Infected: Shift

by Andrea Speed

  Dylan opened his eyes, and said, “Hey, I didn’t—holy shit, what happened to you?”

  Roan caught a glimpse of himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, and while he was almost afraid to look, he still managed. He looked human, himself, with light, long scratches across his cheek and just beneath his eyes, one almost bisecting his lip where an older scar was. Dee had cleaned him up nice, and his partial change had closed some of the scratches up. But he was very lucky he hadn’t lost an eye.

  “Cat incident downtown,” he told him, and he was so tired, his legs so rubbery, he sat on the floor beside the bathtub. “Some protest gone horribly wrong. Had to get four cats out of a building.”

  Dylan had sat up and was now looking at him over the lip of the tub. “Are you okay?”

  Stupid question. Of course he was okay, he was always okay. People died around him, other infecteds died, but he just wouldn’t go down. But who was it that was hanging on so hard—the Human or the cat? Maybe neither; maybe it was just the virus. “No,” he admitted, and for whatever reason, he started crying. Why the fuck was he crying?

  He wanted to stop it, but the drugs had sapped him of all his will, and as Dylan reached out and brought him into a clumsy embrace, he was too stoned to fight it. He sagged into him, into his warm, wet skin, and wished he could be a normal human being.

  12

  Temporary People

  Roan felt like a moron and wondered if Dee had lied about giving him Demerol and given him something else, something that made him as maudlin as a drunk. Dylan remained as sweet as he always was, comforting him and soothing him. When Roan admitted that he felt like he should be doing more for his people, Dylan rightly asked, “Which ones?”

  A good point. He was always in the middle of a reverse tug of war, with the gays saying, “You have him,” and the infecteds replying, “No, you have him.” But he'd always said he didn’t want to be a member of any group that would want him, so at least he could belong to either with a clear conscience: neither wanted him.

  He meant infecteds, but sure, gays too. He did nothing for anyone. Dylan pointed out that wasn’t true, that just by being the first infected to join the police force he’d been a trailblazer and broken down a lot of doors, but how much good had it done? There weren’t any other infected cops that he knew of on the force right now. And openly gay? Well, he knew of one downtown, not counting Dropkick, but he knew many more were still in the closet. It was a Pyrrhic victory at best.

  A combination of drugs and posttransformation crash made him tired, but his hunger (also a posttransformation symptom) let him know he was going to be up for a while. So he called for a pizza and noticed he had a couple of messages on the machine already. In fact, if he hadn’t turned the ringer off for the phone, he might have noticed it going off almost nonstop. (He discovered this when he turned the ringer back on. Dylan answered the phone a couple of times, and after reporting he had no comment and didn’t wish to speak to the press, they just turned the ringer off again.) He kept smelling blood and thought it might be psychosomatic, but then he realized his pants were soaked with it. He stripped them off, a bit relieved to see the blood hadn’t soaked through to his skin. Rather than put on pants, he figured fuck it, being down to his boxers was good enough. Dylan didn’t care; he’d seen so much worse.

  Dylan decided to go downstairs and check on what was happening on the news, and Roan decided to stay upstairs and try and get some work done. A joke, since he was still incredibly stoned and not really in a good headspace for it, but he was convinced he could try and force himself to go there. He blasted Pansy Division, mainly because it sometimes helped.

  He assembled everything he had about Jordan in a computer file. It basically boiled down to “spoiled brat.” In that case, he probably would have run off to Tijuana or something, was having the time of his callow life with cheap hookers and tequila. Could he convince Hatcher he needed to take an all-expenses-paid vacation down there to find him?

  The pizza guy came, but Roan hadn’t heard him, so Dylan, dressed only in a green tank top and matching yoga pants, brought him his large pepperoni pizza (he was going to eat all of it and Dylan didn’t feel like pizza, so he didn’t feel bad about it). “You know, there’s this guy on the news saying you’re a hero.”

  “What kind of attention whore is he?”

  “He said a cat tried to attack him and you caught it. He said you were fighting two cats at once.”

  He paused to consider that as he opened the pizza box, and the smell of grease, tomato sauce, cheese, and processed meat hit him face-first and nearly made his stomach turn inside out with need. “Oh, he must have been the fuckhead who opened the door. He wasn’t in any danger he didn’t put himself in with his sheer idiocy.”

  “Is that how you got so scratched up?”

  He shrugged, but he had the excuse of having about half a slice of pizza in his mouth. (He was so hungry, he wanted to shove a whole piece in.) Once he’d finished chewing, he said, “It was a combination of things. Mainly I got angry and lost control. I had to constantly fight myself to stay focused.”

  Dylan had brought him a can of root beer, which he took with a grateful nod. Yes, root beer was disgusting and sickly sweet, and yet he really liked it. Dylan sometimes looked at him like he was crazy, but he humored him, just like he humored his carnivorous ways. “How much did you change?”

  Oh shit. Talk about a question he didn’t want to answer. Luckily, he could give him an honest answer. “I dunno. Too much.”

  Dylan nodded, and looked distracted enough that Roan asked between mouthfuls of pizza, “What’s wrong?”

  He sighed heavily and sat on the end of the bed. “They said there was a near riot by the Arcadia building. Twenty-five people were arrested.”

  “That’s not what’s bugging you. Well, not everything.”

  “I gave my notice at Panic today. I’m not going back.”

  “Not because of me, I hope.”

  “No. I’m not sure it’s safe there anymore. Best to pack it up and try somewhere new.”

  “Your fan club’s gonna miss you.”

  This made him smile faintly, staring down at the carpet. “My fan club is horny drunk men. They’ll miss me for approximately ten seconds, until the new guy with the pecs passes through their field of vision. Then they won’t be able to pick me out of a lineup.”

  “I’ll still be your number-one fan.”

  He looked up at Roan, giving him a genuinely amused and adorable smile. “You’d better be.” He paused briefly, then added, “Should we check the dressings under your shirt, Rambo?”

  Roan looked down, and he could kind of see the irregular lumps of bandages, but not well. “Ah. I bet I can’t blame an ill-fitting bra, can I?”

  “You can, but I know damn well you’re not a cross-dresser.”

  Roan took off his shirt, and Dylan got up and went to the bathroom, emerging from it with gauze and medical tape. Dylan did his best to take the bandages off carefully, but Roan had a reasonably hairy chest, so there was just no way to do this painlessly. At least the Demerol (or whatever) was still working.

  He’d done a decent job using the partial change to heal himself, as his chest didn’t look like ground chuck anymore. It was still bad enough to make Dylan grimace, though, and two of the gauze pads Dee had slapped onto him were saturated with blood and needed replacing. “Maybe I should do it,” Roan told him. “Infected blood and all.”

  “I don’t have any cuts on my hands,” Dylan replied, with a brief but fussy frown.

  “Still—”

  “I’ll be careful,” he snapped. And to give him credit, he was. Dylan was always careful and always gentle, and he let out an empathetic hiss of pain when he had to pull the tape off Roan’s chest hair. (With the hair, of course. At least growing hair had never been a problem for him, especially when a transformation was involved. As proof, even though he'd shaved this morning, he now had about a two day’s growth of beard on his fa
ce, thanks to his partial transformation.) Dylan cut the gauze and the medical tape very carefully and said, more to himself than anything, “I guess I’d better get used to this. These are the kinds of skills you need when your boyfriend’s a superhero.”

  “Don’t you start that shit.”

  “Oh stop kidding yourself, hon. You’re the closest thing to a superhero in this world and you know it. See, a real superhero wouldn’t be lauded and loved; a real superhero would be seen as a freak and threatened with lawsuits at every turn.”

  “Shit. Put it that way, and you have a point.”

  “Of course I have a point. I have a BA and an unemployment check. I know everything.” He then flashed him a brilliant smile, and Roan couldn’t help but grin back.

  “Can I call you my boy wonder?” Roan teased.

  “Only if you like sleeping on the lawn.”

  “Ah. And it’s too soon for you to have an unemployment check. You’ve just left.”

  Dylan gave him a self-deprecating kind of smirk. (It was possible. Roan had seen it several times.) “A boy not so wonder can dream.”

  If he was a superhero, he was a super-lame one. But hey, someone had to be Aquaman. And who would want to be Superman anyways? Red underpants over blue tights? No one was that gay, not even Paul Lynde.

  He finished his pizza sitting in front of his computer wearing boxer shorts and bandages, wondering if all superheroes ended up like this, when he decided to check on his many phone messages before the damn thing filled up. Anyone who identified themselves as a reporter got their message instantly erased. He had nothing against the press; he just had nothing to say about the incident today or in general. Except Arcadia sucked, but odds were they wouldn’t print or show that.

  Dee had left him a very simple message. “See Doctor Rosenberg soon, or I’m going to talk to her myself.” And that was it; he'd hung up. Did that mean he’d seen the numbers Shep had written on his glove and didn’t like them?

  The call from Dropkick was slightly more interesting. “If you’re finished being a cat wrangler, call me back. I think our hooker killer is a serial.” And then she had just hung up.

  Well, he had to return that call. He did, and luckily he caught her at her desk. “Has another body turned up?” he asked. It’s the only reason why she’d jump to the conclusion that the killer was a serial.

  “Yeah,” she sighed wearily. She sounded tired. “I started searching for fairly recent murders that shared many of the same characteristics as the previous one, and I found a really sad one. Seventeen-year-old girl, possibly raped, strangled and found in a drainage ditch off some abandoned government land outside of Spokane two months ago. Probably an illegal, as she was never identified by anyone, and they weren’t able to find anyone in the databases matching her fingerprints or description.”

  Roan closed his eyes and lay on the bed, rubbing his forehead. The Demerol was finally wearing off, and he felt a dull ache deep in his head. “Not a hooker.”

  “Not to anyone’s knowledge, but in the same general category of disposable people. A person no one would miss or look too hard for. Fits the general profile of such a bottom-feeder killer.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  She scoffed, and he heard a soft, dull noise in the background. Had she thrown some paperwork on her desk? “They pawned the case off on some overloaded detective who did all he was supposed to do, and absolutely not one thing more.”

  “So it’s a cold case.”

  “If she was a seventeen-year-old white girl, maybe someone would have given a fuck.”

  “Now now, we’re not supposed to play the race card. Or the sexuality card. Or the gender card. What cards can we play?”

  “Do not pass go.”

  “That’s it? I was hoping for Community Chest at least.”

  She sighed again, long and low, but afterward she said, “I wish you were back on the force, Angus. For a crazy asshole, I think you were the sanest one here.”

  “Holy shit, are things that bad?”

  “It seems like it sometimes. Ignore me, it’s been a shitty day.”

  “Tell me about it.” The pain in his head was getting worse. It felt like the slow-motion explosion of a migraine. The problem with that was migraines usually gave more warning. Still, his partial transformation could have fucked up the schedule.

  “Yeah, how was that cat thing? I heard you got scratched up pretty bad.”

  “I’m fine.” He really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  “Yeah, macho man, you always say that.”

  “Like you don’t.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a woman. We always handle these kinds of things better than you wimpy men.”

  “Sexism! I could have your badge.”

  “You can have it.” After another frustrated sigh, she said, “It’s been a day for crazies. I got called out to a scene first thing this morning—it’s probably on the news, if you bother to watch it—where a guy took a shotgun to his family in a mobile home.”

  “No.” More of sympathy than disbelief. He had little trouble believing it occurred. “Bad scene?”

  “Four kids under thirteen, his wife, and then himself. It looks like the ten year old tried to fight back and escape through the bathroom window, but she never had a chance.”

  “Jesus.” He rubbed his eyes, which now had the dull, hollow hurt of a migraine. This fucker was coming on fast, like it was just waiting for the drugs to wear off so it could jump into the fray. “So what excuse did this dirtbag fuckjob leave behind?”

  “Well, from what I can tell, he thought his wife was cheating on him. Did I mention he married her when she was fifteen and pregnant? He was twenty-two at the time.”

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess controlling, abusive, immature bastard.”

  “Also guess unemployed and eighty pounds overweight and yeah, you’ve got a good picture of him. Fuck, I hate this job sometimes, you know? It’s not about catching the bad guy. It’s about picking up the pieces and throwing them away. The worst part was the false hope we could pillory this guy, you know? A neighbor called it in, ’cause they thought they saw a body through the window—nobody heard the gunshots; a shotgun in a fucking mobile home park and yet no one fucking heard the thing—but the guy was gone, and I thought maybe I’d get to string the bastard up by his balls, show pictures of his ten-year-old’s head splattered across a shower curtain until every juror wanted to beat him to death with the gavel… but then the fucker’s car gets spotted by the highway patrol in a lot behind a bar. He killed himself there, God knows why. And now I have all this disgust and I have no one to vent it on. I just have pictures of entrance wounds and exit wounds, when there was enough of a body left to call it an exit wound, and I have these e-mails and phone messages left by the killer that show me what a selfish, immature, hideous prick of a man he was. Fuck.”

  “Know what helps? Working the heavy bag. Or any punching bag really. Go now, hit the gym, beat the shit out of an inanimate object until you’re ready to drop.”

  “Like I don’t fucking know that?” She made a noise of frustration, one he was very familiar with, and he let her have a few seconds. Finally, she said, “Sorry, yeah, I probably oughta. My victories feel smaller and smaller.”

  “I know the feeling. It happens to us ex-cops too, if it’s any consolation.”

  “It’s not, but thanks.”

  There was a long silence, but it wasn’t awkward. It was the silence of two people who really wanted to help people and often found themselves wondering why. Why would anyone want to help people when they were so fucking awful? You had to ask yourself that question a hundred times, and maybe Dropkick sometimes came up with an answer. Roan knew he almost never did.

  Dropkick broke the silence once more, clearly trying to get her mind off the wholesale family slaughter she had to sort out this morning. “Can you ask Holden and his hooker pals about any customers they have in the military, or maybe among truckers?
I’m thinking our serial will be among them, since if I’m right about Jane Doe, this guy travels.”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that.” Spokane was in Eastern Washington, and Coyote and Karen worked here, on the Western side. But there was that serial killer in the military—was he Air Force? Roan couldn’t remember—who killed mainly in Eastern Washington but had a couple of known victims in Western Washington when he was stationed here. There was also a trucker serial killer, although he spread his handiwork along the I-5 corridor from California through Oregon and to here, pretty much leaving investigators an obvious clue to his profession. “I know Holden’s had a military client or two, one gave him his dog tags. I’ll see what he can find out.” He didn’t tell her it seemed to be a porn site that was doing genuine snuff films, mainly because it sounded like something out of a Dennis Cooper novel. Also, because the Feds would have to be brought in, and they might escape. Well, no, they’d probably get caught. But Roan didn’t want them caught. Did he want to kill them? He didn’t know. His impulse was to hurt these fuckers, hurt them for seeking out and killing some of the most vulnerable adults (near adults, if Jane Doe was indeed a victim) and filming it for the sexual gratification of equally sick motherfuckers.