Free Helix: Plague of Ghouls by Pat Flewwelling Page A

room.
    “I didn’t bring her,” Ishmael answered.
    “But I told y’all to come up—”
    “I thought you meant y’all, singular. If you meant y’all, plural, you should have specified,” Ishmael said. Burley breathed a lamentation peppered with obscure Southern metaphors, and the Padre told Ishmael it might not be a good idea to antagonize her, or he’d never get another word in edgewise.
    Burley left the briefing room door open. The room was big enough to hold ten lecture chairs and a desk, but Ishmael and the Padre remained standing. Burley herself sat on the corner of the desk, sniffing and wiping her nose. The dry air made her nose run constantly. She had a map projected onto the whiteboard behind her. She frowned at it, and then squinted at her printouts, as if she couldn’t see them properly. She couldn’t. Muttering all manner of Southern epithets, she opened a desk drawer, took out her purse and extracted a pair of reading glasses from a velvety case.
    “Gotta say, feels hella weird, me bein’ up here and you over there. Supposed to be the other way around.”
    Instead of replying, Ishmael set down his dinner on one of the chairs and began to eat while she spoke.
    “We got Agent Maple down in Halo County, in Ontario. We had some problem there for a while, back when Wyndham Farms was just gettin’ set up.” She glanced at the Padre, as if he was supposed to say something important. He didn’t. She continued. “Maple’s asking for backup. Says there’s something big happening down there and he doesn’t wanna get caught with his pants around his ankles. He thinks there’s a few of ’em down there.”
    “A few of what?” the Padre asked.
    She looked him up and down like he was a man-sized millipede. “A few of you .”
    “Bridget said Wyrd found them all,” Ishmael said. “Every one of Dr. Grey’s patients were documented, addresses and all. Bridget said they found all of them.”
    “And then some,” Burley replied.
    Ishmael nodded. “You picked up whole families. Friends, lovers, one-night stands . . . Anyone who might have come in contact with Grey’s patients.”
    “Grey’s victims,” she corrected him. “God, what a mess. You know, we had to pick up a private investigator and dump her in quarantine, because she’d linked all the disappearances back to Dr. Grey?”
    “Yeah,” the Padre said. “She didn’t last long.” He was glaring at her over the rims of his glasses. “Two broken ribs, a concussion, and a broken arm before she got there. Didn’t much help her chances at survival.” Ishmael himself had been brought to Wyndham Farms in no better condition, but he’d had the advantage of therianthropic blood.
    “The Lost Ones?” Ishmael asked him.
    “Sepsis,” the Padre answered.
    Burley didn’t immediately reply. Ishmael took advantage of the silence by finishing his spaghetti and meatballs, and washing it down with the cheap coffee.
    “There was always a risk of a couple second generation misfits who slipped the net,” Burley said. “Lord knows, even I was on the ground sniffin’ ’em out, and I was in charge of the round up.”
    And in the meantime, while you were busy for years doing that, I was whistling Dixie all around the world, completely unaware of what was going on here at home. Why didn’t anyone get me involved?
    “Hundreds of ’em we did find, but only God knows how many more got out.”
    The Padre shook his head. “No . . . No, second generation victims always started showing symptoms six months after infection. Someone would have spotted them by now.”
    “I know that,” Burley said haughtily, giving him another head-to-toe look. “And no new incidents after August of 2012. We thought we got ’em all, so we could finally breathe and just monitor all y’all at Wyndham Farms. But now, we don’t think we got ’em all.”
    The Padre was still shaking his head. “If they were second generation, they’d have been Lost by now. They’d have