by Andrea Speed
He thought about taking their guns, but no point. They wouldn’t be getting up to use them any time soon. He’d have felt sorry for them, but they deserved worse. He should let the lion bite deep into their throats, tear them out, leave them to bleed.
He let the Human reassert itself, got up to his feet, moved toward the men’s room door of the rest stop. With his hearing as changed as his eyesight, the buzz of the sodium lights was irritating, almost like an endless drone of guitar feedback, but still he could hear voices inside, all male, Holden’s and two others. One of the men had an unidentifiable accent, but the other sounded Midwestern.
All Roan heard was voices, not words, but from Holden’s low, almost dead tone, he was playing scumbag to the hilt, a man who saw others as pieces of meat. Holden could probably mimic them perfectly because he’d been bought by them before.
It happened fast, with no vocal inflection change at all. Holden was talking to them, and suddenly there was a shift, a dull thud of violence, a shift in smell, and the other male voice, the Midwesterner, now angry. There was a gunshot, the sharp tang of black powder, but Roan had already burst through the door and was on the man before he realized there was someone else in the bathroom.
It was a blur, the drugs no longer participating. As the man swung the gun around toward him, Roan already had his arm, snapped it like balsa wood, jagged ends of bone bursting out of his skin and spilling his blood. The man started to scream, but Roan grabbed him by the face and slammed him down into the sink, with enough force to break it, porcelain chunks cracking like ice and sliding across the tiled floor as the man collapsed bonelessly to meet it, blood splashing over the broken remains of the basin and pipes poking through the wall, creaking in complaint.
Roan stood there, panting, for a second, trying to breathe through his mouth so he didn’t have to smell their surroundings. Blood covered a lot, the man’s blood and the blood of his companion, whom Holden seemed to have knocked out with an object. Beneath it, though, there was the stink of a bleach-based industrial cleanser, pine-scented urinal cakes, and a piss and shit smell that could never be completely scrubbed away for his kind.
Holden came out from behind the safety of a stall, and only then did Roan notice the small bullet hole in the far wall, close to him. Holden looked down at the gunman, at the destroyed sink, at the man’s blood snaking its way toward the drain in the center of the floor, and said, “Who needs hockey players when they got you, huh?”
Roan just stared at him, eyes blurring, refocusing, locking on. He wiped the blood from his mouth, and asked, “What went wrong?”
“Timing. I thought I could get them in succession, but that prick moved away at the last second. How were the guys out front?”
“Pathetic.” Roan knew there was another person here, he could smell them, and he found them, crouched down and wedged between a urinal and a sink pedestal. It was a little girl, scrawny for her age—she looked prepubescent—in a dress that seemed a little too small for her. Her legs were scabbed and her eyes were hooded bruises in a studiously blank face framed by lank, black hair, and Roan felt something knot in his chest as he realized she was too broken down to even be scared of this situation. Seeking cover was reflex, little more.
He glanced in one of the mirrors to make sure he looked Human, to make sure all the blood was off his face, and then crouched down to be close to her eye level. “What’s your name? I’m Chris.” Yes, he was lying to her, but if he told her his real name and she repeated it to a police officer someday, he was in deep shit. At least Christopher was his middle name.
After a long moment, she said, “Lolita.”
“Your real name.”
She paused again, almost as if she thought this was a trick. Finally, she said, “Katie.”
“Okay Katie. We’re not bad guys, we’re here to rescue you. We’re gonna take you to a safe house, okay? I promise we won’t hurt you.” She didn’t seem convinced, and he couldn’t blame her. She probably heard that a lot. “If it means anything at all to you, my friend and I are as queer as three dollar bills. We’re not gonna hurt you.”
“Hey, I’m a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent bill, thank you very much,” Holden said. He was going through the pockets of the unconscious men, but he wasn’t taking their guns. He took some money, and he seemed to leave something in their pockets. What?
Roan almost held out his hand, and did, but only as a gesture. He kept it out of her reach for the simple reason that he wasn’t going to make a sexual abuse victim touch him, even if it was just to innocuously take his hand. She needed to have some bodily autonomy, and it might as well start here. He nodded and stood, hoping she would follow, and, reluctantly, she did.
Holden was done, so he headed out, and Roan waited by the men’s room door, holding it open, waiting for Katie. There was a molten pain radiating from his jaw like something nuclear, the drugs no longer able to fight it.
She glanced at the men on the floor, and he noticed she had the gangly limbs of a teenager, pushing his age estimate up by a year. She asked, “Are they dead?”
“No.”
She said nothing, but he got the sense she was disappointed. Her refusal to say anything indicated to Roan she didn’t trust them. He didn’t blame her.
When they got outside, Holden was finished planting things in the unconscious men’s jackets. He’d promised to get them arrested, and Roan had to assume this was part of it.
The girl got in the back seat of the Plymouth, still quiet and beaten down, enough to make him feel mildly nauseated. People were such shit—wasn’t he glad that he wasn’t completely one of them?
Holden found a cell phone in one of the goons’ coat pockets, and called 9-1-1, lowering his voice and using a passable Spanish accent. As soon as Holden gave the information required, he snapped the phone in half and tossed the bits into the parking lot.
Holden opened the trunk of the car and pulled out a large envelope, which he put in the backseat of the traffickers’ car, then came around and got in the driver’s side of the Plymouth. As soon as he started the car, Roan asked him, “What was all of that?”
He gave him a sly grin, and said, “Enough rock for a thirty-year ride, minimum.”
Roan shook his head, although he didn’t disapprove. It would render this a scene of “drug violence,” and no matter how the men protested it wasn’t and that the drugs weren’t theirs, they wouldn’t dare tell them the truth, so nothing they came up with would make any sense. The cops would never believe the drugs weren’t theirs.
“We’re taking you to a friend of mine,” Holden told Katie, looking at her in the rearview mirror. She didn’t look back or look up. “Jessie will take good care of you, and she’ll help you go home if you want.”
“I don’t wanna go home,” she replied, almost a grumble. Did her parents sell her in the first place? It was possible. People, as he had previously mentioned, were shits.
“I hear ya, sister,” Holden replied. “I wouldn’t go home either.”
There were several miles under their wheels before she spoke again. “They’ll be coming for you,” she said, her voice a dull monotone. Again, she was broken, a shell of who she had been. Hopefully she’d recover after she wasn’t abused for a while. “They’ve done it before.”
Holden shook his head. “Not this time. They can’t trace us, can’t find us. You’re safe.”
She made a negative noise, like she didn’t believe him, and again, he couldn’t blame her.
Holden didn’t either. He pointed at Roan, and said, “He’s standing between your guys and you. Do you think they have a chance?”
She looked at Holden with her sullen, wounded eyes, and said, “No. He isn’t Human.” So she did see him in his partially transformed state. There was a long pause before she added, “Good.”
That about summed up his feelings right now as well.
26
Greetings from the Great North Woods
HOLDEN was correct about Roan
knowing Jessie, only when he knew Jessie, Jessie was still on the street—and still a man.
Now Jessie was a social worker of some kind, and a very hippie-ish woman who favored granny glasses, long skirts, and peasant blouses, very much someone he’d describe as a crunchy granola type. Her transition was an impressive one; you barely noticed her Adam’s apple.
Roan pulled her aside and told her he was worried about the girl because she was so quiet, acquiescent, and never scared. Some people took silence or meekness for fear, but he could smell the difference. As he told Jessie this, she canted her head like a parakeet, looking at him curiously, and when he was done, she said simply, “You were abused, weren’t you?”
He just shrugged. “Who wasn’t?” Now, if she’d asked if he’d ever been hit with a crosscut saw, he might have had an emotional moment, but now he no longer cared. Nearly everyone had a “smacked around as a kid” story, and he wasn’t as bad off as Katie. He got scared, he got hurt and scarred, but he never got broken. That had to wait until Paris died.
At least Katie was in good hands now. Even though Holden gave him a funny look, probably due to Roan’s casual acknowledgment of past abuse, he agreed to take him home, and when they were in the car, he said, “You realize you’re stone-cold sober now.”
“Uh-huh. I hurt like fuck.” It was a shame to be back to normal, but the partial change had caused Roan to fully metabolize the pills and the booze. But at least he’d been fucked up enough to keep a handle on the beast for the whole time (more or less). Maybe that was the way forward from now on—get super fucked up and keep in control during the change.
“And yet you’re so cavalier about the violence.”
“Child rapers are the lowest of the low. As far as I’m concerned, whatever they get, it’s not as bad as they deserve.”
Holden stared at him for a moment, before putting the keys in the ignition. “At least we’re on the same page there. Which kinda bothers me.”
What was there to say to that? So he said nothing, and searched his pockets for any pills. He found a couple, and when he was sure Holden wasn’t looking, he dry swallowed them.
By the time Holden dropped him off at the Magnolia place he currently called home, the pain had ebbed to a dull roar. The house was dark and he knew Dylan was upstairs asleep, because he caught his scent still in the air. He must have come home within the hour.
Roan glanced at the only clock in the house with a readable time on it, and wondered how it had got so late. It hadn’t taken that long to beat those guys up and get Katie out of there. Maybe it was the drive.
As for the clock, it was designed as a fishbowl, and the minute hand was a goldfish that made the slowest rotation in history, with the hour hand the type of underwater castle you see in a goldfish bowl. There were no numbers, merely lines, but he could still figure out what time it was. In the living room was a huge clock the size of a hubcap, shaped like a starburst. Did it have any hour markings of any kind? No. It had hour and minute hands that pointed at nothing; you were supposed to guess the time by position. He wasn’t an idiot—he didn’t like to think of himself as an idiot, at any rate—but he found it impossible to read that fucking clock. What was the point of it? It didn’t even look that good as an objet d’art.
Staying in this expensive, archly decorated house seemed to emphasize the differences between him and Dylan. Roan knew his lower middle-class roots were showing in the fact that he found this house almost appalling on several different levels, while Dylan just shrugged and chalked it up to different tastes. But as different as he and Dyl were, he thought this was a good thing. They had separate lives, they weren’t in each other’s business all the time, they had different interests and time apart, all of which was good. Roan didn’t know how couples who were together all the time ever made it. You needed your own space. Just because you were married (or civil partnered, or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it) didn’t instantly turn you into conjoined twins.
Roan took a shower in the absurd downstairs bathroom (this house had three, all overly decorated, and large enough to be spacious living rooms), washing away any lingering traces of blood (okay, only he could smell them and barely, but why take the chance), wondering what was so wrong with him that he wanted to take a sledgehammer to this place—because he was sure you could feed all the homeless of Seattle for a year if you sold the furniture? Actually, you could probably feed Tacoma’s homeless as well. And why even have it? The couches were ugly! And uncomfortable. The ninety-dollar one he’d picked up at a thrift shop was comfortable enough to sleep on, and didn’t look like a drunken leprechaun had thrown up psychedelic mushrooms on it.
Oh shit, was he turning into some bitter old queen? (In his mind, he could hear Dee snort and say, “Turning? Try have been and get back to me.”) Bitter, cynical… vicious. That trafficker who took a shot at Holden was dead. Maybe not this second, but he would be. There was no way you could use a man’s skull to shatter a sink and not kill him. Roan didn’t feel bad about it—he was selling the girl; she had simply been one in a series—but he thought he should. He was hardening, becoming more of a predator by the day. Or was that a convenient excuse?
Roan went upstairs, to the insanely large master bedroom with its round bed (ludicrous—who had a round mattress, and most importantly, why? Even Dylan admitted he had no idea how they ever bought the sheets for the thing), where Dylan was curled up on one side of the spacious bed. He remembered how the bed was all white when they first moved in—white sheets, white blankets, white shams, whatever those were. (Both he and Dylan found that weird. “We’re just not all-white people,” Dylan had said, and Roan ran a hand through his hair and replied, “Speak for yourself. If I was any whiter, I’d be translucent.”) In a spare bedroom closet, Dylan had found a comforter that was a very gay shade of lilac, but at least it was a color, so he moved it to this bedroom and was currently huddled beneath it. Roan crawled into bed carefully, so as not to wake him up.
His eyes were adjusted to the dark, so he could see Dylan’s shoulder, the delicate latticework of bones beneath taut olive skin, and he carefully traced the scapula with his fingertip.
They were a relationship of two different worlds. But it wasn’t the divide people expected. It wasn’t that Dyl was an artist and he wasn’t, or that Dylan was younger than him, or that he was Hispanic and Roan was clearly a whiter shade of pale, or even that Roan was infected and he wasn’t.
It was that Dylan was totally Human, and he wasn’t. He wondered if that would ultimately tear them apart.
WHEN his bladder finally forced him awake, Roan found himself confronted with the punishing, bright accusation of the sun, streaming through the gauzy white curtains like a stream of curses. He squinted and grumbled as he made his way to the bathroom, which was all white marble and gold-colored fixtures, and it took Roan a moment to realize what was wrong: the birds. At home, he could hear the birds chirping sometimes very loudly, as if they were right above his head. Here, the landscaping kept them in the ornamental trees some distance from the house, and perhaps the building materials also kept the outside sounds muted. It was a shame, as he actually had gotten used to the noise of birds and wind and branches scraping and slapping against the side of the house. He was a city boy and he knew it, so he had no idea why those sounds made him feel better.
Since it was such a sunny, pretty day, he decided to just go ahead and stay in bed with the covers pulled up. Roan felt more accustomed to rain, fog, and gloom. Still, he smelled toast, and wasn’t surprised when the door opened and Dylan came in, eating toast and carrying a mug of tea. “So, when were you gonna tell me about the video?”
Roan sighed as he pulled the sheet off his face. “When I found the right moment. I never did.”
Ultimately, he had compromised with Bolt, and while it didn’t involve him compromising on personal principals, Roan still felt dirty. He’d shot a quick video that would be on Divine Transformation’s web page and in general on YouTu
be. It wasn’t much really, just a statement of intent: he would resist any registry, and encouraged any and all infected to do the same. He doubted they’d arrest them all, but he kind of hoped they’d try, because then the registry would be revealed for what it was. Roan encouraged them to all stand together, and promised them, the infected viewing audience, that he would fight this as long as he could. There was nothing radical on it, nothing saying he loved the Church or even liked them, it was simply a statement of fact. One that might get him investigated by the FBI, but fuck it. Playing it safe didn’t appeal to him.
He sat up as Dylan sat on the edge of the bed and offered his tea and toast to him, possibly because he thought Roan might have a hangover. He didn’t, but he was starving, so he accepted them with a nod and helped himself to a bite and a gulp. The toast was at least sourdough, and the tea some weird green tea-berry combination that was actually pleasant. “So are you leaving me?” Roan asked between bites of toast, mostly just curious.
“No. I must say you sounded very reasonable. I have no idea why some people are losing their shit over it.”
“Because I am encouraging the armed rebellion of infecteds against the normals. It’s the apocalypse, and I’m God or Satan, depending on who you ask.”
“I missed the armed part.”
“I think it’s implied, me being me and all.”
“I see.”
Roan set the tea down on the end table, and put a hand on Dylan’s naked back. He was wearing nothing but pajama bottoms, pale blue with white and red snowflakes on them, and Roan found himself once again entranced by the long, lean line of his spine. “I’m just gonna apologize now for all the shit that’s gonna come ’cause of this, okay?”
