Infected: Lesser Evils (7 page)

Roan knew he should tell Dylan first, but he was tired and a bit headache-y from the partial change. Besides, Dee would understand what he was saying from a medical perspective. So he took a deep breath, and told him what Rosenberg had uncovered, and what she speculated might happen. Dee took it in with growing disbelief, or at least that’s what Roan decided his widening eyes and slightly unhinging jaw were all about.

When Roan finished talking, Dee said breathlessly, “Bullshit. Bullshit! There’s no way—”

“No way what? I’m becoming more lion? I fractured a man’s skull with one punch, and I was trying to go easy on him. I saw the tendons humans don’t have, I saw the bone spurs in my hands. Sometimes, if I press the skin hard enough, I swear I can feel them.”

“You’re not going to turn into a lion one day and not come back. That is not happening.”

“Are you sure? Can you give me a written guarantee?”

“Don’t be an asshole—”

“It’s what I do best.”

“Are you ever gonna stop interrupting me?”

Roan shrugged, and inexplicably felt like he was on the verge of tears. “I know I’m hurting Dylan, and I know that’s what you called to lecture me about, but there’s a danger you’re not aware of. I think I may actually hurt him, physically. I think I’m losing control. I don’t want to hurt him, Dee, but to keep the lion back I need more drugs than I have.”

“You don’t want to hurt him, do you?”

“No, of course not, how can you even ask that? But since he’s the only thing keeping me Human, I think the lion would be glad to have him gone.”

Dee stared at him for an uncomfortably long minute. “You do know how insane that sounds, right?”

He nodded. “If you think it sounds crazy, imagine being me.” He wiped the back of his hand beneath his eyes, getting rid of any lingering moisture.

Dee continued staring at him like he was the craziest person he’d ever met, which was saying something from a paramedic—along with cops and social workers they were often the front line of the crazy brigade. “You’re gonna get angry at me, I know, but people addicted to painkillers can have delusions—”

“It’s not a delusion, Dee. The lion is sneaking out—when I don’t want it to appear, it does. It’s getting stronger and I’m drowning. Rosenberg only confirmed it’s physical, not just mental. Did you know I can feel it? In my shoulders especially. They almost always feel slightly dislocated. It’s not pain, not exactly, it’s just the feeling that they’re loose, not perfectly attached. Whoever glued me together didn’t use enough.”

He grimaced. “Did you talk to Rosenberg about any of this?”

“Of course. She said it wasn’t in my head, it looked like everything has changed since the last time I was scanned, even my brain waves are changing… and she wants me to come back to Willow Creek. She wants to do more tests, more and more, until I’m nothing but tissue samples on a plate. I think she’d be happy to keep me there for the rest of my life.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“I do. But I’m this century’s equivalent of the Elephant Man. I am her medical legacy to the world, and I’d be an idiot not to realize that.”

“That’s kinda conceited, you know.”

“I know. Am I wrong?”

Dee gazed at him steadily, for once at a loss for words, and then stood up, saying, “This is too heavy, I need a drink. Want one?”

“No, but thanks. I oughta get going.” He stood and wondered where he was going. Home, he supposed. Maybe he could stop at the store on the way home, pick some stuff up. Truth be told, he just liked wandering stores after midnight; it was his favorite time to shop. Almost no one was in the store, and those who were seemed as strange as you. It was a gathering place for the lonely, the desperate, and the misanthropic; the bar of the ’00s.

“You have to tell Dylan.”

He sighed heavily. “Yeah, I know, but he’s gonna tell me he loves me no matter what, and I don’t want to hear that. I want him to call me a freak and leave while he still can. Talk to him, see if you can wake up his sense of self-preservation.”

“Didn’t you just say he was the only thing keeping you Human?”

“Yeah, but maybe he shouldn’t. Straddling two worlds is killing me.”

At the door, when Roan was halfway outside, Dee said, “So the virus is progressing. Maybe you just need a little more time to adapt to it. Just ’cause the lion’s winning the battle now doesn’t mean it will win the war.”

Roan didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. It was an interesting theory, but just a theory.

On his way down to the parking lot, his phone hummed in his pocket, and since it was Rosenberg, he answered it. “Yeah?”

“You bastard, you couldn’t let me stay home and have a drink and watch
Star Trek
repeats, huh? No, you have to get me involved in this farkakt case,” she said, pausing to take an angry drag off a cigarette.

“You watch
Star Trek
?”

“This from the punk rock nerd. Don’t you start.”

“What’s so farkakt about the case? Besides the obvious.”

“Everything.”

“She still alive?”

“No, you were right, she didn’t make it. Died before I got here. Know what killed her?”

“The poison.”

“You’d think so, but no. Acute agranulocytosis.”

Roan paused at the bottom stair and sat down. “In English, please?”

“No white blood cells. None. Her bone marrow completely shut down. To be perfectly honest, it was probably a low-level staph infection that killed her, but it couldn’t have if she didn’t have acute agranulocytosis.”

He was now glad he had sat down. “So this was a preexisting condition? Many infecteds can get immune system disorders—”

“Not on her chart. On her chart, she was as healthy as a noninfected, and at twenty-two, you’d kinda hope.”

“You know who she is then?” Stupid question, but no one had told him yet.

“Yep. Ava Pagano, she’s listed as one of the women missing from the bachelorette party. Someone was relatively sober enough to tell the cops they didn’t know where Ava was, and your cop friend was smart enough to track her info down. We got a match. None of her friends—if you can call ’em that—even knew she was infected.”

“A recent infectee?”

“Maybe.”

“So she did enter the club Human.”

“Apparently so. Even the most sober of her friends can’t remember when she saw her last.”

Roan had to move aside as a young black man came down the stairs, also talking on a cell phone. They didn’t acknowledge each other in any way, locked in their own electronic worlds. It occurred to Roan the world was becoming more autistic, people were getting locked into their own little worlds (but voluntarily so, assisted by their machines), but he didn’t know what to do with such an observation, so he kept it to himself. “Okay, so… how did she change in the club without anyone noticing her? Why did her bone marrow shut down? Why did she smell like a chemical weapons factory?”

She snickered. “Chemical weapons factory? Cute. Well, I can’t answer any of those questions, except maybe they’re all related to the substance we found in her bloodstream.”

“Which is…?”

“Fuck me if I know, sport. That’s why you’re a bastard for getting me involved in this farkakt case. I’ll be here all night ’cause of this.”

“I’ll buy you a box set,” he told her, his mind racing in a dozen different directions at once.

How did an infected but otherwise healthy young woman enter a club as a Human, and end the night as an infection-ravaged cat corpse?

Not that it would be much comfort, but Rosenberg wouldn’t be the only one getting no sleep tonight.

Transitions from Persona to Object

B
Y
THE
time Roan wandered home, Dylan was asleep upstairs, and Roan watched him for a while, wondering if he should just sleep downstairs on the couch. It was almost morning, and exhaustion had finally gotten the best of him, along with the pills. The upside of the fact that he was on the verge of near collapse, the lion was too. Even the beast needed to sleep from time to time.

Figuring he was being stupid, Roan crawled into bed beside Dylan and braced himself for bad dreams, but of course, since he was ready for them, none came. But he did have a really bizarre one, full of the smells of color and the roar of blood, and it made him wake up, a sense of doom pressing down on him and smothering him. It was just the blanket, which he had pulled over his face.

Dylan was up, which surprised him, but in a way he was relieved. How awful—he was such a coward. Bad show for a lion.

He was in the shower, shampooing his hair (Had it grown overnight? It felt like it), when Dylan came in. “You’re up early,” Roan said over the sound of running water.

“It’s noon,” he replied.

“It is?” He hadn’t looked at the clock. Perhaps he should have.

“What time did you get in last night?”

“Umm… it was dark. I stopped at the store, picked you up some more silken tofu.”

“I saw, thanks.” He put the toilet seat down and sat on the closed lid, so Roan could see him through the open slice of shower curtain. He was dressed in a green tank top and loose black yoga pants, and as he crossed his arms over his chest, he had that stubborn look on his face. Oh good, were they going to fight?

“So, I’m a little of tired of pretending something isn’t wrong. Are you ever going to tell me?”

“What do you mean?” Dylan shot him an evil look. “Look, it isn’t you—”

“I know it isn’t me,” he snapped. “I’ve analyzed my own behavior a thousand times, to make sure I hadn’t pushed you away in some fashion. I haven’t, so it must be you. Why haven’t you touched me in two damn weeks? What happened at Willow Creek? I’d love to accuse you of having an affair, but I know you’re not. Why couldn’t you be having an affair like a normal guy? At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about you stepping out in front of a bus.”

Roan was rinsing the suds out of his hair, and he was glad, as Dylan couldn’t see his face with his wet hair hanging down in front of it. Yes, it was definitely longer.

“What?”

“I know you’re depressed. I also think you’re suicidal. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Mean it.”

He swept back his damp hair and glared at him through a scrim of water and steam. “I wouldn’t, okay? Now will you hand me a towel?”

“No, not until you tell me what’s going on with you.”

“You’re really going to keep me trapped in a shower?” He sighed irritably, then figured what the hell, and told him about the progression of the virus. If he didn’t tell him, it was likely Dee would anyways.

Dylan seemed to listen impassively, not moving, not reacting until he was done. “Well, you’re just feeling self-pitying to believe that,” he claimed, getting up and grabbing a towel off the bar. “You’ll never be a full-time lion.”

He seemed really certain of that. “How do you know?”

“Because you couldn’t be a smartass as a lion. You live to annoy the shit out of people, Ro. You can’t do that as well as a cat.”

He had a point there, he could hardly deny it. It probably didn’t work like that, but he could hardly argue with him. He turned off the shower and got out, and Dylan gave him the towel. As he dried his hair, Dylan asked, “So that’s why you won’t touch me? You’re afraid of lioning out?”

“I’m afraid it wants you dead.”

“What if it does? Are you going to stand for that? Does it think nothing’s going to happen to it if something happens to me?”

That was a good point, but it only distracted him for a moment. “That’s logic. I don’t think that applies to a cat.”

“But it must understand self-preservation. You’re still sharing a body, and if it does something to me, are you going to let it pass?”

“Of course not.”

“Okay then, we should be okay.”

Roan scrubbed the towel over his head before looking at him curiously. “Why are you not worried about this?”

“It’s you. You’re not going to hurt me.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “It’s not me we’re talking about—”

Dylan grabbed his face in his hands and kissed him, a full-on, passionate kiss. It was a little too nice for his not-quite-numb libido, so he reluctantly pushed him away. “No, okay, no. I’m not risking your life gambling on a lion being sensible.”

“It’s because you bit me too hard that one time, right?”

“Yes! You can’t tell me you’d like me ripping out your throat.”

He considered that a moment. “It wants blood?”

“I told you what it wants.”

“But blood makes it happy?”

“I—I don’t know what makes it happy. I need a cat whisperer or a virus whisperer or something.”

Dylan did the strangest thing. He bit his bottom lip. That wasn’t strange in itself, as he often bit his lip while thinking, but this time he bit it until he broke the skin, until it started to bleed, a teardrop of blood welling on his lower lip. “Let’s give it a little something to shut it up, shall we?” He grabbed Roan again, and this time when he kissed him his lips were slick with blood. On one level, it was incredibly creepy and gross.

Of course, the lion loved it. It responded eagerly to the taste of Dylan’s blood, and while Roan was fighting the impulse to tear into him, increase the flow of blood, he also found himself responding to him like a regular Human. It didn’t help that he was cold and Dylan was oh so warm. There was a growl/purr in the base of his throat as he pushed him back into the bedroom, sucking at his lower lip. Roan hated the taste of blood—his own more than anyone else’s—and yet it tasted so good; maybe it was just Dylan’s blood that tasted so good. All that vegetarianism and healthy living may have made his blood cleaner than most, or at least that’s what Roan told himself. The blood made him feel intoxicated, hot under the skin.

They ended up having the most intense and somewhat violent sex Roan had ever had, and afterward he was filled with mixed feelings about it. Of course it felt good (god, had he missed sex), but the taste of blood was tacky in his mouth (both nauseating and enticing), and any sex involving blood play was kinky beyond belief.