Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  There was little furniture in the living room—an old couch that was so stained and damp it gave off a strong aroma of mildew was pretty much it—and there was some bird and mouse shit along with the crumpled beer cans and broken crack pipes clotting the corners. An abandoned house used as a party house. Not new, not surprising, and there’d be no clues here.

  Well, no, technically there’d be a thousand clues, but none that would point directly to Grant. There was no one to talk to about the party, except for Marjean, who had probably told him all she could clearly remember. He supposed he could grill her, ask her about other people at the party, but what was the point? The cops were most certainly combing through Grant’s stuff by now, putting an APB out on his car. He was probably in custody already. Roan was a dollar short and a day late.

  He called Gordo but got routed straight to his call messaging. He didn’t leave a message. When he could call and tell him they had Grant, he would.

  By the time Roan reached home, he had that odd hollow-head feeling that wasn’t quite a headache and wasn’t quite a dizzy spell but was some sickening offspring of the two. As soon as he was in the door, he kicked off his boots and dropped his sodden coat in the foyer, figuring he’d pick them up later. He took off his wet shirt on the stairs but kept it with him so he could throw it on the floor of his bedroom. He stripped off his pants, also damp from rain, and just threw them aside, figuring he’d be up before Dylan showed up. He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow; he barely got the covers pulled over him.

  He slept hard, but he did have vague memories of a strange dream where he was playing poker with Paris and Grant Kim. Grant had no shirt on and a pony keg on his lap. The whole thing was very weird, and the only thing he remembered Grant saying was, “Only infecteds can play.” Well, duh.

  The phone woke him up. Oh, how he was learning to hate the fucking phone. He reached out and snagged it, keeping his face buried in his pillow. “What?”

  “What the hell, are you gagged?” Gordo asked, annoyed. “I can barely hear you.”

  He ignored that comment. “You got Grant yet?”

  “No, and I need you here, in the woods next to Martin Ellis High School.”

  For a moment, he thought he was still dreaming. “Did you say you want me at the high school?”

  “Near the school. Just follow the cop cars and local TV news van. I’ll probably be telling some blow-dried asshole to fuck off.”

  “So, a normal night for you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Why am I goin’ to the high school, Gord?”

  “We have a body here I need you to check out. I think I know who did it, but I need a confirmation, and you’re faster than waiting for a bite print to come back.”

  Roan felt his stomach sink like a stone. “Oh no. Grant?”

  “Approximate time of death seems to say the vic died early this morning, around the time the first crime scene was discovered. And we’re about a mile away from it.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Yeah, that was my opinion too. It looks real bad. The vic’s a kid, too, or at least from what I can tell. Right now I’m goin’ by his high-tops and the remains of his Seether T-shirt.”

  “Christ.” Roan shoved himself up to a sitting position, looking out the window at the rain, which had backed off to a pissing kind of drizzle. But it was still raining. Rivers would be flooding soon, if they weren’t already. Just one more thing to worry about.

  Deaths by cat were always bad, and always caused a minor firestorm in the press. But the death of a kid? That sometimes made national news, and brought out all the “we should lock ’em in camps” right-wing assholes in their wake. Not that he was advocating tearing up teenagers should be given a pass, but it wasn’t Grant’s fault. It was the cat who did this, not the person. But some people didn’t give a rat’s ass about the distinction or didn’t even bother to make it in the first place.

  He told Gordo he’d be there as soon as possible and hastily got dressed, ignoring the fact that he had perhaps the worst case of bed head he’d ever glimpsed in a bathroom mirror. It’d be wetted down by the rain soon enough.

  Since he was going to get drenched regardless, he decided to take the bike. He could use the extra speed right now anyways. It’d help wake him up.

  In the end it didn’t, but other people driving like idiots kind of did. It was Washington State—it rained. It rained quite a bit, although not as much as the jokes would lead you to believe. So why did so many people panic and drive like the world was ending when it rained? He would never understand that.

  And Gordo was right, it was easy to find the site. The Channel Eight news van was visible several blocks away, thanks to the garish logo painted on the side. But they must have only known it was a killing near the high school and not a kid victim, as it wasn’t their big “action news man” on the scene but one of the minor ones, the cute but ethnically diverse female reporter (Asian), Hannah something or other. Roan couldn’t remember, as he didn’t watch Channel Eight news. He got all his local news from the newspaper, and all other news from the Internet or BBC News. Did that make him a snob? Ah, fuck it, who cared? If he could be a snob in a black vinyl raincoat and a Dalek T-shirt with a sparkly black motorcycle helmet wedged underneath his arm, so be it.

  Channel Eight’s team was being held back at a hasty cordon of sawhorses, where Hannah was arguing with a poor beleaguered beat cop roped in to stand guard and protect the crime scene. The team seemed to be Hannah in her ridiculously expensive raincoat, a sound engineer huddled beneath an umbrella being held by the segment producer (?), and the cameraman, who was standing aside and smoking a cigarette like he’d been starving for nicotine.

  They were an interesting contrast, and they all glanced at each other as one of the other cops working the line recognized Roan and waved him through the blockade. The sound engineer looked like he was barely out of high school himself, a lanky black guy who had that type of youthful face that would guarantee he’d be carded until he was in his forties. The segment producer was almost a foot shorter than the sound guy and his opposite in almost every way: stocky where he was lanky, doughy where he was lean, pale where he was dark. The cameraman looked like a stereotypical biker, with thinning but shoulder-length steel-gray hair and a salt-and-pepper beard that was neatly trimmed but may as well have been bushy and shaggy. He just gave off a disreputable air, whether that was fair or not.

  As Roan started up the slight, muddy incline, he heard Hannah ask, “Who the hell is that?”

  One of the men—not the cop, but part of Hannah’s entourage—muttered, “I think that’s their outside cat expert, the kitty fag. His name’s like McKitchen or something.”

  Roan sighed and stopped where he was, looking back at them. “You really shouldn’t casually slur the guy who can track you down by scent alone, you know? Just an FYI. And it’s pronounced Mick—kee—an. At least get that much right.”

  He saw the surprise register on their faces—all but Hannah’s, as she simply didn’t react to anything (on-air talent rule 101)—but no one said anything, so Roan turned and continued on. He then heard, very faintly, “How the fuck did he hear me?”

  There was a throaty chuckle, and the cigarette rasp of the voice led him to think it was the cameraman talking. “The shit I heard about him, he’s damn right—you don’t fuck with him. He can’t turn the cat off, or some shit like that. He’s like superhuman or something.”

  Can’t turn the cat off? What a weird way to put it.

  The woods were just a thick stand of pine and firs that had yet to be cleared away, a couple hundred yards away from the chain-link boundary of the school’s football field. Some attempt had been made to clear away the undergrowth, but you couldn’t kill blackberry vines with a tactical nuclear strike. Around the clinging, barbed vines were discarded forty-ounce bottles of various kinds, cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, even a used condom and a pill bottle with its label stripped off, an
d the side of a dark-red-spattered white shoe was visible. Rain and wind diluted the smell of blood, as did the smell of piss, stale beer, and fresh pot smoke. Well, relatively fresh, a few hours old.

  “Kid was smoking pot?” Roan asked as he approached Gordo.

  Gordo was wearing a brown felt hat that wasn’t a fedora but wanted to be. Rain dripped from its brim, and as he turned, it flung some droplets. “Probably. I ain’t even gonna ask how you knew that.” Many forensic people buzzed around, nearly all of whom Roan recognized. Since they knew who he was and why he was here, he wasn’t acknowledged in any way. “Apparently a lot of kids come here before or after school to smoke up or have a drink, stuff like that.”

  “Fuck around?”

  “That too. There’s kind of a path over there, near the dogwoods, so it’s pretty well traveled.”

  “And yet the kid’s been here since around the time school started?”

  Gordo nodded, making rain shower from his hat. “And the body was only reported less than an hour ago.”

  “So who knows how many saw it before anyone bothered to report it? The scene’s contaminated.”

  “I know. It’s all massively fucked. What’s wrong with kids today? How can you see the body of a kid that’s been mutilated and then not call it in?”

  Roan shrugged. “It’s not a new thing. Every generation has its segment of people who never want to get involved.”

  “I suppose. But they’re gettin’ younger by the year.” He paused. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t said what it was.”

  “It was a leopard.”

  Gordo let out a sigh that sounded like he was deflating, and the way his shoulders sagged, he might as well have been. “God, what a clusterfuck this is turning into.”

  “And you haven’t found Grant yet?”

  “No. Kid could be hiding out anywhere. We have a list of friends and acquaintances, but it’s fucking huge, and many of them are pretty shady and not inclined to cooperate. I’ve talked to the parents, but they said they haven’t talked to him for a month or so, and I’m inclined to believe them.”

  “What are the parents like? Traditional, strict, hippy?”

  He gave him a curious sidelong glance. “You’ve never met them? I thought Miranda Kim was a friend of yours.”

  “She is, but she never took me home to meet the parents.”

  Gordo shrugged and reached into the pocket of his trench coat, pulling out a crumpled tissue that he blotted his face with. Belatedly, Roan realized he wasn’t drying off rain but sweat. He was sweating, in spite of the chill breeze. And in spite of the growing darkness, Roan noticed he was looking a bit off, a bit pale. “They just seemed like people. Father teaches English at Collins High, the mother’s a librarian for the county. They seemed fine. Upset, as you might imagine. They had no idea he was infected. Why? You got a theory?”

  “No, I’ve just been piecing some things together. I know they had a room set up in their house, but is it possible that this was Grant’s first transformation? That he didn’t know he was infected either?”

  Gordo raised an eyebrow at that but didn’t scoff. “So why the room?”

  “It was put together for Bowles. They all knew he was infected, but Grant got his stupid ass infected and didn’t know. Not until he started transforming. It caught him, Bowles, and Jones short. None of them were prepared for Grant to change. Hence the resulting bloodbath, as they were suddenly faced with a loose leopard, angry and in pain. And a hurting animal can be one vicious fuck, especially if it thinks the people before it are the cause of the pain.” Roan squinted at him, catching a faint whiff of… something. He couldn’t identify the smell. “You need to sit down. You smell wrong.”

  Gordo glared at him. “Smell wrong? Jeeze, thanks, my deodorant fails and you’re calling me out on it. Can you put the nose away for a second?”

  “It’s not body odor.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Roan was forced to shrug. “I dunno. It’s just wrong.”

  “Terrific,” he grumbled sarcastically. Gordon continued to ignore his advice and retrieved what looked like a small Ziploc bag, only inside it was a bloody scrap of plastic. “Even though we don’t have all of this vic, at least he had his ID on him.”

  It was blood-smeared and had been mauled by teeth and claws, but Roan could see enough to determine the kid’s name was Trevor German, and he was seventeen years old. Son of a bitch.

  He recalled his strange dream of him and Grant and Paris playing poker, and realized the symbolism, his brain trying to tell him something. “He panicked.”

  “The kid?”

  “Grant Kim. Assuming this was his first transformation and he wasn’t expecting it, he probably freaked out as soon as he transformed back to Human. That’s why we can’t find him—even he has no idea where he’s going. Paris didn’t know he was infected until he woke up in a dog house in a neighborhood close to the campus, with dog guts strewn all about him. He freaked out when he realized it wasn’t a sick joke and figured out what had happened to him. He left school and ran—hell, he inadvertently ran into the States. He started in Canada.”

  “You think Kim’s gonna run up to Canada?”

  “No. I think he doesn’t know what to do and he’s freaked out. That could actually make things more dangerous.” Roan unconsciously glanced up at the sky, which was already dark with clouds but was growing darker by the second as the sun, somewhere behind the cloud layer, started setting. If they assumed that last night/this morning was Grant’s first transformation, then he was due for round two tonight. Transformations lasted, at bedrock, five days; at most, they could last an entire week.

  Gordon got where he was going. “He’ll be loose again tonight. Why won’t he turn himself in? He’d be safe in a jail cell.”

  “He won’t remember killing anyone, but he will wake up bloody. If he wasn’t freaked out before, he will be now. Do you really think the moment you wake up in tremendous pain and covered in someone else’s blood, with no memories of what happened the night before, that your first impulse would be to call the police?”

  “Well, you put it that way,” Gordo grumbled. “Guess not. But we gotta find him before more people die. Or somebody kills his furry ass.”

  “I know. The problem is, the panicky don’t exactly have a rhyme or reason. We’re looking at this logically, and there’s no way in hell we’re gonna find him that way.”

  “Yeah, but how else do we do it? Throwing darts at a map seems like a big waste of—” Gordo suddenly leaned against a tree, head down toward the ground.

  “Gord?”

  “Just a little dizzy,” he said and made to push off the tree, but his legs gave way and he collapsed, hitting the muddy ground with a thud. Roan dropped his helmet and fell to his knees beside Gordon as he struggled weakly to get up. “I’m okay—”

  “Fuck you, you are not,” Roan said, putting a hand on his neck. His skin was clammy, his heart rate incredibly erratic.

  One of the female forensic technicians was the first over and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “He’s having a heart attack,” Roan snapped. “Call in the EMTs already.”

  It was wonderful how shitty situations could always turn shittier, in ways you never expected.

  8

  Ghouls

  CLUSTERFUCK was probably the only word for it.

  At least Gordo got taken to the hospital pretty quickly, and if he lost consciousness, it wasn’t for long. Seb went with him and called Connie, Gordo’s wife, but Roan went with him as well. Why, he wasn’t sure.

  It wasn’t like he and Gordo were great friends. For a long time they’d had a very weird, slightly tense work relationship, because Gordo—like most of the het cops—didn’t know how to handle him being gay, and then him being an infected while Gordo worked infected crimes was just an added layer of macho bullshit. To Gordo’s credit, he got over it, and for the last few years most of that baggage had been put aside. T
hey were kinda friends, but not really friends—acquaintances? Hard to say. It was a weird category, something in between. But Roan knew it was guilt that brought him along to the hospital.

  He helped Seb comfort Connie, who, to be fair, didn’t need much. Although clearly upset about the whole thing, she had a good patrician background that served her well in times of crisis. Luckily Gordo had had a “minor” heart attack. Roan wanted to ask if that was akin to a minor bullet wound or a minor shark attack, but with Connie here, he bit back his sarcasm.

  Roan had to call Dylan and tell him they’d have to do the tattoo thing either after work or tomorrow, as there was no way he’d be home in time. Once he told Dylan why, he wanted to come to the hospital—for him, not Gordon. Dylan only knew that Gordo was one of his police contacts, but that was about it—but Roan told him he was leaving now anyways. He could only stay in a hospital for so long before a mild panic attack would set in. He had no choice when he was unconscious and drugged, but when he wasn’t, he could walk out.

  It was funny. Roan stood outside the hospital, longing for a smoke, and he had never smoked a cigarette in his life. He hated the smell. But he wanted something to do, something to take his mind off all this shit.

  The universe, in its odd wisdom, answered his plea. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he thought it was Dylan, so he answered without really looking at who was calling. That’s why he was surprised when he answered and an unexpected voice said, “Okay, things just got wicked.”

  It was Jay Bhaskar, medical examiner and Quincy wannabe. “Pardon?”