Infected: Lesser Evils Read online

  He was kind of hoping Dylan would be asleep when he got home, but he wasn’t. He was sitting on the couch, working on his sketchpad, and when Roan came in the door, he started to ask him how things went, but stopped when he looked at his face. “Oh god, what went wrong?”

  He felt so tired, so terrible and almost feverish, that he had no will to even lie. He told Dylan what had happened, and admitted that he was getting less Human as time went on, that he was becoming unrecognizable even to himself. His hand was hurting but he ignored it—the Vicodin probably helped there—but it was starting to swell and Dylan saw that. He got him an ice pack and wanted to take him to the emergency room, but Roan informed him he never needed to see a doctor for a broken bone—he could just force a change, and his bones would heal right up. That’s what they did when he transformed: they broke themselves and then reset in another configuration. He was the Amazing Bone-Snapping Man, and he could do it at will. He even had extra tendons. Rosenberg had told him that last bit; the scans revealed tendons that had never been seen in a Human body before, and no one was sure what to make of them. Even she wasn’t sure what their function was, except perhaps they were the “backup”—when he transformed, his tendons and muscles tore too, and healed, but the spare tendons simply stretched and didn’t tear, so they were ready to go when he transformed from Human to lion, no healing time necessary. More of his body’s adaptation to the new regime.

  Dylan held him and kissed him, and that’s when he noticed. “Are you running a fever?”

  “My body temperature goes up with a change. That and my blood pressure.”

  “But you didn’t change.”

  “I did, but I didn’t.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Tell me about it.” He felt tired and a bit dizzy, so Dylan led him upstairs and tucked him into bed, and whispered words of comfort to him that he appreciated without actually listening to what was being said. Roan didn’t actually care what he was saying anyways, it didn’t matter.

  Things weren’t all right, and they wouldn’t ever be all right.

  DYLAN held Roan until he was sure he had fallen asleep, wondering if now that he’d admitted the truth he’d sleep any better.

  Ever since coming back from Willow Creek, Roan had slept really poorly, although he probably didn’t know Dylan knew that. He probably thought he was being crafty, sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to read or work on the heavy bag in his office. Sometimes Dylan heard him, or just woke up to find himself alone, although a quick check would confirm that Roan was downstairs.

  Some people worried that their partner or spouse was cheating on them. Him, he worried his was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  He quietly crept out of the bedroom, heading back downstairs to retrieve his sketchpad. He’d been making some sketches for Jade, Roan’s infected tattoo artist friend, as she was willing to pay him for his designs, and he figured why the hell not. Art was art, whether it was on a wall or on your arm.

  He checked the time, and figured it wasn’t necessarily too late, so he called Dee. Although he sounded slightly rushed when he answered his cell, Dee didn’t tell him he was busy. Dylan asked if he knew what had happened with Roan tonight, but it was a stupid question, because of course he did.

  Dee confirmed that the X-rays seemed to indicate a blow to the side of the head was responsible for the guy’s skull fracture; it wasn’t impact with the ground. But since few people could punch that hard, there seemed to be a general consensus of freak accident that Dee was doing his best to encourage. The one bright spot here was the guy was probably going to live.

  “How’s he doing?” Dee asked, referring to Roan.

  “Honestly? Horribly. He’s pretending he’s not falling apart, but he’s unraveling, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “You know, I don’t get that. If someone told me I was better than Human, I’d get me a nifty spandex outfit and a publicist.”

  Dylan sighed irritably. Dee was just trying to be funny, but there was a kernel of truth in there as well. “He’s been different all his life. He wants to be less different, not more, but every time he turns around he’s getting more different. I think he feels he’s getting farther and farther away from the Human, and yes, while that sounds like a marvelous idea, it isn’t to Roan. The thought of it is killing him.”

  Dee sighed. “Oh, the big drama queen.”

  “You know, I appreciate you trying to be funny, but not right now. He’s barely hanging on. You should have seen his face when he came home tonight.”

  “What, he looked like he killed someone?”

  “Worse. He looked like he had given up. And the way he talked—” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes, unaware he was tearing up until he could feel the drops running from his eyelids. “Fuck. I want to help him, but I don’t know how.”

  “Give him pills.”

  “Would you stop? I’m serious.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Stop. Okay, look, he won’t talk to a therapist, will he?”

  “No. He’ll barely talk to me. Why, I don’t know. No, I do, but I’m pretending I don’t.” Because Dylan had freaked out and almost left him after seeing him partially transformed. But it wasn’t that, not really; he knew from the beginning that Roan wasn’t your average person. It was just the idea that he wasn’t telling him anything, that he was keeping him out of his life completely. At first he thought it was because he really didn’t love him—Roan didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t love Dylan. Eventually he decided the problem was Roan himself: he was scared of what he was becoming, of what was happening to him, and had decided the best way to handle it was to completely deny it. It wasn’t an ideal way of handling anything, but he had this sinking feeling Roan was tired of being who he was. He wasn’t stupid enough to commit suicide… maybe. Dylan no longer knew. He just knew Roan was tired of being a “freak” (Roan’s term), and there was no fixing that.

  Dee sighed. “Then you know what you have to do.”

  He did, and he didn’t like it. “Talk to Doctor Rosenberg.”

  “She gets through to him where others fail. He won’t like it, but what does he like nowadays? Call her.”

  “He’ll hate me.”

  “He won’t. He might be angry, but not for long.”

  He knew Dee was right, but it felt like a kind of betrayal to go behind Roan’s back and talk to his doctor. Still, she was a formidable person, and Roan was at his best when he faced off with someone equal to or stronger than him. She would kick his ass, and he probably needed it.

  But it was too late to call tonight. After getting off the phone, he wandered back upstairs and watched Roan sleep for a few minutes, wondering if that twitch in his hand meant anything, if it was at all related to the movement behind his eyelids.

  Lately, Roan had taken to occasionally growling in his sleep, a deep, throaty rumble that had scared him awake the first time he heard it. Dylan had thought maybe an angry wolf had somehow found a way into their bedroom, although why he’d thought that first he had no idea. A sleeping mind was a strange thing.

  And a sleeping lion’s mind was probably stranger than most.

  A SUDDEN feeling of impending attack woke Roan up.

  It was stupid of course, insane, and he knew it the minute he opened his eyes and sat up. Some lingering dream fear, a nightmare already forgotten.

  Who got woken up by feelings? That was just stupid.

  It was early morning, full of drizzle and birdsong, and Dylan was sleeping so peacefully Roan didn’t want to wake him up. So he used the downstairs bathroom to shower, shave, and check his pill stash. He briefly wondered what would happen if he took all his Percocets and Vicodins at once—would it kill him? No, how could it? Elephant tranqs didn’t kill him. It wouldn’t be fair to Dylan anyways.

  Roan had a piece of toast, gulped down a couple Vicodin with his morning orange juice, and set out for the
office. Since he was so early, he stopped by a doughnut shop and picked up a few to bribe Fiona with, as well as give the office a pleasant smell. It smelled kind of dusty and stale, since he so rarely opened the office nowadays; he was getting to the point where he was thinking he should close it up. He didn’t want to sack Fi, though, and he hated to let the space go since he had so many memories of Paris here. Sometimes, on days like these, he expected to unlock the door and see Paris sitting behind the desk, giving him a smartass grin, and he was always so disappointed to find him gone.

  He put the doughnuts on Fi’s desk and got down to the paperwork he’d been putting off, half expecting Seb to show up with his temporary new partner and ask him about last night. It never happened.

  His mind wandered, and he typed out an e-mail to Dylan, in preparation for the day when he transformed into a lion and didn’t turn back. He may have told him about the secondary tendons last night, but he hadn’t told him about how his aorta walls had thickened, not in a heart disease way but a puzzling way, one that Rosenberg deduced was to shore them up, keep them from spontaneously rupturing when his blood pressure skyrocketed during a change. He hadn’t told him about the fact that it looked like he now had cartilage in his jaw, presumably to help the shift; that he had two teeth that had apparently, at some point, grown back (one had been pulled as a child; the other had been knocked out in a fight), and they were a different density than the other teeth in his mouth. (Why was a bit of a puzzler, but Rosenberg figured they were constants, the same in Human and lion form.) He had what initially looked like bone spurs in his hands and wrists, but what she figured were extra bone and cartilage that became his claws in lion form. Almost all his joints were oddly shaped internally now (luckily you couldn’t really see it on the outside), for what she figured was flexibility. The muscle density in his legs and arms had changed, and she assumed that’s what gave him his astounding long jump and occasional superstrength. There was more, something about his blood vessels changing shape, something about him requiring more protein and iron, but at that point he was too overwhelmed to pay much attention. He kept seeing his X-rays on the light screen, with their weird, almost ghostly bones buried within the normal bones of his hands. Internally, he was transforming—how long until it moved to the outside? How long did he have until he stopped looking like a human being? What would he do then? All he knew was he’d kill himself before he ended up in a fucking zoo, or vivisected in some doctor’s lab. Even Rosenberg looked at him in a strangely avaricious way, like she couldn’t wait to show off his abnormalities to the medical community and make her bones as the greatest infected researcher of all time. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but he didn’t know what to think or feel anymore.

  She said the virus was accelerating; she said it was altering more of his genes, and she couldn’t say why. She said it might be part of its life cycle, it’s just that no infected had lived long enough to experience this kind of acceleration. “Maybe the end result of the virus is—or is supposed to be—total transformation.”

  Now he remembered. He’d dreamed those words this morning; they had woken him up. He noticed his hands were shaking and he saved a draft, stopped typing, and took another Vicodin. Eventually, the shaking stopped. It occurred to him he had no memory of forcing a change to fix the bone in his hand, but it no longer felt broken.

  Fi came in, and they both enjoyed a doughnut while he told her about the resolution of the Rubin case. She didn’t think he should feel bad about breaking his skull since he was a wife-beating bastard, but he didn’t tell her that wasn’t really what he felt bad about. He was terrified that he could no longer control anything—his own strength, his own musculature, the change. He was losing control in increments. One of these days, he wouldn’t have any left at all.

  He was about to tell her he was going to close up shop early today, he was in no mood to work, when the door opened and two infecteds walked in. He could smell them before they were all the way through—one lion, one leopard.

  One was average height, a bit pudgy, with a figure like a salt shaker, his overly moussed brown hair helmet acting as the round top. He wore dark slacks with a navy blue sports coat that didn’t quite match but was probably supposed to, paired with a pale pink button-down shirt he left open at the collar, like they’d all just time traveled to the seventies. Except for his anchorman hair, he was unremarkable, a whey-faced schlub who wore an expression like he thought he was pretty damn cool, suggesting a level of self-delusion that was awe inspiring. The man behind him wore a matching black suit, like a funeral director, and was nearly an entire foot taller, his body as long and lean as a surfboard, his thinning hair shaved down to a few translucent wisps. He wore black sunglasses and a matching black skinny tie, like an old member of a ska band who refused to change with the times. He was supposed to be muscle, and maybe he was; he could have had wiry, lanky strength, but Roan couldn’t fear a leopard on his worst day. Or any other infected for that matter. Maybe a tiger strain. They smelled more like annoyance than trouble. Salt-shaker man held out his hand and pasted on a creepy smile that didn’t quite reach his incurious brown eyes. “Roan McKichan, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  Roan deliberately looked down at his hand like he didn’t know what it was, and then looked at him with the faintest of scowls. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man didn’t let it faze him. He lowered his hand like he’d never offered it and said, “I’m David Bolt.” He said it like Roan was supposed to know it. He didn’t, but he took a wild guess.

  “You the new nacho grande over at the Church?”

  He smirked. “That’s an amusing way to put it. I was told you were funny.”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  “Now there’s no need to be hostile—”

  “There’s every need. Get the fuck out.”

  The muscle took a step toward him, and Roan took a step toward him in return, glaring at the lenses of his sunglasses, which he was tempted to slap off his long horsey face. He would be damned if he’d ever be intimidated in his own office. “You wanna try something, Lurch? Really?”

  “Hey, now, I didn’t come to fight,” Bolt claimed, waving his hands ineffectually. What was he trying to do, flag down a cab? “I have a proposition for you, Mr. McKichan.”

  “And I got one for you. There’s the door—use it.”

  Bolt seemed to be deliberately ignoring him. “I know your history with the Church has been a bad one, but we’d like to make amends.”

  “By catching the first bus outta town?”

  Bolt almost smirked, but stopped himself when he heard the growl coming from the base of Roan’s throat. He couldn’t stop it, and he didn’t even try. Bolt pressed on, although now nervousness was evident, a smell like kelp going bad. “No. Things have been in disarray since Elijah died, and the tragic shooting only brought home the fact that we must be a united front against the prejudice faced by our people. We need a leader who can unite us, take us into battle against the normals who would kill us all.”

  “You starting a jihad?”

  “Hardly. We just need you.”

  Roan wasn’t sure he heard him correctly over his own growling. “What?”

  “We need you to lead us, Roan,” Bolt said, and he was dead serious.

  It was a good thing he was completely medicated, otherwise he might have dropped dead from shock.

  3

  Camera Shy

  IF THIS jackass wasn’t yanking his chain—and it really seemed like he wasn’t—then the world had gone from simply insane to bugfuck insane. “You are aware I loathe everything you stand for?”

  “I’m aware there’s been a problem in communication,” Bolt replied blandly.

  “Are you also aware I’m an atheist?”

  “Our Church is open to all of our infected brethren, no matter their belief system. Or lack thereof.”

  Roan shook his head. He knew he was incredibly drugged up, so he looked at Fiona, who seemed
just as startled as he was, and asked, “Is this actually happening, or am I hallucinating?”

  “If you’re hallucinating, so am I,” she replied.

  Okay, that settled that. “I’ll give you credit for thinking outside the box, but you’re out of your fucking mind,” he told Bolt.

  Bolt shook his head, but Roan could read nothing in his expression. “Am I? You are respected in the infected community, feared by some, and even some of the normals know who you are. It can be argued you’re one of the most famous infecteds existing today.”

  “Famous?”

  “On a regional level.”

  “Umm, no. But thanks for playing.”

  Bolt shook his head. “Are you actually playing dumb?”

  “You’re blowing sunshine up my ass and I have no idea why. Flattery doesn’t work even for guys trying to get into my pants.” He was hoping the reminder of his extremely gay lifestyle would make Bolt hesitate, and there was an obvious blanching, but it only threw Bolt off his spiel for a moment.

  “I’m not sure it’s flattery. Yelling your name in a crowded police station will get you some dirty looks.”

  “Yeah, but that’s probably not related to my infected status.”

  “You garner a certain respect few other infecteds can claim.”

  “If hostility can be interpreted as respect, I’ll give you that.”

  He shook his head again, impatience finally showing. “You’re not going to take this seriously, are you?”

  “Look, I give you lots of credit for balls, but there’s just no way in hell I’m joining your Church.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Are you seriously asking that? Where do I start? How about your predilection for suckering in Goth kids and other awkward teens and getting them infected?”

  He spread his hands out as if offering something. “If you don’t like something, change it. We understand this is a two-way street.”

  Actually, that was a tempting offer, and he might have even taken Bolt up on it if he thought he was at all serious. “What if I told you the only thing that would make me happy would be me killing the whole lot of you and burning your Church to cinders?”