Infected Freefall Read online

  “I wasn’t saving you, fuckbrains. I was saving him.”

  And Holden couldn’t help but smile coldly as the reality of it all settled in Harvey’s eyes, seemingly deadening them.

  “Welcome to street justice, motherfucker.”

  15

  Stranger By the Minute

  BY THE time he staggered to his car, Roan was already half unconscious from the pain.

  He couldn’t say how many bones had broken and reset themselves or how many muscles had torn. All he knew was it was too damn many, and by the time he fought the lion back, he was shaking and involuntarily crying from the pain. And only the pain, damn it. But the humiliation was bad enough.

  With trembling hands he got the glove compartment open and managed to wrestle the top off the first bottle of pills he grabbed—what they were was irrelevant; he only had codeine and Vicodin in the car—and swallowed whatever was left in the bottle. Six or seven maybe, it didn’t matter in the big scheme of things, as nothing short of elephant tranquilizers was going to kill the pain. He felt like he was full of broken glass, his nerves on fire and melting into barbed wire, his skull shattered like an egg and hastily glued back together again. He spit blood from his aching mouth and tried to wash out the taste of it with the water he had stashed under the seat, but it wasn’t up to the task. He simply tasted more blood, coppery and salty, and he forced himself to drive and get the fuck out of there even though he hadn’t been able to stem the flow of tears from his eyes. At least they were no longer pink with blood.

  His mind didn’t know where to focus. It reeled like a drunken Tilt-A-Whirl. Where the hell had Holden come from? Why was he there? How did he know about Dylan?

  He had wanted to kill Harvey so badly. His terror was a sweet appetizer for what was to come.

  Was Holden really going to “take care” of Harvey? Roan thought he had the answer to this: yes. He hadn’t been lying. There was no way he could have lied to him in that condition. Was he really going to let Holden do his dirty work for him?

  Yes, obviously. He could barely drive his fucking car right now. Homicide was way out of the question.

  Roan swung by his office—it was on the way back to the hospital—and let himself in so he could use the bathroom. Turning on the light, he saw a horror show in the mirror: a blood-splattered man who could have been Victim #1 in a slasher film. But it was him, of course, a bloody ruin that had no right to be still standing. He tried to ignore the fact that his hair had grown an inch in the course of an hour, and that he now had a layer of reddish-gold stubble hidden beneath the blood caked on his chin and cheeks.

  He washed in the hottest water he could stand, filling the sink and sloshing a bit of blood-tinted water over the sides as he cleaned his face and hands and peeled off his shirt to clean off the blood on his torso. Hopefully he could salvage the shirt, because he really liked it. He found some more pain pills hidden in an Excedrin bottle and swigged them down with cold water straight from the faucet, and only then did his tears start to dry up. He sat down for a moment to let the pills work their magic and wondered if there was a mental hospital that could contain an infected. You’d think there were some. Not all people took being infected well. Many had psychotic breaks or, in the case of Paris, just had nervous breakdowns. It was hard to deal with becoming another species every once in a while, not to mention the pain of the transition and possible hazards (such as eating your pets, neighbors, or family).

  Once he thought he could manage it, Roan got up and searched his office for spare clothes. He always kept some here just in case, so he had a clean T-shirt and pair of jeans to pull on. He put his blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag and stashed them in his garbage can. When he was in better shape, he’d come back for them.

  He found a towel and wiped off the blood smears near the light switches, on the door, on his desk. If Fiona came here tomorrow and saw blood everywhere, she just might quit, and he rather liked her. As soon as he was done, he tossed the towel in the garbage can and went back out to his car. His body just throbbed with residual pain, but his head, while still aching, had a strange pill-caused lightness to it as well. Was he safe to drive? Oh, fuck it—it was past the time when the bars were closed. The streets were as close to a graveyard as they ever came.

  Roan made it to the hospital in one piece, but his head felt pumped full of helium, although the residual pain kept him anchored to this world. He stumbled past busy and exhausted night-shift workers who were honestly too wrapped up in their own dramas to notice him. Dylan was no longer in the room he had been in, but he had been moved recently enough that Roan was able to pick up his scent (in spite of the hospital smell of illness, blood, and cleaners that could peel the skin off a person) and follow it to the ICU. Or a place near the ICU. Right now he couldn’t tell, and he didn’t much care.

  Dylan was still out cold, although someone had stitched up the cut on his head and shaved off a tiny strip of hair to do it, throwing his haircut out of all whack. Roan touched Dylan’s head, running his fingers carefully through his hair. “I don’t know how I do it. I always hurt the people I want to protect the most.”

  He found a chair in the tiny room and pulled it over, collapsing in it and grabbing Dylan’s hand, laying his forehead on the edge of the bed. “I wish you could wake up and curse me the fuck out. Call me every name in the book, tell me how I ruined your life, kick me out of here. Just do it. I won’t fight back. Just wake up.”

  He waited for Dylan to respond, to do something, but he slept while the machines kept a steady, uninteresting rhythm. Roan stared at the floor in the dark and wondered how he could have fucked things up so badly.

  “Y-YOU can’t—” the guy who was probably named Harvey said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Holden snapped, pressing down on the knife blade. Harvey shut his mouth so fast there was an audible click as his teeth slammed together. “I’m not interested in a single thing you have to say. You hurt Dylan. You’re fucking trash.” With his other hand, Holden reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, which he flipped open, and punched in a number with his thumb. It was on his speed dial, but it wasn’t a number he called often at all. It was just there as an emergency, something he could use if he absolutely had to.

  After half a dozen rings, it sounded like the receiver was dropped before actually being answered. “Yeah?” the man on the other end slurred. In the background, very faintly, Holden heard the type of dramatic grunting and groaning he associated with porn.

  “Spider, it’s Fox.” He kept his eyes on Harvey, never looked away. Harvey looked like he was contemplating shouting for help, but he weighed it against the knife at his throat and thought better of it.

  “Oh, Fox. What can I do for ya, man?”

  “I have something I need to get rid of, but I don’t want to pay the dump fees. Want to help me haul it out?” It was code. Clumsy code, and yet best when dealing with Spider. Spider was a member of a biker gang. Not a leather-daddy one or a gay one, an overly macho het felonious one, the kind you occasionally saw getting busted by the feds on the evening news. Spider was one of the scariest-looking dudes he had ever met, with the most tattoos of anyone he’d ever encountered, and he was painfully confused about his sexuality. Oh sure, he’d fuck bitches (and he always referred to women as bitches, unless he was calling them cunts), but he really enjoyed fucking guys, and he had a problem dealing with this. It didn’t fit the macho image he’d grown up with and worked so hard to cultivate. So while he hired the occasional male prostitute on the side—only ones he could pay to keep their mouths shut about him—he also worked out his internal conflicts with pool cues, spiked chains, and a pair of .45s. Spider hadn’t been convicted of a felony in this state yet, to his knowledge—but it was a given he would. He often bragged about how he beat a murder rap in Nevada because the chief of police was on the payroll of the drug gang they often ran coke for, but he really did kill the guy. The most disturbing thing about that was that talking about
the killing gave Spider a hard-on.

  Spider was a full-on closet case who became a full-on psycho because he couldn’t deal with his own personal dichotomy. He was also a methhead of a serious variety, usually high or drunk, as he had long ago given up dealing with the world sober. In spite of that, Spider had an inkling they might be falling under the feds’ radar, so he was very careful what he talked about and to whom. And he liked Holden enough that he promised if he ever needed something—like, say, a guy killed—all he had to do was give the word.

  It sounded like Spider took a drink of something before he said, “Sure. Where’re you stayin’ now?”

  “A place off Riverside and 42nd. Got me a lot of cats.” Harvey was staring at him in mute horror, as the code really wasn’t that hard to figure out: he was giving Spider directions to the church.

  “Oh… that place? Okay. We talkin’ somethin’ big here?”

  “Nope. Small potatoes. I call them Harvey.”

  Spider snorted, and the groaning in the background had stopped, indicating he’d turned off the set. Was the snort a sign he’d done a bump? Maybe. He never saw him sober. “’Kay, I’ll be there soon.”

  “Appreciate it.” There were no good-byes; he simply folded the phone shut and slid it back into his pocket. “The man’s a professional. You’ll disappear, and it’ll be like you never existed at all.”

  Harvey made a small noise like a whimper in the back of his throat. “P-please, no. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t beg,” Fox spat at him. “Don’t you have any spine at all? Jesus, you fuckheads who won’t even do your own dirty work make me sick.” He pressed the knife in hard, hard enough that it broke the skin, and a thin rivulet of blood started trickling down his neck. Harvey was struggling very hard not to cry. “Now be quiet and listen, because I’m only making this offer once. If you’re very fast, you might be able to get out of state before Spider finds you. Maybe. But once you’re gone, you’d better stay gone—you feel me? Abandon the church, don’t tell them what happened to you, never ever talk about Roan or even think of Dylan again. Because Spider’s gang runs all up and down the West Coast, from Vancouver to Baja, and one phone call from me is all it takes for a bunch of angry bikers to show up at your door. You bother Roan or anyone near him again, and you’ll be nothing but a dismembered, unidentifiable corpse strewn across the I-5 corridor. Understand?”

  He wanted to nod, but the knife was still cutting into his throat. “I get it,” he whispered harshly, tears squeezing out the corners of his eyes. “I won’t—I’ll leave him alone, I won’t bother him again—”

  “No, you won’t,” Holden agreed, staring him straight in the eye. Working a hunch, he said, “I think I’ll fuck you before you die.”

  There was a flinch, a blossom of fear in Harvey’s eyes—yep, homophobe. They were really fun to mentally fuck with, because they arrogantly assumed every gay man was after their flabby, pale asses. Even if he paid him cash, Holden probably wouldn’t fuck this guy, but how was he to know that? He probably thought sex was all gays thought about, and that they fucked all the time. (Some wished they did, sure, but name a man who didn’t.)

  Holden withdrew the knife from his neck but still held it up so Harvey could see the smear of blood on the blade. “Run. Now.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. Never taking his eyes off him, Harvey grabbed his coat and ran out the door, pretty fast for an out-of-shape guy.

  There—that was his Good Samaritan deed for the month. Roan probably would have felt bad about his death in the morning. Maybe. Well, odds were fifty-fifty.

  Holden strolled through the tiny bungalow and found the bathroom off the small bedroom. He wiped the blood off the blade with toilet paper and flushed the evidence before cleaning off the blade in the sink with antibacterial liquid soap and folding it back up. He could ditch the knife, but not here, not now. When Spider showed up, he could give it to him if he wanted, and he’d be happy to get rid of it or “recycle” it (use it himself). It probably wouldn’t be necessary—a cat cultist, go to the cops? Yeah, right.

  The cops would probably be here by then, and Spider would hang back, unwilling to show his face around the uniforms, but he would loiter long enough to see if Holden was in custody or not. If the gang had no cops on their payroll, they would have people on the inside, inmates, who would help him out if he was stupid enough to get arrested. Spider was a psycho dirtbag in a whole pack of psycho dirtbags, but even they had their place.

  Coming back through the bedroom, he saw a wallet on top of the dresser, along with a scattering of loose change. Holden checked the wallet, saw about forty-five bucks in cash, a debit card, and a couple of credit cards. He pocketed the wallet—no way a guy took off without taking his wallet with him; that’d look suspicious—and figured his Boulevard boys would be eating and drinking good for a couple nights or so.

  At least Harvey’s money would be going to a good cause.

  ROAN was in a half stupor and he knew it. He could see in the dark, through the dim light of the machines, and it looked like the floor was breathing. It was rising up and flattening out in rhythm with Dylan’s breath, and he wondered how many pills he’d had.

  Lifting his head caused the walls to shift around him, like they were on casters, and he wondered briefly if he had fallen into a Terry Gilliam film. He didn’t think so, but if Hunter S. Thompson had ever actually done that many drugs at once, Roan finally knew what he’d felt like.

  “I need to balance this out,” he told the still-unconscious Dylan. “I need caffeine. I’ll be back.” He kissed him softly on his unbruised cheek and felt a surge of anger buried beneath the muffling effects of the drugs. What was Holden doing to Harvey? He hoped it was good.

  It took him a moment to lever himself up to his feet with the help of the bed, and then another moment to get his sea legs. Even then, he felt like he was staggering, and his brain was swimming laps inside his skull. The funny thing was, he could still feel the pain—it still felt like his eyes had been plucked from their sockets and shoved back in with dirty fingers, like he had been pulverized by a sledgehammer and then plumped up with saline until he looked vaguely Human.

  He got out to the corridor, where the lights suddenly seemed too bright, and he had to close his eyes for a moment before opening them slowly, readjusting to the light. While he was doing this, a young male intern in blue scrubs walked into the corridor, and giving him a look out of the corner of his eye while still reading a clipboard, said, “Sir, you shouldn’t be here.” He then stopped suddenly and looked back at Roan with wide-eyed horror. He looked maybe twenty, super young, but he was one of those Asian guys that looked twenty even when they were forty. “Are you all right?”

  Roan wondered how much of his over-intoxication was showing on his face. It must have been a lot, because this guy was staring at him like he was a ghost. “I’m fine, I just need some coffee,” he said, as the hallway seemed to pitch and yaw like a storm-tossed ship. Did he feel a little nauseous? Maybe.

  But it soon became irrelevant, as he couldn’t fight the dark narcotic tide any longer and sank into the soft, warm blackness.

  16

  Subtle Body

  ROAN found himself sloshing through ankle-deep water, not a hundred percent sure where he was. Looking up, he saw he was somewhere off the coast… or at least on a beach of some sort. Although it seemed like there was some hulking shape off in the water, obscured by thick fog, and the coastline was an unfamiliar blend of cement-colored sand and broken rocks as big as satellite dishes. As he waded toward shore, he saw someone sitting on one of the rocks.

  “This is a dream, isn’t it?” Roan asked the figure, as snakes the color of water fled before his advancing footsteps. Drug dream? Oh yeah, big time.

  “Of course it is. What d’ya expect?”

  He froze hearing the voice. He had honestly expected Paris, his usual dream companion, but this voice had an Irish accent. He felt a coldness in his stomach as his gut
twisted, and oily sweat prickled on his back. Oh shit. “Connor?”

  “Not what you were expectin’, right?” Roan could see him now, sitting on top of a boulder with his knees drawn up to his chest, arms around his legs. He looked just like he always did, his shockingly deep-black hair mussed up and making his skin look gothically pale. His eyes were a vivid blue, Caribbean Sea blue, contrasting against the black lines of his eyebrows and the bruise-colored smudges beneath his eyes, speaking quietly of too many late nights and too many binges. He had a pleasant oval face, almost impish, which highlighted his big, startling eyes, and it made Roan’s heart hurt to recall how oddly striking he was.

  Connor never knew it, though. His hair had always had the now-fashionable “bed-head” look because he very rarely combed it; he seemed to think running his hands through his hair was enough. He’d never owned any hair products or cologne, and did all his clothes shopping at thrift stores (in fact, he’d taught Roan which ones were the best ones, and how to look for a good deal); he put to rest the stereotype of the vain gay man. Although maybe he had been the living stereotype of the boho one, the artist who was deliberately shabby when he didn’t need to be. But he hadn’t been pretentious or snobby. He was just a guy who didn’t know the rules and didn’t really care about them, preferring to make them up as he went along. He was always quite fiercely himself, which was why it had been such a rush and such a pain to be with him. Heaven and hell in one pretty package.

  “You just don’t like thinkin’ about me, do ya?”

  “You fucking hurt me, you selfish bastard,” Roan snapped, guilt making his stomach ache. “You didn’t have to kill yourself.”

  Connor shrugged, sliding off the rock and down to the beach. “Sometimes it hurts so much you just don’t know how to deal with it anymore. You gotta know what that’s like.”