Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  Shep was as straight as a gate, but he could see why guys (or girls, or cats or dogs, whatever) could be attracted to Roan. He had a strangely intense energy about him, and yet a sort of regal gravitas, casual but still ever-present. Dee had once joked that being with Roan was really like being in the presence of a genuine lion… and you know, it kind of was. Compacted power, and an awareness that one wrong move could wake the slumbering beast.

  Stalking across the waiting room toward him, it looked like he had indeed woken the beast—or just Roan—up. His deep reddish-brown hair (it was almost the color of old blood, which was strange since it didn’t come from a bottle) was mussed, and he was wearing worn jeans that probably needed a belt to fit properly and a rumpled black T-shirt that inexplicably had the words “These Arms Are Snakes” printed on it. What was that supposed to mean? Well, this was probably just an example of what Dee had described as Roan’s large collection of strange T-shirts. Dee had claimed it was Roan’s penchant for T-shirts that made most people think he was straight. Roan’s usual magnetism had a dark air about it now, which was reflected in the shiny metal glimmer of his eyes. It was partially the emptiness of a shock victim and partially the squirming black shadows of someone restraining a volcanic rage.

  “Where is he?” Roan asked, his voice pitched low. His jaw was taut with the effort of speaking through clenched teeth.

  “I’m not sure you can see h—”

  “Where the fuck is he?” Roan repeated, storming past him. Shep grabbed his arm, and Roan yanked out of his grasp with excessive violence, making Shep stumble. He could almost swear he felt muscles twitching like snakes beneath the skin of Roan’s arm, something sentient and impatient under tender flesh. Did he have muscle spasms? It was possible; infecteds had lots of secondary conditions.

  “I’m not the enemy,” Shep snapped, and his tone of voice made Roan stop and look at him. Roan’s look was flinty and yet slightly distant. He was somewhere in his own head, his mind gnawing the hell out of something. There were a few people in the waiting room, a few nurses coming and going, but it was funny how everyone deliberately avoided them. Roan’s “fuck you” vibe was filling the corridor and scaring everyone back.

  A crack appeared in Roan’s armor. It was brief, but it was there, something human flashing through eyes like green glass. “I know. I just need to see him.”

  The anger was hiding pain; Shep had seen it enough to know it. Lots of people cried or broke down, but some retreated to anger because it was easier, safer. It wasn’t a surprise a scrapper like Roan would lash out first and foremost. Shep glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention to them, then jerked his head, a tacit invitation for Roan to follow him. He did, without comment.

  Dylan was currently alone in a treatment room off the main ER, because shortly before Roan had arrived there’d been a flurry of activity that pulled just about all the doctors and nurses away. First was a car-crash victim who’d had the bad luck of having a steering column almost completely collapse their sternum, and the second was a teenage gangbanger with a GSW to the abdomen. They were fighting hard to keep the accident victim breathing and to keep the boy from bleeding out or having his guts slosh out the gaping hole. (Shep had actually seen that happen; he hoped he never had to see that again.)

  Dylan was alone on a gurney in the small, cool room, although he wouldn’t be alone for very much longer. Still, he was in much better shape than the two patients currently enjoying the lion’s share—no pun intended—of the attention. Although it wasn’t good for the victim of a potential head injury to be unconscious, his vitals as reflected on the monitor were good, stable and steady, and that was always a positive sign. Still, if he did have a head injury, they could be slow to build, and yet very sudden in their effects. It was why they were such bitches to deal with, and why Dylan was going to be here for a while.

  Shep wanted to give him the upbeat diagnosis, focus on the positive, but he seemed to understand that he needed to be quiet for a moment. He stood by the doorway as Roan ventured in, moving slowly toward the gurney as if sleepwalking. Dylan didn’t look great; the right side of his face was swollen and bruised, with butterfly bandages temporarily holding a gash on the side of his scalp closed (later, it would be properly mended), while there was a tiny, bloody line where the corner of his mouth was torn. A blanket had been thrown over him, covering the bruises on his arms and chest, but it didn’t matter too much; it didn’t look like there were any broken bones, save for one finger (and possibly a cheekbone, and maybe a hairline skull fracture). Soft-tissue injuries never killed anyone—they just looked and felt bad.

  Roan lowered his voice to a whisper, and all the tension seemed to sag from his frame as he stroked his boyfriend’s hair. “Dylan, can you hear me?” His voice didn’t crack, but Shep picked up the sorrow beneath regardless. “I’m so sorry.” He kissed him softly on the forehead, which was touching and sad. No, he didn’t get the whole gay thing, but love was love, and he had no problem with that. There wasn’t enough of it in the world.

  Suddenly Roan’s muscles seemed to tense again, and Shep could feel himself respond, tense in kind. What was it? Roan looked at the far wall, or at least glanced in its direction; he didn’t seem to be focused on anything. “He was attacked by an infected.”

  That caught him completely off guard. Roan had a terrible way of doing that. “Umm, what? I—”

  Roan spun and faced him, anger surging through his frame, putting him back in that defensive posture once more. “I can smell his blood. Where is he?”

  Okay, rewind. Shep considered his words a moment, and how deeply strange they were. He smelled the blood of the infected guy on Dylan? The bouncer had worked one of the attackers over a bit, but the blood splatter on Dylan must have been minimal, because most of the blood on him appeared to be his own. And, hey, wait a fucking second—since when did one kind of blood smell different from another kind of blood? Blood was pretty much blood. “What the hell do you mean you can smell his blood?”

  Roan approached him, shoulders up and head low, a look in his eye just a few degrees shy of murder. “Where is he, Shep? Is he still here?” His voice was low, silky, reasonable, coldly dispassionate—a warning sign if there ever was one. This was a man who was comfortable with what he was going to do next, even though he was fully aware it was bad. His brother Jonny sounded the same way before he went off and broke Bobby Tanhauser’s arm.

  “His injuries were bloody but superficial. He was treated at the scene and taken to the police station. He was never brought here.” It was the truth, but he expected Roan to accuse him of lying.

  It didn’t happen. He cocked his head, nostrils flaring, and then he nodded faintly, looking straight through him. “Doesn’t matter. I want the ringleader.” He stalked toward him, and Shep stepped aside, wondering if he was going to shove him or hit him. But no, Roan would have just run over him. He stormed out as though Shep had never been in his way at all.

  Couple of things: he muttered a word that sounded like “Hurry” (Harvey?) under his breath, but it was hard to tell, as he was growling. It was the kind of growling that made the hair on the back of Shep’s neck stand up. It reminded him a bit of the Benson’s dog, a big-ass Rhodesian ridgeback that was perhaps the nastiest beast he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. It wasn’t a human noise, and he couldn’t help but shudder a bit as he followed Roan out.

  “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 actuall
y 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

  IT 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 an
d 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?”