by Andrea Speed
Roan was going to protest, but he had no idea why, so he nodded and meekly got up, swaying slightly on his feet. Dylan reached out and steadied him, and kept holding onto his shoulder. “What about my bike?”
“I know some guys, I’ll get them to pick it up.”
“Good. I love my bike.”
“I know you do. Sure I can’t check you into the hospital while we’re here?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’m sure you’re not, but I just wanna get home.”
He had only the vaguest memories of getting out to Dylan’s car, and almost no memory of being in it, except he was pretty sure that he admitted to Dyl he was a monster. Dylan of course told him he wasn’t, but Roan wasn’t sure he told him in the car in retrospect, because he remembered Dylan holding him and telling him he wasn’t, that he couldn’t be. He couldn’t recall the reason why he wasn’t.
He woke up feeling not so much hungover as feverish, and not well rested. But he must have slept a while, as it was dark outside, and once again he had a feeling of time having passed around him. You’d think he would have dreamed, but the drugs had weighed him down so much he hadn’t, or at least he had no memory of it.
He was still so tired he didn’t want to take a shower, so he took a bath, and once in the water he didn’t want to get out. Dylan must have known this, because he perfunctorily knocked on the door before coming in, holding a plate of food and a brown bottle. He’d hoped it was a microbrew, and it was, but a microbrew ginger ale. “I thought you were going to sleep until tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t have minded.” The smell hit his nose, and his nausea slid into hunger. Dylan had made his famous huevos rancheros, which Roan couldn’t get enough of in spite of the fact there was tofu in it. “Oh, you bastard. The secret weapon.”
“You have to eat, and I know you’ll eat this.”
“In the bathtub?”
“I’m attempting to lure you out. You’ve been in here almost two hours.”
“Have I?” Weird. He could have sworn he just got in.
Dylan put the food on the dresser in the bedroom, then came back with a towel. “Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No, but you seem ill. You even look flushed.”
“I’m in a tub full of hot water.”
“It was hot maybe an hour ago. I bet it isn’t now.”
He was right, but he wasn’t going to give Dyl the satisfaction of that.
“How many pills did you take?”
“Today? None.” Well, was it still whatever day it was this morning? Oh fuck, he had no idea. He really should have looked at the clock.
“Yesterday.”
“I don’t know.”
The look Dylan gave him was harsh and unrelenting. “You know, I put up with the pill popping because I can’t imagine the pain you’re in, but I’m not going to stand by while you put yourself in a coma.”
“I can’t put myself in a coma. I could take eight bottles of pills and nothing would happen.”
“Don’t even think that.”
“I’m not Human, Dylan. The amount of drugs needed to put me down permanently are off the charts.”
“Stop it. Stop this shit now. You are Human, and I’m tired of hearing you say that about yourself.”
“No Human can do what I have done,” he said, levering himself out of the tub.
Dylan looked uncertain for a moment, then approached him with the towel. “You went after the guys that hurt Holden, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think you want to know what happened.”
Dylan enfolded him in the towel, and Roan was content to let him. “No, I don’t.”
He then turned away, heading out into the bedroom. Roan followed, the towel wrapped around him, keeping him dryer if not exactly warmer, and Roan sat on the bed while Dylan retrieved the food and brought it to him. He took it with a grateful nod, then admitted, “I’m an animal. I can’t be around people anymore.”
“No. You just proved you’re Human,” he said, sitting down beside him.
That almost made him scoff as he shoveled a forkful of eggs into his mouth, but he was too tired. “What I did was—”
“Human. I didn’t even recognize Holden in that hospital bed. Beaten to a pulp doesn’t begin to describe it. Animals have no desire for vengeance. It’s a Human passion, a Human failing. Animals don’t get embarrassed, don’t laugh, and they don’t seek revenge.” He opened the bottle of ginger ale and held it out to Roan, although he wasn’t looking at him.
Roan took it and downed half the bottle in two swallows. After a moment, he said, “Wow. Couldn’t you do me one little favor and stop being smarter than me?”
Dylan patted his thigh in a comforting manner. “That’s wisdom I learned the hard way. Remember what chased me into Buddhism in the first place?”
Oh yes—his all-consuming desire to kill the man who had killed his boyfriend Jason. Dyl had even bought a gun, and planned how he was going to sneak it into the courthouse. “You fought the urge.”
“Yes, by turning it inward and trying to kill myself. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
After a moment’s pause, he asked, “How fucked up are we?”
Dylan snickered, but it had a humorless quality about it. “Life is fucked up, honey. We’re simply reacting to it.”
Roan leaned against his shoulder, and Dylan leaned back, so they were resting their heads together. “This all proves that I should worship you. You are so out of my league.”
“Stop that. I am a lowly bartender. I am out of no one’s league.”
He chewed another forkful of fluffy eggs smothered with homemade salsa, and wondered if it was the food or Dylan that made him feel a bit better. Maybe both. Oh sure, he was still a monster, but a Human monster seemed somehow more manageable. A glance at the bedside clock informed him it was after midnight. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be at work?”
Dylan shrugged, and slipped an arm around his shoulder. “I slept so poorly last night, I figured, fuck it. I got Mandy to cover my shift for me; I’m going to cover her shift Sunday. It’s weird, I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Panic. Despite the sleaze and the occasional grope, it seemed like a nicer place.”
“Better tips?”
“A bit, not much. It just seemed… I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It was like there was a tacit agreement the world outside the doors was really fucked up, so let’s party. In Silver, it’s a tacit agreement that the world would be better if everyone just knew their place and stuck to it.”
“You could always go back. I’m sure Panic would welcome you. Everybody loves your pecs.”
He gave Roan a smirk that was almost a grimace. “There’re so many bad memories there for me, though. Eric was murdered, and some white supremacist freak tried to kill you there as well.”
“Yeah, but he picked the night I was with a hockey team. That’s the definition of bad timing.”
“The fact that he was a monumental idiot doesn’t negate the fact that he tried to kill you. Oh, that reminds me, you ought to check your messages. Some of them are really interesting.”
“Oh. How much shit am I in?”
“You personally? Not much. As an infected? Hon, it’s looking grim.”
“Shit.” He enjoyed another bite, this time with one of those tortillas that melted in your mouth (where Dylan got them he had no idea, but they were the best he’d ever had), and then picked up the phone and went through his messages. A couple were from an increasingly weary-sounding Seb, who just said to call him if he could, until the fifth message, when he said, “Cat freak-outs in Kapowsin, Olympia, Aberdeen, Forks, and supposedly we have one loose near Snoqualmie Falls. The death toll, not counting the cats, is currently seven, with twelve injured. This is just a shitstorm, Ro, and we’ve had reports that maybe something similar happened down in Portland. We’re gonna leak to the news media the possibili
ty that tainted batches of burn are to blame, but we don’t know that for certain, none of the tox screens are back, and we have it on good authority that there may be an attack planned on Divine Transformation by enraged citizenry. Probably mouth-breathing Glenn Beck fans, which gives me enough reason to shoot them. Anyways, get ready, we may need to call you in at any time, and… we may need to put you into protective custody if this gets worse. And I think it’s only gonna get worse from here.”
Roan sighed wearily. Oh god, where were his pills? “It’s an epidemic.”
Dylan nodded. “There was an ugly protest outside the Church tonight that turned violent. Bricks were hurled through windows, someone tried to use a Molotov cocktail but set themselves on fire—”
“Awesome. Please tell me that’s on YouTube.”
Dylan scowled at that and continued. “—a car was overturned, a couple people were bitten by pit bulls someone brought to the festivities, and what I heard on the news was twenty arrests and a multitude of casualties, mostly self- or crowd inflicted. There have been a couple of charges of police brutality, but I don’t know, they really seemed to be on the protesters’ side.”
“Wow, the idiots versus the morons. Who do you root for?” The last message, the most recent, was from Rosenberg, and had been left only forty minutes ago. “Kiddo, we got a problem,” she said, in her smoker’s rasp. “Your cop friend, the one who’s gonna be played by Denzel in the movie of your life, got me some samples of the drug. An older sample is just amphetamines basically, nothing special, but the newer sample… fuck me sideways, it has a chemical analog of the hormone lepidysine, which is released by the virus during the transformational cycle. The drug is making them change ahead of cycle, I can confirm that, and there’s a mild hallucinogenic that’s probably driving them crazy in cat form. But here’s the thing: this is fucking impossible. When we’ve tried to synthesize the hormone for testing purposes, it generally fails, to the point where we just use some extracted from infecteds in cycle.” She paused to take a drag off her cigarette, but she didn’t sound any better. In fact, she sounded a bit pissed off. “So there’s some fucker out there who figured out how to synthesize this shit, in such a way that it triggers the virus. And it doesn’t do anything to regular humans, oh no, it’s just a drug to them, there’s nothing for the lepidysine to trigger. I’m having my interns at the university analyze this fucker down to its knee socks, I wanna know how he does it and where it came from. Oh, and one more thing: it’s a weapon. Whoever designed this—and this wasn’t happenstance, no putz is going to blindly bumble into this complicated a chemical formula—engineered it specifically to kill the infected. Hallelujah and pass the bullets, we have our first new designer chemical weapon of the twenty-first century. When you said it smelled like a chemical weapons factory, you were bang on target. When you call back, give me next week’s lottery numbers, okay, Kreskin?” And with that, she hung up.
Roan put the receiver back in the cradle, and looked at Dylan, whose sympathetic eyes told him he’d already heard the message. “I wasn’t sure how to brace you for that one.”
“There’s no prepping for the completely insane.” And it was, and yet, was he surprised? Things had been in a downward spiral, and nothing had broken it. Things never got any better, no matter what happened.
And now someone had declared war on the infected, and had drawn first blood.
9
The Blind House
ROAN knew he had to act. The problem was, what could he do? Seb was definitely not at work now, he was off shift, and if he called him at home he’d just wake him up. There probably wasn’t anything he could do until daylight. Too late.
Dylan noted his restlessness, and said, “You might want to get dressed first.”
Somehow he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing anything except for a towel. “Oh. But a naked man ranting gets a lot of attention.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. But probably not the kind of attention that would be helpful.” Dylan then turned toward the opposite nightstand and grabbed a magazine Roan hadn’t noticed there before. “Speaking of which, the article’s out.” He held it toward him with the full-page picture of him (he had no idea it was going to be a full page) side out.
“So this was what Luke was talking about.” It was actually a good picture, probably one of the best ones of him he had ever seen. His back was turned to the café window, so you could see the street beyond, overcast and gray, very noir. As for Roan himself, his hair was the color of dried blood, and shiny enough that it looked half wet, while his eyes were an unearthly green, the lids at half mast with either physical exhaustion or a general weariness with the world, although somehow he looked more alert than truly sleepy. The scars on his lip and eyebrow stood out ghostly white, little lines that could have been negative scratches on the photographs. Ironically, you could make out the words “Panic” and “Freak” on the T-shirt he wore, half covered by his leather jacket (it was his “Now Panic and Freak Out” shirt, so he’d set himself up for that). His face had a lean, almost feral look that he wasn’t sure he liked seeing.
“That is gorgeous,” Dylan said. “We need to get me a smaller version I can carry in my wallet.”
“I look… dangerous.” It was funny how that was the first thing that occurred to him. He thought he looked like a coiled snake in humanoid form. If he encountered the man in the photo, he would keep an eye on him.
“Yeah, sexy dangerous.”
So either Dylan didn’t see it, he was pretending not to see it, or Roan was projecting. He flipped the magazine over to see the beginning of the article. The header at the top of the column, Future Leaders Of America #8: Roan McKichan, Leader Of The Pack. “Well, at least he didn’t go for pride,” he muttered, reading the opening lines of the article: There is no designated leader among the tens of thousands of infected Americans, no organized group. And the uninfected are lucky, because the most obvious leader is Roan McKichan, a man of such overwhelming magnetism and intelligence he would be unstoppable. “Holy shit, is this a hagiography?”
“Kind of. He even says in the article he’s not gay, but your charisma is so powerful he found himself attracted to you. He has a huge man crush on you. And I’m super impressed you could use hagiography in a sentence.”
“I don’t have charisma. He’s in the closet.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Of course you have charisma. It’s why cute guys are always sniffing around you. Speaking of which, can I borrow your Taser next time we go out?”
“Knock yourself out.” He rolled up the magazine and wondered if it would make good kindling. “You know, this couldn’t have come out at a worse time. Good thing only three people read this.”
Dylan gave him a half smile. “Ah, he said that you were quick-witted enough that you could have been a comedian.”
“If this guy just wanted to blow me, he could have asked.”
“He didn’t?”
“Nope.” After a brief pause, which Roan hoped sounded natural, he asked, “He didn’t imply I had superhuman abilities, did he?”
“No, but he flirted with it at times. Still, he was so clearly crushing on you it could be excused as purple prose.”
“Good.” He gulped down the rest of the ginger ale and gave the magazine back to Dylan before standing up and putting his now empty plate and bottle on top of the dresser. The towel fell off, but he didn’t care, as he was already grabbing underwear out of the top drawer.
“Did you think that was a possibility?” Dylan was trying to sound casual, but clearly he was curious.
“Yeah. He pretty much told me he knew I wasn’t Human, and he wanted a comment. I refused to confirm anything.”
“You know, you don’t have to get dressed on my account.”
“Come on, I’m cold, and no one likes shrinkage.” He pulled up his shorts with a snap, and then started searching for a clean pair of jeans. Damn, he was behind in his laundry.
Dylan shifted
on the bed, springs creaking as he moved into a more comfortable position to watch him get dressed. Roan noticed this as he stepped into his jeans, and when he went to the closet and pulled out yet another of his weird T-shirts. Finally, he asked, “What? Are you waiting for me to apologize? Okay. I’m sorry I didn’t call, I was a self-centered ass, I won’t do it again.”
“Good. But right now I wonder where you think you’re going.”
He decided on a Pansy Division shirt and pulled it on before answering. “I can’t just stay here and wait. I’ve got to go out and see if I can find out where the tainted burn is coming from.”
“Which means what exactly?” When Roan hesitated to answer, and started to search for his HK instead, Dylan guessed, “You’re going to go talk to some drug dealers, aren’t you?”
“I was thinking of talking to Kevin first, but I’m working toward that.”
“Let me come with you.”
That surprised him, but he didn’t know why. “Dyl….”
“I know who was the biggest pusher of club drugs at Panic. He was always hitting on me, trying to give me freebies, probably hoping if he got me high he could get into my pants. We show up tonight, I bet he’ll tell you all about burn distribution.”
Roan stared at him in genuine admiration. “Look at you, playing an angle. I’ll corrupt you yet.”
“Well, if you believed in certain tenants of Catholicism, we’re all born corrupt.”
“Actually, since we’re gay, most of the major world religions see us as corrupt and degenerate.”
He scoffed as he stood up. “Wouldn’t life be more fun if we were?”
“See, that’s my argument.”
While he finished getting dressed, Dylan changed his clothes from sweatpants and a paint-stained T-shirt to more presentable black jeans and a clean olive green T-shirt. Roan was sitting on the end of the bed, pulling his boots on, and he almost sat on the magazine. He picked it up and looked at the header again, and asked Dylan, who was now in the bathroom, “What Sisters of Mercy song has the lyric ‘In the land of the blind, be king’?”
