Helix: Plague of Ghouls (5 page)

“He wasn’t a child, that’s all we know. With this amount of damage, I couldn’t hazard a guess at his age. We needed either you or the medical examiner to weigh in on it. And speaking of weighing in . . .” Buckle brought him over to the pelvic dump site. While he and Two-Trees stayed a good distance away, the technician followed her own tracks step for step, then lifted the stained sheet for them. The lump under the sheet wasn’t much more than a mash-up of torn denim, flecks of tissue, and the corner of a hip bone. “Check out the belt.”

“What do you mean?”

The victim had been wearing jeans with a long, worn belt the colour and texture of boiled steak.

“Without removing it from the body, I’d have to say that thing is almost six feet long,” Buckle said. “We’ll find out more as soon as the medical examiner gives us the go ahead to move the body, but I’ve gotta say, this boy had a hell of a girth.”

“Least of his worries now,” Two-Trees replied. “But what’s your point?”

“If he had a sixty-inch girth . . .” Buckle shrugged. “Where is it?”

Two-Trees nodded. “Any word yet on animal tracks?”

“You’re thinking animals could do this?” Buckle’s lean face cracked into a dubious smile. “In Halo County?”

The police and media claimed animals were responsible for the mayhem at Pritchard Park too.

Two-Trees was deadpan. “A bear is an animal, so are dogs and foxes, so are wild boar, so is
man
. . . So yeah, an animal did it. But tracks could narrow it down to phylum and family.”

“ . . . Sorry, down to what?”

“What tracks did you find?” Two-Trees asked.

“There were feet all over that scene, clawed and shod—half of them belonging to the Halo County detachment. And I do mean those tracks were everywhere. We’ve done a search of a 200-square-metre perimeter and lost count of the tracks. Clean ran out of evidence markers.”

“But you did find
animal
tracks?”

“Some scratch marks, some small paw prints—probably coyotes or raccoons or something.”

“Did you find any evidence of . . . gnawing?”

Buckle raised his hands. “I’m not the ME. Ask him. But if I were to offer a wild-ass guess . . . ?” Buckle frowned. “If we weighed all his . . . his leftovers . . . I doubt we could come up with enough to fill out a sixty-six inch waist band. So where’d the meat go?”

“Animals,” Two-Trees said. He reclaimed his umbrella and stepped outside the tent. The storm was now a sullen, steady rain. “A lot of them.” He opened his umbrella.

“You leaving?” Buckle asked. “So soon?”

“Just when it got interesting? Hell no. But for one, I have to defer to the medical examiner. For two, I left my phone in the car. I’ll call my assistant, tell her I’m going to be here for a couple of days. Listen, it’s been a while since I’ve been in town. Can you recommend a decent hotel?”

“Decent as in ‘not sleeping in biker body hair?’ My advice is if you’re on the clock and if you’re submitting an expense report, go with the Howard Johnson. Right downtown, four blocks from the OPP detachment, free breakfast, free Wi-Fi. All the comforts of home.”

Two-Trees snorted.

“Pay-per-view, too.”

“I can’t expense that.”

“The Marigold Hotel it is then, God help you, or the Lancaster Motel.”

“Nothing else?”

“Holiday Inn burned down, and the Ambassador went bankrupt. Don’t go to The Purple Horn.”

“Still a BDSM club?”

“Swinger’s club on Thursdays,” Buckle said, with a nod. “I hear they’ve got the best wings in town. Floor show’s nothing to write home about though.”

Two-Trees smiled. “Give me ten minutes to make my calls, and I’ll be right back to take another look at what CSI’s grabbed so far.”

“You need this?” Buckle offered the flashlight.

Under the gurgle of flooded ditches and the rush of wind through the weeds, Two-Trees swore he heard the soft padding of feet. Buckle swung his flashlight in the direction Two-Trees had turned. The light shone on a swaying bush of staghorn sumac. None of the other trees moved.

“Yeah, gimme that,” Two-Trees said. “Last thing I want to kick in the dark is somebody’s head.”

“Aw, but that would make my job easier. Hurry back, would you?”

Two-Trees made his way through the slippery grass, across the damp wooden planks, and down the gravel shoulder to his truck. Once there, he collapsed his umbrella, got in the truck, and considered speeding away. He picked up his cell without disconnecting it from the charger and placed his first call.

“Maple, calling in, ID is HTT1963,” he said. “Yeah, that’s me. Yeah, they’ve granted me access to the site, no problem.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “No, of course not yet. It’s too early for any kind of DNA testing. Hell, the medical examiner hasn’t even arrived yet.” Rainwater warped the scene outside. Another OPP cruiser drove up from town and parked at the head of the line. “Yeah, it won’t be long before the press arrives. Halo County may have grown in the six years since I was here last, but it’s still the small town I knew thirty years ago. We’re not going to be able to keep something like this a secret, press or no press.”

He rubbed his forehead.

“But if you ask me to go on instinct? Then yes, we do have a big problem on our hands. I’m going to need backup, preferably a well-trained canine unit.” He wiped his face. “You’ve gotta send me Bridget on this one. No—I . . . No, listen to me. Hey! Listen! I know what she did, and I don’t agree with it either, but I know why she did it, and we’ve got a hell of a lot more on our hands than what did or didn’t happen at Wyndham Farms. It’s Bridget or nobody, not even me. I’m not equipped to deal with . . . Yes, I realize that, but—but I . . .” He sighed and nodded, though the nod was useless on a voice call. “I understand. See what you can do for me, all right? And we’re going to need some help on the inside, because guaranteed, they’re going to run tests, and that’s going to give us a whole new level of grief.”

Could be in Venice right now, standing on the Bridge of Sighs. Sailing around Corfu. Checking out the nudist beaches on the Côte D’Azur.

“Either way, we need the experts on this one,” Two-Trees said.

Can’t believe we’re back to this. We were supposed to be finished with this three years ago.

“No, I don’t mean Gil. Leave him where he is.”

Can’t believe I’m saying this.

“We need Daniel Grey. He started this. He ends it.” He saw figures moving past the escaping light of the evidence tent. “No, because it isn’t just one. Listen to me. There are parts of a very large corpse that have gone missing, and either they were sliced off and taken away in bags, or they were sliced off and taken away in stomachs—either way, there would have been more than one stomach could handle, even one of theirs. This kid was huge.” The insides of his windshield and windows were fogging up, and humidity clung to him, amplifying the smell of exposed intestines and muddy, clotting blood. “I don’t know. More than two.”

It was going to be a long night and a longer week ahead.

“Yeah, which means either we missed a few . . . or we’re dealing with a new strain.”

THE SUN WAS
setting behind the expansive log house near the Varco Valley gas station, when the phone rang. On the first ring, Ishmael thought,
The tribunal has convened.
He sat back, staring out the dewy window at the frosty grass and the highway beyond. He’d just sunken deep into the body-hugging office chair, he’d barely sipped his espresso, and he knew that time was officially up. The phone rang a second time, and he thought,
Time to pay the piper.
Holly shut off the shower; by then, every window had steamed up with shampoo-scented clouds. She hated closed doors, except for those that kept out the encroaching winter. On the third ring, Ishmael uncurled his middle finger from his fist and showed it to the handset, and on the fourth ring, he finally picked up the phone.

“Varco Valley Station, how can I help you?” Ishmael answered, in case it was an outside call. It wasn’t. It was Angie Burley, the Wyrd senior field assignment handler. She was one of the less obnoxious Council members, but she could complain as proficiently as the rest of them. She’d been promoted a year and a half earlier, and she hated the job, primarily because it meant quitting her home in South Carolina and relocating to “The Devil’s Frozen Ass Boil, Purgatory State, Canuckistan”.

“Ishmael?” Burley asked.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he answered.

“Can y’all come on up to the main house?” Burley asked. “Got a job for you.”

“Uh . . . what?”

“We’ve got a job, you’re the best qualified, and I’m low on personnel.”

“Does Haberman know?”

“Jess git yer ass on up here, Ish, so we all can talk about it face to face, all right? Can’t stand that dayummed static on the line. Gawd, tired of all this backwater bullshit—” She hung up.

Ishmael sat at his computer, feeling numb, worn out, terrified, and a little amused.

Holly stood in the doorway, rubbing a towel across her hair. “Who was that?”

“Burley,” he answered. “I have to go up to the main house. You want to go up there with me?”

She was staring out one of the picture windows. The sun had gone behind the hills. Sky and lake both glowed in shades of rust and fire. She moved like a figure skater on dry land, smoothly and silently, mastered by graceful self-control. “No,” she said softly. Even her voice had an edge-free quality to it. She slid her hand across his shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. “But you can drop me off at the Hollow.”

He didn’t want to go to the Hollow. Mary Anne was there. So was Dep, who had in his veins the same backfired vaccine that had turned Digger into a long-horned wendigo. Whether Ishmael’s virus had helped to counteract Digger’s less attractive qualities or not still remained to be seen.

Helen was out there too. Little Helen, who’d entered quarantine at age seven. When she was nine, there’d been an explosion and fire at the abandoned hotel where she and dozens of families had taken shelter. While other parents held their children to the flames, Helen was rescued, disfigured but alive. Until she turned twelve, she spent every day and night hiding from lycanthropes, including her own mother. Then one day, Ishmael arrived. Not a week later, Jay flew over and dropped huge incendiary bombs on the quarantine, Helen’s mother was murdered before her eyes, and then Ishmael dragged Helen through a firefight and dumped her into this new morass of frontier justice. Cross-infected, mute with despair, she now had to adapt to life as a lycanthrope, reviled and under suspicion, at Varco Lake.

The last time Ishmael had seen Helen, she was sitting in a corner in Ferox’s dormitory room, knees pulled up to her chin, hands lifeless on the floor beside her, mouth open, eyes unfocussed. Mottled brown skin was regaining its even complexion. Her burns were healing at a superhuman rate.

Helen had been given the same faulty vaccine as Dep and Digger.

Holly slid her hand across his back, making him jump. She tossed wet hair over her shoulder and regarded him with a gentle but worried expression. “What did Gil say?”

“He said I’m fine,” he said. “It’s all in my head.”

She rubbed his fingernails, turning his hands over to feel the ligaments and bones in the palm. She looked alarmed. “Ishmael, are you running a fever?”

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling away. She pouted. “I run hot when I’m pissed off and anxious. It’s been too long since I’ve heard from the Council. They were supposed to hand down a decision two weeks ago, and they still haven’t made up their minds what to do with me. What to do with
us
. And now Burley says she’s got a job for me.”

Holly stared out a window, mouth slightly open, as if listening to birds no one else could hear.

“Gil needs help, and he thinks Foster’s gone. He wants Shuffle. He wants Dr. Grey.”

Holly didn’t answer for a long while. “I’ll go as far as the Hollow,” she said. She looked confused, angry, as if wrestling with herself.
Not far from the truth, I’ll bet
. When she slept, she talked to herself—or rather, to Eva Foster. Ishmael would sit on the edge of the bed, watching over her, listening to the one-sided shouting match. Some mornings, she’d wake up with her arms and hands full of bedclothes, growling and swearing as if she were trying to strangle a ghost in the sheets. But, morning after morning, it was Holly who gained supremacy and emerged, though she’d have to endure thirty minutes of disorientation, distrust, and despair before she began to remember who and where she was. He’d begun to understand why Eva and Holly had slept so little in quarantine; the nightmares were there waiting for them when they fell asleep, and then again when they woke up.

And since Ishmael had been getting sicker, Foster was waking more often, and shouting more loudly inside Holly’s head. Sometimes, Holly would stumble with her fingers pressed to one side of her head, as if Foster had stabbed her there. When the pain passed, Holly always had a question to ask, yet it usually sounded as if she was translating it from a language she barely knew. “If you’d been masticated in your gluteal, why don’t you fibrous your collagen . . . ? In your arm?” or something equally convoluted. He’d give her some kind of answer, but by the time he’d said it, Holly was blinking like someone coming out of a mescaline trance, and she’d forget both his answer and the question she’d asked.