Helix: Plague of Ghouls Read Online Free PDF

seemed to have a nervous energy that burned away fat and kept his reflexes jerky. When Buckle approached the tent flap, shafts of light shone on high cheekbones, sunken but scalpel-sharp eyes, a pinched nose, and lofty eyebrows arched over his wire-framed glasses. He held open the flap for Two-Trees, and pointed the way with the lit flashlight. “You go in and tell me how suspicious it is.”
    They’d covered a large surface area, maybe ten paces in all directions, and under the tent they’d kept the stained ground more or less sheltered from the storm outside. Two-Trees collapsed his umbrella and stood at the very perimeter of the tent, taking in the whole scene before setting a foot onto potential evidence. Spotlights warmed the humid air, and Buckle’s glasses quickly steamed up; he took them off and put them in his suit jacket pocket. He had a slightly Asian look about his eyes, which were as black as hematite, and they had a habit of flicking from view to view, as if he was taking a thousand close-up snapshots of the environment and of the people around him. This is a man who knows what to look for in a crime scene, and how to look for it. “Watch your step,” Buckle said. “This area’s already been trampled by witnesses and the responding officers.” Buckle took Two-Trees’ umbrella out of courtesy, allowing Two-Trees to free up both hands.
    In the centre of the scene, there was a mound covered in a white cloth. Near the far left corner, there was another. Near Two-Trees’ shoe, there was a third. Near the right tent wall was a technician dressed in a flimsy-looking white hazmat jumpsuit. She was fixing the sheet over a fourth form.
    Two-Trees sniffed back the dew forming in his nostrils, and immediately regretted it. Whatever he was looking at hadn’t been decomposing for long, but it was definitely dead, and it was definitely wet. “Which one am I looking at?” He had to raise his voice over the sound of rain on the thick, rip-stop plastic of the tent tarp.
    “Depends on where you want to start.” Buckle signalled to the crime scene technician, who came over obligingly. “How about we start in the middle?” The technician in the hazmat suit followed Buckle’s line of sight, and she lifted the corresponding sheet for them.
    There were four deep gouges in the earth, drawn down toward the body. They were tracks made by desperate fingers. The fingers were still in the grooves, attached to a muddy, bruised, swollen right hand. The left hand had been flung far forward, and those fingers were hooked into the earth as desperately as those of the right. It was as if the headless, legless torso had died while crawling away.
    Two-Trees tilted his head and carefully stepped to one side. Horror movie special effects, he thought. His startle reflex may have been tweaked too high, but when it came to a gross-out, he could deal with it. Sausage casings filled with stained foam chips, he imagined. Some ballistics gel, red dye, and body paint on a latex dummy. Most times, his mental fake-out worked. If he looked at a crime scene, believing it was a Hollywood re-enactment, he was in the clear.
    Two-Trees was accustomed to the smell of spilled blood, but it was the smell of rotting pork and evacuated bowels that made him nauseated. It was a stink that would stick to everything, rain or no rain.
    This was no dummy nor prop. It was a human torso, decapitated, severed at the waist, and from the rib cage down, the intestines had fallen out, and they were clogged with partially digested food.
    I wonder how far away the scavengers are.
    “You all right?” Buckle asked.
    “I’ve smelled worse.”
    “Yeah, but have you seen worse?”
    “You mean, since Pritchard Park? Actually . . . yes. But not often.”
    The biceps and triceps of the cadaver had been shredded to the point of allowing broken bones to show through. The forearms were bruised and sliced, but not to the same extent as the upper arms. The torso had been