Infected: Lesser Evils Page 17

  Holden noticed a look on his face, a sort of desperation, and he decided to use it. He couldn’t be Roan, he couldn’t even be an analogue, but a desperate infected? Yeah, he could play that. He made faces in the mirror until he found one he liked, and then mussed up his hair with a little mousse, trying to mimic the look of someone who hadn’t slept well for days.

  He wondered if now, because his face was all messed up, he’d get a call back, and he smirked at the thought. Unbeknownst to anyone but Rocky, he’d actually auditioned for a part in a low-budget horror flick some people were shooting up in the Cascades. Rocky was a friend of a friend of the casting director, and suggested Holden might be perfect for them. Seems they needed an actor who didn’t mind working for scale and didn’t mind potential nudity. If nudity bothered him, boy was he in the wrong profession.

  Either the world was changing, or being friends with Rocky just meant they were more open than most. They knew he’d done some porn, and didn’t care. Gay porn? Didn’t care, even though he was reading for an ostensibly straight part. He thought the audition had gone extremely well; he made them laugh a couple of times (deliberately), and they said they’d call him back in a week or two. For more auditions, or had he gotten the job? Even Rocky hadn’t been sure, but he said that was a good sign.

  Maybe this, combined with the beating, was some cosmic sign Holden should give up hustling and become an actor. It was just another form of whoring, with slightly less sex. He wondered if anyone in the local theater would hire him—”Hi, I’m in gay porn, and tonight, I will be Iago”—but he actually knew some people in the local theater scene. Hire him for Shakespeare, no, but some angst-ridden, artsy-fartsy modern piece? Probably, yeah, no problem. Now it was time to prove his acting chops in an alternate venue. If he could pass as a desperate infected, he’d consider that a good sign too.

  When he came out, Dylan looked at him with unreadable dark eyes, and said, “You look like you’ve been preparing for a role.”

  “Too phony?”

  “No. I’m just getting that you’re not new to this.”

  “Of course not. All I do is pretend. I probably wouldn’t know the real me if he came up to me in a bar and bought me a drink.” Even as he said that, he thought he might have given too much of himself away, but screw it. He could look at it as throwing Dylan a bone—poor Dylan, who never knew what to make of him.

  You know, Roan did have a point with him. Dylan was the better self, the thing that both he and Roan could never achieve. Poor bastard. How did you end up that way? This was not a world for the better selves; it was not kind. What a terrible burden to live with.

  Dylan was quiet, even after they got back in the car and started driving toward the Church. He was handsome; even his profile was a knockout, with his diamond-cut chin and sleek jaw, now peppered with late-day stubble. Roan did have an eye for beauty, you had to give him that. Finally, at a stoplight, Dylan spoke again. “Don’t you hurt?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You just got out of the hospital, and you still look pretty banged up. How many guys attacked you, anyways?”

  “Two. Armed with clubs and Tasers.”

  Now he stared at him. “Cops? You were beaten by cops?”

  “They had the accoutrement of cops. Doesn’t mean they were. You can’t believe everything you see.” Besides, how much did State Patrol really count as cops? More than a mall cop, sure, but less than a SWAT team member. They were somewhere in that squishy middle.

  Dylan continued giving him a dubious look, but the light changed to green, and he was forced to look ahead. “Did you tell Roan this?”

  “I told him nothing. I didn’t have to. He knows Taser burns when he sees them.”

  “Jesus.” He grimaced as if anguished, and sure he was—Dylan probably hurt for the world—before he shook his head. “Why the hell did they attack you?”

  “Oh darling, that is a long and unpleasant story. Let’s just say I wouldn’t take a beating like a good for-hire piece of meat should. Some men in power don’t like it when you get uppity.”

  “Why do you do this to yourself? You don’t have to sell yourself.”

  “That is debatable. But let’s agree to argue about that later, okay?” Actually, he’d skirted the issue, but he did kind of hurt. His whole face felt like a toothache. He’d been given some painkillers, but very few, and weak; Roan probably had better in his pocket. Holden could have asked, but fuck it, he had an emergency joint at home, and pot was usually a great painkiller. Also, it’d give him his appetite back, which was good. He knew he was hungry, but he’d had a hard time eating. Hospital food, maybe.

  Dylan let it be for the moment, but finally asked, “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “What, fake my way into a drug deal? Easy. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Ah. That’s very kind of you. But I’m always happy to be someone I’m not.” This was true. Was it sad? He wasn’t sure. He had to admit that right now, he didn’t much care.

  The Church was busy tonight, with lights burning in every window and no parking on the street. Holden could hear the thud of repetitive deep bass that usually accompanied club music coming from somewhere nearby. Dylan had to park down the street, in front of a house where no one was apparently home. “Must be one of those infected mixers that drives Roan crazy,” Holden noted, and then, after a moment, added, “You don’t have to go, you know.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Dylan said, taking the keys out of the ignition and putting them in his coat pocket. “These are the people making Roan’s life hell. I want to meet them.”

  Holden just stared at him, impressed by his profile even in the dark. “What did he do to deserve you?”

  Dylan almost scoffed, but it was too weak to be much of anything. “He has a magnetism about him, doesn’t he?”

  “Animal magnetism?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that. But Roan has said something about him having an unstable pheromone load now that he’s out of a viral cycle. He says that could be responsible for anyone being attracted to him ever.”

  “Wow. So, does he hate himself ’cause he’s a lion, or does he hate the Human part of himself more?”

  “I don’t know. How do you tell?”

  “Ask?”

  “And do you think I’d get a straight answer?”

  “Good point.” With a sigh, Holden put his hand on the door handle. “So are you going to be you, or are you going to use an alias?”

  “Just me. You?”

  “Since I doubt Roan used his first name, being that he’s anathema to the Church, I’m just gonna be me.” With a grin, he said, “I’m a lion.”

  “I don’t even know what I am. If they ask, I guess I’m a lion too.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Holden tried to sound optimistic, but Dylan was clearly at the end of his rope. Shit was getting to Roan, but it was getting to Dylan too. Everyone just needed a hug and possibly some quaaludes, but hey, who was he to judge? It wasn’t like he’d ever been in a functional relationship where he wasn’t being paid to be there. It made life uncomplicated, which was nice, but it also made him the last person who should ever give relationship advice, ever.

  They walked to the Church in silence, and Holden took the lead, for no other reason than he was simply the point guard. He was the one trying to pass as an infected in need of burn. Dylan was just… well, he wasn’t sure. Since he was a Buddhist, he probably wasn’t on a mission of vengeance, but who knows? Maybe he was. Just because he was Buddhist didn’t mean he couldn’t snap and lose it. Holden just wished he had a better idea of what he was going to do so he could back his play.

  The Church was all dolled up tonight. There were little white lights framing the windows, and little blue ones overhanging the doorway. It occurred to him they were called “fairy lights” in Britain, and he almost laughed. He was wondering why they were so open, considering their recent troubles, then he noticed the hu
lking figures in the thick shadows. Church security guards, so thick on the fringes they were almost a Human cordon. So it was open within reason, apparently, but there was a brace of rent-a-cops in case something looked really suspect. Holden wondered why he and Dylan weren’t challenged, but after thinking about it a moment, realized an obviously beaten guy and his pretty partner just didn’t seem like the anticat armed fundamentalist types. He bet the mousse he put in his hair helped too; it probably made him look pretty gay, or at the very least, metrosexual.

  Once inside, all was light and throbbing noise, like a dance club, although the noise was leaking from another room. There was a long table, on which there was an assortment of boxed cookies, crackers, some fruit, and some bottles of water. It was a coffee pot away from looking like the spread at an AA meeting. A Stepford robotic blonde woman greeted them with a creepy smile. “Hello, and welcome to the Church of the Divine Transformation.” Her fake smile faltered as she looked at Holden’s face. “Oh my, whatever happened to you?” There was a hulking man in the corner, probably Samoan, trying as unsuccessfully to blend into the wallpaper as his coat was unsuccessful in hiding the weapons stashed underneath. The Church seemed to be prepared for an armed siege.

  Holden decided to play this belligerent. He had a chip on his shoulder now, and he was done with the world. Why else was he here? “What do you think happened? Normals, that’s what.”

  “Oh my god,” she gasped, with some seriousness. “Would you like to talk to one of our counselors?”

  “Thanks, but I’m done with talking to counselors.” Holden walked past, deeper into the house, and Dylan followed.

  Eventually they discovered the ballroom (?) where the main party was taking place, a cavernous room made to seem that much larger by the fact that it was mostly shrouded in darkness, with all the lights isolated spots or bars of neon colors. From what Dylan had told him, he was looking for a guy named Pierce, who was supposedly wearing a pale-blue dress shirt and a dark blazer (dressed, in other words, like a chaperon or a narc). They split up, wandering to different parts of the room, while Holden struggled to recognize the music. It was generic club DJ stuff; it could have been anything. It probably was.

  Holden eventually found his man standing near the northeastern part of the room. He was standing beside a table stocked with bottled water and Vitamin water or one of its equivalents, candy-colored liquid in plastic bottles that probably tasted exactly like they looked. Pierce was an average-looking man in a reasonably expensive-looking blazer. He was one of those guys with such a severe widow’s peak that it looked like an arrow, the rest of his hair thinning around and behind it, making it look like his meager hair could have been painted on. It also made him look like he had more forehead than was advisable for anyone who wasn’t a Star Trek alien. His eyes were small and deep set, their color impossible to guess in this low-level lighting, his mouth wide but fairly thin under a slightly Roman nose that dominated the otherwise weak features of his face. Did he look like a bird? Maybe. Hawkish. That was the only thing he could think of.

  “Pierce?” he asked.

  Surprise flashed through his eyes, making Holden wonder how his bruises looked under the black lights. “You the guy who called earlier?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No. Do I look like a cop?”

  He didn’t answer that. “You wearing a wire?”

  Holden didn’t answer, just lifted up his shirt to reveal his naked stomach, which had a couple of lavender bruises on it as well. “Wanna see my dick?”

  Pierce looked at him sharply. “What?”

  “It’s how hookers weed out the cops. You ask to see their dick, and if they don’t whip it out, odds are they’re a cop.”

  That looked like too much info for Pierce; he seemed slightly nauseated at the prospect. Ah, insecure straight boys, you had to love their squeamishness. Up close, Holden realized he was probably younger than he looked. Thanks to premature balding and a nebbishy build, he looked like he was in his midthirties from a distance, but up close you could tell you were probably about ten years off. The eyes gave it away. “No, I don’t wanna see your dick. How do you know that about hookers?”

  “I know people in all the wrong places,” he said, letting his shirt drop. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the complete truth.

  Pierce looked a little stunned by this. A drug lord he wasn’t. He was new at this whole thing, wasn’t he? And yet didn’t he have the Church locked up, saleswise? Hmm. Either this guy was a stringer, not the head honcho after all, or he was the head honcho only because of nepotism: he knew someone here, he was a favorite of someone here, and that was enough. How was he going to find out which?

  “Gonna hook a brother up or not?” Holden asked, trying not to laugh at his use of the word “brother.” Honestly, it should be illegal for a white person to use that term in a nonironic manner, but he was playing the type who would say something like that and never see the irony in it.

  Pierce—or whoever he was—seemed reluctant, but said, “Follow me.” He left the ballroom via a small door that was really hard to spot in the gloom, and Holden followed.

  The door led to a narrow corridor, and Holden was sure it had some type of architectural name, but he couldn’t place it. Was it a servant’s access or something? “How much is a hit? And how do I take this stuff? Snort it, shoot it, smoke it, what?”

  The guy paused, giving him a look that suggested he didn’t think he was quite for real. “You can take it lots of ways, but I got the liquid stuff.”

  “Great. Like GHB?”

  The guy reached in his blazer, and pulled out what looked an Altoids tin. Inside were a few small glass vials of clear liquid. “Thirty-five,” he said. Thirty-five dollars? Not too bad. Maybe that was another reason so many infecteds took it. Holden pulled out a wrinkled twenty, ten, and five, and was careful to ball it up in his fist before handing it to Pierce (he was just going to think of him as Hawkeye, because there was no way he was Pierce), so money changed hands in a way not visible to any invisible observer. (But they were alone in the hall, so who were they trying to impress?) After taking the money surreptitiously, he gave Holden one of the vials and put the tin back in his pocket.

  “What’s it taste like?”

  Hawkeye scowled, his thick brows meeting in a V over his nose. “I dunno. I don’t think it has a taste.”

  “You’ve never tried it?”

  “Yeah, but in juice. I didn’t taste it.”

  Wrong. He’d never done it. He wasn’t a great liar, was he? Holden popped the cap off the vial and took a sniff, but smelled almost nothing besides a slight chemical odor. He wondered what Roan would think of this—would this blow his head off? Would he flinch like he sometimes did at smells that almost no one else noticed? He swigged the vial, and he could feel his mouth going numb, the drug spreading like ice through his bloodstream.

  Holden smiled at Hawkeye, who was still too uncomfortably close to him in the narrow hallway, and grabbed him by the thinning hairs on the back of his head and kissed him, forcing his tongue between his lips and letting the drugs run from his mouth to Hawkeye’s.

  He tried to push him away, but Holden had a firm grip on his hair and had pinned him up against the wall, and the guy was no heavyweight anyways. To keep him quiet and confused as the drugs kicked in, he very gently fondled his balls. Even if the guy was straight—and his hair seemed to indicate that—there were simple biological responses that couldn’t be suppressed. That was the wonderful thing about men: they were so simple.

  When Hawkeye sagged a bit under the weight of the burn, and he started getting obviously turned on, Holden broke away from him with a smile. “Wow, yeah, this shit is fantastic.” It was. He’d hardly done any at all, but his face no longer felt like one overwhelming bruise; he felt great.

  Poor Hawkeye was desperately confused, his eyes glazing over with drugs, but he remembered to at least seem to be indignant. “Why
the hell did you do that?”

  “Bobby told me it was like Ecstasy—you didn’t wanna do it alone.” Almost everybody knew a Bobby or a Mike; these were good names to use to just muck up the issue. Holden then leaned in, cradling his balls again, and whispered in his ear, “Why don’t we find someplace private, huh? Have our own party.”

  “I’m not gay.” Weird how his voice broke when he said it. He was half turned on and half scared, and all stoned. Hard to think straight in those circumstances, pun very much intended.

  “I’ve been told I could suck a bowling ball through a straw. Wanna find out?” About as subtle as a six-foot dildo. But the thing was, gay, straight, or other, no man could resist the lure of a blow job. Well, okay, he bet Roan and Dylan, holier than thou guys that they were, probably could under certain circumstances, but not all the time.

  After a very long moment, where he listened to the guy breathe, Hawkeye finally said, “There are rooms upstairs.”

  “Awesome. Lead the way.”

  He let Hawkeye take the lead, and glanced at his wallet, which Holden had liberated from his blazer pocket. Not that he noticed; when your balls were getting a good cuddle, you never noticed anything else.

  The hall lead out to a larger hallway, and there was a staircase that lead to the upper floors of the main house. Hawkeye knew the place well enough that he had been here a lot, clearly, but was he an infected? For some reason, Holden doubted it.

  Hawkeye found a small, unoccupied bedroom, and he was really tripping balls now. He was giggling in a truly disturbing schoolgirl sort of way, and said, “You can’t tell anybody I did this.”

  “Did what? What do you wanna do?” Holden asked, mock seductively, and bodily pushed him down onto the bed, straddling him as Hawkeye now laughed more hysterically.