Infected: Shift

by Andrea Speed

  Dylan groaned, reaching behind him to run a hand down his back, and said, “A couple of hours, you dirty old man.”

  “Who’s old?”

  Dylan shrugged him off, just enough to turn his head and kiss him, a strong, hungry kiss that surprised him with its intensity. Dylan had missed him too, huh?

  Less than an hour later, they were lying on their bed, trying to catch their breath, sweat cooling on their skin. Roan saw a sliver of light painting the ceiling, as the bedroom curtains weren’t totally closed and the porch lights were on light sensors and came on immediately at night. “You ever gonna tell me what’s wrong?” Dylan asked. He had his head on Roan’s chest, arm draped over his abdomen, leg crooked over his. Roan stroked his hair by habit, wondering how his hair always felt so soft.

  “What? I thought that went well.”

  “Don’t you dare make a joke of this.”

  Okay, so the sex was only a temporary distraction. He should have known it wouldn’t last forever. Roan knew he was in a bit of a bind here, as he had promised Dylan that if he came back he’d be totally honest with him. Fuck. He considered what he would say, he didn’t honestly know, so he was a little surprised when he heard himself say, “I’m scared.”

  Dylan propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at him in concern. “Of what?”

  “Disappearing. Of the lion coming out and never going away.”

  Dylan frowned, gently brushing hair off Roan’s forehead, his dark eyes full of touching concern. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I’m beginning to think it could.”

  “Why?”

  Yes, great question. Could he tell him the truth? That he meant to just beat a guy senseless and he ended up mauling him, crushing his arm and snapping his leg like it was made of pretzel sticks? That the change seemed to seize him suddenly and he hardly felt it? “The rules no longer apply to me, Dyl. I could—”

  The phone rang then, making them both start. By the second ring, Dylan said, “I bet it’s for you.”

  “Probably. I wish it was good news for once.” Reluctantly, he reached over to the nightstand and snagged the phone by the fourth ring. “Yeah?”

  “I need you at 725 154th Street, off Hill Road,” Gordo said with no preamble. “The faster you get here the better, ’cause it seems the press has already got wind of this.”

  “Hey, you’re back on the job,” Roan replied, honestly surprised. As far as he knew, there were two kinds of cops, those that couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, and those that wanted to stay on the job until they died. Gordo was one of the latter, those crazy sons of bitches who became their job. He was on medical leave under protest, and must have finally convinced everyone he was fine to return to the cat crime squad. “How you doing, Gordo?”

  At the sound of the name, Dylan kissed his chest, sighed, and rolled off the bed. He knew a call from Sikorski was never good. Roan watched him walk to the shower with envy. “Don’t you ask me that,” Gordo snapped. “I’m tired of answering that question. Now move your ass. Time’s wasting here.”

  “How bad is it?” There was something in his voice that told him it wasn’t just people worrying about him that was pissing him off.

  “Probably the worst scene of the year. Now stop stalling and move it.” He hung up abruptly, but Roan was sort of expecting it by then.

  He rolled off the bed himself, stopped in the bathroom to have a piss and throw the condom away, and told Dylan he was off. Dylan told him to be careful, which struck Roan as funny. The crime was over; all that was left was the cleanup of the bodies and the identification of the cat that did it. But he appreciated the sentiment.

  He got dressed hastily, careful to not grab a T-shirt that was in any way silly (no need to be disrespectful at a murder scene), and didn’t care that he probably smelled like sex and sweat. They expected him to show up any time of day or night, they were going to have to live with him as is.

  He was starving, though, so he stopped in the kitchen to wolf down a croissant and wash it down with a Diet Pepsi, which he also took his Percocet with. He went out to the garage, grabbed his motorcycle helmet off the workbench, and wheeled the bike out.

  It was drizzling now, a piddly sort of rain that did no good at all except fuck up traffic. Luckily, since it was now past ten, traffic wasn’t bad enough to be really fucked. It took him ten minutes to reach the site, and down the street from it he saw the cherry-red lights that indicated a police presence. That was never good. Even at this time of night, in this weather, there were rubberneckers, people trying to get a glimpse of death and misery over the police tape and shoulders of beat cops roped into playing guards. There were some people he vaguely recognized from the twenty-four-hour local news channel, and as he parked his bike across the street and crossed to the scene, the reporter shouted at him, “So it is a cat crime scene.”

  “No, it’s a gay one,” he shouted back, wearily crossing a cracked parking strip and sodden lawn. “Disco balls all over the place.”

  Another guy close to the reporter, one he didn’t recognize, stage whispered, “Is that true?”

  He must have worked for Fox News.

  You knew when you approached a doorway and found a rookie blowing chunks in the rosebushes that you were in for a fun scene. Of course, the smell had already hit him, the meaty smell of spilled blood, coppery and hot, the shit smell of death, and it made his gorge rise and his stomach growl simultaneously, the lion making itself known in the hair rising on the back of his neck and the growl welling in his throat. He felt muscles tensing all up and down his body, ready to feast or fight, whatever presented itself first.

  Sikorski met him at the door with a snarky, “Took you long enough.” Technically, he looked better than he had when Roan had last seen him, but the heart attack had taken a toll on Gordo. He had never been really fat, so now he looked gaunt, his cheeks hollow, giving his face an unintentional ghoulish look. He looked his age now too, which was saying something. He stepped back, and said, “Welcome to Blood Castle.”

  Easy to see what he meant. Blood slathered the living room of this single-level manufactured home like someone had decided to paint with it, but then decided to just throw the stuff around instead. Arterial blood had arced up the side wall, splattering the television, while a blackish-red puddle pooled around the coffee table tipped over on its side, almost obscuring a severed hand from view. Great crimson skid marks seemed to extend out into the next room, while dribbles of brighter, redder blood smeared the kitchen tile. Seb was standing with one of the forensic techs in the far corner, discussing something in an evidence bag. It looked like a chunk of random flesh.

  Among all this blood and death, it was hard to determine nuance, but he could if he focused, and oddly enough the Percocet helped there. It not only calmed and numbed him, but it kept his brain from racing around, trying too hard. “Why do you think this is a cat killing?” he asked.

  Gordo raised his snowy-white eyebrows at him. Pre-heart attack, they were silver. “We found a paw print in the back bedroom and in the kitchen. We’ve got it tentatively identified as a cougar, but we wanted confirmation.”

  Roan shook his head and advanced carefully toward the kitchen, staying on a plastic runner someone had put down to keep people from tracking blood out on their shoes. “How many victims?”

  “We found two in the bedroom, but all this blood seems to indicate a third—”

  “Four victims,” Roan told him. Blood was blood, but everyone’s smelled just a little different. In the kitchen, he caught a whiff of something new. “Make that five.”

  “Five?” Gordo’s exclamation was one of horror, not disbelief. Roan had come through too many times to be disbelieved on these kind of things. “Where the fuck are the bodies? No way a single cougar could have eaten that many people.”

  “No way indeed. This is a frame job.”

  “What?”

  Roan looked at him and shook his head again. “It’s all u
ninfected blood I’m smelling, all pure Human.” And one of them had sweetish-smelling blood, indicating diabetes, but he felt that level of detail was far too fucking creepy to ever admit. “No cat has ever been here.”

  Some of the techs still working paused and looked at him with the same kind of bewilderment that was on Gordo’s face. “Bullshit. We found paw prints.”

  “Two. Planted. Shit, Gord, look at the way the blood’s splattered. If a cat did this, it would have had to hit a major artery every time it bit someone. This is a setup. Someone slaughtered this family and wanted people to think a cat did it.”

  Gordo’s look was stark and hot with doubt and anger, but he wasn’t really angry with Roan. He was just angry at the idea that someone would conceive of such a thing, and that he didn’t grasp it immediately. “Who the hell would do that? And why?”

  Excellent questions. Roan was wondering about that himself.

  9

  The Unshakable Demon

  Roan hadn’t sought out an argument with the cops, but he kind of ended up in one anyways.

  He viewed the paw prints, but scenting the room, he only caught the scent of blood and death. And there was something about the paw print, its placement, the way the blood soaked into the impression of the pads, that struck him as false. He was trying to imagine a large cougar—it would have had to have been a large cougar—standing here, in the position required to leave the print, and he couldn’t imagine why the cougar would have stood in such a position… and only left a single print. There may have been others, partials, but they didn’t take.

  There was a bit of an argument, enlivened by the fact that no one was sure how someone could leave fake prints anyways, but he eventually headed back into the kitchen, where he realized that fifth blood scent was bothering him. He knew why after a couple of seconds—it was too faint. All the blood was heavy, except for one person’s, which was just a trace. At this crime scene that made no sense, so he decided to ignore the bullshit and follow it.

  There was a trail to follow. It wasn’t always visible, but he could smell it if he crouched down, close to the ground. Gordo thought he was losing it, but followed along with Seb, staying back a respectful distance. Roan followed the scent out into the backyard, through a broken fence, and eventually, coming over the crest of a very tiny hill, he knew exactly where his trail would lead, or at least get lost. “Empty it,” he told them, pointing at the small but deep drainage area in front of the power substation. It glittered in the gloomy night like quarters in a gutter. “You’ll find bodies.”

  Gordo and Seb looked at it with wonderfully stoic cop expressions. “Were we following a corpse?” Gordo wondered.

  Seb shook his head. “We were following the killer, weren’t we? He cut himself.”

  Roan nodded. “Or someone cut him before they died. It’s a man, or a woman with so much testosterone she must have nascent balls. But not an infected. An infected in cat form wouldn’t carry someone out to the water anyways.”

  “No, a cat wouldn’t bother,” Seb agreed.

  “It might. Leopards can sometimes drag prey up a tree,” Roan pointed out.

  They both scowled at him. Okay, he probably hadn’t needed to say that. Still, he felt he had to, just to be a smartass.

  By the time they got back to the scene, there was far more press and a few more cops too. As he walked to his motorcycle, a couple of the press people got up in his face and asked, “How many cats did it? Was it a group?”

  The light from a video camera nearly blinded him, and he gave the unseen filmmaker an evil frown. “There were no cats involved in this crime. Go chase another ambulance, will you?”

  “Why are you here if cats aren’t responsible?” a female voice accused.

  “’Cause someone fucked up.” There—he’d guaranteed that footage wouldn’t end up on the news.

  He drove home running through the gory scene in his head, wondering who would stage something like that. Kill four people, splatter their blood all over the walls, dump two bodies but leave two partially dismembered at the scene, then stage a couple of paw prints… why?

  He suddenly wondered if any of the cuts could have been made with a tile cutter.

  No, that guy was still locked up, if not in transit to California. But how interesting that these things occurred so close to one another. Could be coincidence. Should he count on that?

  At home, Dylan was gone to work, and it was later than Roan had thought anyways; he’d spent longer at the scene than he’d realized. He took a bath and tried to wash the scent of blood off of him, which lingered even though he hadn’t gotten any on him. It was probably all in his head.

  Was someone targeting cats again, but in an entirely new way? He was an obvious infected, being rather “out” about his status (and his gayness), so if they wanted a cat target, he’d be ideal, and Panic would be a good place to find him. And if they wanted to ramp up common sentiment against cats even more than the Grant Kim case—which was still a powder keg—a big ugly slaughter would do it. It didn’t feel perfect, but there was enough truth to it that it seemed like solid ground. Yet that was incredibly troubling, wasn’t it? It meant that Charlie the tile cutter wasn’t working alone.

  After his bath he went downstairs and nuked some of the food Dylan had made earlier, because gruesome scene or not, he was still hungry. His head was starting to get that slow ache that it sometimes did before a migraine sank its talons into his brain, so he popped a couple of more pills after eating a couple of forkfuls of vegetarian rigatoni. It was good, but he had to nuke some Italian sausage he had hidden in the fridge, because the leftover lion urges wanted flesh between his teeth. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to indulge it.

  After eating, the exhaustion hit hard, so he went to catch some z’s, and even though he didn’t take anything heavy, he slept right through a phone call from Hatcher. According to the message he left, that web site Roan had asked about was hard to track down, but the server was somewhere in Romania, which was common for sites trying to get around certain legal restrictions. He was trying to find out the real name of the owner, but the bastard was tricky. He also volunteered that he assumed this meant he’d discovered Jordan’s fascination with Internet porn. So Hatcher was aware of it? Did he know about Brittney and Darren too?

  He was contemplating whether to call him back or not when he heard an unfamiliar car in the driveway. He looked out the window to see a beat-up old hatchback the color of mold green and primer gray, which hardly seemed like a threatening car, but he knew who it belonged to as soon as he saw a whisper-thin man with expertly coifed hair get out of the driver’s side. It was Luis, and honestly, shouldn’t the “Save a horse—ride a cowboy” bumper sticker have been the giveaway?

  He ran downstairs and managed to open the door just before Luis and Dylan reached it. He smelled blood and saw Dylan at the same second. “What the fuck happened?” he blurted, swallowing back a growl of rage.

  “It’s a good thing I’m looking for a job, ’cause I think I just got my ass fired,” Dylan admitted, clenching bloodstained teeth. His left eye was swelling shut and discolored by a bruise that was mostly dark burgundy, slowly shading toward a livid purple. His upper lip was nearly bisected by a bloody cut that was just starting to scab, and there was an abrasion on his cheek that would probably turn into a minor bruise in the next couple of hours. A dribble of blood was visible on the navy blue Seattle Falcons T-shirt he wore (hey, they got them as freebies, so why not).

  “Oh, that pendejo deserved worse,” Luis insisted. “Too bad your straight hockey friends weren’t there tonight. Although I swear I’ve seen that one before.”

  “The one that looks kind of like a darker Matthew Mitcham?” Dylan replied. Roan wished he knew who that was. At Luis’s nod, he said, “Oh, that’s Scott. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in Panic before.”

  “He’s gay?” Luis asked with an awful lot of hope.

  “Switch-hitter,” Roan told him, scowl
ing at them both. “Now who the fuck beat you up?”

  “Actually, he did the beating,” Luis told him. “You’d have been proud of him, honey. You should see the other guy.”

  “You probably will see the other guy if he presses charges,” Dylan admitted sheepishly. He slipped past Roan and into the living room like he was trying to escape an awkward situation. Like it was going to be that easy.

  “If he presses charges, you press ’em right back,” Luis argued. “I’ll say he threw the first punch, and I can get a whole bunch of people to back me up.”

  “Is anyone going to tell me what happened?”

  Luis gave him a funny look, which he didn’t quite get the meaning of until he said, “Nice undies.” Roan had forgotten he was sleeping in his Homer Simpson boxer shorts. Oh well, at least he wasn’t naked. Then Luis's eyes focused on his chest and arms, and he asked, “Wow, you got a lot of tats. Some of these are new, aren’t they? I didn’t think you had that much ink.”