by Andrea Speed
He didn’t feel terribly strong, pain echoed through him like ripples on the surface of a disturbed pond, but Roan knew enough not to show weakness. Cop cars stacked the sides of the street, making a half-assed cordon, and the amount of blue on the sidewalk seemed excessive, several of them openly wearing bulletproof vests on the outside of their uniforms. They were more afraid of the Humans around here than the loose cat, a message they were sending loud and clear.
Obviously most of the guys recognized him, and more than a few sneered or turned their backs on him. Boy, he wasn’t going to win any popularity contests, was he? Someone at the head of the street whispered, “Fuckin’ kitty fag,” to his buddy, letting Roan know they’d forgotten about his sense of hearing. Right now he didn’t care much, he was too weary to give a shit about their insults.
He cut through the cops easily, they parted like he was toxic, until he reached Seb, who regarded him with the same equanimity he always did. “Wow, Roan, you look like shit.”
“Bad day. Any word on the cat squad?”
“ETA seven minutes out. Better get movin’.”
This was a bad area to have a superior sense of smell, but then again, most places were. Still, he crouched down, as being closer to the ground would help him filter out so many of the Human smells, the garbage smells. He smelled blood, tainted quite heavily with alcohol, and asked, “Who was hurt?”
“Transient. He was able to stop the attack by shoving a lighter in its face. He’ll probably survive. Said it was a cougar.”
“Amazing he had the presence of mind. He was super fucking drunk.”
Seb chuckled. “Yeah, noticed that. Guy smelled like a sour mash explosion.”
The lighter explained the noxious scent of burned hair, but there was something else, something… off. “Cat’s sick,” Roan said.
“Might explain the attack.”
“Probably.” Was he convinced? Oh, he didn’t know—it seemed to vary from one cat to another. But he didn’t like the smell.
Roan stood, took the drug gun and radio Seb offered him, and followed the trace scents, just barely there beneath the odious, garbage-y Human scents. He followed it into the alley, which was strewn with even fresher garbage, enough to make him almost gag.
He pressed on, past old blood, gang graffiti, and a trash can overflowing with garbage so old it was sweet with rot. The buzz and click of insects was a constant background noise.
His phone went off, still on vibrate, but in this state it was as loud as a bang, so Roan reached in his pocket and shut it off without looking at it. When he concentrated, when he let the cat inch forward, his senses exploded, and he had almost a kind of synesthesia. Sounds were almost feelings; smells were colors, layers in the air. The Human and trash smells made the air look polluted, a sort of murky, washed-out brown, nearly the color of landfill mud, but the sick cat was a tiny red thread beneath it all that he could follow, the world’s dimmest beacon.
He entered one of the empty buildings, whose door had been smashed in by police battering rams a long time ago and never replaced. The smell of Human shit and piss was overpowering, a noxious dirty-yellow funk that suggested junkies and homeless people were using it as a toilet.
There was no light, the former windows (they hadn’t seen glass for decades) were boarded up, but Roan could see well enough to know he didn’t want to pull out his flashlight. There were gang tags, curses, and feces smeared on the wall, and a staircase that was definitely unsafe, with a missing chunk of railing and a broken step gaping like a missing tooth in a crooked mouth. But the cat’s scent line went that way, so he had no choice.
Careful to avoid any particularly disgusting piles, he made his way to the steps and carefully went up them, avoiding empty spots and steps soft with rot and damage. The ceiling was hanging down in chunks on the second level, so he couldn’t imagine the upper floors were very stable, if at all passable.
There were no rats, which told him the cat was here even if nothing else did. The rats around here had no fear of house cats or even Humans—why should they be afraid? They outnumbered them all. But a cougar was a different story. Rats were smart enough to know you don’t fuck with that shit.
So he wasn’t surprised to see the muddy-hued cougar waiting for him in the middle of the corridor, growling low in its throat. She was small, female, and attempted to roar. Cougars, whether the born or infected variety, couldn’t actually roar; they could squall, make an almost equivalent noise, but a roar it wasn’t. Roan reflexively showed her what a roar actually was, tearing up his throat and hurting his own ears in the process.
The cougar seemed to accept it well. Her ears went back, but she crouched slightly, not as if ready to pounce but in submission. She wasn’t going to fight him, she knew she would lose, and this again brought home his general, unspoken thought that the female cats were generally smarter than the male ones. Of course, to be fair, it varied from cat to cat—he’d met some remarkably dumb females, and some males who seemed to have some sense—but in general he liked facing females more than males. There was usually less bloodshed.
But then the cougar did something odd. She turned and walked down the hall, not running, not trying to hide, and he followed in curiosity.
The stench hit him about three feet later.
Dark tendrils of the sickly sweet rot of death, the metallic meat smell of blood, and it was so overwhelming that he had to pause for a moment to regain his bearings. He’d have instantly blamed the cougar, but the smell of blood had the sort of rusty tang of old blood; it wasn’t fresh.
The cougar was at the fifth door on the left, scratching at a closed apartment door like a housecat who desperately wanted back inside. It was such odd behavior that Roan wondered for a moment if this was a prank being played on him by the cat squad. Except they couldn’t rig something like this, and they weren’t really bright enough to think of something this creative either.
The cougar was trying to tell him something, and he knew exactly what: the death, the blood, the meat smell was behind that door, and the cougar didn’t like it any more than Roan did.
As he approached, the cougar backed off and crouched down low, submitting to him. He let his Human side come forward more, as the cougar was no threat, at least not to him. He wondered if he had his gun with him, because honestly he’d forgotten. The threat was behind the door, and even the cougar was happy to leave it to him.
Fuck it, he wasn’t Human—no matter what the threat, he didn’t need a gun. Like Seb said, he was a superhero, right? He was the weapon. Guns were extraneous.
Roan kicked open the door, as surprise wasn’t much of an option with a cougar scratching to be let in. He didn’t think there was anything living on the other side, though; he smelled nothing alive among the dead.
Still, what he saw surprised him. It was a tiny apartment, more or less intact, and there were pelts hanging like the shadow of death from the low ceiling in just about every available area, the layers of newspaper on the floor stained brown with blood. Roan counted over a dozen cat skins, of all the species—lion, panther, cougar, leopard. (Okay, no tiger, but good fucking luck getting one of those.) They were almost all headless pelts, but otherwise full skins, cleaned and dressed like a professional tanner had been working on them.
On a rickety card table in the center of the room were a couple of severed paws, with what looked like metal fittings on the end. Was someone turning them into jewelry? Maybe some kind of trophy pendant. There was a single severed head on the table too, a panther, the top of the skull and brain removed—someone had been using it as an ashtray. Somehow he recognized Marlboro butts, a weird little detail that shouldn’t have stuck out but somehow did.
The cougar made a strange noise behind him, a sort of a combination growl and whimper, and Roan found himself echoing it before catching himself. The horror of the scene sank like a stone in his body, leaving him feeling cold. Then the rage came, a wave that warmed him as a growl boiled in his throat, a
nd he had to swallow it all back before it overwhelmed his rational mind. Well, whatever he had left that passed for a rational mind.
He remembered his radio, and pulled it out from where he’d stashed it in his coat pocket. “I need a forensics team in here.”
“What’cha got?” Seb replied.
“A slaughter.”
“Cat under control?”
“The cat didn’t do it. A Human did this.”
“What?”
“It’s an abattoir in here, Seb. Some motherfucking bastard has killed a bunch of cats, skinned them alive.”
These weren’t just cat pelts, of course; these were Human skins. Someone had killed infecteds in their cat form and peeled the fur from their bones, kept their transformed skin as a hunting trophy.
Not just a murderer. A sadist, a fiend, the sickest bastard to walk the city.
And he was loose. Where was the freak squad for him?
30
Hell’s Bank Notes
ROAN knew the cops would do this differently for murdered cats than murdered people, he knew it.
But he had really underestimated both the bullshit and the contempt.
It started with sniggering references to a cat house, and how many ways you can skin a dead cat, and while Seb didn’t take part and tried to shut everyone up, most ignored him. Roan knew it was macho cop shit as well as graveyard humor, the kind that eased the horror of ugly situations, but it was just too gleeful. He snapped when one obnoxious little rookie shit made a comment about what cat tasted like, and maybe the Greek restaurant down the street was responsible. People had said worse things, but he had had enough.
Roan grabbed the rookie by the throat and slammed him up against the nearest wall. He held him with one hand, felt his pulse beating in his neck, and knew with a single squeeze he could crush every single bone in his neck to powder. It wouldn’t even take much, just a millimeter more pressure; Roan’s arm was actually shaking from the restraint that he was using to hold back all the strength that wanted to pour into his hand. “These are people,” Roan growled. And it was a growl; there were actual words in there, but they surfaced and sank like a drowning person. “You fucking sadistic moron, these are Humans beings. Are you that much of a cannibal? You Hannibal Lecter’s boy, huh?”
Seb was right there, and looked like he was about to touch him, maybe grab his arm, but instantly thought better of it. Instead, he said, firmly but not angrily, “Roan, let him go. He’s mine to deal with.”
The rookie had almost reflexively put an arm on Roan’s shoulder, as if to push him away, but just as his confusion turned to rage, his hand slipped away as his rage turned to fear. Roan had no idea what the brush-cut little boy saw in his face, but it scared the shit out of him. Almost literally. The growling probably wasn’t helping. While the fear was intoxicating, Roan knew it was time to step back.
With almost painful reluctance, he let go of the rookie, who sank down to the floor. Only then did he realize he had lifted him up off his feet. Once again, Roan was surprised at his own strength, and remembered Rosenberg had told him that maybe it wasn’t his fault. He certainly hoped it wasn’t.
“Let’s take a walk,” Seb said. It wasn’t a suggestion and they both knew it.
As they both left the noisome hallway of the tenement, he noticed the cops were now shooting him looks of wariness, or looks that could have qualified as first-degree felonies. But at least they’d all shut their ugly fucking mouths.
They had to make their way carefully down the broken staircase, but didn’t talk until they were outside. Seb turned on him, and exclaimed, “What the hell, dude? I know they were being assholes, but that doesn’t give you the right to Hulk out.”
“If I’d Hulked out, they’d be dead,” Roan snapped. “And they weren’t being assholes; they were a hell of a lot worse than that. Those were bodies in there, and they were making fun of the whole situation, like this was a fucking disturbance at a strip joint.”
Seb gave him his firm but otherwise emotion-free Spock look. “Could you please stop growling? It’s distracting.”
He hadn’t realized he was growling—yes, again—and it was a true effort to stop. “They’re treating them like a joke, Seb, like they aren’t people at all.”
“I know, and I’m reporting each one who made a crack. This is not your fight, Roan.”
“Isn’t it? They’re my people.”
That made Seb raise an eyebrow at him. “You’ve adopted them all? I thought you weren’t—”
“This isn’t the place for semantics. You better go back inside and make sure those fuckholes aren’t wearing the victims as hats.” He then turned and stalked away, before he could take out his rage on Seb, who was possibly the only nonasshole at the scene.
At least the cougar was okay. Roan had drugged her before forensics was able to pick its way up the staircase, and the cat squad took her away, complaining that they never saw any action anymore. Roan wished he could say the same thing.
Once he was back in his car, he felt like punching something, but the last time he had, he’d almost broken his steering wheel, and he couldn’t imagine how much that would cost to replace.
The cops weren’t going to treat this like a murder case, Roan knew it. It was legal to kill loose cats, wasn’t it? They weren’t going to try very hard to find the killer, or even find out who the victims were. Yes, Seb was a good guy, and Chief Matthews seemed to want his services as the resident cat expert, but he was losing what little faith he had left in humanity.
That actually gave him an idea. He needed the help of another person who had zero faith in humanity.
Holden answered on the second ring. “Well, aren’t I Mister Popularity today? And what can I do for you, Roan?”
Did he even want to know what that popularity crack meant? “You home? I need to talk to you.”
“Great, yeah, come over, I’ll make you a sandwich.”
Was that sarcasm? Somehow Roan didn’t think so. “Make me a sandwich?”
“You just changed, didn’t you?”
He wasn’t still growling, was he? If he was, he could neither hear it or feel it. “How do you know?”
“Your voice. Sounds like you’ve been scraping your throat with a metal rasp.”
“That’s a very specific descriptive.”
“I know. I save this shit for you. I know you’re the only one who’d appreciate it. Chicken or tuna?”
Roan checked over his shoulder to see if he could tell where the conversational shift went. “Huh?”
“Your sandwich. Which would you prefer?”
“You’re serious about that?” Truth be told, he was hungry, but he usually was after a shift. “Tuna, I guess.”
“Good choice. The chicken’s kinda iffy. And don’t hit the pills, I got something for that too. See you in a few.” With that, Holden hung up.
Roan looked at the cell for a moment, his anger draining away to simple confusion. What the hell was all that about? Then again, it was Holden—he would never understand the man, nor was he going to waste his time trying. He just lived to confound, vex, and thwart, all words he probably would have liked. And that was precisely the reason Roan had called him.
His head started throbbing on the drive over, a seeming aftereffect of the sharp pains pulsing in his jaw, bad enough that he wanted to reach up and rip off his lower jaw. (Could he? He had a feeling he could if he really wanted to, so he wasn’t going to push it.) The sun coming out didn’t help, as the light stabbed into his eyes like glass shards. Was he getting a migraine? His reaction to light seemed to indicate that.
By the time he reached Holden’s apartment, he ignored what he’d told him on the phone and went ahead and gulped a Percocet before getting out of the car. He was going to need it.
Roan was about to knock when the door opened, and Holden said, “Wow, you look like shit. Maybe you should take some pills.”
“Say it louder, I’m pretty sure your upstairs neighbor
didn’t hear you,” he replied sourly.
Once they were inside, and Holden had shut the door behind them, he said, “Please, he’s a drug dealer. All he’ll wanna do is sell you some E.” Holden was shirtless, wearing nothing but sweatpants and the dog tags he’d got from that soldier client, now long dead. His apartment smelled like popcorn and tuna, and the scent of food made his stomach roil. It must have showed on his face, because Holden looked alarmed. “Fuck, you gonna hurl?”
He wasn’t sure, and he took a moment to just stand still and concentrate on swallowing down his gorge. “I dunno. I think I’m having a migraine attack.”
“Fuck. Okay, c’mon, let’s get you settled, I have an ice pack.” Holden helped him needlessly to the sofa, and then picked up a saucer and put it on Roan’s leg. “Have that, it should make you feel better in a few minutes.”
It was a brown lump, which would have been really unappealing, except it smelled like chocolate. A brownie chunk, only… there was something else there too, too strong to ignore. “Are you seriously feeding me a pot brownie?”
“These are better than your average po-bo,” he claimed, retrieving an ice pack from his fridge. “I know Mavis, this charming British lady who works for the Angel Project, you know, that charity that delivers food to seriously ill people? Real sweetie; wish she was my grandmother. Anyways, she makes these special painkiller brownies for some of her people, and by making a generous donation I got some. I keep them on hand for really bad days.”
“Pot brownies are horrible.” Roan had had a bite of one once, and almost immediately spit it out. It was dry, with an almost strawlike texture, and tasted like chocolate-laced shit. He had no idea how anyone ever ate them.
“These are different. Mavis has a way with Hershey’s syrup. Try it, you’ll see.”
He sniffed it warily. “You turnin’ into a pothead on me?”
This made Holden snort derisively. “I oughta. I just have painkillers around in case I ever need ’em. A lingering remnant of my street corner days, I suppose. You always had to be ready for somebody to try and beat the shit out of you. And trust me, those brownies are a great painkiller.”
