Helix: Plague of Ghouls (38 page)

This mission
has been one unlikely coincidence after the other.

“God, I mean, look at me,” one of the girls said. “I’m falling apart.”

Absently, Two-Trees did as the girl suggested. He studied her reflection in the steamed-up window beside him. All three girls were as skinny as pikes, with hair as big as teased wigs, and they had thorny shadows along their cheekbones.

Two-Trees pivoted in his seat, pretending to look around for a clock. There was nothing wrong with their faces, aside from the fact that they were wearing too much foundation. Judging by their wrists and forearms, they were porcelain pale, and only artificial dyes could put colour in their faces. There was nothing wrong with their hair either. They wore shoulder length, off-bias cuts with a little volume blow-dried in, but they weren’t wearing jungle punk wigs. Two-Trees gave his head a shake and used a napkin to wipe the condensation from the window. Bridget was right. He needed sleep. He’d begun to hallucinate.

When Bridget walked in, she locked onto the hyperactive young girls, frowning. She came straight to Two-Trees’ table and dumped her wallet on his map.

“Tell me about Digger,” Two-Trees said, as she settled into the hard seat across from him. “Tell me about the wendigo.”

“Unh?” Bridget asked. “Oh. Eight feet tall, with horns, and a craving for werewolf flesh. At least, that’s what Ishmael said.”

“Why werewolf flesh?”

“I think he’s making a giant assumption about that,” Bridget said. “The only flesh available on the island was of the werewolf variety.” Bridget rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. “The Lost Ones were scavengers too, not just the wendigo. They ate their own dead. Hunted their own living too.”

“So ‘craving’ was just a dramatic choice of words?”

“Well . . . they never seemed to spend as much time hunting Helen or Dep,” Bridget said. “I guess you’d have to ask Foster.”

He pointed at her wallet. “What’s the prognosis? Good news?”

“No. Both still came back declined. Gave me a 1-800 number. Called the 1-800 number from a payphone, and the message said to call back during business hours.” She took one of the donuts and inspected it. “Ishmael was right to be paranoid. Damn it.” She was about to put the donut in her mouth when she decided to swear again instead. “
Damn
it, I should have left him on that island.”

“No, you’d hate yourself more if you’d left him there to die.”

She drummed the fingers of her free hand on the table. “Then damn Daniel Grey for having come up with this nightmare in the first place. GMO werewolves, Lost Ones, wendigos, now cannibals . . .” She rolled her fingers up into a fist. He heard tendons creak and snap. “What if this
isn’t
his fault,” she wondered. “What if it’s something new altogether? What if it’s just a bunch of very, very sick human beings?”

Two-Trees raised his eyebrows. “God, I hope not. It would undermine my whole crusade to prove human beings are better than . . .” He let the thought dangle, but he regretted it. “Sorry.”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine.” She set the donut on the plate and left it there. Her cheekbones were unusually sharp, and her vestigial fangs pressed against the insides of her lips. She was watching the three squealing girls in the corner. He wondered if they were old enough to graduate. After all, this was the overnight shift they were working. Screaming and cavorting was probably the only way they could stay awake, but they’d probably be too wrecked by morning to attend class.

“Jeez, I don’t even know what day it is.”

“Saturday,” she said.

“Good. Less traffic. Listen, I want to go along this route,” he said, running his finger along Samson Industrial Parkway. “When we were here during the Pritchard Park incident, businesses were shutting down during the recession. I want to see if . . .”

Bridget’s eyes flashed open at a sudden motion.

“Shit, Bridget,” he whispered.

“What?”

Without another word, he gave her the donut, moved the plate, crumpled the map and began to leave. He nearly left without his coat. Bridget knew better than to ask why he was leaving in such a rush. She simply threw on her coat and went outside. Once into the cold air, she took a deep breath, as if relieved. She touched her face. “Shit!” she said. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

She jogged across the parking lot to the truck, opened the passenger’s side door, and looked in the make-up mirror. There wasn’t enough light to confirm or disprove her suspicions. He tapped her on the shoulder and turned her around. He couldn’t see if she was doing better now either, so he pulled her into the circle of the streetlamp glow. She turned her face up so he could get a better look at her eyes.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “What the
hell
, Bridget!”

She wiped her mouth with the full length of her forearm. “Padre was right. It is this town.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s something more than that, Bridget. You’ve
never
slipped up like this in public. Never once. I’ve seen you take a pick axe to the
thigh
and you didn’t change. But seriously? Donuts?”

“Yelling helps, Hector, keep going,” she retorted.

“Are you going to cycle?”

“No,” she insisted. “I’m fine! Seriously, I felt aggressive when I was in there, but I thought it was because those bitch-puppies were pissing me off with all their noise. Now I feel fine.”

He shook his head. “Bridge, you never slip up.”

“I know!”

“What happened up there? Tell me honestly.”

“Up where?”

“At the Farms.”

She put her fists on her hips. “Just what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ishmael went up there, and a month later, he comes back vomiting and having ‘accidents’ in town. You went up there, and a month later—”

“I didn’t pick anything up,” she interrupted. She opened her mouth to fire back something else.

“Yeah,” Two-Trees said. “A little blood transfusion, maybe? He’s bleeding, you’re cut up—”

She shook her head. “No, nothing of the—” Her mouth fell open.

“What?”

She listened closely to her own thoughts for a moment. “I’d been shot,” she said. “On our way out, Uriah shot me three times. And Ishmael was torn up from getting blown out of a building.”

“So you could have picked something up. Open wounds. Blood transfer.”

She shook her head vehemently at that. “We beat the shit out of the Padre when we brought him in, and he cut me up some too, you remember?” She smiled, showing off the points of her wide fangs. “No change after four years. Sarah and Gina Peterson? I had a throat in either hand, you remember? They tore my arms to shreds, and you had to put them down, because I couldn’t let go or they’d kill you—and they were clawing and salivating and I was drenched. Five years after that? No change. Hector, for all that, none of the trackers—” She quickly amended the thought. “None of the
lycanthropic
trackers caught whatever Grey’s patients had. We were immune!
Are
immune.”

“Unless someone’s so unique he doesn’t share your immunity, and he managed to mutate the virus in himself. Bridge, there are chicken viruses that mutate in order to make the jump to human beings. Why is it so hard to believe that Grey’s virus couldn’t make the jump to you by way of a cat?”

She thought about it, long and hard. Then she firmed up her jaw. “And as soon as I walked out of that donut shop, I was fine. If I was going like Ishmael, I’d be cycling through all the way.” She shook her head. “That was just a superficial change.”

“Your eyes turned bright orange, Bridget. Like jack-o-lantern orange. I don’t call that superficial.”

“Did they see it?”

“Who, those girls?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think they saw anything past the frame of their Facebook profile.”

She massaged her face and asked him again if she looked all right.

“That was a close call,” he said.

“It’s like back at the Howard Johnson! We’ve been looking at this the wrong way! We’ve been looking for the bodies, not the perpetrators. What we need to do is . . .” She shrugged. “Use me as a canary.”

“What?”

“Like in the old mines. Take a canary down the mineshaft with you. If the canary dies, you’ve hit a gas pocket, and if you don’t get out, you’re going to die too.”

He frowned. “What, pheromones?”

She nodded. “We figured there was something wrong at that HoJo, and then we all got distracted one way or the other, and we didn’t follow through. Get your map out. Let’s mark the hot spots.”

“You know, I’m starting to think maybe this global cold has nothing to do with Styroforma.”

“What?”

“Everybody’s sneezing and wheezing around here. Maybe it’s not pollution. It’s environmental, yes, but it only seems to affect us
indoors
.”

“So, you think whatever’s setting me off . . . it’s setting you off, too?”

“Some people are allergic to dogs. Maybe this is no different.” He got in the truck on the driver’s side. “You’re sure you’re going to be able to handle this? I mean, how many superficial changes can you tolerate before you grow a full length beard?”

“We’re about to learn, I guess.”

AROUND FOUR THIRTY
, Two-Trees and Bridget arrived at the Marigold. He’d had to give her his keys, because he couldn’t see straight anymore. He should have been more accustomed to sleep deprivation, but now that they were onto some actionable plans, his frustrated brain could finally relax, and his whole body gave out. He crashed on his bed fully dressed while Bridget made detailed notes for follow up in the morning: the donut shop, the Howard Johnson downtown, the electronics store, and especially the second-hand store, where the Padre’s picture had been taken. Each site was a confirmed or suspected trigger, meaning that someone had been farting out change pheromones in each of those locations.

Two-Trees mumbled about adding Laura Maurelli’s school to the list, but Bridget argued against it, since it was too populous. She yawned and insisted that there was some common factor to all four sites. She wanted to know who worked at each. Drowsily, he reminded her about the convention that had booked up every room at the Howard Johnson, and how crammed full the lobby had been. She insisted that the trigger source was local, and not customers, because it was bloody unlikely that some random guest at the Howard Johnson was going to all the same stores hours before Bridget and the others arrived. Then she rebutted her own argument, because if lycanthropes had been exuding change pheromones in all those locations, then someone
had
to have noticed a fully furred werewolf loitering about. Lycanthropic changes were big, noisy events, involving lots of hair and screaming. Then she asked something about a lycanthrope having a cycle no more than twelve hours long.

Two-Trees didn’t hear much after that, except for the occasional rustling of papers and a distant
bing
of an email notification. He let the sounds wash over him, and he slept.

TWO-TREES GRUMBLED
when someone poked him in the back, over and over, calling his name.

“Hector,” Bridget was saying. “Wake up. Come on. We’ve got to move.”

“Whattimeuzzut?” he asked.

“It’s time to get up. Come on. We’ve got
minutes
at best.”

He rolled over, feeling shaky and sick to his stomach from such a sudden interruption from deep sleep. “What?” he whined. She was helping him put on his shoes. “Is the hotel on fire?”

“Get up,” she said. When he was too slow, she threatened to carry him. “The bad news is that room is now off-limits for a while. The good news is we have a nose, but it’s on a real short timer.”

Two-Trees followed after his hand, since Bridget was tugging on it hard enough to rip it away from the wrist. He snapped free and went back into the hotel room, barely aware of what he was doing. He didn’t even have both eyes focused yet, and his face was slack with sleep, but physical memory remembered where his knife belt and gun case were. She didn’t argue with him about the weapons this time. Instead, she took the gun case from him so he could check for the hotel pass card and do up his belt. Holly met them partway down the hall—Holly, not Eva Foster. She pointed at the door to the stairs. The elevator was too slow, Bridget agreed, so Two-Trees stumbled after them. He miscounted the stairs and nearly went skidding after them, but he caught the rail and righted himself, blinking bleary eyes as he went. He followed Bridget, who followed Holly out through a back door.

Outside, it was still dark. He had no idea what time it was. He only knew that they were running toward Two-Trees’ truck, and that Bridget had his keys.

There was a man standing near the truck, his face hidden in shadow where he stood under the street lamp light, wearing a hoodie.