Helix: Plague of Ghouls (54 page)

He hadn’t lost his memory—he
knew
the man’s name, he
knew
there was a connection between him and this conspirator—but it was as if his memories had been stored in a soundproof glass room. He was locked out of his own mind. For that matter, he knew he’d been to Elmbury, stayed in a hotel, and had been sick most of the time, but he couldn’t remember what had brought him to Elmbury.

“I don’t think they ever planned on escaping.” He winced. “Six days, I’ve been out of it?” Mary Anne asked him to try and sit up, and with Foster’s help, he swung his legs over the side of the gurney and sat up. His head spun, but he was more hungry than nauseated. He was exhausted. “And Elmbury’s . . . what, under quarantine now?”

“Padre’s looking into that now,” Bridget replied. “But yeah, it looks like someone’s organized a militarized quarantine. They’re calling it some kind of airborne respiratory disease, but somebody’s got to know there’s more going on, or they wouldn’t have called in the army.”

After all that . . .

Ishmael hung his head. “Buckle’s right, we shouldn’t have stayed.” He opened and closed his hands, as Mary Anne asked him to, while Foster shone a light in his left eye, then his right.

“We stayed, because we were hoping to regroup,” Bridget said. “It was the only place I knew most Wyrd agents could find, and it had all the equipment Foster needed to keep you alive.”

“Regroup,” Ishmael echoed. He knew he had allies, but he was damned if he could remember a single name. He was too tired to beat on the barrier between himself and his memories. “With who?”

“Anders and Chloe, at least,” Bridget said.

Those names he remembered, though from ages ago. A lifetime ago.

Bridget ran her fingers through her short hair. “I was able to get emails out to them a few days ago. Now I’m getting error messages saying those addresses don’t exist.”

“Phone?” Ishmael asked.

“Their phones were shut down at the same time as ours,” she said. “Tried calling from payphones. Number out of service. Bunker’s got WiFi, and I’ve kept my non-Wyrd email going, but no one’s replying.”

Ishmael rubbed his face. The cheekbones were too low and too round, and his eyebrows felt swollen. His skin and fingers both felt numb.

“I don’t know who else to contact,” Bridget said. “Haberman’s missing, Angie Burley’s dead. Helen’s missing, along with Shuffle and Gil. Varco Valley Station, Varco Manor, Gil’s lab, it’s all blown to shit. Our phones are dead, our credit cards are flagged for fraud, and if Buckle’s right, cops are out looking for two big black trucks with Manitoba license plates, and they probably have us under surveillance right now. I don’t know who else we can trust. Anyone I ever worked with during quarantine is either dead or MIA, and of the living, I don’t know who might belong to Jay’s camp.”

“What’s wrong with my face?” Ishmael asked.

Foster moved Bridget aside. “You’re probably going to feel strange for a couple of days. God help you, it was that damned cure that saved your life, but it’s had some . . . side effects.”

Mary Anne caught him from falling forward. Aside from a broken nose and an asymmetrical face, Mary Anne had never looked so healthy.

“The mammalian dive response,” Foster said. “It slowed your breathing and your heart rate. And because you were just barely a lycanthrope, you couldn’t burn out and die. Once we took you out of the water, well, that’s when things got interesting. By the way, brown doesn’t become you.”

“It’s true,” Bridget said.

Ishmael’s hand floated up as if tethered to half-inflated helium balloons, and then it flopped on his head as if the strings were cut. His hair felt coarse and unwashed.

“The real problem was that you were stuck,” Foster said. “And I don’t mean between forms. I mean you were literally wedged between the wendigo’s
teeth
, holding up the roof of her mouth like Atlas holding up the world.”

He didn’t remember that.

“When she died, instant rigor mortis. It took three dives for Buckle to pull you free, and we didn’t know how long you’d been under. And Buckle had a hell of a time bringing you up to the surface without drowning himself. Your brain suffered massive damage from oxygen deprivation.”

“Buckle pulled me out?” He couldn’t recall the name. “No.”

Foster stopped talking.

“You mean Two-Trees,” he said.

“No, she doesn’t,” Bridget said.

“You mean—”

“He went down fighting,” she said, biting off the words.

“Shit, Bridget . . . I’m so sorry . . .” Ishmael folded his hands into fists. “I’m sorry.” Everything tingled, but he was in one piece. Foster took a pin and prodded his fingertips to measure how much sensitivity he had lost. “Still human?” he asked Foster, mumbling.

“As the day he was born,” Bridget replied.

“I meant me,” Ishmael said.

“It’s too soon to tell.” Foster’s face reddened. “But we don’t think so. Reinfection was the only way to reverse the brain damage. But your old virus wasn’t taking the way it should so . . . we . . .
I
. . .”

“Did what we could with the tools at our disposal,” Mary Anne added, as she took his blood pressure. “But between reinfection and whatever detritus you inhaled in that flood, you went into septic shock, and your white blood cell count went through the roof. And I can say from personal experience, the first thing Gil’s cure does is put your immune system into overdrive. You’ve been fighting off reinfection.”

“Gil,” Ishmael whispered.

“He told Ferox everything,” Bridget said.

I can barely remember what he looks like. Curly hair? That’s all I’ve got left of him.

“Gil did this to me?” Ishmael asked.

“Jay wrote the code that pirated my offline research,” Foster said, “but it was Gil who used it. It was Gil who replicated my countercyclical agents and the cycle-blockers. And it was Gil who tinkered with the off-switches on the lycanthropic virus, because Gil was looking for a way to cure
himself
.”

Ishmael closed his eyes and hung his head.

“Gil’s first attempt was a catastrophic failure,” she said. “He shut off the wrong genes and created something brand new.” Foster ran her fingers across her forehead. “Bonewalkers.”

Ah hell, Gil. You were trying to warn me all along.

“On the upside,” Foster said, clearing her throat, “even after that disaster, he kept trying to find a cure. Not only did he have the Wyndhamites to worry about, but he had the bonewalkers to deal with too. Gil had a treatment ready for the last five months, but—at the time—he had no willing test subjects. And Jay wouldn’t let him test it on the bonewalkers, not until he saw it work on a real therianthrope.”

“Me,” Ishmael said.

“When Harvey sent out that kitten video,” Bridget said, “Gil was convinced you’d flipped your lid. He loved you too much to kill you, but he hated you enough to cure you.”

Because Gil knows how much I love my own power. He knew that was the best way to get revenge. The only way.

“That’s why he asked Wyrd to send you into quarantine,” Bridget said. “To keep Wyrd from executing you, at least until he had proof his cure worked.”

“Except while you were on the island, you just had to keep sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong,” Mary Anne said, ripping off the blood pressure cuff. Ishmael tried to pick off the tape holding the IV in place, but she smacked his hand and told him to leave it alone.

“Jay figured you’d found out what he was up to,” Foster said, “and he thought you were trying to tell Haberman. He had to stop you ASAP, and to hell with testing the cure. That’s why he bombed the shit out of Wyndham Farms.”

Mary Anne hung up the blood pressure cuff. “Still don’t know where he got those planes from.”

“However,” Foster said, after a fortifying breath, “before you were taken into quarantine, Gil had a crisis of conscience. Just in case he was wrong, he wanted a way to reverse the process. Shortly after Bridget knocked you out in LaGuardia Airport, and while you were en route to Wyndham Farms, someone took blood samples before administering the cure. Using those samples, Gil isolated your retrovirus—the purest form, before all this shite happened during quarantine and after. He concentrated it, made more of it. He wanted something on hand to compare against, if and when your supposed kittens were caught. He wanted some way to prove your guilt, or to absolve you once and for all. After quarantine, Gil guessed what Jay and his Bone Tribe were up to. So he sent your viral samples to a lab near here, to hold in storage until we arrived.”

“A booster shot,” Ishmael said. He ran his hand over his arm. The scars were fading.

“Something like that,” Foster said. “But it wasn’t enough to stimulate the change. It wasn’t working fast enough, and you were suffering organ failure. So I . . .” Foster covered her eyes and sighed. “I tinkered.”

Ishmael was too long in the torso, too short in the leg, too wide in the shoulders, too everything. He put his hand on Bridget’s shoulder and got off the gurney.

Shit
.
I’m taller.

He glared at Foster. “What the hell did you do to me?”

To Be Concluded in
Helix: Scourge of Bones

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Having written her first story at 7 years old, first novella at 10 and first novel at 11, Pat is an emerging, multi-genre author with full length non-fiction and science fiction credits, and an enormous backlog of ideas, characters and stories to share in the years to come. She is also an avid support of independent and emerging talent, whether they are writers, musicians, web designers or fine artists. She participates in an annual novel writing marathon to raise funds for literacy programs in Ontario. You can find out more on
www.ninedaywonder.com
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