Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  “You gonna give me a name, or do I call you Dickwad all the way to the station?” Kwan asked. The funny thing about Kwan was he seemed to be in a perpetually bad mood. He’d been on the force for twelve years, and you’d think maybe he was bitter and burned out by the job, but oh no—he was always like this. He was born a grumpy bastard, and he would probably die a grumpy bastard, outliving them all and dying at the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty-two. Everybody knew the grumpy, sour bastards lived longer than anyone. But besides that, he was a remarkably fair cop.

  The boy seemed to think about it for a moment, then muttered, “Rollo Tomasi.”

  Kwan scowled and looked at all of them. “Why does that sound familiar?”

  “It was a name used in L.A. Confidential,” Roan told him. Another team arrived, this one to secure the scene and collect forensic evidence. Not that there was much to collect—just blood splatters, maybe the bullet that took out the car window.

  “Oh hey, so you’re a highbrow punk-ass bitch, huh?” Kwan said to the boy, getting uncomfortably close to his face. That was just a favorite interrogation technique of Kwan’s, invading a person’s personal space, and it worked fairly well. No one liked a cop breathing down your neck. “They’re gonna love you in lockup. C’mon, Dickwad, move your ass.” He started shoving him toward the patrol car, and Tim moved ahead to open the rear door. Kwan shoved the kid’s head down, perhaps more brusquely than necessary, and all but threw him in the backseat, Tim slamming the door on him so fast it almost caught the kid’s foot.

  “You know what this was about?” Kwan asked, turning toward Roan. His eyes seemed to catch Dylan holding his hand, but his eyes remained impassive as they flicked back up to his face.

  “He works for someone within the Church of Divine Transformation. They’ve been threatening me for a couple weeks now, ever since it got around that Eli left me his computer.”

  “It’s a computer. Big fucking deal.”

  “The hard drive has dirt on all the members prior to Eli’s death. And I mean quality blackmail material.”

  He grunted in dark amusement. “Someone fucks a sheep, and ’cause you know, you’re a dead man?”

  “They want it back. Either to destroy it or keep others in line. Probably the latter more than the former. Knowledge is power.”

  He shook his head and looked back at the squad car. “Violent religious fanatics give me the willies. What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

  Roan shrugged. He’d been asking himself that ever since his brief stint in the foster home of a devoutly religious couple who saw his infection as demonic possession and tried to have him exorcised. “Everyone needs to believe in something, even if it is totally bugfuck nuts.”

  “You don’t believe in that shit?” Kwan asked, referring to the kitty cult.

  “Fuck no. I believe in entropy. That makes everything else irrelevant.”

  “Wow, that’s really nihilistic. Congrats.” Kwan turned back toward the cop car and told Tim, “Let’s roll.” He paused by the driver’s side door and pointed back at him. “Know the drill?”

  “As soon as I’m patched up, I’ll come down to the station and make a statement.”

  “There you go.” He got in the squad car and drove away without a second glance.

  As soon as he was gone, Dylan turned to him and asked, “Why do I have a feeling that kid was lucky not to have gotten the full Rodney King?”

  Shep snorted a laugh as he wrapped medical tape tightly around the gauze, making a semi-tourniquet in an attempt to staunch the blood flow. Roan shrugged his good shoulder. “Eh, Steve’s not that bad. He just seems unpleasant.”

  “Seems or actually is?”

  “Little of both. Depends on the day.”

  As soon as Shep was done, he gave him the spiel about keeping his fluid levels up and told him the common-sense stuff that no one should have to be told, such as if bleeding continues or his hand goes numb and he can’t move his fingers, he should report to the hospital immediately, yadda yadda yadda. Roan thanked him and got up, pretending he didn’t get a bit of a head rush just doing that. Dylan stood with him. He let go of his hand but kept a hand on his arm, in case Roan needed the help. He would have resented it if it wasn’t simply done out of kindness.

  He managed to convince Dylan he’d be okay while he went back up to his apartment and got his shoes and coat on, and while Dylan was gone, Roan found his car and dug out the bottle of Tylenol-codeine in the glove compartment, popping three tablets and washing them down with a bottle of water stashed beneath his seat. He knew once he could get home, he could partially transform and heal some of the tissue damage. Maybe not all, but enough to make it a minor thing. He just didn’t know when he’d have the chance.

  Dylan insisted on coming to the station with him, and when he saw he intended to drive, he indignantly shoved Roan over into the passenger seat and did the driving. Roan was fine with that, mainly because his bandaged hand was as insensate as a frozen hamburger, and the codeine was starting to kick in, a warmth spreading from his gut outward. The good part here was he didn’t have to hide being stoned, as Dylan didn’t know that Shep had only given him a localized painkiller.

  Things were chaotic as usual at the station, and as such he was not the star of the freak show, just a minor player, and he was actually grateful for that. During all the formalities of giving his statement, he overheard Kwan talking to a cop he didn’t recognize. The kid who shot him had been identified, as he was in the system—he’d been processed several times as a juvenile for petty shit, mainly vandalism and drunk and disorderly: Nolan Morse. (What a name. He might have decided to become homicidal if that was his name, too.)

  Now he could figure out who wanted him dead, the Dow sect or the Harvey sect. Whoever Morse was attached to was the motherfucker who’d been phoning in death threats. Now, all he had to do was figure out who Nolan was working for.

  Once Roan was done giving his statement, he excused himself to use the bathroom and ducked into an empty hallway to make a call. He punched up the number of Rainbow’s aunt and left a message for Rainbow, asking her if she knew or could find out whose side a church member named Nolan Morse was on. He didn’t say why, because Rainbow knew better than to ask, and he knew she could find out, because even those in the church who didn’t like her (very few) saw her as completely harmless. She was one of those hippie-ish “earth mother” types who never wanted to hurt anyone. But the world was an awful place, and sometimes bastards—like him—would use that to their advantage.

  He then went to the bathroom and discovered that his bandage was starting to soak through. It hadn’t done so all the way, but there was a deep-red splotch starting to bloom beneath the snowy-white bandages. He knew all he needed to do was go home, but would he be able to convince Dylan of that?

  As it was, he managed. The drugs were really kicking in now. He was tired and almost nodding off on the drive home. Dylan was concerned, thought he should take him to the hospital, but he assured him he could take care of it at home. Roan went upstairs but convinced Dylan he would be willing to drink some of his “special” green tea, which Roan was fairly certain was made from a heretofore undiscovered kind of straw, so Dylan stayed downstairs for the moment. Roan ducked into his bedroom and hid in the bathroom, where he braced himself before punching the bathroom counter with his injured hand.

  The drugs Shep had injected into his palm and the codeine conspired to keep the pain from reaching his brain, but he broke the bandages and tape open, causing blood to spurt out, and finally the right synapses started firing. He concentrated on it, focusing on the pain, forcing the change. He watched the bones in his hand shift beneath his skin like it was flimsy paper, the muscles twisting and warping, but it was easy to shut off the change. He thought it was the drugs, but he didn’t know for sure. The hole was no longer all the way through his hand, but the skin was still torn on both sides, suggesting he hadn’t held onto the change long enough, and the p
ain in his hand was now molten. But it was good enough, so he stripped off the bandages and threw them away, ransacking his medicine cabinet to find some gauze. He wrapped it around his hand but couldn’t duplicate what Shep had done. He just had to hope Dylan didn’t notice right away.

  Dylan came in as he came out of the bathroom, holding a cup of tea that smelled faintly of fruit and burnt hay. “Is everything okay?”

  “Considering,” he lied, stripping off his shirt and only just then noticing he had blood on it. God, he was tired. Was the room starting to spin a bit?

  Roan managed to collapse on his bed as Dylan continued to stare at him in concerned disbelief. Roan wondered what he was going to do when Dylan called him on his shit.

  6

  Something Bad Is Gonna Happen

  ROAN found himself sitting at a round patio table under a glaring sun, a paper coffee cup in his hand. He looked down to find the cup completely empty, even though he seemed to be in the outdoor section of a coffee shop. He was wondering why he didn’t get a table with an umbrella when he suddenly became aware that the seat across from him was taken.

  It was Paris sitting there, his long black hair glossy in the sun, his mirrored sunglasses strangely reflecting nothing at all. “You have to stop,” he said, his Canadian accent oddly pronounced. It was really weird, because as far as he knew, Par had never had an accent at all. Sketch-comedy jokes aside, he’d never once said “aboot.” “This is the time to leave, Roan. You can’t do this anymore.”

  He looked down at his cup to find it was now full of something red. Punch? “What are you talking about?”

  Paris pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head, and for some reason there was an almost hair-thin trail of blood trickling from his right eye. Paris, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. “You. You have to put it away now.”

  “Put away what? What are you talking about?” He heard a dull noise and looked down to see he had somehow dropped his cup of punch on the ground, and the liquid was no longer red but clear, like water. When he bent down to look, he noticed a lion sprawled on the road, seemingly sunning itself, its tail flicking in a lazy yet strangely metronomic fashion. He looked around to see if people were freaking out, but bizarrely, he was all alone.

  Roan woke up, suddenly panicked. “Dylan?” he asked, instantly wondering why he was panicked and why he’d said that. God, he hated these fucking weird codeine dreams.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes and realized someone had undressed him and tucked him under the covers. Wow, a couple guesses who that was. It was dark now, no light coming through the open curtains of the window over the bed, and as he stumbled to the bathroom, he wondered why codeine always gave him dry mouth. His hand was throbbing, but it wasn’t so bad.

  He thought about taking another pill, but he felt so logy he wasn’t sure the others had completely worn off yet. He heard noise downstairs, a television, and smelled tomatoes and spices. Dylan? But it was dark—shouldn’t he be at work? He threw on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs to find out.

  From the stairs he glanced down at his television and saw that Dylan was watching Doctor Who as he cooked. Roan was nearly at the base of the stairs when Dylan finally noticed him. “Hey, should you be out of bed?”

  “I was shot in the hand. I’m not an invalid. If I play my cards right, I won’t even have a limp.”

  Dylan gave him a warning frown, tearing a sheet of aluminum foil off the roll. “You must feel better. You’re back to being a smart-ass.”

  “Hard to keep a good smart-ass down.” As he entered the kitchen and went to the fridge, he saw a couple of pans on the stove, steaming away. He’d almost forgotten he had pans like that. “Smells great. What is it?”

  “Penne alla puttanesca.”

  “Wow, I love puttanesca sauce.”

  “I know, that’s why I made it. It’s ready if you’re hungry.”

  Roan pulled an old Gatorade bottle from the back of the shelf and gulped it down. It was disgusting, but he had to admit he felt a little less logy afterwards. And as disgusting as it was, he drank it all. He had to get his fluid levels back up; he probably hadn’t lost that much blood, but he was bleeding pretty good there for a while. “Yeah, I guess I am, thanks.” He paused for a moment. “Doesn’t puttanesca sauce have anchovies in it?”

  “Mine doesn’t.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Roan got a plate down from the cupboard—at least he remembered where they were—and helped himself to a ladle full of pasta (whole wheat, of course, and probably organic; he was dating a hippie) and sauce, which were in separate pans. The sauce smelled really good, anchovies be damned.

  He sat down on the couch with his food and a bottle of pomegranate-blueberry juice and saw that Dylan had brought in all the papers from his car. The Keith Turner files.

  He started reading them while eating and felt himself getting sucked into the dry recitation of facts, which broke people’s lives down into vanilla data that made them as flat as the page he was holding in his hand. “Weren’t you supposed to work tonight?”

  Dylan scoffed as he collapsed in the love seat across from him, a bowl of pasta in his hands. “Yeah, my boyfriend’s been shot, I sure feel like pouring drinks for horny, lonely men. I called Casey to take my shift for me. We just switched. I’ll cover a Tuesday for him next month.” Casey (bar name: Rod) was the only straight bartender to ever work at Panic. He used to be a bartender at a “regular” bar but figured he could make more money if he took off his shirt and flirted with guys, so he did. He had a reputation as a cock tease just because he was straight, but it was also because he got huge tips, as some gay guys held on to this fantasy of “converting” (or at least nailing) a good-looking straight guy. Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that—it was dishonest as hell and the equivalent of being gay for pay, and yet it was refreshing to meet a straight guy so secure in his own sexuality he didn’t feel the need to beat up any guy who dared to make eyes at him.

  “This is really good. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad you felt well enough to come down for it. I was going to put it in the fridge and save it for you for when you felt better.”

  Roan felt the same free-floating guilt that he often felt around Dylan. He was too good for Roan, and he suspected they both knew it. Dylan was still wearing his worn jeans from earlier, but he noticed he was wearing his Pansy Division tour T-shirt and wondered if some of his blood had gotten on Dylan’s shirt. It was possible.

  They ate in silence for a while, the television giving the illusion of life while he was sucked into the paperwork and savored the sauce on the pasta. Damn, if you poured spicy tomato sauce on a shoe, he’d probably eat it.

  But eventually the words began to blur together on the page; it didn’t help that most cops had awful handwriting. He paused in reading to give his eyes a rest and finish off his pasta. He was contemplating getting another helping when he noticed Dylan was frowning faintly at the pages he’d just put down on the sofa. It was a distracted frown, one suggesting he was lost in his thoughts, and the thoughts weren’t pleasant. “Did you look at these?” Roan wondered.

  He glanced up at him, making the slightest noise of surprise. “Huh? Oh, no, just the top page. Why do you have a file on the Keith Turner case?”

  “You remember it?”

  He made a strange noise deep in his throat. “How could I forget? I searched the park.”

  Roan put his plate down. “You did?”

  “I was a volunteer with Search and Rescue until I went to college and decided to “reinvent” myself. You should have seen me when I was younger, Ro—I was a Goody Two-shoes to make Ned Flanders ill. I was so hurt by people making comments about me being the son of that psycho cop who killed his wife, an abusive monster just waiting to happen—like father, like son—that I decided to become the most perfect, upright person on the planet. I got straight A’s, I was on the Honor Roll, I won a spelling bee, I came in secon
d in the regional science fair, I was a Stepford kid. When I got to my teen years, I worked summers as a lifeguard, and I worked with Search and Rescue as soon as I was old enough to be accepted. We once searched the woods near Pinecrest for a lost hiker, but that was pretty much the biggest thing we did before we got word of the Turner case.” Dylan put his bowl aside, rubbing his temple as if recalling it was giving him a headache. “I was horrified that someone grabbed a kid in broad daylight, so close to his parents. What kind of creep kidnaps kids? But I was also a little terrified of coming across a dead body. Worse yet, a dead kid. I got into it to help people, not shatter them.”

  “But you didn’t come across a dead body.”

  “Yeah I did. A raccoon.” He grimaced both at the lame joke and the memory. “No, the park was a bust. We searched for anything that could have been a clue. We were trained to notice small things in wooded areas that might give us a direction or some idea if a person had been there or not, but that park was a mess. This was before the ‘renewal project’, where they remodeled it. There was undergrowth so thick in some of the interior areas that it was like wading through molasses, and all the trash of eons seemed to blow in and get caught. You had your usual stuff—fast-food wrappers, cigarette butts, cans, gum—and the stuff the closet queens who’d troll the park late at night looking for an anonymous fuck would leave behind: condoms, tubes of KY jelly, even underwear. I spotted a nipple clamp, but back then—and this is how naïve I was, I was even repressing my own sexuality at the time—I had no idea what the fuck it was, and neither did my search partner, Sophie. We decided it was some kind of roach clip, as we occasionally came across drug paraphernalia, but mainly those glass pipes and aluminum cans turned into bongs. The park was so messy in these undergrowth areas that we had no idea what could be relevant or not. It all looked precisely the same age, none terribly recent. We all wanted to find something so badly, you know? We all wanted to be the one who found something that would lead to that kid being found and returned to his family. We started the day scared we’d find a corpse, and ended the day depressed that we were absolutely useless. I quit Search and Rescue shortly after that, ostensibly because I was preparing to go off to college, but if I’m honest, it was that. I didn’t want to have to go through that again. Selfish of me, wasn’t it?”