Infected: Freefall (23 page)

“Under normal circumstances? What qualifies as normal?”

“Not furious.”

That made Gordo sit back on the stool, as if the response surprised him. “You’re the Hulk now? We wouldn’t like you when you’re angry?” He suddenly looked toward the front door and said, “Hey, yeah. You punched out a deadbolt when you thought Henstridge had killed Paris. I’ve never seen anyone punch out a deadbolt without tools. Wow, how’d I forget that?”

Roan had forgotten that too, and turned away so he could wince out of Gordo’s view. He went to the fridge and pretended to be looking for something to eat, just so he had a reason to turn away. “It was a long time ago.” How had he forgotten that? That had been a partial transformation, a use of his warping muscles that was, in retrospect, extreme. He couldn’t even remember his hand hurting after that.

Gordo scoffed. “Doesn’t matter. I haven’t forgotten the rest of it. You don’t forget seeing a man whose throat has been ripped out in one solid piece by a tiger. That was.…” He petered out for a moment and grunted softly. “No offense to Paris, but I’m glad there aren’t many tiger strains. I think the Human race would be doomed.”

“We’ll kill ourselves off before any animal has the privilege.” Roan saw the containers of Indian food he had gotten and saved for Dylan, and his stomach twinged. Well, he could have them when he got back from the hospital. He saw a pear and grabbed it, figuring this was a good enough foodstuff to pass.

Gordo shrugged a single shoulder as Roan turned back to face him. “Probably. We Humans are good at that.” He slid off the stool and pointed at Roan, like he was picking him out of a lineup. “Keep doing this kinda shit, and everyone will know. Not only will we be unable to hide it, but people will put the clues together. I don’t even wanna imagine that media circus. Just… tone it down. And no matter what you do, stay the fuck away from those cultists. You getting in trouble or getting infamous will be just what they want.” He then gave him a small salute on his way out the door.

Roan collapsed on his couch and wondered what he was going to do about himself. Gordo was right—if he kept displaying these abilities in public, it wouldn’t be good for him. He could imagine doctors lining up for the privilege of gawking at and poking the freak, keeping him in medical quarantine “for his own good,” but really just so they could dissect him and figure out how the virus had mutated in him, become something as helpful as it was harmful. If he was religious, he could call himself blessed or damned, and both would be equally applicable.

Shit. As soon as Dylan was well enough, they were definitely going on vacation and getting the fuck away from here for a while. He really needed to get his shit together.

When Roan had conquered his lethargy, he turned on the stereo and cranked These Arms Are Snakes as he forced himself to do what he had to do to keep his mind off the pills. He did laundry, he did paperwork until he thought the boredom was going to kill him, and then, even though he felt unusually tired, he went into his study and worked the heavy bag, not letting himself get too carried away. He focused on the rhythm of his fists hitting the bag, trying not to put too much behind the punches (because if his muscles took this as an invitation to warp, he might break the goddamn chain), and threw in a few side and snap kicks for variety, so he didn’t fall too completely into a somnambulant pattern.

He finally stopped when he was forced to pant for breath, the sweat dripping off his forehead as he bent down and put his hands on his knees. He caught his breath in increments and watched sweat beads fall and plop onto the dark carpet, where they were quickly absorbed. His muscles felt stretched, had the post-workout burn, but he hadn’t taken anything too far, hadn’t partially changed, so that was good. Sometimes small victories were all you had.

Roan had no idea how long his phone had been ringing when he finally heard it. He just barely picked up the receiver before the machine kicked in and had to tell the person on the other end to wait a moment as he muted the stereo. “Yeah, sorry.”

“This has been one bizarre day,” Murphy said, sounding grim.

“They find something at the Chesney house?”

“I have no idea. The Sherriff hasn’t called me yet. No, this is about your client, Holly Faraday.”

It actually took him a moment. So much had happened it seemed like ages ago now. But how could he forget that she had set him up for some inexplicable reason? Had him trail her cheating husband, only to murder him and flee. “You caught her?”

“No, but we’ve found her.” She paused, and Roan stood up straight, suddenly wary. What the hell had happened now? “We found her body in an old gravel pit about two miles from where Dallas Faraday’s body was found. Somebody put a bullet in her brain too.”

Roan felt honestly terrible that his first reaction was relief that she hadn’t used him. But who would want to kill Holly?

Strike that: who would want to kill the Faradays?

He had picked a bad week to stop taking pills.

19

The Bones of You

“I
DON
’
T
suppose it was suicide?” Roan asked, collapsing on his sofa.

“It’s a little strange to shoot yourself in the back of the head, so I’m gonna say no,” Murphy said.

Roan made a noise of strangled disappointment, pressing his hand hard into his forehead. It didn’t change a thing. “Fuck.”

“If it makes you feel better, we have a suspect.”

“Who?”

“A minor player of a thug named Marco Lewis. He’s a small-time drug dealer, but it seems Mr. Faraday owed him money. And Mrs. Faraday’s murder has some of the hallmarks of a robbery gone bad, so what we think happened here was genius—aka Marco—tried to extort money the hubby owed him from the missus, and something went wrong. Mr. Faraday was probably then killed, for more than one reason.”

“So she was right to be concerned about his debts. She just wasn’t concerned enough in time.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Shit,” he sighed wearily. He felt terrible for Holly. If he’d been faster, better, would she still be alive? No, he couldn’t think about that, mainly because it wouldn’t change anything. His client was dead, and while if he’d gotten the case a few days earlier he might have been able to do something to prevent it, it was all a moot point now.

Murphy promised to call him as soon as she heard anything about the Chesney house, and he went upstairs and took a quick shower that failed to make him feel any better. After getting dressed, he got together some books for Dylan, as well as his MP3 player, and went back to the hospital to drop them off. There he encountered Dylan’s sister Sheba and her husband.

That was always awkward. Roan got the feeling that Sheba was humoring him most of the time and was not-so-secretly freaked out by his infected status (although he couldn’t blame her there—she was probably afraid he might accidentally infect her brother), and it didn’t help that her well-meaning husband usually gave off that odd straight guy vibe that said,
“I want to be cool around gay guys, but damn, they creep me out.”
Everything was civil and fine, but Roan still got the impression that Sheba would have been happier if he had absolutely nothing more to do with her brother.

Dylan was happy to see him, though, and gave him a kiss even before he gave him the books and his MP3 player. He was as bored as hell and wanted to go, but he’d just gotten some “damn scan or something” and they weren’t letting him go just yet. Only later did Roan find out that Dylan had gotten a head CT and figure Dylan had dismissed it so he didn’t freak out about it. Dee would later tell him that it was fine, they were just checking something. What, he didn’t say.

Dylan scooted over and patted the mattress beside him, so Roan ended up sitting on his bed with him as they talked, Dylan leaning his head against his shoulder as Roan idly caressed his thigh and they talked about very mundane things. But it was strangely nice. Roan felt oddly settled and didn’t notice his drug cravings in this moment of chaste intimacy. Dylan just had a calming influence on him. He made him feel Human, although not in a bad way. He enjoyed his warmth and his comforting scent, although it was diluted with the awful medical scent of the hospital.

He admitted that he hadn’t taken a pill all day, and save for tiredness and minor cravings, he really didn’t miss them. What he didn’t tell him was he feared he had acquired his own internal numbness, which was better than any narcotic. And he was going to have to learn to use it, because if he didn’t get his lion episodes under control, he was going to be in real trouble.

A nurse came in and chased him off, which seemed par for the course, but she gave him and Dylan especially dirty looks, and even though they were just sitting, talking, she warned them stridently that there wasn’t “any of that kind of thing” allowed in the hospital. That kind of thing? What? Butt fucking? Did she think they were on the verge of having wild and perverted gay sex before she heroically burst through the door? He and Dylan exchanged a look—they seemed to be thinking the same thing—and before he left, they shared a long, overly passionate kiss that they played up a bit, just to disgust and annoy her. Which it did. But she deserved it—they weren’t shy, acquiescent gays, and if she was going to indulge in jackassery, so were they. Although, to be totally honest, that was one hot kiss. Goddamn, they needed to kiss like that more often.

Just before he left Dylan’s floor, he remembered Ponyboy and went up a couple of floors. He hadn’t checked in on the kid forever, and no, he didn’t know him, but it was a decent thing just to check up on him. When Roan stepped out of the elevator, he saw Holden slumped in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs that lined segments of the hallway, his tall frame almost folded in half. The posture looked more sad than painful. “Holden, everything okay?” he asked, belatedly realizing that he’d forgot to call him Fox. Oh well, hopefully no one had noticed, and those that did didn’t care.

Holden sat back and looked up at him, a strange blankness in his eyes. “You here to see Ponyboy? You’re too late.”

“Oh shit.” Roan sat on the chair beside him. “What happened?”

“They think it was blood clot in his brain.” Holden shrugged and looked away, tears making his eyes look glassy. “Christ, what am I supposed to do now? Track down the parents he ran away from in the first place and say,
‘Hey, your little faggot is dead. Do you want his body or should I just throw him in the trash like you did?’
” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fuck.”

“I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“I’m a detective; I’ll track the parents down. And when I was a cop, I used to hafta do the dead calls, contact relatives and next of kin to come down and identify a body.” He sighed at the memory. “People’s responses always surprised you. You expected the ones that reacted in horror or burst into sobs, but the ones who had no reaction, or the ones who said ‘I don’t care’ or had some profane or pedestrian response to it were always the most startling. There were people who said they were watching something and they’d be over as soon as it was done; others who said simply, ‘Let ’em rot’ and hung up. You don’t know how people really feel about you until you die… and then you’re dead, so why would you give a fuck?”

Holden looked at him askance. “That was a philosophical abortion.”

“Hey, at least I tried.”

They just sat in silence for a moment, staring at the white wall before them, the noises of the hospital floor sounding like the background of a television show, minus the ubiquitous syrupy power ballad. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” Holden finally admitted. “I didn’t know him at all. He was just a friend of a friend.”

“He was a kid, whose crime was essentially being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been any of us.”

He nodded and sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Well, it couldn’t have been you. You’d have ripped them to pieces and beaten them to death with their own limbs.”

Roan opened his mouth to object to that classification, but of course Holden had just been kind to him. He had seen Roan in a more transformed state than anyone had since Paris. He could have said “eaten them” and left it at that. It would be true. So he decided to simply say, “I think you’d have fucked them up pretty well too.”

Holden scoffed. “They wouldn’t have fucked with me either. I may sound like a twink, but I’m built like a jock. Those fucking scumbags only pick on easy targets.”

“True.” They sat together for a moment, staring at the wall. Sometimes there was just nothing that could be said or done. Sometimes all you could do was sit in the silence and wait to see if the world ever noticed. Even though Roan knew from experience that it never did.

Poor Ponyboy. He wondered if his parents would care and then feared the answer.

By the time Roan got home, there was a message waiting for him on his answering machine, one he had both longed for and feared. A body had been unearthed at the Chesney place. As had a piece of another one.

The next couple of days, it would be splattered all over the local news. In total, three bodies were found, all women, only one identified (by dental records—a woman named Jamie Lynn Anderton, Chesney’s youngest victim at age nineteen), although a concerted effort was under way to identify the other two. The disappointing thing was that clearly none of these victims were Keith Turner, but it did prove that Roland Chesney was a more disturbed and violent man than many had believed. Murphy told him it sounded like the DA was going to try and cut a deal with him, get him to confess to other victims and point out other dumping places in exchange for slightly lesser charges. (A joke, as he was going to be in jail for the rest of his life, no matter how this played out.) He must have known that, because Chesney was denying that he had murdered the women. Although the dry desert conditions had basically jerked the bodies, some evidence was found that proved Chesney was lying his ass off. He’d probably have no choice but to deal.