Helix: Plague of Ghouls (17 page)

But first, he’d need to score a colour printer and permission from the OPP.

“DEER JUMP FALLS
,” the Padre muttered, as he filled the tank. He jammed his free hand into his coat pocket. “Elm Overlook Park. Happy Apple Gorge.” He snorted. “Forest bloody Parkway South.”

“You all right?” Ishmael asked.

The pump was already up to seventy-five dollars and didn’t show any signs of stopping.

“Oak Haven Drive,” the Padre said. “Pine Hill. Elk Run.” He took his hand out of his pocket long enough to smear a bulb of water from the end of his nose. “You see one damned tree anywhere around here? Or parks? Or elk?”

Ishmael smiled.

“Peach Grove Street. Mountain Ash Road. Foxrun Lane. Pretty damned sure we passed a Horny Moose Alley back there somewhere.”

A woman in a quilted pink and white parka was watching them with disgust. Ishmael wrestled his smile into a warning smirk. The Padre muttered to himself. He was saying something about ugly houses and shitting on dinner plates.

But so far, the Padre showed no signs of recognizing where he was. And despite all his complaints, the Padre did seem to be enjoying himself. He watched everyone coming and going, his eyes shining with a sense of wonder. “Everyone is so fat,” he mouthed.

Ishmael laughed. “Take this.” He gave the Padre Bridget’s Wyrd-issued credit card and spoke the PIN in the Padre’s ear.

“You really trust me with this?”

“If you can’t trust a Padre, who can you trust?”

“Where are
you
going?”

“Into the truck,” he said, and opened the door to prove himself right.

“Why?”

“Last time I tried to check my messages at a gas station, they shut the pump off. Just go pay for the gas, will you?” Ishmael climbed into the truck and shut the door beside him.

“And?” Bridget asked, once the Padre turned to the pump.

“Nothing yet,” Ishmael said. He made a show of looking at his phone, in case the Padre was watching from outside. “He was rhyming off streets that we passed, but only because he was trying to sound ironic.”

“So he doesn’t remember?” Bridget asked.

“Bridget, I swear he’ll be fine if we tell him.”

“He doesn’t remember what?” Holly inquired from the middle seat. Bridget gave her the highlights—how the Padre had been captured in Elmbury hours after tearing his own brother apart. She already knew about the Padre being one of a pair of twins, and that he didn’t know which twin he was. “And now we’re back,” Holly said. “Well that’s just fantastic.”

“Yeah,” Bridget replied. “Don’t try to prompt his memory either. The last thing we need is for him to flip out like he did the first time.” Bridget took a quick breath. “Can I see the map again?”

Ishmael took it out of the side compartment of his door and gave it to her. She blocked most of the front windshield when she shook out the map. “Where’s the Howard Johnson again?” She was asking herself. Burley had sent the address to her phone, not to Ishmael’s. She checked the address against the county map. It didn’t seem to be good news, whatever she was reading. “It’s about six blocks north of Pritchard Park, and twelve blocks east of the church.”

“Scene of the murder,” Ishmael asked, “and . . . where you picked him up?”

Bridget put her phone on standby and shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans. “Naked in a confessional,” she said, “shouting ‘oh God, oh God, oh God’. Yep.”

“Is that where he got his crucifix from?” Holly asked.

“Hell if I know. Probably.” She paused. “Okay, he wasn’t completely naked. God only knows how that damned chain managed to survive his ordeal . . .”

“Yeah, considering his glasses didn’t,” Holly said.

The gas pump clicked off, and the Padre tried a few times to squish in as much gas as possible. He hung up the nozzle. “You guys want anything?” he said through the glass of Ishmael’s window.

“No,” Bridget said, softly. Holly didn’t want anything either. Ishmael told the Padre that they were all good. Bridget rubbed the sleeve of her coat. Ishmael doubted she was cold. It had been a frosty morning, but the truck was warm enough for everyone else to ride around in their shirt sleeves. “I don’t like this,” she said. “Don’t let him out of your sight. Hell, don’t even let him see signs for Pritchard Park. God, this has got me on edge.”

“Any word on Dep or Helen?” Holly asked, of no one in particular.

“I’ve got nothing,” Ishmael said, though it was a little white lie. Gil had sent him a message, saying that Dr. Grey had scored a skin and blood sample from Dep, and that they were going to start analyzing Dep’s infection that same day. Gil was pessimistic. Just because they could identify how Dep’s virus differed from anyone else’s, no advance analysis would tell them what Dep was about to turn into. They could, at least, match it against Helen’s own altered DNA, so if Dep went first, they’d know what to expect for Helen. Ishmael was relieved to know that Shuffle had started working with Gil in earnest.

Aside from that, there was a message from Burley confirming their reservations at the Howard Johnson, and some spam from Expedia. As for the kitten video, no news from his allies in Gdańsk, no word from Manila, and no updates from St. Petersburg. Nothing but dead air.
Someone must have found them. Someone must have threatened them, or paid them to stall.
Ishmael wondered if they’d been at a loss to find evidence of digital manipulation and so decided that the films
were
real, that he
was
guilty, and they were weighing their own options.

He turned in his seat and asked Holly to pass him his overnight bag. She stood, crouching under the ceiling, and rifled through the bags until she found the right one. She brought it up. Inside there was antiseptic hand wash, cleaning solution, and his contact lenses. He flipped down the sun visor and had to move Bridget’s map out of the way of the make-up mirror. Mismatched eyes like his weren’t inhuman in any way, but they were easy to remember, if a witness was pressed to identify him. He blinked the dark brown lens onto his green eye, then slipped the same colour lens onto a lighter brown eye. It was easier to make both eyes darker than to find lenses that would make the green eye match the brown, or vice versa.

“Wish you’d get a better colour,” Bridget said, though she wasn’t looking at him. “Makes you looked possessed.”

“I was going to get the ones that look like spirals, but they were on back order.” He winked and squinted his contacts into place as he folded up the sun visor.

“We should have asked for a newspaper,” Holly said.

“Shit,” Bridget said. “You’re right.” She crumpled the map and thrust it into Ishmael’s lap then rushed out of the truck and slammed the front passenger door.

“How much longer to the hotel?” Holly asked.

“Only another three kilometres, according to GPS. Why?”

“I’m trying to decide if I want to use a skanky gas station bathroom, a skanky restaurant bathroom, or a skanky hotel bathroom.”

“You’ve spent the last six years peeing in bushes. Why the hell are you worried about skanky public washrooms?”

“Because bushes aren’t infected with all sorts of embarrassing STDs.”

“Hover,” he said.

She said she could hold it a while longer. “So . . . tonight . . .”

“We’ve got budget enough for four rooms,” Ishmael said.

Her hopeful smile fell.

“Doesn’t mean we need all of them,” Ishmael assured her.

“Good,” she said. But the smile didn’t come back. “Because I hope it’s your face I see first when I wake up.” If she meant it to sound romantic, she failed. It sounded ominous.

“How did you manage to go this long?” he asked. “Without her coming back?”

The side door opened. “Goddamned lineups with goddamned loudmouth whiny-ass, stuck-up little soccer moms . . .”

“Do not,” Bridget warned the Padre, “disparage soccer moms.”

The Padre slammed the rear passenger door and grumbled all the way to the back of the truck, which rocked on its axles when he flopped into his seat. “They’ve got two damned murders on their hands, shit for leads, and the possibility of a brand new contagion—”

Bridget jumped in and shut her door so no one outside would overhear.

“And all she’s worried about is what kind of goddamned foul language I’m using while Dumbass at the front cash is trying to remember which coins make up a dollar fricking forty-five.”

“She told him to shut up, because kids might be listening,” Bridget explained. She gruffly handed the newspapers to Holly, who set them down beside her. She ripped the seatbelt down across her body and snapped it shut. “God, I love civilization.”

“Hooray for road trips,” Holly said, in a tiny voice.

Ishmael started the truck and put it into gear. “We find the murderer, we put him down, we all go home,” he said. And he meant it, because there was a familiar tightness between his shoulders. He’d have to find some private shelter soon.

The satellite images had been four years and eight building projects out of date. According to the internet map, they’d just gassed up in the middle of a forest, though they were surrounded by twenty blocks of half-built McMansions. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d ever had to endure a change in silence and in civilization, but it would be a great risk to the other lycanthropes in his party, who’d be a hell of a lot harder to hide. Bridget, for one, got mean and loud when she up-cycled. She’d once bitten through aluminum siding to get at a rogue hiding in somebody’s attic. Crowded hotels were not ideal.

IF THE GAS
station was enough to turn the affable Padre into a walking, ticking F-bomb, then the hotel lobby was about to make him go critical mass. It was packed. For want of enough seats, professionals and friends sat in each other’s laps. Everyone was talking at once. To Ishmael’s left, two women were talking about allergies. To his right, two people were debating Paleo and gluten-free, while a third implied they were all on crack. One was complaining into a cell phone about how their roommate had snored all night long. Someone else asked a friend to smell his breath. He exhaled, and Ishmael smelled vodka from six feet away. In the far corner, a man was bitching about how he caught two colleagues in the shower together, and he was pissed because he’d slept with one of them the night before, and he was even more pissed when someone asked him if his wife knew. For everyone’s safety, Ishmael grabbed the Padre by the shoulder and made him stand still, because the receptionist had just shouted over the noise in the lobby to tell them that no, there were no records of a reservation under Ishmael’s name, under Burley’s name, under Bridget’s name, under Ishmael’s company name, nor under the name of any Wyrd-owned company. The Padre had turned an unhealthy tone of grey when he heard the news, and in a certain light, his eyes were an unnerving shade of rusty-orange. When Ishmael sent him to the truck, he could see the Padre’s neck hair standing up.

There was a call centre management conference clogging up the entire hotel, the receptionist explained. Every room was booked. Ishmael quoted reservation numbers that Burley had provided, but the receptionist shrugged and said they didn’t have anything on file to match it. She recommended they contact the travel agent who made the reservation. Had she taken the call, she’d have sorted things out right away, because the whole place had been booked up months ago. Only because of a cancellation did the hotel have a single room.

Bridget didn’t even blink. She took it for granted that Holly and Ishmael would bunk together. “Padre and I can take the truck and find another hotel,” Bridget said over the background din. “Some place further away from Pritchard Park.”

“All right, but you be good to him,” Ishmael said. “You’ll only break his heart.”

Bridget gave him a look Burley would have been proud of. “I’m not his type, and he’s not mine.”

Ishmael cocked his head. “I’ve been meaning to ask. You and Two-Trees . . . ?”

Bridget grimaced. “That’s practically incest, dude. Besides . . .” She shuddered. “I know this shouldn’t be a hang-up, but . . . God, the man’s
feet
. . .”

“Smelly?” Holly asked.

“Like Doritos gone bad. And
hairy?
Swear to God, Hector’s the only man I know who can braid his own knuckles.”

Holly clapped a hand over her mouth to hide the fang-filled laugh.

“This,” Ishmael said, “is way too much information. You want to see if you can use their lobby phone, call another hotel before you leave?”

“Sure,” Bridget replied. While Ishmael texted an update to Burley, Bridget went to the courtesy business area, where a gang of over-excited middle managers were hogging the computer and printer.

The place smelled of dust and cleaning solution. It stung his sinuses. He wondered if Holly or Bridget were feeling the same discomfort. If they did, they weren’t showing it.

“You want to wait here until they confirm the room for us?” Ishmael asked Holly. He needed air. The place was foul with the smell of a hundred human bodies exhaling greasy breakfasts, sweating, wafting perfume, and farting. Someone was demanding to know if hotel management had arranged for extra police protection, as requested the night before. The news was on, and a helicopter was buzzing overhead. Colourful shirts, loud ties, and uncomfortable shoes moved in all directions, sometimes cutting between Ishmael and the front desk.