Helix: Plague of Ghouls (43 page)

“Is that where he runs off to?” Ishmael asked. “Grey said he’d bugger off and no one would be able to find him.”

“Sure. I set it up on my DVD player in the garage, in that little office space you built for me. He goes in there, sits himself down, and his lips move and his head nods like he’s reading along with his favourite bedtime story.” She turned in her seat, one hand on her generous, muscular thigh. “Don’t know why you didn’t suggest it to him yourself, since you did it for me.”

Ishmael was inspecting a smoke-coloured glass bowl, bevelled, and well used for holding candles. “Because I didn’t want him to remember what you did to him and his family.”

Bridget’s face went pale. She turned around in her seat and paid more attention to Foster, who was uncharacteristically reticent.

God, I can’t stay here another second
.

Foster and Bridget played cards in silence and without much enthusiasm. Ishmael wanted to go outside and hit things. He needed to be in town. He needed to be digitally connected. He needed to know if his message to his London friends had gone through.

“So, does he have to change his name or something?” Foster said.

“What do you mean, change his name?” Bridget asked. “As far as I knew, there weren’t any missing persons reports out on Andre Boucher-Veneur.”

“No, not him.”

The Padre shoved open the splintered door. Ishmael came over to help him with the fuel he’d managed to find. At least the fireplace was still in good working order, once the Padre took a stout branch, climbed the roof, naked, and knocked down the birds’ nest in the chimney. It would be even warmer once Two-Trees returned with fuel for the generator.

“You know, when he gets infected,” Foster asked.

Bridget stared at her. “Who, Two-Trees?”

“Yeah. You said all human Wyrd agents were named after types of trees. Sumac, Larch, Pine, Maple . . . That’s why you call him Two-Trees, right? I always thought that was a cruel joke,” Foster said. “Sure, they’re strong and flexible, but dogs piss on them, day in and day out.”

“All human Wyrd agents are named after types of trees, yes, and when they’re successfully infected, we give them new call signs, yes,” Bridget said. “They’re all named after trees in honour of Red Cloud, George, and Hector Two-Trees. Grandfather, father, son. Red Cloud was one of the first human agents in Wyrd. Certainly the best, until the end.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ishmael said. He helped the Padre hunt down matches and tinder.

“Red Cloud Two-Trees was one of the founding members of Wyrd, supposedly,” Bridget said. “And yes, some agents have been brought over and renamed, accidentally or on purpose. One of the women I hired to staff the quarantine guard’s camp—she spent a full year up there, perfect record, hard worker. On my recommendation and her request, she was deliberately infected. Wolf-type, her choice. We call her Anye now.” She asked for an ace. Foster didn’t have one.

The Padre pointed to the kitchen cupboards and asked for a boost over the gaping hole in the floor, to see if he could find matches. Ishmael looked around for a ladder, anything that could keep the Padre from falling into the cellar and breaking his neck.

“But not Two-Trees,” Foster said. “You won’t . . . infect him.”

“No, not Hector. He’s on the Do Not Promote list. Gil tested his blood. Like his father George, he carries the recessive genetic markers for Cystic Fibrosis. If he’s infected, that disease will develop and kill him inside a year.”

Foster sighed. “Just like Gil, only a shorter deadline. Someone tried to turn him, too.”

Bridget glanced up at Ishmael, sad but accusing. Foster sat up straighter, turning in surprise to Ishmael. The Padre had let fall whatever he was picking up.

There were at least six new lycanthropes in Halo County alone, there were eight new kittens prowling around, and yet Gil was dying, a carrier but never successfully infected.

“But I thought you said you never turned anyone,” the Padre said softly.

“I didn’t,” Ishmael growled. He left the way the Padre had come in.

ISHMAEL STOOD ON
the moss, listening to a raven in the trees, thinking about Wyndham Farms—wistfully, even. There, everyone responsible for their own lives.
Survive or die. Nothing in between.

He could still hear Foster and Bridget chatting by the window. The encroaching forest was silent, and Ishmael’s ears were nearly as acute as when they were fully feline. Foster was asking why Two-Trees never married or ever had kids to carry on such a worthy bloodline.

A car was coming up the path. Branches hung so low that they slapped the roof of Buckle’s car. Buckle was driving slowly and carefully.

“Then why does Hector risk it?” Foster asked. “One bite, and it’s a death sentence.”

After a long moment, Bridget answered. “He does it for the same reason I do.”

Buckle’s car parked, and Two-Trees got out of the passenger’s side. Buckle turned off the engine, but he wouldn’t move.

“Hey,” Two-Trees said.

He does it for the same reason she does.

“Hey,” Ishmael replied.

Revenge.

“So we lost the hotel rooms,” Two-Trees said. “All the luggage was waiting downstairs for us.”

“Because of the credit cards?” Ishmael asked.

Two-Trees nodded. “Tried my personal credit card. Same idea. They say the card was shut down because of suspected fraud. Go figure, eh?” He handed Ishmael a plastic bag. “Take a whiff before you put them on.”

“New?”

Two-Trees gave him a receipt. “When we’re done here,” Two-Trees said, “I want you to give that man a good job and a hell of a salary. He paid for all these out of his own back pocket.”

“You talked him into joining?”

Two-Trees shook his head slowly. “Ishmael, there
is
no more Wyrd for him to join.”

“You tried calling Gil?”

“Number’s disconnected.”

“What?”

“Tried every Wyrd extension. Nothing. Wyrd has gone
dark.
”

“Are you safe?”
Ishmael had asked, and Gil had said
“No”
and hung up.

Dep
.
Helen. Gil. Oh, God, Gil . . . hang on. We’re coming.

“We’re far up shit creek,” Two-Trees said, “and still miles to go before we find the source.”

Ishmael opened the bag and took a whiff. He felt no effect.

“We went almost to Sudbury to find a shop run entirely by old men,” Two-Trees said. “I hope you like Polo shirts.”

He closed the bag and asked if he’d bought anything for the Padre. Two-Trees had. He also had shoes and groceries in the trunk. Ishmael thanked him. His feet were red from the cold.

“And what about
him
?” Ishmael asked, chucking his chin at the car parked at the corner of the tumbledown shack. “He knows now.”

Two-Trees was staring at the ground between them.

“You know the rules,” Ishmael said. “No, screw the rules. Whether Wyrd still exists or not, we’re not welcome. But you know the
consequences
of him seeing—”

“Don’t preach, Ishmael.” He had his free hand resting on the hilt of one of his knives.

This man has been with Wyrd for nearly as long as I have been, and he’s as human as the day he was born. How the hell has he managed?

“It’s his decision now,” Two-Trees said. “Get dressed. Talk to him. But if he chooses—”

“I’ll make it quick.”

Two-Trees caught him by the arm. “
I
. . .” He locked eyes with him. “I’ll make it quick.”

Ishmael had only meant that he would make it a quick
conversation
, and let Buckle have some time alone to think it through, but Two-Trees, clearly, took his job way more seriously than Ishmael did.

“And I’ll make it clean,” Two-Trees said.

He thanked Two-Trees quietly for the clothes, and he went to sit in Buckle’s car, because Ishmael, for one, didn’t think a witness had to die, even if he was a threat.

There were enough lives lost already.

Buckle still had his hands on the steering wheel. Cords of muscle and vein stood out in his face and neck. He breathed shallowly through his nose.

Ishmael let the passenger’s seat slide back on the rails and put on one of the new shirts. It was a size too small, but it would have to do. “You know, you look like a
Mesquite
kind of guy to me. Ever consider a change of careers?”

FOSTER SAT IN
the front passenger’s seat of Ishmael’s truck. Ishmael rode in the backseat while Buckle drove them into town. Two-Trees followed in his own truck with Bridget and the Padre. No one was happy about the arrangement, but Bridget had convinced them. If they walked into one of the many “trigger buildings”, they’d need their so-called cadaver dog to pick up the trail from there. And at least doglike, no one could arrest the Padre on suspicion of murder.

“There’s a slim chance that one or both of the Reid brothers infected someone in Halo County,” Foster began to explain, the moment she’d fastened her seatbelt. “If that person then infected someone else, they could spread it around—and so on, and so on—It’s really just your basic epidemiology.”

Buckle drove in silence. Ishmael could empathize. It was a lot of information to take in.

“I’m familiar enough with the virus,” Foster said, “that I should be able to extract it from the plasma and identify it more or less at a glance with the proper . . .”

Ishmael looked up when her voice trailed off. She turned in her seat, facing him.

“What do we know about the other Reid? His alternate form?” she asked. “All along, I’ve been operating under the assumption that twin brothers would have the same reaction—the same alternate body type, quadrupedal, coyote-like . . . When we know very well that Grey’s treatments were incomplete and had wildly different effects on every patient—”

“Treatments?” Buckle asked. It was the first word he’d said since “I need time to process this,” and that had been nearly thirty minutes earlier.

Foster looked from Ishmael to Buckle and back again, as if unsure how much more she should say. Ishmael shook his head.

“Dr. Grey was trying to find a cure,” she said, and left it at that. Buckle’s face relaxed a little. Ishmael hoped Buckle had assumed “a cure . . . for lycanthropy.” What Grey had been trying to cure was death itself, and he’d reinvented lycanthropy instead. “Anyways, like sire like pup, right? Bitten by the Padre, you end up looking like the Padre. Get bitten by Ishmael, you—”

“Foster,” Ishmael sighed. She was doing wonderful things for his headache.

“The point is, if one of the Reids did infect someone, we should be able to tell pretty quickly whether the Padre was responsible or his brother was. If the victim looks like a four-legged coyote, we can smack the Padre on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.”

Ishmael was glad the Padre was riding in the other vehicle. “If one of the Reids did infect someone,” he said, “they’d be
dead
by now. You know that. I’ve seen what becomes of them.”

Every night before he fell asleep, he saw Icepick standing on a broken road in quarantine, with his half-made arm hanging by his side, and a grenade primed in his other hand, while a dozen Lost Ones pawed at his face, hands, and chest. Every night since quarantine, rubbing his fiery arm, Ishmael knew what would become of himself.

“Like I said,” Foster continued, “we don’t know what the other Reid was like. For all we know, he could have had a perfectly stable form of the virus and lived as long and as healthy a life as you or I.”

Ishmael was sweating, scar tissue scalloped his left shoulder, he’d vomited again, and the slightest breeze sent him into a near seizure of shivers. He wasn’t the picture of health.

“All right, as long and healthy a life as me,” she said. “Which means that anyone he infected may also be longer-lived than most.”

“How many second generation victims did you study up there?” Ishmael asked. “Statistically speaking, do you really believe . . . ?” He was weary of the whole thing. “Besides, anybody he infected would be second generation. We could be looking at what, third, fourth generation victims by now? It’s anybody’s guess how fast they’d deteriorate.”

The cop’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

“The victims I studied were chronically malnourished and stranded in a hostile environment with little to do but attack each other,” she said. “I never studied what could become of Grey’s victims under ideal circumstances.”

“We’re still assuming they don’t
change
,” Ishmael said, “or someone would have noticed by now. There’s too many of them in too small a territory.”

“Then explain the corpses,” she said. “Two-Trees said that the bodies were bitten and eaten, not butchered and eaten. That tells me at least one of them has teeth adapted to eating raw meat off the bone.”