Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  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.

  ROAN’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.

  He was inside, watching television, the blather of voices blending with an electronic hum. The door was locked, so Roan walked back to the midpoint of the yard and then ran for the door, jumping and turning so his shoulder and hip hit the door first, and just like he suspected, the doorjamb splintered and cracked under the sudden force and the door slammed open with a bang as loud as a rifle crack. Harvey let out a shocked yelp and jumped off his sofa, sending a beer falling to the carpet, where the glass bottle bounced without shattering, spilling a yeasty reek throughout the room. “You,” Roan snarled, his growl swallowing the word as Harvey stared at him in wide-eyed horror, falling back against the wall, beside the sofa, as the urine scent of fear started sneaking in beneath the alcohol. Harvey started sliding along the wall behind the sofa, color draining from his face, his mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning in open air. Finally he spit out syllables, but they were anemic things, nearly stillborn. “What—what’s happened to you… what’s wrong with your face….”

  Roan heard the faint crackle in his jaw of bones resetting, the taste of blood so constant he didn’t even notice it anymore, even though it ran down his throat both inside and outside, dribbling on the beige carpet and getting lost in the wet stain of beer. “You don’t go after Dylan. You leave my people alone.” It was hard to talk. Not only was his growl too loud, but his vocal cords were changing shape, he could feel them spasming in his throat like he was being very gently strangled by constant, growing pressure.

  Harvey’s wide eyes glanced toward the open door, but Roan shifted a single step in that direction. He wasn’t fast enough to make a run for it, and no help was coming from the main house. The way he started to slowly sink behind the sofa, as if hoping to use that as a shield, seemed to indicate that he knew he was screwed. “I don’t know wh—” Harvey began, an obvious lie, and Roan screamed in rage, a noise that came out as a roar loud enough to shift the glass of the small living room window in its frame. Harvey clapped his hands over his ears and winced, trying very hard not to look like he was terrified. He was failing. Roan could smell that he had pissed himself.

  “All right!” Harvey shouted, just as the roar died. “All right! But he wasn’t… they were just gonna grab him. It was gonna be an exchange, him for the hard drive. I don’t know what went wrong—”

  “You’re dead.”

  “Call the police, I’ll fucking confess! Is that what you want?” Harvey’s eyes met his briefly, then looked quickly away. He couldn’t look at him. “Are you changing? How can you be changing? It doesn’t work like that—”

  “It does for me. You stupid shit, don’t you get it yet?” Roan’s throat was shredded, his vocal cords warping out of true, so now he sounded like he’d just gargled with Drano and sandpaper, with the blood and the growling adding a strangely liquid undertone. “I am your fucking god.”

  For a brief moment, anger flashed in Harvey’s eyes, probably due to Roan’s blasphemy, but then his shoulders seemed to crumple. He was beaten. The cowardly shit wasn’t even going to fight for his life.

  Oh well. He’d had his chance.

  14

  Mescaline Eyes

  IT OCCURRED to Holden that this wasn’t what he’d signed on for when he found the big guy kneeling on the grass, weeping like a baby, cradling an arm that hadn’t been broken so much as it had been nearly ripped in half. The bone was just poking out of his arm like a branch someone
had stabbed through his elbow, blood running out in a stream.

  Holden wasn’t going to stop, but the guy was clearly in shock. There was a discarded coat on the grass—his?—so he grabbed it and quickly wrapped it around the guy’s arm, and that’s when they heard the roar that made them both start slightly. It sounded like someone had pissed off a dragon… which was, in retrospect, a fairly accurate assessment of what was going on here. “He’s not Human,” the guy breathed, betraying a hint of an Israeli accent and a big dollop of his shock.

  “He is, he’s just… confused,” Holden told him, running toward the noise. Was that smart? Oh hell no, it wasn’t, but he figured he’d gone this far. He did commit to his role. No one could accuse him of not doing that.

  He came to an open doorway in what could have been a bungalow but seemed too grand a name for an outbuilding turned into a guest cabin. “Stop!” he shouted, before he even got a look at what was going on inside.

  He thought he was prepared. Yes, it had been freaky the night Roan had started to transform while wrestling down that gay-bashing cop, but it still wasn’t this. What he had seen that night was mild, the warm-up for this.

  If Holden hadn’t known it was Roan, he might not have recognized him. His jaw was starting to distend, blood running down his chin in a constant flow now that almost all his teeth had come in and ripped open his gums—fangs and teeth made for tearing muscle and crunching bone. His eyes seemed large in his distorted face, cat’s eyes, and his skin gleamed slightly golden, although it took Holden’s mind a moment to comprehend that it was because some fine fur was starting to come in. His fingers seemed to be twitching in odd ways, like he had jumping beans beneath the skin, and the crackling sound was coming from them as the bones continued to break and shift into something else. He was breathing through his mouth in a pant, his shoulders hunching and popping as his back spasmed and roiled, preparing to drop him down into a four-legged stance. He didn’t know Roan could actually get this far into his change on anger alone. Or at all. It was shocking and fucking batshit, and he wanted to run away screaming, especially when Roan’s lion eyes focused on him with no recognition, just pure contempt.

  But this was where Holden’s training came in handy. All things he had figured out for himself, of course—how he’d learned to survive as a street kid and a hustler. Important things like swallowing whatever feeling you had and playing whatever suited the situation best—what would allow you to survive, and if at all possible control the situation. Emotionally, he shut himself off from his body, like he was outside looking in on this bizarre tableau, and as such nothing could hurt him here; nothing could touch him. He was safe here, far away, where no one could ever get him. He was in a body encased in ice. It felt nothing. It was dead meat.

  “I suppose telling you that Paris wouldn’t want you to do this wouldn’t work this time,” he said, in his Fox voice. Fox was almost another personality from his own, a default personality he could assume whenever he needed to, a role he had tailor-made for himself. And who wouldn’t want to be Fox? He was slick and charming, with the unwavering confidence of someone who knew everything and was shocked by nothing. He wanted to be Fox; that’s how cool he was.

  Roan simply looked at him, growling low, no recognition, nothing Human peeking through. The man who was trying to sink behind the ratty blue sofa kept looking at him in mute appeal, big, obvious “HELP ME”s, but Holden felt nothing for him. He must have been the man behind Dylan’s attack, ergo, he deserved this. “It’s gone too far, Roan. We might not be able to smooth this over. C’mon, let’s go.”

  The lion thing never stopped growling at him, but its eyes focused on the man instead, and his lip curled up, exposing sharp, bloody teeth. The inside of his lip was turning black.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Holden insisted, but the lion thing didn’t oblige him. The control of the situation—which he’d never really had—was almost totally gone now, not leaving him much choice. Glancing around, he saw a small ceramic statue of a black panther on a wall shelf near the door. He grabbed it and threw it as hard as he could near the feet of the lion thing, and it exploded into half a dozen good-sized pieces.

  That got the lion’s attention. Its head snapped around toward him with an angry snarl.

  “Good, are you listening? Knock—”

  It happened so fast that Holden couldn’t actually process it until it was all over. He never saw Roan move, and yet the next thing he knew, he had been slammed bodily against the wall, so hard that the shelf next to him collapsed, spilling tchotchkes on the floor as he struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked out of him. His ribs ached, and he wondered how many had been broken as the lion thing growled in his face. His breath was hot and smelled like blood, and his eyes were like black holes under glass. There was nothing in them, just perfect emptiness reflecting his own right back at him.

  Holden, deep inside himself, was shit-scared. But it didn’t even come close to reaching the surface. Much like dogs, Human predators knew they had won the moment they smelled fear, so Holden had learned early in his hustling career to smother it in the crib before it could ever get out. Give them no fear, give them nothing to work with, and they lost their footing. Fox was out now, and he knew how to handle this. Well, kind of. He’d never dealt with a lion man before.

  “I’m not your enemy, Roan, but you shouldn’t be here,” he said, as soon as he had enough breath back. “He’s not worth the murder charge and you know it.” Nothing. Nothing upon nothing. No response, a mirror showing empty mirrors. Gambit number two. “You should be with Dylan.”

  Response. A brief flicker deep inside the endless dark wells of his eyes. Something Human was still in there, just fading fast. He had to get it back. “Yeah, Dylan, remember him? Back at the hospital? Why aren’t you with him, Roan? Why aren’t you protecting him?”

  More response. Oh thank god or thank Buddha or thank fucking Noam Chomsky, but Fox had stumbled on the right thing to say. Again, why couldn’t he really be like Fox? He bet life was easy as Fox.

  Roan’s clawlike grip on his shirt started to ease, even though the spasmodic seizures of what was left of his fingers continued. It might have been easy to summon the change, but not as easy to switch off. Like most things, doing one thing was infinitely easier than doing the other. More humanity was coming back to his eyes, a light in the dark, and Holden knew he had to keep hammering this home. He had to give Roan a hand and pull him out.

  “He needs you. Not here, there. You should be with him. Anybody can beat this fucker’s ass, hell, I know guys who’ll make him disappear permanently for eighty dollars’ worth of crank. But right now Dylan has no one else but you. You should be there, taking care of him, not indulging some mindless need for revenge that’s not gonna help him in the slightest.”

  “No one fucks with my people!” Roan roared, still growling and gravelly, but there was Human emotion in it, something a cat wasn’t capable of, and now something like guilt shaded in his eyes. Holden was so happy to have him back he would have kissed him… except he was still actively bleeding out the mouth, and he still had that half-lion jaw thing going on, and it was not attractive.

  “Your people? He’s not your people. You love him. Wow, you can’t even admit it to yourself, can you?”

  Roan let him go and turned away, and Holden heaved a very quiet sigh of relief. He had been so sure he was dead. Roan showed his back to both him and his prey, whoever he was. (Who was supposedly giving him grief at the church? Harvey something? He was reasonably sure the guy’s name was Harvey something.) The boiling and popping along the shoulders seemed to slow, then stop. Proof that Roan could go pretty far into his transformation but still pull the brakes if given the right stimulus. He was staring down at the floor, the blood piddling down like a soft rain.

  Harvey was now sitting on the floor behind the couch, and from the sound of it, either hyperventilating or having an asthma attack. He’d just seen a very ugly death
coming right for him, and he was having a hard time dealing with it. Well, boo-fucking-hoo.

  It was stupid, as the noise made Roan turn back toward him, but the transformation of his face had stopped. His hair seemed to have grown, though, and taken on a mane-like fluffiness. Holy shit, how dangerous was Roan? Seriously. He thought he’d been dangerous enough as your average Human. The growling returned in the base of his throat.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Holden said. “Go to Dylan. He needs you.”

  Roan glanced at him, and Holden saw that one of his eyes—just one—was almost Human again. It was nearly more creepy than seeing him halfway to lion mode. Here was a man who would never truly be at peace with himself, because he wasn’t just a man, but he wasn’t a lion either. He was and forever would be the unholy combination of both. “He—”

  “I owe you, for saving Ponyboy,” Holden said, and that was true. Roan had to know that. “I’ll take care of him. Now go. The cops’ll be here soon, and that doesn’t give me much time.”

  Roan looked back at the cowering Harvey and growled for several more seconds, then turned sharply on his heel and stormed out the open door, not looking at him or glancing back, probably because he couldn’t. He was riding a line of control, and he could only do what he had to.

  “Oh my god,” the guy who was probably Harvey said, still gasping for breath as he used the back of the couch to pull himself up to his feet. “Thank you, thank you. I thought… my god, what kinda freak is he….”

  Holden had reached into his front pocket, and felt the now body-warmed metal handle of his butterfly knife, the lucky charm (and more) he’d had with him all his life on the street. As he crossed the small room toward Harvey, he expertly flicked his wrist, opening the knife and exposing the blade, which Harvey didn’t seem to see until Holden had shoved him back against the wall and put the long, cool blade right up against his jugular vein. Fear flooded his eyes again, now tempered with confusion.