Infected: Shift (64 page)

He pulled himself through the window until he could sit on the sill, then carefully pulled leg one through, then the other. He knew he was starting to put on weight—he could exercise and limit carbs all he wanted, but he was getting older, and your metabolism naturally slowed down—but at least he wasn’t so chubby that he couldn’t squeeze through the window. Not that it wasn’t a tight fit. He made sure to close the window after him on the off chance Roan broke the door down.

He jumped down to the backyard, which wasn’t a proper yard at all, just barren scrub land eventually defined by a chain-link fence that glimmered silver on the horizon like a mirage. The sky was starting to lighten, the sun coming up somewhere out of his view, and already the cool bite of morning was starting to warm. It would be an insanely hot day, so Holden hoped to be far from here before afternoon could roast him alive. At least it would be a good day for burning.

The shed was an extra big garden shed with peeling green and white paint that couldn’t have looked more out of place in this landscape. Since obviously no one was gardening out here, what could possibly be in it? He had a sinking feeling that it probably held something sinister.

As he was walking toward it, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a guy who was crouching beside the house, holding a rifle. His head was turned toward the house, as if he was listening for Roan, so Holden saw him first. He’d raised the Glock by the time the guy finally noticed him, doing the slightest double take, and he could see the curiosity in his eyes: What’s the whore doing out here? But he didn’t let the confusion stop him from swinging the rifle around and taking aim at him.

But he didn’t have a chance, as Holden had him in his sights the whole time. He pulled the trigger first, and the guy, who was dressed in all-black clothing and had one gay-ass bushy mustache, jolted as he was hit and sprawled on his back on the ground. Holden walked over to him and didn’t bother to see where the bullet had hit, he just saw the guy was wide eyed and staring up at him as Holden took his rifle away and slung it over his shoulder. “How many more of you are there?” When the guy didn’t answer right away, Holden kicked him in the leg.

“I dunno! Some guys took off, took the car. Is it still alive?”

“Alive, angry, probably about to come outside to see where its prey went. I’d find somewhere to hole up if I were you.”

He was breathing hard through his mouth, panting. He had a hand over his stomach, and blood was seeping through his fingers. Having been stabbed in the stomach, Holden knew how much that hurt. “This was a setup.”

Holden scoffed as he walked away, headed back toward the shed. “Your first clue should have been the fact that my name is Fox, asshole. We’re tricksters, each and every one of us.”

The shed wasn’t locked, which may have been the only positive sign. Opening it, he smelled something like fertilizer and old oil and saw bags of quicklime piled in the corner. Didn’t that dissolve bodies? Okay, the bad feeling was back again.

There was a freezer humming away, plugged in under the postage stamp window on the left-hand side, one of those low, horizontal ones like his mom had tucked away in the garage when he was growing up. It usually held sides of beef, trout his dad’s friends would bring him after fishing trips. He bet the odds that there was something that innocuous in there were low.

He shut the door and dragged a bag of quicklime over, putting it in front of the door. It wouldn’t keep anyone out, but it would make opening the door difficult, giving him time to pull his gun and shoot first. He tucked the Glock in the front pocket of his jeans (it kinda fit, mainly because these were his slightly oversized pants), and took a moment to steel himself before opening the freezer.

The banality of the contents almost shocked him. Frozen pizzas, Popsicles, pre-made frozen beef patties in plastic bags—it was just food. Guy food certainly (were there no women involved in this enterprise, beyond victims?) but just food. He let out a sigh of relief and almost laughed when he saw something odd tucked up against the near side of the freezer. He wasn’t sure what it was at first, but on closer inspection, it turned out to be a human thumb. Attached to a hand, attached to an arm, attached to something else.

He started pulling boxes out of the freezer, throwing them on the floor, and when he cleared away a stack of Popsicle boxes, he found a face staring through a plastic bag. He wasn’t a hundred percent certain, but it looked like Jordan Hatcher. “Aw, fuck.” So Roan was right—his odds of being alive had been low. Now they were nonexistent.

He sank to the floor, sitting with his back to the still humming freezer, and wondered how he was going to get Roan out of here alive.

Roan
was floating on a sea of blood. But it was warm and soothing, so he didn’t mind.

It was like he was hovering on a bed of warm, thick air, and it didn’t smell as much as you thought it would. It was very peaceful, and he almost didn’t notice how much pain he was in. But there was pain.

In fact, it was so great his mind seemed to have fuzzed out. Someone had overloaded the speaker, blasted it at a volume beyond eleven, and now nothing sounded right. Nothing felt quite right; it was lopsided somehow, off, and he wasn’t sure if he minded or not. Maybe when he was closer to consciousness.

That was a huge problem. When you were close enough to consciousness to ponder it, you were obviously coming back to it. It was totally unfair.

The floating sensation became a slow, sinking sensation, pain growing and dragging him back to Earth. The pain quickly went from excruciating to unbearable, and then moved into an area where vocabulary failed. It felt like he had been crushed, every single bone in his body had been pulverized one by one, his blood broken vessel by vessel, and he would have screamed if he had been capable of doing it without causing himself further pain. (Which was impossible, so he couldn’t.)

He lay absolutely still, trying to will the pain to settle like warped boards in an abandoned house, but it never happened. So he had to lie there, aching, hoping he didn’t have to move, but just opening his eyes brought on a pulse of pain.

Where the hell was he? He was in a room with cheap white stucco paint slapped on flimsy walls, moldy green curtains pulled against what looked like radioactive sunlight, and a threadbare carpet some odd color between harvest gold and chewing tobacco. He smelled bland, horrible industrial laundry detergent coming from the flat pillow he was resting his head on, and figured he was in a very cheap motel, and if he was capable of feeling something beyond pain, he’d feel rough sheets. He groaned deep in his throat, incapable of actually articulating a syllable. He couldn’t move either. Breathing hurt.

Oh shit—he'd totally transformed, hadn't he? He must have. This was the kind of roaring, angry, malicious pain that only came with a full body warp. What was the last thing he remembered? With all this pain, his memory was even more fragmented, but… running into the house. He had a memory of that, of body tackling someone coming out the door. Then… shit, he didn’t know. Did he bite someone’s throat out? Did that actually happen? He had a sense memory of that, of flesh and muscle between his teeth, but nothing else. Could just be part of his nightmare. (Well, certainly that’s what he wanted to believe.)

From another room—but close—he heard running water and a slightly out-of-tune male voice singing. He heard a door open, smelled fragrant steam, and eventually the man crossed into his limited field of vision. Of course it was Holden, dripping wet and naked save for a thin white towel wrapped around his waist. “Hey, you’re conscious! Hold on a sec, I got something for you.” He disappeared to the other part of the room, and Roan heard a strange noise. Liquid being shaken in a plastic bottle? Yes, that was it. Finally Holden reappeared with a water bottle not quite half full of water. “Gonna need to drink this. It’s got enough ketamine in it to numb half of Panic, so I bet it’ll make you feel almost human for five seconds.” He frowned, then said, “Just prop your head up. I’ll dribble it in.”

He guessed he couldn’t move well? Good guess. He leaned his head back, a small movement painful enough to make him wince, and Holden delicately brought the bottle to his mouth and let it trickle down his throat. The water was lukewarm and had a slightly bitter, plastic taste, but Roan was dying of thirst, and the water kind of soothed his ravaged throat when he could force himself to swallow. The bottle was almost empty when he finally started feeling the effects of the ketamine, a gradual, warm numbness that started to wash over his agonized body like a healing tide. Once the bottle was drained, Holden walked off, still talking. “I know you can’t get heavier in your lion form, but I swear you were. Holy shit, did I have a hard time dragging you to the jeep.”

Roan turned over onto his back as the Vitamin K took over and he could breathe without feeling like someone was punching him in the chest. “It was a clusterfuck, huh?” His voice was a ghastly rasp. Apparently his throat hadn’t fully healed yet.

“Nope. I’d say it all went off according to plan. We make a hell of a team.” Holden crossed to the room’s lone chair and held up something flat and black. A hard drive. “You want evidence for the Feds? They can go to town on this.”

“Jordan?”

He shook his head. “We were too late. They killed him long before we got there.”

“Fuck.” He rubbed his eyes and was glad the drugs had kicked in. He did feel almost Human, although his heart was pounding a bit fast now. “Where did you get the ketamine?”

“They had it. They had a lot of date-rape-style drugs. Maybe some of the people they killed weren’t getting paid for their time after all.” With no modesty at all, Holden pulled off his towel, showing Roan his bare ass as he pulled on his underwear. Well, no shock there. Holden seemed to think modesty was overrated.

“What the fuck happened?”

Holden told him that he lioned out (well, duh), and some guys fled while others attempted to bring him down, and they didn’t fare too well. Also, Holden figuratively lioned out and got a couple himself but didn’t specify what that meant (although Roan could guess). He then told him about finding Jordan’s body in a freezer in a shed behind the house, and how he'd decided he needed to get back to the main house, but couldn’t because Roan was out in his lion form. So he threw out the meat patties that he found in the freezer, hoping that would distract him. It did, apparently, but not enough that he felt safe to run back to the house. But he lucked out in that it was a hot day and he (the lion) was full and went to lay down in the shade and fell asleep. That’s when Holden decided to sneak out, and it was his intention to go back into the house, find some heavy drugs he could dose him with, and then get him out of there, but he didn’t need to. He told Roan he was already changing back, albeit slowly, when Holden ventured out of the shed (he wanted to ask how so, what that exactly meant, but he was scared to know and didn’t ask). So Holden just went back into the house, found some drugs he thought he might be able to use later, grabbed some cash, and then lit the place up.

Roan honestly thought it was the drugs at first, and the fact that he felt like he should have been dead, or that dying would have been more merciful at this point. “Lit the place up?” His voice still had yet to recover; he sounded like Harvey Fierstein’s distant cousin.

“Yeah,” Holden replied casually, pulling up his jeans. “Burn, baby, burn.”

“You burned the house down?”

“Of course I did. You probably left blood all over the place, and I’m sure I left fingerprints, and I’ve got a record, so I’m in the system. Better to hasten the ashes to ashes, dust to dust bit.”

Didn’t he know going in that working with Holden was opening a very dark door? These were “his people” these snuff guys were messing with, giving him an extra sense of mission. Roan knew he could only blame himself, as there was only one way this could go. “Aw fuck, Holden….”