, as was the case with so many neighbouring cities, the mining prospects often dried up, and boom turned to bust. Then, after many complaints about the smell and poor quality of water, the original mill was shut down, and a new one built in East Oxley, another town in the same county, but downriver of most of the county’s population and closer to Lake Superior. In its heyday, the original paper mill had been built on the rapids between Steeper Lake and Pouch Lake; then the city built a small hydroelectric dam, and expanded Steeper Lake’s shores while shrinking Pouch Lake below it. The shell of the mill remained, but now it was nothing more than a romantic photo opportunity and a dangerous place for urban explorers. Since the dam had been built, part of the mill was now submerged—worse in spring, and extremely dangerous whenever the hydro workers opened the controlled spillway. As with several parts of Halo County, many things that had been built between 1850 and 1914 were abandoned, fenced, shuttered, and reclaimed by nature.

Instead of becoming a ghost town, Elmbury grew. The county was blessed with rare pasture land, and where forests had been denuded, sheep farms had sprung up. There were two provincial parks nearby, three enormous tracts of Crown land, the local Ojibwe Reserve where Two-Trees had grown up, and a few private hunting lodges that had been around since the 1930s. In 2005, hobbyists had managed to restore a steam train and part of the old CP Rail spur that used to shuttle summer tourists up from Toronto. Then, a couple of mid-sized factories moved in and stayed, attracted by low taxes, nearby chemical and mineral processing plants, and an overabundance of job seekers who’d settle for lower wages than might be found in the Golden Horseshoe, if it meant staying out of the Golden Horseshoe. Corporations like Styroforma, Pritchard Antiseptics, and Hemadoro Tires employed half the town. To support them, the rest of the town worked in malls, doctor’s offices, government offices, schools, and day cares—everything that a self-sufficient and expanding community might need.

The only thing Elmbury really needed was sidewalks. It was laid out like an old country town, divvied up by streets marked “Halo County Road #17” and “Range Road #3”. What the receptionist had called a three-block trip turned out to be a half-hour hike along weedy plots of land that smelled of sumac, overripe black currants, and watered-down dog shit. Here, the overnight snow had mostly melted, though Two-Trees could see patches of it where the sun had failed to reach. The road itself was neglected but serviceable, and the loose gravel at the sides had evidence of bicycle tracks and footprints.

He passed an unmarked cinderblock building covered from the bottom up in bindweed, and from the top down in graffiti.
This place is perfect for a lycanthrope to hide in.
Halo County was close enough to civilization to take care of all his human needs, yet it was a short drive until he was lost in abandoned farmland. Lycanthropes didn’t, by nature, flock to the woods. Old growth forests had little ground cover. Ancient trees grew to cathedral heights, blocking out the sun, meaning little new growth, which in turn meant few places to hide. Caves were rare and dangerous, prone to collapse and flood.

But towns like these were ringed with long-lost homesteads that had been shorn of their trees and grown over by sumac colonies and invasive deciduous species. Wells that had been sunk in the 1890s could still be used in the 2010s, so clean water was rarely a problem. Abandoned farm houses, barns, silos, and factories functioned as perfectly respectable places for the homeless to live in. Sometimes they even had functional septic tanks, and fire pits where a lycanthrope could burn last night’s fur.

And it’s a real challenge, finding a body in reclaimed land.

By the time Two-Trees arrived at the little strip mall, the first thing he wanted was an asthma inhaler.
Six years crisscrossing this country in a modified Chevy Suburban doesn’t give you much time to hit the treadmill.
He decided very definitely to think about maybe planning to go back to the gym, possibly, once this job was over.

At one end of the mall, detached from everything else, there was an independent gas station. Between that and the Beer Store there was a grocery store, a flower shop, a hardware store, a pharmacy, and a restaurant that had an enormous early bird special breakfast for five bucks between 5:30 and 8:30, Monday to Friday. He was in luck. It was just past 7:30. However, seeing that the pharmacy was open from seven to midnight, and given that sweat had only made the itch all the more maddening, he went to the pharmacy first. That way, he figured, he could use the restaurant bathroom and apply the itch cream.

He barely had his head inside the pharmacy’s front door before the cashier bid him a happy good morning, and as he passed through the cosmetics department, down the shampoo aisle, and past the stomach remedies, he was greeted by two more employees. He stood in front of a modest selection of skin creams for no longer than fifteen seconds before the pharmacist herself asked if he needed any help. He didn’t, but he thanked her anyhow.

He was trying to determine best price by volume when a young man apologized, reached across the full width of Two-Trees’ chest and grabbed hold of three “value-sized” tubes of diaper cream. Two-Trees made room for him, because clearly this was a diaper rash emergency.

It was the tan lines that gave Two-Trees a start. They were faded now, but they were distinct: two parallel tan lines across his right cheek. This was a boy who’d spent most of his summer outdoors wearing war paint.

And now he was buying diaper cream.

“Sorry,” the kid said again. He turned without a look or another word and jammed his hands, diaper cream and all, into his coat pockets.

Interesting
.
Five-seven, hazel eyes, dirty blond, no scars, ears slanted backwards but not pierced, narrow nose, sharp cheekbones, no sign of fang-shadows.

Small town policing instinct told him to find the nearest and quietest path to the pharmacy’s front door to confront the little thief as he tried to leave. Yet age and experience told him pockets were a great way to hide an embarrassing purchase before the buyer reached the counter. Next to condoms and feminine hygiene products, diaper cream wasn’t something a young man liked to be seen carrying around.

But Wyrd instincts told Two-Trees to follow jungle punks wherever they might go. Three had already shown a fondness for human skulls. One more might lead Two-Trees back to another body dump site.

So, playing up the part of the bumbling old fat guy, Two-Trees hummed and hawed in his aisle, listening for the young man as he moved further toward the cash register. And as long as Two-Trees lingered, the boy lingered. Two-Trees grabbed a bottle of no-name calamine lotion and turned toward the back of the store, near the dispensary, not because he needed drugs, but because there was a fish-eyed mirror attached to the wall.

The kid lashed out a hand and took more things off a shelf with so much speed and so little care that boxes fell off the shelf, and then he made a run for it. Two-Trees could have caught up, maybe even tackled him, but for now he was playing the part of potbellied old fart. The cashier chased after the kid as he burst through the door, over-ringing the merry chimes as he did. Two-Trees, on the other hand, took his time going up the aisle toward where the kid had claimed his five-fingered discount. On his way, he saw that other types of skin cream had been thieved.

Diaper cream, stretch mark cream . . . and hemorrhoid medication.

“Are you all right?” the pharmacist asked him.

“Me? Yeah, I’m fine,” Two-Trees replied. “Damn . . . I
thought
he was acting weird, but when he bolted like that . . .” He shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, even if I hadn’t been frozen up, I wouldn’t have been able to catch him.”

“No,” the pharmacist said. “It’s not your fault. Just glad you’re all right.”

All right . . . and gobsmacked. What the hell does a kid like that need with hemorrhoid cream?

Occam’s Razor dictated that the simplest answer was the likeliest one: the kid was someone’s baby-daddy, and in the absence of cash—or pride—he’d stolen what his girlfriend needed.

“I really am becoming a sentimentalist,” he mumbled. When the pharmacist asked him what he meant, he said, “Back in my day, we used to steal bubble gum and baseball cards!” He smacked his lips as if he’d forgotten his teeth, and the pharmacist laughed and mentioned a sale on denture cream.

AT THE RESTAURANT
, Two-Trees left his briefcase and computer on the neighbouring seat, since breakfast took up the entire table. If he’d had company, they’d have had to stack the plates. He did have room left over for his iPhone, and there was enough reception for him to perform a few web searches.

There has to be something in the air
. People sneezed in all corners of the restaurant. Two were scratching as badly as Two-Trees. One had a visible rash.

The waitress came over with the carafe to refill his mug. Her eyes were red.

“Hell of a bug going around,” Two-Trees said.

Two women in another booth sneezed when a younger waitress passed by.

“Bugs we can get better from,” the older waitress said. “This has been going for almost nine months!”

“Huh?”

“Nobody knows,” she said, with a shrug. She poured his coffee. “It’s bad all over town, but worse the closer you get to Styroforma. We figure it has something to do with the pollution. Maybe they changed chemicals or something. It’s been all over the news.”

“I’ve been out of town,” he said.

She uttered a dry laugh. “Maybe you should have stayed out.”

Once she was out of earshot, Two-Trees said he’d rather be anywhere in the world but back home, especially under these circumstances.

There were six high schools in Halo County. Two were in Elmbury, one was in Deer Fall Valley, one was on the Waabishkindibed Reserve, and the other two were on opposite ends of the county. The nearest was Waabishkindibed Secondary School, but the Preparation H Thief didn’t seem the type. Two-Trees had been wrong about these things before, but he figured it was more likely that the kid was a student of Elmbury North Heights, about ten kilometres to the south of the hotel.

A jungle punkish baby-daddy who stole diaper cream, Two-Trees figured, would be cool enough to know what was going on in his clique, but responsible enough to divulge leads and evidence to Old Uncle Hector. Since the theft had occurred well before first period, and given that the boy had left his war paint off for the day, Two-Trees figured that maybe the thief had planned to go to school.

All Two-Trees needed was a viable excuse to hunt the kid in his natural habitat.

Sometime between finishing his third pancake and starting his fourth sausage, Two-Trees dropped his fork and bonked the side of his head with his hand. The answer had been staring him in the face. He may not have had a good reason to go asking after individual students, but he did have a good reason to visit the schools.