Infected

by Andrea Speed

  Dee retrieved his medical kit and pulled out the hypodermic he had ready and waiting for Roan. He flicked it a couple times, did a small test squeeze to make sure there were no air bubbles, and wiped down a small section of Roan’s arm with an alcohol wipe before stabbing the needle into a prominent vein. It was a painkiller, a powerful one he might not risk with anyone else, but Roan could take whatever he gave him. He didn’t have the tolerance problems of a normal human, which his overdosing on animal tranquilizers proved. Hell, some asshole was cutting heroin with horse and elephant tranquilizers, tiny amounts, and it had already killed five people that he knew of. And that was hardly one one-thousandth of the dosage Roan had been hit with and survived. Superhuman was really the only word for it, but no one in the medical community would say it. But on top of everything else and all he’d been through, it really was the only explanation for how he was still alive. No normal human could be.

  Dee put the used needle in a small paper bag and stamped on it with a sneakered foot before tossing it in the garbage. That was one needle he never wanted anyone reusing. Dee then got busy dumping warm food in a bowl before pulling the carafe from the fridge and pouring the lemonade in a plastic tumbler.

  “You didn’t make us dinner, did you?” Chai asked.

  “In a way. Roan’s metabolism freaks out, and I have to make sure he doesn’t starve to death. Why don’t you tell me what happened to you, starting from how you got kidnapped.”

  Chai did, while Dee set aside a plate of food for him. He didn’t know if Chai was hungry—and if he had a concussion, he’d be nauseous—but he got a sense of interest. So Chai told him the story, and none of it was terribly surprising except the fact that the men would go for a kidnapping on a street in daylight and actually get away with it. That was pretty brazen. But Dee could easily imagine that Ro’s return had rattled them to their core. They probably thought they could handle everything, until the professional wrench showed up to break their machine.

  He briefly wondered if any of them were alive, and then decided he didn’t care. He knew he should, but come on. No, it wasn’t public, but so many people, especially cops and medical personnel, knew about Roan. They knew, if enraged, the lion came out, and the lion didn’t fuck around. It had no time for your bipedal bullshit and boomsticks. It came, it saw, it tore out your fucking throat. It was known. These men, if they were cops, should have had sufficient warning. They should have known that the smart play, the minute Roan showed up, was to get the fuck out of Dodge and try to hit someplace without an extradition treaty before anyone caught up to them.

  But macho guys didn’t run, did they? Macho cops held their fucking ground and decided they could take out the kitty fag that everyone else was so afraid of. He was an infected and a flamer, right? No problem for straight, macho guys like them. Men’s men. Who went the way of all men who decided their fragile sense of masculinity was a hell of a lot more important than their lives. He would have pitied them if he didn’t find that kind of dickhead so infuriating. That’s why Dee generally didn’t date cops. Roan had been the exception because he didn’t feel the need to be hypermasculine or worry about how he presented himself to other men. In retrospect, of course, he didn’t have to worry about any of that. He had a lion in him. No man was ever going to be bigger or badder than that. Roan had cornered the market, and unconsciously, he must have known that. It was hard to make a man feel insecure when he knew, if push came to shove, he could easily kill everyone in the room.

  But right now, he was an unconscious lump on the couch. Dee grabbed Roan by the shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. “C’mon, old man, wake up,” Dee said, trying to encourage him. He had no idea if Roan actually heard him or not.

  “Why do you keep calling him old man?” Chai wondered. “Is he that much older than you?”

  “Not really. But I’m trying to irritate him back to consciousness.”

  “Does that work?”

  “More often than not.” But even as he said it, it was clear it wasn’t working right now. Dee crouched down and patted Roan’s cheek. “Come on.” If he couldn’t get him to open his eyes, he’d probably have to dig out his IV rig, which he had hidden in the back of his closet. But if Roan was that bad, he’d need a hospital. The IV would only keep him relatively stable for a short period of time.

  Of course, part of it was that he didn’t want to break out all that gear in front of Chai and have him ask if all paramedics kept so much medical gear at home. He could lie, as it was probably likely Chai wouldn’t know either way, but it was the principle of the thing.

  He liked to take the moral high ground on Holden, and he felt he’d earned it. Holden was out there hurting people. But Dee knew it was kind of hypocritical of him since he had essentially played Kevorkian for friends and friends of friends who were terminally ill. He hadn’t done it recently, but that was only because most of the infecteds he knew were already dead.

  What he learned when his mother had a late diagnosis of ovarian cancer was that doctors didn’t like to give certain people—minorities, for example, or the poor—too much in the way of painkillers, and yet were happy to keep them alive even though their life had devolved into a never-ending grind of pure torture. Seeing it happen once had been more than enough for Dee. If the terminally ill wanted to move up their own expiration dates a couple of days, why the fuck did medical institutions stand in their way? Things were starting to change, very slowly, but from what Dee understood, they were getting even stingier with painkilling drugs, thanks to widespread opioid addictions. Dee still had connections in the infected community and was ready to go as need be. But he felt the difference between him and Holden was that he was helping people, easing their pain, but they made the call on what happened and when. Vigilantes were completely in charge of the whats and whens, and whether they helped anyone or not was subjective.

  Finally, Roan reached out and batted at his hand with a weak groan that could have been a swallowed word. His eyelids were fluttering as if he was fighting to open them. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen Roan’s body respond before he was fully conscious, but it never stopped being freaky. He had a powerful mind and an overpowered body, and yet it was his body that often let him down and his mind that would eventually kill him.

  Roan’s eyes finally opened, and Dee was reminded he thought his green eyes were always Roan’s best feature. Well, that and his ass, but his ass wasn’t always visible.

  “Dee?” It seemed to take him a moment to remember why he was here; Dee could see it in his eyes. But then he did. “Oh shit.” He immediately looked around, sitting up straighter, and seemed to relax a little when he saw Chai was in the chair. “You okay?”

  Chai nodded. “More or less. Sorry I didn’t stay home.”

  “It’s okay. They might have tried to move on you anyway. They were extremely stupid.”

  Dee couldn’t imagine a more fitting eulogy for those assholes. And he knew it probably was just that.

  Dee handed Roan the bowl of food and the glass of lemonade. Roan took them but rolled his eyes. “Are you my mom now?”

  “You wish. Eat up.”

  It seemed to take Roan a few seconds of intense concentration before he could actually drink from the glass. Whether that was a lingering effect of the change or the pain was debatable, and only Roan knew for sure. Whether he would admit it was another thing entirely.

  Roan drank most of the liquid in three swallows, proving how parched he was. “Wow, that’s terrible,” Roan said, giving Dee the now empty glass. He looked a bit better, showing sometimes all you needed was water and sugar.

  “Tell me about it.”

  While Dee was in the kitchen pouring another glass of the awful lemonade, there was a knock at the door. Dee glanced at Roan, who looked toward the closed door for a few seconds. “It’s Dyl. Did you tell him I was here?”

  Dee was briefly flabbergasted. How did he know it was Dylan? There was no way he could smell him from t
here, was there? Maybe. Before Ro had moved to Canada, he was getting…. Dee didn’t want to say more catlike because that was stereotypical and wrong. The infected really weren’t big cats, no matter what they shifted into. Except Roan, of course. There was a time you could claim he wasn’t leonine in the least, but that time had ceased how many years ago? And it wasn’t a guess. Roan was saying it as if he could see him through the door. Which… no, that was crazy. Yeah, he was superhuman, but this wasn’t a fucking comic book.

  “He called me, worried about you,” Dee said. He almost checked through the door’s peephole, but fuck it. Even if Roan was wrong, any trouble stepping though the door would be laid out on the floor before it had a chance to regret its poor life choices.

  Of course it was Dylan, and Dee was almost struck dumb. Incredibly, while Dylan had changed very little since the last time Dee had seen him, he was somehow hotter. He’d let his black hair grow out a bit, making it not only longer but giving it a bit more of a wave. He also had a discreet five o’clock shadow that could have been accidental or deliberate, just like his hair. It was calculated bedhead sexy, although the weariness in his eyes suggested none of this was deliberate. He finished the look with a wardrobe that could have come straight from Roan’s closet: worn jeans with small paint splatters, biker boots, an oversized olive-green jacket that could have been Army surplus, and a T-shirt advertising the Serrano Art Gallery. Dylan was rocking disheveled bohemian chic without meaning to, which made it that much sexier. Goddamn Roan and the goddamn hunks who were sucked into his orbit like gorgeous moths to dangerous flames.

  Of course, maybe Dylan was adjusting to meet his role as hot new artist. His career had taken off since they’d moved to Vancouver. Well, as much as it could take off in the art world. But it seemed up there, the rumors about his husband had made Dylan a hot commodity. Why that hadn’t worked the same down here was anyone’s guess, although Dee bet it had something to do with the fundamental difference between Canadians and Americans. For one thing, it wasn’t legal to kill transformed infecteds up there, unless they posed an immediate threat to life, and you had to prove that. They tried to treat infecteds as human, no matter their current guise. It was laudable, and the Canadians were so fucking smug about it.

  Dylan opened his mouth to speak to him, but his deep brown eyes were drawn to Roan sitting on the couch. Roan gave him a sheepish wave, which led Dylan to giving Dee nothing more than an appreciative nod before heading toward his husband. “What am I going to do with you?” Dylan asked. Roan took a breath to respond, but Dylan quickly added, “That was rhetorical.”

  “Dammit,” Roan said. Dee was curious if Ro was going to try to defuse this with humor—humor being Roan’s weapon of choice when he wasn’t in full lion mode—but what else could he do? Not that it would work. There wasn’t enough humor in the world to make this okay.

  Dee realized they would need some privacy to have their talk/domestic squabble, so he walked over to Chai and offered him a hand up. “Come on. Let’s go do something about that eye.”

  Chai self-consciously touched his eye but then winced as he made contact with bruised flesh. “Is it that bad?”

  “No, but I’ve neglected it long enough.”

  Chai took his hand, and Dee helped him stand up before leading him to the bedroom so Dylan and Roan could temporarily have their own space. He really hoped being in a strange place kept them from a knock-down, drag-out sort of fight.

  Once Dee closed the door and flipped on the light, he wished he’d cleaned up his bedroom a bit more before leading Chai in. It wasn’t terrible; he had made a halfhearted attempt to clean up yesterday. But if he was trying to make a good impression, it was a partial stumble. He hadn’t made his bed as much as he had casually thrown his dark blue comforter over it in hopes it would look neater than it actually was. At least he’d picked all his clothes up off the floor.

  Chai sat on the end of his bed while Dee pulled out a secondary first aid kit. He was never going to be caught unprepared by anyone. “Okay, I’m gonna do a couple of tests, and they’ll seem weird, but humor me.”

  Chai appeared a little wary, but at the same time, seemed resigned. “Sure.”

  Dee crouched down in front of him and did the usual for suspected head injuries: he pulled out a penlight and tested the responsiveness of Chai’s pupils—fine—and had him follow his fingers with his eyes without moving his head. Chai really did have lovely eyes, almost more black than brown, really pretty. He also audibly confirmed that, while his head hurt a little, he’d had worse hangovers, and he wasn’t nauseous. “So do you think I’m okay?”

  “For now. Best to keep an eye on you for twenty-four hours. Any change or weirdness needs to be reported immediately.” Dee slipped his penlight into his pocket, as it had a tendency to come in handy for nonmedical reasons. “Let me guess—you’re mixed race, right?”

  “Yeah. My dad’s Indian, and my mom’s Indonesian and Thai. So I’m really three races mixed. My mother mainly identifies as Thai, and as a result, I identify as Indonesian so I can disagree with both my parents. Why?”

  Dee nodded, smiling. “I have this sort of sixth sense for finding people like me. Glad it still works.”

  Chai gave him a sassy eyebrow raise. “Like you? You don’t look Indonesian to me.”

  Dee pointed at himself. “Black and Puerto Rican. I feel all us mixed-race people are the same group, no matter what we’re mixes of. I mean, single-race people are like purebreds, aren’t they? Inbred and riddled with disease.”

  Chai laughed, and that made him wince and reach for his eye, although he stopped before he touched his face. “Have you told them that?”

  “Some of them. Depends.” Dee was aware that Dylan was one of that group—being half-Latino, half-white—and that Roan wasn’t, but he actually mentioned the purebred joke to Roan once, who only said, “That’s fair.” Like it was! He was only being silly. Well, mostly. He did wonder if Roan was an honorary member, since he was half-virus, but wasn’t sure he could stretch the definition that far. Roan probably needed a category for himself alone, wherever the hybrid species and mutant superheroes went.

  Chai was shaking his head, but he was smiling, and it looked like the ashen tone beneath his skin was fading away. Dee didn’t blame him; some people never recovered from the shock of seeing Roan in his altered state. “So racist.”

  “I prefer to think of it as contemporary.” Dee busied himself putting his secondary medical kit away and surreptitiously checking out his room to make sure he hadn’t left out anything too embarrassing. It was unlikely but still possible. “When we get back out there, I probably have a bag of blue ice you can hold to your eye.”

  “Does that do anything?”

  “Sure, it can ease the swelling a bit.”

  “A bit?”

  “Not even ice can perform miracles.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Dee turned back to Chai, giving him a smooth smile. He knew that serious accidents could leave psychological scars, and that some people never quite adjusted to their new reality. But he got the distinct impression that Chai thought because he’d lost half his leg, he was suddenly rendered ugly. Yeah, he had some scars on his scalp, but the way he styled his hair kept them hidden. He was still as hot as shit, probably way too hot for Seattle, but he didn’t seem to know it. With Roan it made more sense because nothing about him screamed hot. He was just magnetic in a way he chalked up to his freak factor. Chai was movie-star handsome, although not in that “not of this Earth” way that some stars had. (Dee had no idea why, but sometimes he saw those actors in movie trailers and wondered how they weren’t mannequins, with perfect skin and perfect teeth and perfectly symmetrical features. The one thing he and Roan did have in common was occasionally finding perfection a weird sort of turnoff. Not always, but sometimes it was kind of weird.) “You okay?”

  “Yeah. My headache isn’t even bad; it’s mostly settled around my eye.”

  “Not what
I meant.”

  Chai grimaced and looked away, as if afraid to meet his eyes. “I… I really don’t know. Sometimes I think I kind of am, and that’s weird, but then I look at my hand.” Chai held it up, palm toward the floor, and Dee could see a mild tremor before he lowered it to his leg. “I just… it’s almost like a dream, you know? It didn’t seem real. Not when I woke up in that chair, and not when Roan busted down the door. I can almost believe I made it up, you know? Like someone slipped me some ’shrooms and I had a trip while being half-aware of it.”

  “That’s common with shock. It’s a lot to process, and it may take a while.”

  “Is that why I want to curl up and go to sleep?”

  “Probably. But considering you got punched in the head, I’d say stay up for now.”

  Chai rolled his eyes and winced. Apparently even that hurt. “I thought you just said I was okay.”

  “You seem to be, but it’s best not to take chances with head injuries.”

  Chai grimaced, but whatever he was going to say, he kept to himself. His body posture was awkward, like he really wanted to say something but was afraid to do so. Should he encourage him or back off? Dee was unsure since he didn’t know him that well. Instead, Dee gave him a sassy look, one eyebrow raised and a hand on his hip. Usually people either fessed up or walked when they got that. Chai eventually did what he hoped he would do, which was talk. “Say, uh… um, I was just curious? I’m not pressing. I was just wondering….”

  “What?”

  “The other night, when we hung out? Was that a date, or… something else? I’m not pressuring. I’m just not sure.”

  “What did you want it to be?”

  Chai ran a hand through his hair and chuckled breathlessly. His nervousness was kind of adorable. “Um, well… I’m cool with whatever, you know?”

  Dee shook his head as Chai continued to stammer without settling on one side or the other. “Does this answer your question?” He walked over to him, took Chai’s face very gently in his hands, and kissed him. It was gentle because he had a feeling he should probably handle Chai with care in general, and he waited to see how he would respond.