Infected Read online

  Chai sometimes talked about his therapist, in positive terms, around him. Holden knew that Chai thought Holden should see a therapist too. For what reason? He doubted it would help him. Even with a confidentiality clause, he couldn’t tell anyone about the things he’d done. He could only talk to Roan about this, and he didn’t even tell him.

  It was kind of ridiculous anyway, wasn’t it? What the fuck did he think he was, the gay Avenger? When he was with Roan, it made more sense, because he was helping out a lion guy who wasn’t always capable of cleaning up the chaos he left behind. Someone had to do it, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to understand “Oh, the lion took over, but he remained mostly human in form, or humanish. Kinda. And then there was this thing where transformed cats seemed to be obeying him?” Yeah, that was never flying in a court of law. Even if they did believe it, Roan would be locked up for life—he’d be considered too dangerous to be among normal people. If the lion could come out without much of a physical transformation, if any at all, wasn’t he a public health menace? So Holden was doing a good deed by keeping him out of the local zoo.

  But Roan was gone, trying to enjoy whatever might pass for peace in the mind of a man who never knew, from day to day, whether he was going to be in charge of things or his virus was. And Holden was still hunting down bastards like he wasn’t mortal and fragile. Sure, he’d gained a bit of muscle, thanks to Esteban, and he had weapons galore. But he couldn’t lion out; he couldn’t take bullets or major injuries like his skin was made of self-repairing adamantium. He wasn’t the superhuman. His freak status was everything but physical.

  Holden wondered what he wanted out of this—to help people, or to simply hurt the bastards that deserved it. Ideally, those two things would collide, but if they didn’t, which did he want more? While considering this, he found himself idly pulling the tiny gold ankh of his necklace back and forth across its chain. Well, one of his necklaces. He was also wearing a plain silver chain and one with a tiny silver demon skull on it. For him, three necklaces were a small amount.

  On the streets, where he had to take everything he owned with him or be left without it, he took to wearing lots of necklaces. The first one he ever acquired he found in an alley. It wasn’t broken; it was just off and discarded. He assumed it must have had some terrible story behind it, but he never did find out what. Once he started wearing it, friends would give him necklaces they stole or found—he rarely asked—and tricks might give him one, and at one point he thought he had about twelve, all worn at once. It was never anything expensive; it was personal shit or cheap shit. It should have been ridiculous, made him look like a white Mr. T impersonator, but somehow it didn’t. Small, delicate chains seemed to be the key there. Even after he got a place to live, he still wore chains by the handful because wearing only one felt funny, and it became sort of a security blanket for him. Sometimes nowadays weeks went by when he forgot to put a necklace on at all, but when he did, he never put on just one. It seemed weird now. Along the way, he’d gotten used to wearing a ton.

  Holden glanced around, watching shadows, mentally grading them on a scale of “be concerned” to “don’t worry about it.” The streetlights were little pools of illumination, but some didn’t work, making some stretches darker than they should have been. Traffic was pretty constant, as it was Seattle and that was to be expected. But still, there were enough gaps between cars to let you know this wasn’t one of the better neighborhoods. No one was paying any attention to him, so clearly his invisibility field was still holding.

  After a few minutes of zoning out, of letting his mind wander, he caught a bit of a young man’s hyena laugh, the sneering, mocking kind that never meant anything good. Holden got up and started walking, trying to find it.

  Eventually he did. He cut down an alley and over a cross street and found four young guys—late teens, early twenties—surrounding Captain Trips, a homeless guy he was familiar with. Trips was a central-casting homeless guy with a scraggly beard and even scragglier clothes whom you could smell long before he actually showed up. He got his name from the fact that he used to look a bit like a burned-out hippie, and his mental illness would make him hallucinate some really trippy things. His decline was rapid and tragic, and nowadays he rarely made any kind of coherent sense, even during the rare times he was sober. He wasn’t tonight; Holden could smell the sour, yeasty scent of cheap beer on the wind, and most likely it wasn’t coming from the kids, who looked like they could afford better stuff. One of them was even filming it on his iPhone as his loser friends shoved Trips between them. This was a darkened street, where everything was closed and few lights were visible. Great for privacy and great for being victimized by assholes.

  Holden bent down and pulled the retractable baton out of his boot before saying, “Stop it and get lost, fuckholes.” Holden was keenly aware that two weeks ago, down near Tacoma, a homeless man was lit on fire and died, and no one had been arrested for the crime. The cops didn’t even know who they were looking for as no witnesses had come forward. He had no idea where people had ever gotten the idea that the homeless were utterly disposable, beneath contempt and worthy of violence, but it was the kind of Ayn Randian, Darwinistic bullshit that never went away. As if being homeless made you less than human. Holden still remembered being homeless and didn’t fucking appreciate it.

  “Fuck you, faggot,” one of the kids said, and his friend let out a laugh like a donkey’s bray. Trips was saying something, but his vowels were all sliding together into a drunken slurry, and it wasn’t clear what he was trying to convey. But then again, that was nearly always true.

  Holden waited until he was in range. Then he snapped his wrist to extend the baton and slammed it down on the wrist of the iPhone kid with excessive force. The kid screamed and reeled back, grabbing his arm, while his expensive phone shattered into several pieces on the sidewalk.

  “He broke my fucking wrist, man!” iPhone boy shrieked. Finally his dickhead friends looked at Holden, and Holden took the opportunity to slam the baton into the face of the closest one, shattering his nose with an audible crack. The other two rushed him, but it wasn’t going to help them.

  It was unclear if they were high or drunk or a little of both; they were definitely on something. They also weren’t used to fighting together. They picked on weaker people so they never had to worry about overpowering someone. It was a given.

  Holden rammed the baton into the throat of the one who reached him first and attempted to tackle him, and he slammed a flattened palm into the face of the other guy. The guy trying to tackle him almost closed his arms around Holden’s waist, but as soon as he took the throat shot, his knees buckled and he hit the pavement, choking and gasping for air as he grabbed his neck. Holden didn’t think he’d shattered his trachea, but the guy could still die, depending on how hard Holden had hit him. They were all going to see.

  The one who got the palm strike to the face reeled backward. Holden had broken his nose too, judging from the gush of blood over his hand. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled, although it sounded more like “Sub of a bidge.”

  The first guy with a broken nose came at him in a superclumsy attack, and Holden simply rammed his knee into his balls and gave him a rabbit punch to his solar plexus, dropping him next to his friend who was still struggling to breathe. Just to prevent Palm Strike Boy from attempting to come at him again, Holden clubbed him on the side of the head with the baton. Not too hard, but hard enough to drop him.

  “Okay, boys, here’s the deal. If I ever see you dickheads on my streets again, you’re going home in body bags. Do you understand? Do I have to pull out flash cards, or have you got it?”

  None of them answered him, so Holden grabbed broken-nose boy number one by the hair and raised his head toward him. He glared up at Holden, full of defiance, trying to hide his pain and fear, and he failed on every possible level. Holden would have admired it if he didn’t hate his fucking guts. “Do you get it?”

  “Yeah, you fucki
ng psycho,” he said, blood cascading down his face.

  “From a guy beating up a homeless guy for a YouTube video, I’m gonna take that as a compliment.” He threw him back onto the pavement, flipped him over on his stomach, and went for his wallet. It was in his back pocket, of course. Men usually had their wallet in their front or back pocket. If they were smart they’d stash it in an inner jacket pocket, but they weren’t smart, and he wasn’t going to tell them.

  “Hey, get offa me, you pervert!” he screeched as Holden pulled the wallet out.

  “You fucking wish, micro dick.” Holden expected to find cards, as no one carried cash anymore—and he was so glad he didn’t have to survive as a pickpocket anymore—but this guy actually had some. A lot of ones and fives, dirty, wrinkled, some wadded up, and as soon as he saw it, he wondered if they’d also been robbing the homeless they were harassing. How low did you have to be to rob from people who had less than nothing?

  “Hey,” he protested, finally seeing what Holden was doing. Holden kicked him in the face, rather gently considering, but he got him in the nose, which sent him into writhing spasms of pain.

  Holden grabbed Trips’s hand—he still seemed drunk and spaced out, unaware of what was going on, and why not? His reality was terrible—and put the cash in it. “Go get something to eat, huh? You’re skin and bones.”

  Trips briefly made eye contact with him, but Holden had no idea if he understood or made any connection with what was going on. But he looked down at the money and nodded, saying something that was probably supposed to be a word but was in no language he could identify. Drunkese. Holden helped him step over the bodies and, as soon as Trips was staggering down the street, turned his gaze on the fallen boys.

  One of them was wearing two-hundred-dollar sneakers. Holden could feel the rage building up behind his eyes, a headache waiting to happen, but rather than further take it out on the boys, he slammed his heel down on what was left of the iPhone, making sure absolutely no part of it could be salvaged. He checked the wallet and saw the asshole’s name was Caleb Foote, which seemed somehow appropriate for a prick like this. Holden found a gold card his daddy must have leveraged for him and slipped it into his own pocket while he dropped the rest of the wallet on the sidewalk in a small splatter of blood. “If I ever see you fucks on my streets again, I’m finishing the job I started tonight.” Holden walked away before he could change his mind and start curb-stomping all of them.

  He retracted the baton and shoved it into his boot before he rounded the corner, and by the time he’d returned to streets with lights and people, he’d checked himself for blood and didn’t find any. Well, on his hand, but his jeans were black, and once he’d rubbed most of it off onto his leg, it had blended into the fabric.

  The first person he came across that he recognized was Ruby, a hooker who sometimes trolled the bars near closing time, which was like shooting fish in a beer stein. “Hey, honey,” she said as soon as she saw him. “Not blond anymore?”

  “Nope.” He got up close and showed her the credit card in his palm. She looked at it and him with the same amount of curiosity. “I thought you were gay.”

  “I am. Just took this off a complete prick. Wanna see how much fun you can get out of it before he cancels it?”

  Her eyebrows jumped, almost migrating to her hairline, and he didn’t have to ask her twice. She put her hand over his, and when she drew it away, the card was gone. “Damn right I do. Where you wanna start?”

  He shook his head. “All yours. Have some fun with the girls.”

  She grinned, her teeth off-white against the brick red of her lipstick. “You’re a god among hookers, darling.” She gave him an air kiss and walked away quickly, her heels clicking on the sidewalk as she went. Holden still had no idea how women walked in skirts that short. It seemed like a magic trick or a hidden superpower.

  Holden prowled the streets a couple more hours, not seeking trouble but keeping an eye out for it just the same. This was insanity, wasn’t it? He was doing something a crazy person would do. He knew he should stop, but he didn’t.

  By the time 4:00 a.m. rolled around, weariness started sinking claws into him, and he decided to walk home in the slightly chill air, his only companion the tinny echoes of rap music played over too-loud car stereos. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour, but the sky was already starting to lighten beyond that weird artificial color it always took on at night. City nights were different than nights everywhere else. He remembered when he went up to that mountain compound where they were fighting transformed infecteds in that empty swimming pool, how dark the sky was. You could see a million stars against that deep black. Here, amid all the light pollution, you were lucky to see the moon. He had no fear walking home. He was a man and also the only monster around these parts. It was funny, but when he was a new street kid, there were menaces around every darkened corner. But now? It was funny how no one ever seemed eager to mug Freddy Krueger.

  Back home, Holden took a quick shower, shoved his clothes into the bottom of the hamper for the laundry tomorrow, and went to bed.

  He’d slept for maybe five hours, tops, when he was woken up by somebody pounding on his door. They were knocking so hard he could hear it rattling in its frame. “Hold your fucking horses,” he snapped, grabbing his robe and tying the sash around his waist. He’d slept naked, so this was his single concession to modesty, something he really didn’t have. But you had to keep up appearances, right? Besides, satin still felt really nice against his skin.

  A glance through the peephole showed him a sight he hadn’t expected to see: that lesbian cop friend of Roan’s. He’d last seen her with her wife at the Pride parade. What was her name? Holden couldn’t recall it, and suddenly wasn’t sure he’d ever known it. All he knew her by was the silly nickname Roan had given her—Dropkick.

  Holden briefly considered whether she was here to arrest him. She was Homicide, right? Maybe that guy he clubbed in the throat died. Still, he didn’t think so. She seemed to be alone, and as far as he knew, that was a breach of protocol.

  He undid his deadbolt and opened the door, then leaned against it like a femme fatale in a ’40s detective film. “What can I do for you, Officer?”

  She frowned, clearly not finding this at all amusing. She wasn’t humorless, and she wasn’t unattractive, but he could tell she had her battle armor on, and she wasn’t putting up with any shit. “It’s Detective, and I want to know what you were working on with Kevin Robinson.”

  Holden pondered this, aware he was too tired and too lacking in caffeine to properly consider all the angles. But why she would be asking him instead of Kevin spoke volumes. Kevin must not want her to know. “We’re not working on anything—”

  “Cut the shit,” she interrupted. “I know you were seen at the morgue with him, and afterward at a coffee shop. Does it have to do with that low-rent black marketer killed at the Jungle?”

  Now it was his turn to frown at her. If she knew this much, why was she bothering him? “I went to identify Burn’s body, if that’s what you’re on about. It’s not like he had any family that could do it.” Her posture was tense, her mannerisms impatient. There was something he was missing here. “Why are you coming to me? Didn’t he tell you this?”

  Now she crossed her arms over her chest, anger burning in her hazel eyes like embers. “No, he didn’t. He was shot last night, right outside the Jungle.”

  Oh shit. He should have walked down to the Jungle after all.

  11—Things to Say to Friendly Policemen

  HOLDEN INVITED Dropkick in because it seemed polite, and also he wanted the entire story of what had happened. He offered her some coffee, but she declined. She also declined a seat, so she stood awkwardly in his living room while he bustled about his kitchenette, making coffee.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked. “Is he alive? Did you catch the bastards who did it?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out, yes, and no.”

  Hold
en paused while he worked out what she said. She was certainly a no-nonsense type. Then again, that fit in with a personal philosophy of his that the world would be much better off if it were run by lesbians. They got shit done, and as had been previously established, straight men were the fucking worst and never should have been able to run things for so long. That was merely a belief of his, and he could be wrong. But Holden honestly didn’t think so. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  She fixed him with a gimlet-eyed stare that probably made weaker men crack. “Not really. We don’t know a lot. For some reason, after the end of his shift, Kevin went down to the Jungle and was subsequently shot in what a couple of witnesses called a ‘drive-by,’ although their description of the car varies. He’s alive, last I heard, but he’s not conscious, and he couldn’t tell us why he was there. Even his usual partner at Vice, Hyer, couldn’t tell me what he was up to. So I did some asking around and came to you. Which made no fucking sense, because why was he even at the fringes of a homicide case, and why the hell was he with you?”

  He caught the venom in her voice and couldn’t help but smirk. It was a cop thing. She didn’t trust him, and that was fine as he couldn’t trust her either. It was funny how even such a thing as gay solidarity was thrown out the window in this circumstance. Although Kevin, being closeted gay, was included in this as well. But Holden made sure the smirk was gone when he faced her again. “You know Burn was killed, right? Then you have the story. He doesn’t have any family, but Kevin knew he was an acquaintance of mine and asked me to come and officially identify him. That’s all.”

  Dropkick started shaking her head about halfway through his sentence. “No.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “Just no. You want to help him, you need to be honest with me. How else can we find this asshole? And how else can I keep Kevin from getting his ass burned by this?” In her neat but inexpensive suit, navy blue so dark it may as well have been black, and crisp white blouse, her posture radiated the confidence of a woman who knew she was smarter than you and could kick your ass. Even with her badge on her belt and the obvious bulge of her gun, she didn’t look anything like the lady detectives on TV. She looked down to earth and implacable, and Holden really dug it. Clearly she wasn’t changing herself for her job. This was her. You either liked it or you didn’t, and she didn’t care much either way. He could see why Roan liked her.