by Andrea Speed
He ached. He had a funny pain in his leg, a dull, throbbing pain that his icy coldness didn’t seem to be helping, and he didn’t know why until he started thinking about it. And as he thought about it, he remembered fighting cats and being shot. Oh shit. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
“What if I said you were dead and this was heaven?”
“I’d say this isn’t The Lovely Bones, and cram it with walnuts.”
Paris laughed, a sound Roan realized he missed terribly. It made his chest ache and feel hollow. “Mister Cynical. That’s just never gonna change with you, is it?”
“Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“I kind of wish I was,” Roan admitted, repositioning one of Paris’s arms so it was just under his throat. He felt warm and good, but not nearly warm enough; he felt like he had an icy core, like his insides had been replaced by liquid nitrogen. He recalled losing lots of blood, reddish-black blood spurting as if from a hose. “I miss you so much.”
“What did Dylan tell you once? People die, love doesn’t.”
“How cheesy is that? I’m sure he probably got that from a fortune cookie.”
“Maybe. But you still love me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“But you love Dylan too, yes?”
“It’s not the same.” It wasn’t. How could it be? He had given everything he had to Paris, and his death had killed a part of Roan that had never come back. He did love Dylan, but it wasn’t the same, nor could it ever be. Sad but true.
Paris kissed him on the back of his head. “You need him. You know you do.”
“Yes.” This wasn’t really Paris, this was himself, so what was the point of a lie?
“So treat him better. Treat everyone better. You need to stop being a self-pitying bastard and get your shit together, because seriously, I’d have kicked your ass by now.”
He sighed, settling his head in the crook of Paris’s arm. Yeah, okay, it was a dream, or more likely some hallucination kicked up by his blood- and oxygen-starved brain in an attempt to comfort or rally him, or whatever the autonomic response of the brain was in situations like this. So he wasn’t dead, just dying. Good to know. Although why wasn’t he dead yet?
“Now that’s something else you have to get past, this stupid death wish of yours.”
“It’s not stupid. I’m tired.”
“So? Take a vacation, stop doing what you’re doing, change your life, but don’t give up entirely like some pansy-ass coward.” Paris turned him onto his back so he was facing him, looking down at Roan with his long hair brushing his face. God, he was beautiful. “You are a pain in the ass, and frankly you probably deserved to get your fool ass shot, but you are not a coward. Okay, becoming a drug addict was cowardly, but you always were an emotion dodger, so that makes sense. But you have to stop the rest of this shit. You promised to live for me, remember? Stop living to die. I’m already dead, and that’s no fucking fun.” Paris put his hand flat on his chest, as if holding him down, but he didn’t need to. If he had one more minute with Paris, even a fake one that lived in his head, he wasn’t going anywhere. “So you’re not perfectly Human—so fucking what? Humans are hardly a gift, are they? People suck and you know it. You’re better than them. Start acting like it.”
Roan looked up at him in disbelief. “You would never say I was better than anyone else.”
“No? C’mon, I used to be purely Human, I know firsthand we suck. You know it too. Having a less-than-Human element is surely a boon.”
He eyed him warily. “This is me bleeding into you.”
“I could be as cynical as you.”
“Not often. How much of this is me telling myself what I want to hear?”
Paris smiled down at him sadly. “You’re gonna hafta tell me, hon.”
He wished he could, but he honestly didn’t know anymore. All he knew was he’d be lucky to die, so he never had to find out.
HOLDEN watched the continuing tableau with interest, letting his anger ebb as he realized the cop’s name would probably be in the papers. All he needed to do was wait a couple of hours, and he’d know everything about the guy.
Not that he was going to do anything right now. It was best to wait, see what happened. Maybe the cops would go hard on him, maybe not, but the publicity would keep him in a bubble for a while. Holden could wait. Sometimes having patience was difficult, but he could bide his time, aware that when the publicity died down, the shock of revenge would have that much more impact.
Kevin Robinson arrived, the vice cop that he knew by his nickname “Karo” (sort of a contraction of his name, also a reference to corn syrup, since some of the kids on the street found him corny), the guy Roan and Dylan had been crashing with recently. The burly, somewhat overweight cop surveyed the room, and upon seeing him, gave Holden the guarded but familiar nod that passed between any cop who was trying to keep his street informant options open and the potential informant. Holden filled the potential informant part of the bargain by giving him the slightest of nods in return, although with no enthusiasm. He had nothing against Karo, he just pitied him. It was well known among the hustlers he was a closet case, as gay as a unicorn in hot pants, but not one of the bad ones who over-compensated by beating up any suspected fags as viciously as possible, or by coercing blow jobs out of hustlers he busted. It was known he’d bought services once or twice, but that was the point: Karo bought, and never identified himself as a cop. It was a straight (no pun intended) transaction, purely business, and that was fantastic. Most people with positions of power abused it, and Karo was known to be the exact opposite of that. So he was respected and pitied in equal measure, because, damn, if you had that power, why not use it to your advantage? There wasn’t a hustler around who wouldn’t have had a bit of fun abusing any authority they got. What was wrong with Karo that he wouldn’t?
Maybe that was the true horror of the world. When someone didn’t abuse their position, something was assumed to be wrong with them.
Kevin approached Dylan but stopped; Dylan’s grief was apparent in his hunched-over body, as if he was trying to curl in on himself, and Kevin seemed almost grateful when the cop Roan always called Dropkick returned. She was talking to Grey, but as soon as she saw Kevin, she included him too. Holden couldn’t help but smirk at the inclusion of Grey in the talk, but why not? If you had Frankenstein’s monster, you wanted him to be ready to spring into the fight if things got bad. And while Grey seemed more clever and tolerant than Holden would have ever given him credit for (considering who he was), he was built like a monster, and probably wouldn’t be discouraged from a fight unless you waved a great big torch in his face. He would probably even grunt “Fire bad!”
Also, Grey seemed to be really torqued at the cops for having shot Roan. It was best to keep him on whatever sliver of good side they could eke out. Because Dropkick was Roan’s friend, Holden didn’t think she’d try and talk Grey out of making his statement that the shooter had lied, mainly because the monster couldn’t be intimidated, not unless they brought out the flaming torches early.
Fiona came over and sat beside him with a sigh. “Have you ever felt more useless?”
“Not particularly.” He held out his can of Pepsi toward her, and after a moment, she took it and had a swig. When she handed it back, Holden asked, “Is it wrong that I always assumed Roan would get himself taken down in a hail of bullets?”
She shrugged. “There was a certain inevitability to it.”
The commotion out in the waiting room got worse, and everyone, save for Dylan, noticed. Kevin, Dropkick, and Frankenstein all stiffened and then headed out as someone in the lobby shouted, “Gun!” Dee was immediately on his feet, along with Jeff and Scott. Holden wasn’t sure if they were going to join the rush, or were planning to build a barricade.
He wished he had his gun. The only weapon he had was his butterfly knife, and only Roan could bring a knife to a gun fight and survive it. Well, he could pass it off to
the monster, but Frankie probably did well enough with his fists to never need it.
The most bizarre thing of all? Holden had a feeling Roan would have thrived in this chaos. There was nothing he liked more than a good, hopeless fight.
23
Atlantis to Interzone
DARINDA MURPHY found herself wondering what kind of idiot would start trouble at a hospital full of cops. It seemed like you needed to be a special kind of stupid to do it.
So after they brought in the four yahoos they’d arrested, Murphy used the excuse of being at the police station to look into the records Seb had been gathering. Yes, the Church investigation was his case, and she had nothing to do with it, but she was curious, and he was fine with letting her have a peek. She was backlogged on her own cases, there was never a letup on homicides, but she’d got what Dubois called “a burr under her saddle.” For a suburban guy from Pomona, California, he did have a love of cornpone sayings.
Looking at the site that Roan had given them had been like turning over a rock only to find a nest of snakes hiding beneath it. It turned out the white supremacist link wasn’t the one they wanted—an in-depth look into Dean McFadden revealed that he was attached to the anonymously named First Church of Christ, but this First Church—shorthanded as FCC—was actually a cult, an alternate universe mirror to the Divine Transformation. FCC was some odd hybrid of evangelical Christian, fundamentalist Mormon, and virulent cat hatred. Their poorly worded and vile founding screed handpicked quotes from the Bible to support their supposition that the infected were all cursed, were Lucifer’s minions on Earth, and were out to destroy God’s chosen people, who were them and the rest of Humanity (or at least the straight white male part of it). They had basically declared jihad on infecteds, focusing specifically on Divine Transformation, mainly because they saw it as Satanic, and they were convinced the apocalypse was nigh, and there would be a cataclysmic final war between God and Satan—in other words, between Humans and the infected. They felt it was every good Christian’s duty to kill an infected, or at least keep them from settling in their neighborhood or getting anywhere near their children. (A lot of this seemed like old school homophobia, with gay removed and replaced by infected.) They also promoted the bogus idea that a person could be cured of infection by an exorcist, and had a YouTube video to prove it had been done. (Because if it’s on YouTube, it must be true.) The bigotry and ignorance these people spewed was incredible, and perhaps that’s why FCC had been growing, and had known members in Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Montana, with a new branch sprouting up in Northern California. Of course, apocalyptic cults were no strangers to this region of the country, much like serial killers and hippies weren’t either, but these nasty fuckers hid behind the hateful but still somehow more acceptable Save Humanity Now action group.
Could FCC be behind the Church attacks? Undoubtedly, although proving it might be something else. But the most troubling thing Murphy found was in some blog posts by McFadden.
Initially, they felt the Devil’s right-hand man, the main minion, was David Bolt, current leader of Divine Transformation. But the problem with Bolt was he was a compromise between the two warring factions within Divine Transformation itself; he was a neutral third party both sides could live with, meaning he was as exciting as a bowl of reheated, boiled oatmeal. He had no charisma, no agenda to speak of, he was simply a professional middle man, and it wasn’t that anyone in the Church actually liked him, it was just that they hated him less than the other candidates. It eventually occurred to the FCC that Bolt couldn’t be Satan’s quarterback, because he was as magnetic as an onion, and even half his Church wouldn’t obey his orders. It was about this time that the Grant Kim case, the panicky infected whose own fear led to a minor killing spree, happened.
And Roan got on the FCC’s radar.
Roan beat the holy hell out of the two skinheads who had tried to kill Kim, a brief but brutal and surprising action caught on tape. (Were the skinheads members of the FCC? Quite possibly, but it wasn’t mentioned.) McFadden said this action proved Roan was demonic, not Human, and that all infecteds were children of Lucifer. The focus turned from Bolt as the butt buddy of Satan to Roan, and everyone seemed to like that a lot. They could find clips of him doing things that didn’t look particularly Human, and no matter that they were often poorly filmed and it was hard to say what was going on, you could still tell it was something weird, and it was Roan involved. His hair color was too unique; it was an instant giveaway. (Conversely, it made the fake video images easy to distinguish, because they could never get the hair color exactly right.)
Roan made things worse just by being himself. He was gay, confrontational, a vocal proponent of infected rights, and had come out as an atheist in that damn magazine article written about him. He was everything these people hated wrapped up in one shiny package. They couldn’t have hated him more if he came out for the subjugation of straight white men and the use of their children as living piñatas.
The problem here was, even if Roan had known, he wouldn’t have cared. He’d have egged on their hate, been deliberately provocative to piss them off, because that’s the type of asshole he was. He didn’t wait to be victimized, he’d run right out and confront his would-be harassers, get in their faces, make them increasingly uncomfortable, force them to make a move or leave. (The majority chose to leave, which was always the smartest move. You didn’t want to engage the crazy guy in a fight. The crazy guy had the built in advantage of being crazy.) He was one of the most aggressive gay guys she’d ever known, which wasn’t saying much, as she hadn’t known many. But even if he was a dyke, she’d have put him in the top five of aggressiveness.
That reminded her of the first time they’d met. Because they were both the only openly gay cops on the force at the time, they were of course introduced to each other, based on the assumption that all gay people knew and liked one another. To be honest, since Murphy wasn’t very politically active in gay causes (she supported them, but she didn’t have time between building her career and trying to have some semblance of a personal life) or in gay pride things, she had never associated much with gay men. Men and women generally mixed out of some desire for a relationship, so when you were a woman who preferred women—or a man who preferred men—why would you mix exactly? Again, political causes, parades, or rallies, but not much beyond that. Embarrassingly, she was kind of expecting a screaming queen type, someone who called everyone “girlfriend” and was obsessed with fashion, which Roan was the polar opposite of. (Poor bastard—even she had more fashion sense than Roan, and she wore flannel.) The thing that struck her immediately about him, beyond the odd hair color, was the light in his slightly too green eyes. There was an intensity there, the sign of a fierce intellect and even fiercer sense of humor (the most surprising thing about him was how damn funny he actually was), and… something else. She never knew what exactly, although now she was beginning to wonder if you could kind of see the cat in him. Back then she would have dismissed it as some silly, prejudiced thought wholly unworthy of her, but now she knew it wasn’t that simple at all. Roan and his virus weren’t as easily separated; she had yet to meet another infected who made her think of their cat side so much. You could kind of see the aspect of the lion in him even when he was in Human form, from the intense hunter’s scrutiny of his look to the flare of his nostrils as he unconsciously scoured the scents in the air, to the way he carried himself, to the way he was one of the quietest people she’d ever known when he wanted to be. (The dude could sneak up on you better than most, and she had no idea how he did that.) And when he was angry, he honestly seemed bigger—it was psychological or emotional or just some trick of perception, but when he was genuinely angry, he struck you as lethal, as a beast you were best to escape from as soon as possible. The weirdest thing was she never saw as much of the cat in him on the force; she saw it mostly once he had retired from regular police work.
Then again, most of his more flamb
oyant cat abilities had been coming out over the last few years. Since Paris died? If you did the math, pretty much. Did that mean something? Roan had once said Paris had kept him Human, and now she was wondering if that was actually true.
There were fake wanted posters for Roan on the FCC website, with simply “Wanted: Dead” on them, and the slogan “The only good cat is a dead cat.” There were hidden forums, links within links, where the FCC promised to financially support the family of the “martyr” who took out Roan. This was scary shit, and it was hard to believe that no one knew of this. This was a religious cult coming together in its hatred and focusing its attention on wanting Roan dead. They had his home address, business address, one of his cars (the GTO), places he was known to go (the Panic information seemed outdated). Someone had noticed he seemed to be hanging around with the Seattle Falcons a lot, and asked what the hell that was about, which was the only good question asked in the entire forum.
Murphy had wondered about that too, but finally figured it out tonight. They were all macho guys, and gay or not, Roan was the patron saint of macho guys. They probably enjoyed the macho camaraderie with each other, and the jock boys were kind of weird, which was just another thing they had in common. Grey, for instance. Wow—super intense. He could have been an MMA fighter, so why he was a hockey player was anyone’s guess, although she felt Roan should be glad he was hanging around, because Grey could probably take out a handful of attackers all by himself. The problem was, if you believed the FCC, there were hundreds.
One of the most troubling things had only just been discovered. One of these guys on the forum claimed to be a cop, one who had worked with Roan and found him skin-crawling and reprehensible. He played the victim card, claiming Roan, as a cop, only got his bravery medal and promotion while on the force for purely PC reasons and never deserved them. She absolutely loved the lazy-ass cops who always said someone got promoted due to affirmative action or political correctness, never acknowledging the fact that the minority in question actually just worked that much harder than you. And since Roan got his medal for saving a hostage and getting shot in the process, she wasn’t sure how he didn’t deserve it. He was sometimes so bullheaded he lost all common sense—like all men—but you could never question his bravery: he had brass balls the size of boulders. The cop also vowed to help set Roan up so he’d get “taken out” like the “devil” he was. Since his posting ID was Fagbasher42 (lovely), and the e-mail address he gave a phony one, it would be difficult to determine if he was a real cop or simply a grandiose liar, like many on the web actually were.
