Helix: Plague of Ghouls (34 page)

“This isn’t something that can wait,” Ishmael said. “I just need to find a bank, that’s all.”

“She says you’re probably mutating.”

Ishmael grunted. “Could have sworn she said ‘Revolting.’”

“She said that too,” the Padre admitted, “but more specifically, she said your virus is mutating, which means you’re probably a hundred times more likely to infect someone else—whether they’re lycanthropic or not.”

“Then I won’t bite anybody.”

“Ishmael, you were infected by a
scratch
,” the Padre said, pointing at Ishmael’s arm. “What’s to say that you’re not . . .” The Padre shrugged. “Giving off super-werewolf germs every time you touch a flat surface? I mean, what if a waitress . . .”

“Licked my credit card?” Ishmael asked. “The Lost Ones weren’t keen on personal hygiene, Padre. Chances are they’d just come from clawing apart one of their own. A little Lost skin sample under the claws, transferred into my arm . . .”

“And you’ve been barfing,” the Padre said, pointing at the toilet. “Again.”

Ishmael had vomited into the toilet while it was flushing, so Foster hadn’t heard it, but the Padre always had a stronger sense of smell, even in his human form.

“We can’t risk it,” the Padre said.

“And yet here you are,” Ishmael replied. He handed the Padre his wallet. The Padre declined.

“I have all the same bugs you do,” the Padre said. “Which means I’ve got an equal chance of vomiting soon too.” He sat on the edge of one of the two beds, dejected. “Besides, I can’t risk going anywhere near a bank. I mean look at me.” He pointed to his face. “Last thing we need is for me to be caught on a built-in security camera.”

Ishmael returned to his bed, flopped over, and put his arm over his eyes.

“So now what do we do?” the Padre asked.

“I’ll see if I can make a long distance phone call.” He looked at the time. It was 11:20 p.m. Eastern, making it 4:20 a.m. in London. He’d have to wait a couple of hours. He dropped his arm over his eyes again. The lamp light hurt his brain.

After a worried pause, the Padre spoke again. “Would they do that? Maroon us in civilization?”

Ishmael didn’t know what to think anymore.

There was another knock at the door.

Ishmael thought it might be the hotel’s shift manager come to tell them that the credit card had been declined. “Who is it?”

“Open the goddamned door before I break it down,” Bridget answered.

The Padre got up to unlock and open the door for her. She went straight to the television while the Padre closed the door behind her. Ishmael kept his arm over his eyes and thought,
Dep
. His second thought was that Varco Lake had been raided by the government
,
and his third thought was that someone saw him change outside the mall, and had caught it on video.

He was wrong on all counts.

It was a news broadcast, with a bit of backstory about the attack at Pritchard Park in 2009. Someone was talking about twin brothers Luke and John Reid. When the anchor said, “. . . seen in these photos dated in 2008,” Ishmael lowered his arm so he could watch the screen.

On the left was John Reid, looking fat, beaten up, and hungover. On the right was Luke Reid, looking fat, angry, beaten up, and a little high on drugs. Either of them could have been the Padre.

Then came a third picture, taken by cell phone and credited only to an Instagram alias.

It was the Padre shopping at a second hand store in North Elmbury, dressed in the same clothes he was currently wearing.

Ishmael put his arm over his eyes and wished he was dead.

IT WAS LATE
into the night, and Ferox was once again hunting a girl in the throes of another false start.

Perfect timing, Helen. Perfect timing.

It wasn’t perfect, but Helen’s timing was a potential life-saver. In false starts, the body rapidly self-repaired. If push came to shove, at least Helen could survive a fight and forget about it by morning.

But did you really have to lead me through the swamp?

Here, the terrain was one part exposed rock, one part open water, one part sedge grasses, and two parts lichen. All the wild flowers had gone to seed, the grasses had been bent by a late fall downpour, and there wasn’t a tree in sight. There was almost no place to hide. That should have made it easier to find a weeping, change-addled thirteen-year-old girl, but Helen had been always been a wily child and a skilled survivor in quarantine. Now imbued with Ishmael’s feline instincts and black fur, that girl could hide in an empty concrete room.

At least I’m not alone this time.

Nine hours earlier, Ferox had driven along the route Gil had printed for her—directions only, no map. Dep had been in the passenger seat holding his breath and clutching his belly, as if he had to take a massive shit, and as if somehow this clenching would stop him from having another false start. What Gil hadn’t explained was that he was taking them out of Varco Lake by the main driveway, onto the highway, up and down a series of crossroads, and finally onto a logging road and a gas station. The station was closed, but nearby they found a log cabin that smelled of Ishmael, Holly, and Italian coffee. This, Ferox realized, was Varco Valley Station, where Ishmael had spent most of his time, and that pissed her off, because she’d just driven a full hour and only ended up on the far side of the Varco Lake estate. Since they were on the outskirts of Wyrd’s territory, Ferox and Dep had got out of the truck, followed the Nakii River toward the Hollow, found Shuffle and Mary Anne, passed on Gil’s message and the package from the laboratory fridge, and got everything ready to go. They could have made good their escape right then and there, and no one would have known they were gone.

But they couldn’t leave without Helen, and Helen was nowhere to be found. She’d run off again at first light. By two in the morning, Helen was still on the run.

In adults, regular flare-ups of the lycanthropic virus worked like a factory reset. A person would change into animal form, run around for a little while, and then a biological timer would ding, hormones would shoot into the bloodstream, and cells throughout the body would then refer back to their original genetic map and reorganize, rebuild, or slough off, depending on their role and position. When Dr. Foster had explained this, Ferox had imagined microscopic construction workers, like those little dudes in
Fraggle Rock
, running around comparing cell structures to a blueprint and performing demolition, construction, and remodelling where necessary. One would point to an open wound and declare that there was no matching gash in the blueprint, and then the flock of little dudes in their itty-bitty hard hats would gather up digested food and mash it into the wound until it metamorphosed into skin, muscle, and bone.

A biologist, Ferox was not.

But she did understand what lycanthropy meant to a girl in puberty. The genetic code defaulted to adult, grown up to their full genetic potential. A girl at thirteen isn’t at her full genetic potential, not in terms of organs, nor in her skeletal structure, but especially not in her brain. A werewolf at thirteen would wake up one morning nearly full grown and starving. That kind of a morphological hijacking took an extreme toll on both body and mind. Not many young inmates at Wyndham Farms made it past puberty. Most threw themselves off cliffs, pulling out their hair—or fur as the case might be—screaming all the way down. The ones who didn’t jump were Lost from the get-go, uncommunicative, anxious, feral. Inhuman. Especially if they’d been turned by Vengeance.

They had to find her.

She saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye. A hairy hand sign from Dep. She inclined her head in thanks. She was to run further toward the east, toward the Maachii River. If they couldn’t find her and catch her, then they would flush her out and get her cornered. Helen would fight like a hellcat to get out of the trap, but Ferox and Dep would fight likewise, if only for the girl’s own good.

She heard motion behind her. She froze, flattening against the earth.

She couldn’t have got behind me. Too fast! Too fast!

The motion stopped. Wet grass twisted underfoot. The hunter had become the hunted. These weren’t bare feet. She heard the creak of a hard sole as it bent over rock.

She prayed for more cloud cover.

Using only the pads of her fingers and toes, Ferox crawled backwards across the moss and lichen, a little uphill, a lot downwind.

It wasn’t Jay.

He carried a dim, red-filtered flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. The filter was there to allow enough light through to shine on trip hazards and sudden drops, but not bright enough to rob him of his night vision nor—presumably—to give away his position.

No, not a gun . . . The magazine is all wrong. The barrel is too narrow.

He passed by her, taking his time. He moved more quietly and more cautiously than Jay did. He wore all black, which was almost as bad as wearing all white. Ferox was filthy from head to foot, with twigs and moss in her hair and clothes. He was the shadow of a rifle hunter, smelling of gun oil, shoe soles, detergent, and automobile exhaust; she was landscape, and she smelled that way too.

There was something missing from his scent, and yet his pheromones were setting her off. Fur prickled and pushed against the material of her fleece sweater and yoga pants. With the palm of her hand muffling the sound, she lowered the sweater zipper to half-mast, giving her chest the room it needed to expand forward while narrowing at the sides.

But he’s not changing . . .

The stranger stood in the dip of the earth, head up, nose working. It was the first smart thing he’d done since she’d seen him: in low earth like that, he was vulnerable to an attack from above, but the wind here was channelled toward him from several directions, like the confluence of rivers.

He found what he was looking for, and with less regard for silence, he struck off north-west, toward Varco Lake. The beam of the red-filtered flashlight rolled like a police cruiser’s siren light.

Ferox followed, bobbing on bent legs and running on the balls of her elongated feet. When he stopped, she crouched behind a spindly clump of dead grass. She heard him turn. Slowly, she averted her eyes and raised one shoulder higher than the other, disrupting the shape of her human-animal silhouette under the moon, and hiding the point of her growing ear.

The flashlight beam slid over her back and shoulder, over the moss-softened rocks, and through the wind-blown streamers of milkweed pods.

He left his trail and came toward her. His flashlight beam jiggled, and she moved to keep up with it, keeping her body in unusual twists and contortions—partly on purpose, to disrupt the man’s perception of a crouching human figure, and mainly because of her quickening change—and she silently lunged from one clump of weeds to another one further downwind. He halted, listening. So did she. He breathed loudly through a dry mouth. She heard him gulp.
Why am I changing, if you’re not?

“I know you’re out there,” he said.

Experience and instinct agreed: she’d freeze where she was until she was cornered. Even the change paused, leaving her with one ear fox-like, and the other elf-like. She kept her head bowed and turned away. She needed neither eyes nor nose to know where he was. Her ears told her absolutely everything about the world around her, from the burrowing beetle in a clump of lichen to her right, to the sound the man’s fleece hood made when he moved his head from side to side, listening for her.

She heard his breath hitch. He inhaled sharply. She lifted her hindquarters in an asymmetrical sprinter’s starting position. He ran toward the clump of grass she’d already quit, and when he moved, she did too. Before he crashed through the weeds, she slid into a cold puddle. Her hunched body converted a rocky divot into a soft, earthy mound covered in twigs, leaves, and moss. The dip in the rock gave her ribs enough clearance to angle downward from their usual human configuration into the keel-shaped chest of her other self.

“Where are you?” he mumbled.

Don’t scream
. Her hands were going. She’d hidden them inside her sleeves to seal in the scent of the change, and she’d laid out her arms in dissimilar angles, making her open jacket bleed across the rock like moss. But now that danger was upon her, now that his feet were within arm’s reach, genetically-coded alarm responses were forcing her to grow her best weapons. Like Ishmael, like true foxes, her claws were retractable and spring-loaded. But unlike Ishmael, whose claws grew through exposed nail beds, her fingernails hardened and lengthened as the last bone of every finger bent 180 degrees the wrong way. The knuckles disintegrated with a barely audible crackling sound, and the phalanges bent backwards before the tendons had fully stretched.

And once she had her claws, she would have her fangs, both ears, her bright eyes, and an insatiable desire to attack the first thing that moved.

His feet were so close to her right sleeve that she could have extended her claws and punched holes in the top of his shoes.