Helix: Plague of Ghouls (36 page)

Jay rolled and snapped his fully lupine teeth on Helen’s face, hooking one incisor in the bottom of her eye socket. When she recoiled, Jay went with her.

All that happened in the time it took for Dep to break from cover and cross a river.

Dep arrived.

Looking like Vengeance.

Being Vengeance.

He grabbed Jay by the neck in one hand and Helen by the other, and with a roar, he separated them. Helen’s cheek bone broke, and Jay lost a fang. Dep threw Helen toward Ferox, who broke Helen’s fall. Dep held Jay by the throat and hoisted him into the air. One of Jay’s legs was still human.

Dep had Jay’s colours, his texture of fur, the same shape of the leg and arm and chest. But Dep was nearly a foot and a half taller, and half as wide again across the shoulders.

Jay was no longer the alpha dog here.

“No,” Ferox croaked.

Dep’s head snapped around. Canine ears turned down and tawny eyebrows sunk, and he bared bloody fangs as long as Ferox’s thumb. From the neck up, he was nothing but all-natural wolf, a little longer in the muzzle, a little thinner of fur along his face, but there was no mistaking it: he was more wolf than werewolf, and more Dep than Vengeance. It was Dep’s cadence when the monster laughed, and it was Dep’s lazy smile that curled the right side of his lips.

Ferox rolled Helen aside. The cat-girl was screaming and holding her broken face.

“He doesn’t deserve to die that way,” Ferox said.

Ferox’s arm hung at her side. It didn’t fit into her shoulder anymore. It wasn’t the first time it had been dislocated, but it was the first time she’d been cycle-locked and this badly injured. She wondered if Jay had shot Helen in all the confusion, too, and if the damage to her face and eye was semi-permanent.

Jay yelped, and Dep roared in his face.

“Dep,” she barked, with such force her ears swivelled backwards and down. When Dep glared her way, her big ears rotated forward again. “Throw him in the lake. Anchor him down there.”

Dep laughed and tromped toward the lake, his huge wolf’s tail bobbing along behind him. Jay thrashed and swung so much that Dep had to slow down and catch Jay’s legs under his free arm.

Dep was too new to this form. He didn’t know how to use his tail. Jay swung his legs around, throwing Dep off balance. Dep began to stumble forward, and when he stepped on something, Dep began to fall. Jay slipped free, clapped his paw to his throat and crouched, coughing.

Dep lifted his foot as if he’d stepped in a steaming pile of manure.

“Dep! Focus! Shit!”

Ferox tried to run, but her leg gave out. Something was wrong with the back of her thigh.

She felt Shuffle coming more than she heard him. Every step the three-hundred pound man took sent shockwaves through the ground. With surprising ease, in half-human form he ran leaping from one exposed rock to the other until he was at Helen’s side.

It was Jay’s turn to laugh.

She heard Shuffle gasp.

One ear turned behind her, capturing the sound of shod feet running toward them.

It was another man in another bone-and-black mask. He ran to a stop, opened his jacket, and pulled something from the front of his vest.

Shuffle threw up his arm.

It was a grenade.

Ferox spun away from the missile, arms lifted.

The world went white. A flashbulb image burned Dep’s body onto the back of her eyes: seven feet tall, top heavy, dog-legged from the waist down, with sweat-spiky hackles raised; his chest and abdomen were light grey, his back dark grey, and from his ruptured waistband up, stripes of Ishmael’s fur grew through, curling like black flames up his belly and chest and over his shoulders. Dep had one arm raised higher than the other, shielding his eyes from the blast of light where it exploded in mid-air between him and the man in the bone-and-black mask.

A bubble of air and sound buffeted Ferox off her feet. A metallic whine in her enormous ears keened to the exclusion of all other sound. She could neither see nor hear nor stand. She felt the rough pads of her paws against the sensitive hairs inside her ear, but nothing could block out the sound. It was like listening to a whistling bomb that forever approached and would go off at any second. She wrenched open her unwilling eyes. As white as the world had been, it was now as profoundly dark. Her night vision was ruined. The only reliable sense she had left was the sense of smell, and that was dampened by the scent of her own blood.

“God,” Shuffle growled. “Oh God, Helen!” His voice boomed.

Ferox unknotted her legs and tried to walk, but someone had stabbed her in the hamstring. She crashed forward. She tried crawling, but her dislocated shoulder and half-and-half physiology made progress slow and difficult. If her tail was strong enough, she would have tried to push herself along like a kangaroo, but that wasn’t happening either.

Dep found her and gently—ever so gently—scooped her off the ground into his arms. When he stood up, Ferox was a long way off from the ground. He smelled like swamp and scorched fur.

“What happened to her?” Ferox asked.

“I—God—I don’t know!” Shuffle shouted. “Where the hell is she?” He spun on his heels. She smelled fear and change pheromones on him. In five minutes or less, he would be a near-sighted honey-badger/grizzly bear composite, and the only person who might withstand his wrath would be Dep. Maybe. “Helen!” he called.

“Put me down,” Ferox said to Dep. She shouted over the ringing in her ears. “Track her scent, Dep. Don’t take them all on—just find her and do what you can to sneak her away again.”

Dep was looking from side to side, swinging Ferox in his arms like a pile of kindling.

“Dep! Put me down.”

He wasn’t listening. He was picking up on Shuffle’s panic.

Ferox reached up and pinched Dep’s ear. That got his attention. “Use your nose. Find her. Bring her back safely.”

Dep searched her eyes.

“I’ll be fine. You go.”

He set her down on her feet and waited until she was steady on the stronger leg. Then he turned and ran for two steps, tipped forward, and ran on all fours as if he’d been born to it. She heard splashes as he ran through the Maachii River, and then he was gone.

Shuffle jogged over, out of breath and stinking of badger musk.

“Don’t change,” Ferox said quickly.

“I’m holding it in as long as I can,” Shuffle said. He checked her over. “Shoulder?” She nodded. “Breathe.” He took her arm and her shoulder, and with very little effort on his part, he snapped her arm where it needed to be. He pulled her close and let her scream against his hairy chest. She clamped her fangs together and growled through her nostrils until the pain dulled. “You smell funny,” he said.

“I’m locked. Feels like one of Foster’s old formulas.”

“You can’t self-repair?”

“Not until the formula wears off.”

“Son of a bitch,” Shuffle said. “He did steal Foster’s research.”

“And weaponized it, just like she did. He came here to kill us all off, Shuffle. Now, while Ishmael and the others are away.”

“I smell something else,” Shuffle said, quitting her side.

“What?”

“Flowers.”

She couldn’t smell anything except Shuffle and her own blood.

On sinking feet, he made his way through slurping floodplain and moss until he was at the foot of the outcropping of rock, where Dep had looked down at whatever he’d stepped in.

“It’s not just us he’s after,” Shuffle said, from afar.

Ferox tipped forward until she was on all fours, trusting that one leg and one arm would suffice for now. As she drew closer, her stomach fell. Shuffle was right: he had been smelling flowers.

It was Angie Burley’s perfume, and she was dead, trapped halfway between human and wolf, with her bottom jaw too short for the rest of her half-wolf face. Her scarf had been thrown onto the lake. There were marks on her throat, her eyes bulged out, and her tongue had swollen so much that it forced her uneven mouth open. Ferox looked away. She was no stranger to death—neither of them were—but this was too human, too frightened, and too undignified.

There was an explosion to the south-east.

Shuffle ran toward Ferox, and whether she agreed or disagreed with it, he threw her on his back and began to run, changing form as he did so. When he lost his thumbs, she wrapped her good arm around his enormous neck and hung on for dear life. When he lost his ability to run on two feet, she lay on his back and held onto his fur.

Shuffle raced up the moraine overlooking the Hollow.

The Hollow was on fire.

ACCORDING TO THE
bedside clock, it was three fifteen. Bridget had stripped down to a tank top and crashed face first on Two-Trees’ bed beside him, unmoving for hours. She’d finished most of a bucket of chicken before falling asleep. The room smelled greasy, despite the eleven secret herbs and spices to liven up the flavour. Two-Trees had been staring at the ceiling, wondering,
Red Cloud, Pritchard Park, now this. Why here?
Two-Trees gave up, rolled out of bed, and turned on the computer, and though its welcome jingle was as bold as reveille, Bridget slept right through it.

“I’m gonna find this sicko bastard, whether you’re with me or not,” Captain Bumbulum had written. “Somebody this brazen’s going to slip up sooner or later. Three bodies, one week. That makes him local, and Halo County’s not that big, not if we’re all looking at the same time. Talk to me.”

During the confab in Two-Trees’ room, Ishmael and his party had agreed the best possible course of action was to leave. Ishmael was compromised, the Padre was compromised, they were flat broke and suspected of fraud, and even the receptionist downstairs had started to look at Two-Trees as if she knew him from somewhere else. Foster didn’t want to stick around either, because she needed better quarters in which to perform actual science, and Varco Lake was the best suited for it. But then Bridget had made a passionate case for tracking down and dealing with these late-stage victims of Grey’s curse, remembering how his manufactured disease had decimated whole families before it was brought under control. Then Foster changed her mind and agreed they’d have to set up a new quarantine, with or without Wyrd’s backing. The Padre joined in, saying that he was bound by familial obligation to find Sydney. It eventually came down to a vote: Two-Trees and Ishmael in favour of leaving, everyone else in favour of solving some mysteries and saving the world.

So, instead of sleeping, instead of flying to Cabo, Two-Trees sat in the glow of his computer, wondering what to let slip and what to keep guarded from Buckle.

“What’s the score?” Two-Trees wrote back, posing as Boogidi1965.

A single lycanthrope couldn’t eat that much fatty meat in a month, let alone a week. That meant there was more than one lycanthrope in town; and if they were attacking obese young adults together, that meant coordination. Pack behaviour. So far, they’d stayed out of the media, but that level of cooperation spelled bad news for Halo County. Anyone not rail thin could be a target. Two-Trees scratched his large belly, not entirely out of fear, but out of curiosity. He wondered if he was tasty enough to act as bait.

Buckle must have been online, because the response came through less than a minute later. “Three heads, two bodies, one huge bra, three pairs of very large pants. One head and body combo = confirmed female by Medical Examiner, aged between fifteen and seventeen. Second head/body combo = confirmed male, aged thirteen to fifteen. Both morbidly obese. One body still missing. The head you analyzed belongs to the missing corpse. Cadaver dog would be handy.”

“Time of death on three bodies? And how big was Sydney when she went AWOL?” Two-Trees sent in his reply.

He reviewed the missing persons reports one more time, checking their names in Google searches. One was a fifteen-year-old, chubby but not morbidly so. The last his parents knew of him, he had gone out in July to meet up with some online gaming friends who were visiting from Seattle. Another was a fourteen-year-old girl, also big-boned, who’d disappeared one night in February. Her mother had logged onto the girl’s computer and found months of correspondence between her and a much older man from Portland, Oregon. Their romance had escalated from lovey-dovey to hard core sexting. Another was a seventeen-year-old, robust but certainly not overweight. He too had been engaging in an online romance at the time of his disappearance. He’d been approached by another man from Seattle, whose chatroom alias was LeftHandMouse2013. His parents begged the public to come forward with any information.

So Two-Trees did a new search, this time for Left Hand Mouse. Buried under stacks of advertisements for left-handed accessories, there was a YouTube clip. Two-Trees borrowed Bridget’s earphones and began to play the video, which had been viewed tens of thousands of times, but didn’t seem to have gone viral. It was taken from a concert. According to the video description, Left Hand Mouse was one of the band’s most popular tracks. In the comments section, written with surprising grammatical accuracy, was a remark about how Left Hand Mouse was one of the most iconic of the Jungle Punk subculture. Someone else commented that the poster’s argument was bad, and that he should feel bad. A third commenter explained that Left Hand Mouse wasn’t one of Chokeswallow’s original songs. It was a cover, originally performed by the postpunk band Backdoor Access on their 1992
Quitcher Bitchin’
album.