Infected: Freefall (17 page)

“What are you gonna do? Man, don’t do anything rash….” Shep reached out and touched Roan’s arm, but he didn’t grab him, as he knew that wouldn’t end well.

Roan spun around so fast that Shep jumped back, afraid there might be a fist coming his way. There wasn’t, but he kind of wished there had been. “Stay out of this,” he snarled, his growl never ceasing even as he spoke. The words were syllables lost in the rumble. And—

—holy shit.

Shep just stood there, gaping, as Roan stalked out of the hospital, everyone scrambling to get out of his way. Had he actually seen that?

He must have. Roan’s eyes had changed. In one moment he’d gone from having Human eyes to having cat’s eyes. It had even looked like his canine teeth were longer, thicker: fangs. But that couldn’t be true.

Infecteds changed differently, depending on the viral type, but some things remained pretty constant. For instance, the eyes usually were the first thing to change, but it wasn’t instantaneous. Like most of the transformation, it occurred in stages, and while it was quicker than the bones breaking and restructuring themselves, it still took about ten minutes for the pupils to change shape, for the irises to bloat and the cornea to alter. Usually one eye changed before the other, although pieces of both could alter more or less in synch. And like everything about transformation, it hurt like fuck.

But just like that, Roan’s eyes had altered. One moment he was talking to a Human being, and then next he was looking into the eyes of an overgrown predator who still retained a Human ability to hate. Pupils had gone from circles to ovals, and his irises seemed too big, his eyes too glazed and yet too sharp. The Human was falling away, being shed like an old skin.

Virus children were different; Shep knew that. He remembered, during one of his classes on the “special needs of infected individuals,” his professor admitted that virus children were pretty much terra incognita, as most were born so damaged and died so young it was impossible to say both how and why they were so different than post-utero infectees. His opinion was that if the fetus was able to survive the total integration of the viral strands into their DNA, then they were in essence a different species: neither Human nor Human infected, but something other. It was a controversial stance to be sure, and some suggested crazy as well as racist (specist), but in his favor, it couldn’t be proven or disproven. It was a hypothesis in a vacuum, because there weren’t enough surviving viral children to say. Roan was actually one of three Shep had encountered, in total, in his life, and the only one not in an incubator or developmentally disabled. He was the only one he’d ever actually had a conversation with and the only one not visibly deformed.

He felt like calling Professor Bell and telling him he had found his example. He had found a virus child that just might fit in the “other” category. Was that a good thing, really?

An orderly he vaguely knew, a big Samoan guy everyone called “Bean” (he had no idea why and never asked, mainly because he didn’t want to look like an idiot), came up to him and asked, “What the fuck was that guy’s problem?”

“Someone attacked his boyfriend,” he reported numbly, amazed at how those words didn’t even begin to cover what had happened here.

He had to do something. Whether Roan transformed fully and was caught out unrestrained or Roan found who he was looking for first, Shep was convinced that somebody was going to die tonight.

13

Corporeal

I
T
WAS
scary how easy it was to sneak into hospitals.

Really, in spite of all the security it ostensibly had, if you knew the right people or simply said the right things, you could go wherever you wanted. Holden considered telling someone, but right now this was helping his cause, so fuck that noise. It was way too late for visiting hours, but ever since finishing up with “Doug,” his pilot client, he’d been sitting beside Ponyboy’s bed, reading aloud to him from the book-review section of
Entertainment Weekly
.

Doug had been oddly subdued this evening. He’d only called him six hours ago and asked Holden to meet him at his hotel, as Doug had ended up filling in for a sick pilot at the last minute, and he had a nine-hour layover here. Doug hadn’t been in much of a mood to be beaten tonight. He seemed content to simply be trussed up and thrown facedown on an ugly hotel bed. It gave Holden a lot of time to flip through the TV channels, order from room service, and think.

He knew he shouldn’t feel guilty about Ponyboy’s beating. He was no longer on the street, he was no longer the “den mother” looking out for anyone but himself. And wasn’t that a relief? Wasn’t that the greatest of weights off his shoulders? More so than eating regularly, more so than actually having a regular, warm place all his own to sleep—he didn’t have to look out for anyone else anymore. He was free! So why did he still feel so fucking bad about it all? Because he got out and so many of “his” boys didn’t? Didn’t Chris always tell him that? He would be getting out, it was only a matter of time, and it was generally accepted that most of them would fade away or die like Cheshire, in a crack house with a dirty needle in their arm. Street kid didn’t lead to much of a future, especially if you threw “hustler” into the mix.

He didn’t know Ponyboy that well at all. He knew him a bit through Cowboy and Newt, both of whom felt protective toward the kid, and he wasn’t sure Ponyboy knew him beyond his legend. But he’d taken Cowboy away from him—he was still in that rehab center upstate, the one that catered to gays—and Holden had no fucking clue where Newt was. Newt went on benders and got lost for days at a time. Once he had called him from a drunk tank in Tijuana after having been missing for eight days, and Newt couldn’t actually remember what he’d been doing for the past seven days. He had a tattoo of a donkey on his ass, though. He thought that was a clue, although an extraordinarily unhelpful one. Some people still called Newt “Donkeyboy.”

It was probably a good thing Newt wasn’t here, as Holden was pretty sure he’d punch his stupid ass. Christ, he had HIV (infected most likely during one of his infamous benders) and had to take care of himself. He had a whole buttload of meds the community outreach workers tried to keep him on, but if you were losing days in drunken and otherwise intoxicated hazes, you weren’t taking care of yourself. The last time Holden had seen him, he’d looked like shit. He’d lost about fifty pounds and looked like Christian Bale in
The Machinist
, and he had a mark on the side of his neck that he said was a bruise, but Holden thought it looked more like a carcinoma. It did occur to him that Newt could be dead; he could be a “John Doe” in the morgue in the basement. He had been considering checking it out, but how did you just go to the morgue and say,
“Show me all your John Does, I may know one?”

Guilt kept him at Ponyboy’s bedside, even though it was nearing three in the morning, even though Ponyboy had yet to wake up. He’d been comatose since his beating, and yes, Holden felt a bit responsible for that. He should have done a better job kicking their asses, he should have gotten to the scene faster… oh fuck, he just should have called Roan immediately. He had just stepped in and taken the rednecks out of the fight in under a minute. Some jobs you just had to leave to professionals.

And Holden was losing his touch. He was getting slower, softer, indulging in something so close to a “normal” life that some of the transvestite hookers he knew now looked at him with the same scorn they usually reserved for their johns. Like they knew Holden deliberately kept his refrigerator half empty so he wouldn’t sit down at the end of the day and eat everything. Like food on a regular basis had become such a novelty that now that he could afford to have it, he wanted it all the time. Food had taken the place of sex for him, which was really just a job. Food was his sensual obsession, if he thought about it, and he was trying to keep from indulging even the most minor bit of it, for fear that if he did he’d become as fat as Marlon Brando at the end of his life. And maybe he could pretend he wasn’t some sad bastard who felt a little empty and needed to fill himself up with something to make it go away. He wasn’t some pathetic cliché. Yeah, okay, his head probably wasn’t in its right space, but he wasn’t sure it ever could be. He was the son of a preacher man, and you just didn’t recover from a crippling trauma like that.

He’d brought the magazine from home, mainly because the hospital’s most recent magazines seemed to date from 1992, and was reading the book reviews because he thought it might piss Ponyboy off enough to wake him up. Ponyboy, like most of his generation that Holden had ever met, was not big on reading.

He was cheerfully laying out the plot of a book about multiple generations of an Indian family and the rebellious daughter whose spiritual journey makes her reflect on her ancestors before deciding to just settle for the arranged marriage anyways when the door to Ponyboy’s room flew open. He was expecting the nurse who had attempted to chase him out an hour ago (he’d pretended to acquiesce and leave, hid in a bathroom for ten minutes, and then snuck back to Ponyboy’s room. Oh sure, an orderly saw him, but it was one he had flirted with, so it was cool with him), but it wasn’t Nurse Ratched. It was a not-too-bad-looking natural blond in a paramedic’s jacket, looking slightly wild-eyed, giving off the faintest scent of flop sweat. “You’re Fox, right?” the guy asked, with a hint of a Southern drawl. “One of Roan’s friends?”

That made Holden cock his head at him curiously. He knew Roan had an ex who was a paramedic, and as some bizarre extension of that, he seemed to know a lot of paramedics. Or at least they seemed to know him, which was a crucial distinction. “I’m not sure he’d classify me that way, but I like to think I am. Why?”

The paramedic took a deep breath and swiped limp strands of dirty-blond hair off his forehead. He wouldn’t kick him out of bed, but whoa, wasn’t he a touch panicky? Holden didn’t care for the highly strung; they were always high maintenance. “Do ya think if he got really upset, you could… talk him down?”

It was the faintest tremble in his voice, the wild-eyed look in his eye, the smell of his sweat. Holden shut the magazine and put it on top of Ponyboy’s monitor as he stood, suddenly sure what had freaked the med tech out. “Did he lion out?”

He scoffed, a startled bark of laughter that quickly died in his throat. “Is that what you call it? He’s done it before?”

“When he’s very upset, yes. What happened?” Holden had a sudden mental picture of Roan rampaging through the hospital halls like Michael Myers in a
Halloween
film. But if that was true, there’d have been more screaming.

“Someone attacked Dylan outside of Panic—”

“What?” Dylan—the real name of his bartender boyfriend? Sounded like it.

“—and Roan said the attacker was infected ’cause he smelled his blood on Dylan, and then he just stormed outta here growling like a fucking pit bull, and his eyes just went….”

“Do you know where he’s headed?” This was worse than bad—whatever dickwad idiot had attacked Roan’s lover was asking to get their head ripped off and their throat pissed down while everyone looked on in horror. And that was the best-case scenario. Even
he
knew you could fuck with Roan all you wanted, but you didn’t move on to his loved ones. Roan had a thing about that.

The paramedic shook his head and shrugged at the same time, a picture of desperation. He was probably as cool as an iced cucumber when it came to sucking chest wounds and emergency tracheotomies, but a guy starting to transform into a lion in front of him, without the requisite pain and misery, made him as nervous as a virgin in a room full of chicken hawks. It was kind of cute.

“I dunno. My guess is the church.”

“Divine Transformation?” Holden rolled his eyes and shook his head. When were people going to understand that religion—whether it was widely accepted or considered a “fringe”—was just an excuse to cause misery for other people? “Oh fuck. He’ll tear them to pieces.”

“Can you stop him?”

“I can try.” In all honesty, he was a bit more eager to help him tear through them like a hurricane of razor blades, but Roan didn’t deserve going to prison for it. You’d think there was some way to get him a medal for it instead.

R
OAN
’
S
ability to perceive time seemed to go in and out, or maybe it was just his mind. Either way, trying to hold back the lion—or his rage, whatever you wanted to call it—was such a full-time job that he lost track of everything else. One moment he was fighting to drive, keep on the road (it was harder than he’d anticipated), and the next he was prowling the grounds of the church.

His sense of smell had sharpened as his mental awareness retreated, and the night was full of colors that cut through his sinus passages like broken glass. People here, more earlier but not as many now… eleven distinct heartbeats in the main house, scent trails still present in the wind adding up to hundreds, although not all necessarily from around here, not all Human. Trying to think coherently was beyond his abilities right now, and reality continued to fragment, spider-web cracks becoming fissures at the edges of his vision, breaking the night into puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit together. He hurt, his head throbbed like an open wound, but it made his anger clearer, sharper. He found Harvey’s scent trail and followed it onto the back grounds, where shapes rose up in the dark. Through these eyes, the night sky looked like an odd color of blue, the color of the sea instead of the night. Maybe he was underwater; maybe that explained everything.

Harvey’s scent was a neon stripe that led to one of the small houses looming on the back lot, making him briefly wonder if he had been exiled here or chose to be away from the main house. But the thought squirmed from his grasp like an eel, and then his attention was caught by nearing heartbeats, stronger scents. Guards?

Definitely men, one of whom had a sparking Taser, but Roan had no problem grabbing his arm and making it snap, the bone bursting through the flesh as he twisted the arm in and had the man Taser himself, the scent of blood and singed flesh like charcoal on his tongue. The other guard ran, and Roan considered pursuit. He’d be so easy to catch; he was slow, weak, and like all Humans, easy to break. But he was not Roan’s target. His target was hiding behind walls and shadows, hiding ahead of him, unaware of what was going on outside.