by Andrea Speed
What a weird thought. Here he was, preparing to fuck some people up, and this guy was touting him as the leader of the infecteds. If that were actually true, the normals were in so much trouble.
Wait a minute. Weren’t they already?
He told him he’d think about it. He didn’t want to do any interview, but Dylan wanted him to, and the guy did sound weirdly sincere (and he had done his homework, which Roan had to give him credit for). Dylan said it might give fellow infecteds some hope, but if he was supposed to give them hope, they were totally fucked. But then again, they were. Could he make it worse? It was just a weird thing to throw on his “to-do” pile, along with Rosenberg scanning the shit out of him and him and Dylan signing up for the domestic partnership registry.
He prepped the car like he would for any long stakeout: snacks, pills, and liquids, along with a piss bottle, so he didn’t have to make a stop while tailing these guys. Of course he might have to stop for gas if they went an insanely long way, but he hoped they weren’t traveling that far. He also got a hands-free headset for his phone, so he wouldn’t have to have his cell wedged up against his ear.
He told Dylan he was off on another cheating husband tail and wasn’t sure when he’d be back. Dylan thought nothing of this, as he’d done similar jobs a million times before. He picked Holden up at his place, and as always, Holden looked the part he was assuming. He went with looser jeans with holes in the knee and near the crotch as opposed to tight jeans because they were more comfortable in case a fight broke out, but his shirt was white and skintight and so thin it probably became translucent when wet, and his motocross-style leather jacket said thrift store chic. His biker boots looked expensive, though, and hid the Glock nicely. His almond hair had a calculated bedhead look to it, and as he slumped in the passenger seat, he gave Roan a look of sleepy-eyed seduction. “Do I look like a porno movie manwhore or what?”
“Please don’t tell me you studied for it.”
“No need to study for it. I was born to play this part.”
“That’s what scares me.”
Roan dropped him off two blocks away from the bus station, and they checked phone reception as Holden walked toward the Burger King. It was surprisingly good, which boded well. Roan had to wait a while before a parking spot opened up that had a decent view of the Burger King and the bus station (he had no idea what the snuff guy’s car would be or which exit he would take, so he had to visually cover the biggest area possible). Then he settled in to wait, wishing he could listen to an audiobook or something to kill the boredom.
But he didn’t have to wait long. The guys (Roan distinctly heard two different male voices) approached Holden not long after he settled in a window booth, where Roan could clearly see his profile through binoculars. Roan couldn’t get a good look at either man (nor could he hear them clearly; they were too far from Holden and his phone), but he got an impression of young, white, and generic. The three talked for a couple of minutes (he could only hear Holden’s side; it seemed they were setting a price), and then they left. Holden told him they were driving a black Range Rover by acting surprised that was their car and then complimenting it.
Roan watched them drive off, then let a couple cars go before he followed in pursuit. Let them go? Traffic was nuts; he had no hope of pulling out directly behind them anyways.
One guy was sitting closer to Holden than the other. He’d hear snatches of his conversation, a word here or there, and Holden got these guys to talk, so he knew they were in for a long drive. He also knew this guy told Holden (whom he called Fox, of course, because that’s how these guys knew him) to call him “Matt.” No one in that SUV was using their real name; it was a caravan of disingenuousness.
The driver, whoever he was, drove like a fucking lunatic on the freeway. Roan knew he was in for a long drive. Matt lit up a joint and offered some to Holden. Although Roan didn’t think it was a smart thing to do, Holden apparently took him up on the offer. Hopefully he could hold his drugs, as he didn’t need the pot making his reflexes sluggish. It would make sense that they’d give drugs to the victims, though. It would make them more pliable, less likely to realize how dangerous things had become.
The drive was insanely long. In fact, when they hit the mountain passes, Roan realized they were heading to Eastern Washington. Were there two filming sites? A basement is a basement, so if they had one in Eastern Washington and one in Western Washington, who would know? It would allow them to dump bodies in each place as well, hopefully confusing the issue.
Night set in hard, and he almost lost the cell connection on the passes, but it managed to pull itself back from the brink. Holden continued chatting with the guys, asking where they were going, but Matt was evasive—he only said they were going to his uncle's place, since his uncle had moved to Florida. How wonderfully vague. He didn’t even bother to make up a plausible lie! Roan was offended on Holden’s behalf.
Matt and his friend asked Holden how he got the name Fox (no one was under the illusion that they were using real names), and when he told them he got it because he was “smarter than the average bear,” the guys snickered derisively. But Holden snickered too, and all three men were laughing at something different. Matt and the driver were laughing because they knew Holden was going to his death; Holden laughed because he knew what was in store for Matt and the driver.
Once they were through the mountains, Roan found his natural curiosity battling the exhaustion that was settling in. Where could they be headed? Yakima?
At an intersection, the Range Rover ran a red, and Matt said there were never any cops around here anyways, so it didn’t matter. Roan still waited for the green and wondered how close the house had to be when he saw a glimpse of dark movement out of the corner of his eye. By the time it registered in his brain that it was a car with its lights off running the red, it crashed into him full force.
Roan remembered impact, the sense of sudden force, glass breaking and metal screaming, but then he must have blacked out because he didn’t remember anything until he woke up hanging upside down, looking at the ground through a broken windshield.
He was aching, especially his head, and he was tasting blood, but it was different than the blood he tasted when he changed. (Why, he had no idea. Different concentrations of chemicals? Viral load?) The sound of liquid hitting the dirt and a small hiss told him the radiator was toast. Actually, since it was a Honda, he was surprised there was anything resembling a car left.
He hit the release on the seat belt and braced as it retracted, and he plunged toward the ceiling (now the floor) of the car. He felt the aches throughout his body, but he knew from being injured too many times in his life that nothing was terribly serious. He gathered up the equipment he needed to find Holden and crawled out the shattered passenger window to discover that the Honda had been knocked to a bit of grassy verge about a hundred feet away from the intersection. He looked back at the Honda and saw a distinct U bend to it. How was he walking away from this? Maybe his hybrid life form status was finally doing him some good. Or all the painkillers he was on.
The car that had hit him was sitting half in and half out of the intersection, the driver sitting on the ground beside it, drinking malt liquor from a brown paper bag. The car was a piece of shit Cadillac, old enough to be mostly steel and therefore hardly scratched by impact, mostly primer gray with yellowed ivory peeling off like teeth with bad enamel. “You came outta nowhere, bud,” the guy said. He had long, lank, greasy black hair, which was thinning so much in front it looked like he was wearing a two-part wig with a missing piece. His face was round and pockmarked with acne scars, discolored by broken blood vessels, telling him this man was a career alcoholic, one so deep in addiction that he probably needed to down a keg or two to feel anything. His front teeth were also gone, but he probably didn’t miss them.
“You T-boned my car.”
He looked, his glazed eyes needing a couple of minutes to actually focus. “Really? I don’t remembe
r that at all.”
Roan felt dizzy for a minute, but it passed. He walked over to the Cadillac and peered in. The windshield was cracked, but otherwise wasn’t much worse for wear. Keys still dangled in the ignition. “What’s wrong with the car?”
He made a negative noise, sort of shrugged, but it may have been a full body tremor. “Wouldn’t go.”
Had it actually suffered some damage, or was it just stalled or flooded? Only one way to find out. He got in the car, ignoring the overwhelming smell of malt liquor, old puke, and even older fast-food wrappers and body odor that seemed to permeate the vehicle (he wouldn’t be surprised if roaches lived under the front seat), and tried to start the car. The engine coughed and died, but he tried again, gently giving it gas. This time the engine sputtered and didn’t exactly roar, but at least cleared its throat and kept going. The man finally noticed and said, “Hey, that’s my car!”
“I’m making a beer run. Want anything?”
As Roan thought, that stopped him. He’d been trying to stand up, but he plopped back down happily, and said, “Hey yeah, pick me up a coupla forties, okay?”
“Gotcha.” The Honda had dead plates, so there was no way it could be traced back to Jorge. He’d just have to pay him for the lost parts.
He drove off, hoping he hadn’t lost too much time on Holden and the snuff guys. And if he had, well, if God existed, it better help them, because nothing else could.
Now
Roan ran down toward the sprawling house in the depression of downwinder land, the desert just down from the old nuclear reservation, where the snuff guys had brought Holden for a final performance. He just hoped he wasn’t too late, although he doubted he was. Holden was a survivor, after all, and if anyone could stay alive, it was him.
He had to fight the urge to collapse to all fours, as he felt he could run faster that way. The lion was creeping through him, revealing itself in pain that distorted his bones and twisted his muscles, and as his thinking began to slip sideways, words harder and harder to conceive of, it came out more. The lion thought in concrete terms: blood, rage, hunger. It would be so easy to give in to that, and just about what they deserved.
He parsed the scents, tried to determine how many people were here now, but they were overlaid with so many older scents it was difficult to tell. But he was dealing with at least a dozen; he could smell Holden’s scent here too, leading toward the nondescript ranch-style house. He had just about reached the door when it opened and a man started coming out. “… her. I’ll call her back later, I’m outta smokes.” He turned and saw Roan, but he had only a second, hardly long enough for recognition, before Roan barreled into him and sent him flying back into the house.
This wasn’t smart. He had no idea how many people he was dealing with, how well armed they were, but he was furious, the animal taking over and making him lose control. He was aware only that there were other people in the room: four men, most smoking, some on drugs (amphetamines, prescription, pot, booze), two sprawled on a couch, one standing, the one he had just knocked to the floor. The standing one pulled a gun—there were speech sounds, noises, but they made no sense to him—and Roan lunged at him, roaring. There was an explosion, a burst of hot cordite he could taste/smell like peppery metal, but he didn’t know if it hit him or not. There was pain, but there was always pain, and it was impossible to tell one pain from another. Pain was a light and he was the sun, radiating pain, gifting the world with his aura of pain as his body broke and traded one form for another.
He grabbed the man, pinned him against the wall, sunk his teeth into his neck before he realized what he was doing. He pulled himself away as the man screamed and threw him down, blood in Roan’s mouth and blood pouring from his neck, where Roan had torn the flesh. Someone grabbed him from behind, but he flailed, his elbow smashing into his attacker’s skull hard enough to make the man collapse as if shot. The other two men ran, one outside, the other deeper into the house, screaming something, making urgent speech sounds that Roan was no longer Human enough to interpret. But he recognized fear, the taste sweetly savory, and followed that little breadcrumb trail promising scared prey, all the more tender for their fear. Another man appeared at the end of the corridor, and he had a bigger gun, but Roan jumped the millisecond before he fired, and he heard bullets buzz through the air like angry hornets as Roan landed on the man, driving him to the floor, hitting hard enough to break something (Roan heard the bone snap; not his, this was a musical, beautiful sound of distance), and as he roared down into the man’s face, the man screamed, a pathetic noise of pain and terror, facing something he couldn’t understand. His fear smelled like rain, like fresh meat, like warm blood.
He caught a scent deeper in the house, a smell he knew, more fear, more pain, and the faint but distinct scent of death. Roan crawled over the man and headed down the hall, farther in, following the siren’s call of death. He wanted to sink his teeth into that. He wanted to take a bite out of all of it.
This was his house, his place, his territory. And they were all his prey.
21
Animal
Holden was still arguing about payment when the shit went down.
He’d heard the huge bang, the collision shortly behind them when they were driving in, but couldn’t see anything, as they were too far ahead. He hoped that Roan wasn’t involved in that, but if he was, he was determined to see this through without him. He had a gun, a knife, and an urge to kill these motherfuckers, who probably wouldn’t expect him to put up much of a fight—surely that was good enough.
Once they got here, they sat in the living room and smoked pot, had some beers, and discussed what was going to happen. Holden was deliberately fickle, changing his mind about doing a group sex scene, and then wanting more money, which played out the time. Also, he didn’t really hold in the pot smoke, nor did he do more than sip his beer. He wasn’t going to get fucked up, but he was happy to let them think he was going to. It also helped that the pot they had was total weak sauce. He knew guys who drove in much better B.C. bud on alternate weekends. Drugs weren’t really his thing, but if he was going to do some, he liked to do the good stuff.
He eventually snuck off to the bathroom and lounged in there for a bit, eating up more time. Checking the phone, he found his connection dead. Natural drop off, or had Roan really been plowed into? Shit, he hoped he was okay.
What was he thinking? The guy was a superhero. He’d be fine.
Holden saw a few closed doors on the way to the basement, but he had a weird feeling that he was the only true “guest” in the house today. Which meant what about Jordan? Probably nothing good.
The basement was just a basement, although it seemed a bit more Western Washington than Eastern Washington to him, for reasons he couldn’t actually explain. The walls and floor were poured concrete, the lighting harsh and basically fluorescent, the set up very basic porn, what with a bed, a chair, and two digital cameras on tripods, with a computer setup tucked away in the back corner. It smelled like sweat, sex, ozone, and Febreze. There was the guy in charge of the cameras, “Lenny,” an average looking pear-shaped guy with thinning curly black hair and an underbite he really should have had seen to as a child, while his two fellow “performers” were “Alex,” a reasonably buffed-up guy with a bland face and a smattering of back hair, and “Rex,” a more handsome but almost tragically skinny guy who had the build of Iggy Pop. The tattoo on his calf (a rather ornate scene of the Virgin Mary, roses, and a bleeding heart) seemed to draw far too much attention to his toothpick legs. Holden recognized Alex from the video where they'd killed Coyote.
They all took off their shirts and discussed what was going to be happening until Holden balked again, this time pointing out he was not a bottom unless he got paid a hell of a lot of cash, and nobody had mentioned anything about barebacking. (Honestly, if you wanted to fuck him, you really did need to pony up a lot of dough, to the point where he just solicited as a top, because most people couldn’t afford h
im otherwise.) They started dickering about the cash again, which he internally found hilarious, as these guys were going to give him the money, kill him, and take the money back. So why not just give it to him without a fight? Dickheads! It made him dial up the diva behavior.
