Free Helix: Plague of Ghouls by Pat Flewwelling Page B

been running around, tearing into human flesh and eating it on the spot.”
    Burley’s eyebrows were high. She blinked slowly at him, the very picture of sarcastic irony.
    “Oh shit,” the Padre said. “Really?”
    “At least one,” she answered. “Just not in public, thank God.”
    “They’d be nearly unable to change back,” Ishmael said. He chewed a meatball. “And they wouldn’t be able to travel very far,” he said with a mouthful. “By the time they’re Lost, they’re so physically messed up, body parts start melting together.”
    “That’s a damned colourful way to go,” Burley said.
    “Hard to hide that in a crowd,” the Padre agreed.
    “But,” Ishmael said, “that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t know how or where to hide away from the crowd. If this was their home ground prior to infection, they’d probably know the best places to lay low and undisturbed year round. Let me see the map again? Satellite view?”
    The Padre sucked his teeth. “I don’t know . . . second generation never lasted much past two years. Any new victims ought to be dead by now.”
    “Except for Odysseus,” Ishmael said. “You guys said he made it more than three years.”
    “Because he was fricking Buddha,” the Padre said. “And in the end, he had boneless flippers instead of legs. The point is, with the exception of Odysseus, most of them burned out and died within a year and a half of infection, if they didn’t throw themselves off a cliff first. And you’re telling me that someone has survived this long . . . there ?” He pointed at the map.
    From above, Halo County looked like a series of bacterial colonies in a roughly circular petri dish, surrounded by farmland, forestry, and the odd quarry. In the centre of the petri dish was a pair of lakes, making a shape that resembled a crooked hourglass; one was called Steeper Lake, and the other was Pouch Lake. Rivers fed into Steeper Lake from two different angles. The Deer Jump River looped around hills and suburbs before cutting through Elmbury, the biggest of the towns in that county. The other river, which had a Native name eight syllables long, cut through a First Nations Reserve, around a municipal airport, through a small provincial park, between mirrored suburbs, around the south-western edge of Elmbury before finally spilling into Steeper Lake. Between the airport and the provincial park, there were several industrial complexes and the makings of an expansive residential project, by the look of it. Subdivisions had been carved into the landscape like fingerprints. Ishmael didn’t know how old the satellite picture was, but it looked like the suburb was still under construction. The “x” marked the latitude and longitude of a murder scene, Burley said. It was on a stretch of highway between the two rivers, with fallow farmland on one side and forestry on the other, not too far from one of the denser residential areas.
    “Looks pretty built up, to me,” the Padre said.
    “You’d be amazed where people can hide,” Ishmael pointed out.
    “Which is why I wanted you in on this one,” Burley added.
    “You sure about that?”
    “Jay’s not around anymore,” Burley said, “so it’s not like I can ask that son of a bitch to do it. Fisher’s out looking for a rogue in Myanmar, Alex is in Turkmenistan, and B.D. is out somewhere in New York, hunting your kittens.”
    “Kittens?” the Padre asked.
    “Later,” Ishmael answered quickly.
    “So all I’ve got left is you,” Burley said. She sniffed and peered down the length of her nose at the Padre. “You, and all yer damned Tiger Dogs.”
    “You know, you people keep using that term as if it’s supposed to be an insult,” Ishmael said, “but the more often you say it, the more metal it sounds.”
    The Padre agreed. “Dangerously close to liking it myself. Tiger Dog. Rahr .”
    “When was the attack?” Ishmael asked.
    “It’s been about eighteen to twenty-four hours, Maple said,”