Infected: Lesser Evils (22 page)

Holden decided to play this belligerent. He had a chip on his shoulder now, and he was done with the world. Why else was he here? “What do you think happened? Normals, that’s what.”

“Oh my god,” she gasped, with some seriousness. “Would you like to talk to one of our counselors?”

“Thanks, but I’m done with talking to counselors.” Holden walked past, deeper into the house, and Dylan followed.

Eventually they discovered the ballroom (?) where the main party was taking place, a cavernous room made to seem that much larger by the fact that it was mostly shrouded in darkness, with all the lights isolated spots or bars of neon colors. From what Dylan had told him, he was looking for a guy named Pierce, who was supposedly wearing a pale-blue dress shirt and a dark blazer (dressed, in other words, like a chaperon or a narc). They split up, wandering to different parts of the room, while Holden struggled to recognize the music. It was generic club DJ stuff; it could have been anything. It probably was.

Holden eventually found his man standing near the northeastern part of the room. He was standing beside a table stocked with bottled water and Vitamin water or one of its equivalents, candy-colored liquid in plastic bottles that probably tasted exactly like they looked. Pierce was an average-looking man in a reasonably expensive-looking blazer. He was one of those guys with such a severe widow’s peak that it looked like an arrow, the rest of his hair thinning around and behind it, making it look like his meager hair could have been painted on. It also made him look like he had more forehead than was advisable for anyone who wasn’t a Star Trek alien. His eyes were small and deep set, their color impossible to guess in this low-level lighting, his mouth wide but fairly thin under a slightly Roman nose that dominated the otherwise weak features of his face. Did he look like a bird? Maybe. Hawkish. That was the only thing he could think of.

“Pierce?” he asked.

Surprise flashed through his eyes, making Holden wonder how his bruises looked under the black lights. “You the guy who called earlier?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“You a cop?”

“No. Do I look like a cop?”

He didn’t answer that. “You wearing a wire?”

Holden didn’t answer, just lifted up his shirt to reveal his naked stomach, which had a couple of lavender bruises on it as well. “Wanna see my dick?”

Pierce looked at him sharply. “What?”

“It’s how hookers weed out the cops. You ask to see their dick, and if they don’t whip it out, odds are they’re a cop.”

That looked like too much info for Pierce; he seemed slightly nauseated at the prospect. Ah, insecure straight boys, you had to love their squeamishness. Up close, Holden realized he was probably younger than he looked. Thanks to premature balding and a nebbishy build, he looked like he was in his midthirties from a distance, but up close you could tell you were probably about ten years off. The eyes gave it away. “No, I don’t wanna see your dick. How do you know that about hookers?”

“I know people in all the wrong places,” he said, letting his shirt drop. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the complete truth.

Pierce looked a little stunned by this. A drug lord he wasn’t. He was new at this whole thing, wasn’t he? And yet didn’t he have the Church locked up, saleswise? Hmm. Either this guy was a stringer, not the head honcho after all, or he was the head honcho only because of nepotism: he knew someone here, he was a favorite of someone here, and that was enough. How was he going to find out which?

“Gonna hook a brother up or not?” Holden asked, trying not to laugh at his use of the word “brother.” Honestly, it should be illegal for a white person to use that term in a nonironic manner, but he was playing the type who would say something like that and never see the irony in it.

Pierce—or whoever he was—seemed reluctant, but said, “Follow me.” He left the ballroom via a small door that was really hard to spot in the gloom, and Holden followed.

The door led to a narrow corridor, and Holden was sure it had some type of architectural name, but he couldn’t place it. Was it a servant’s access or something? “How much is a hit? And how do I take this stuff? Snort it, shoot it, smoke it, what?”

The guy paused, giving him a look that suggested he didn’t think he was quite for real. “You can take it lots of ways, but I got the liquid stuff.”

“Great. Like GHB?”

The guy reached in his blazer, and pulled out what looked an Altoids tin. Inside were a few small glass vials of clear liquid. “Thirty-five,” he said. Thirty-five dollars? Not too bad. Maybe that was another reason so many infecteds took it. Holden pulled out a wrinkled twenty, ten, and five, and was careful to ball it up in his fist before handing it to Pierce (he was just going to think of him as Hawkeye, because there was no way he was Pierce), so money changed hands in a way not visible to any invisible observer. (But they were alone in the hall, so who were they trying to impress?) After taking the money surreptitiously, he gave Holden one of the vials and put the tin back in his pocket.

“What’s it taste like?”

Hawkeye scowled, his thick brows meeting in a V over his nose. “I dunno. I don’t think it has a taste.”

“You’ve never tried it?”

“Yeah, but in juice. I didn’t taste it.”

Wrong. He’d never done it. He wasn’t a great liar, was he? Holden popped the cap off the vial and took a sniff, but smelled almost nothing besides a slight chemical odor. He wondered what Roan would think of this—would this blow his head off? Would he flinch like he sometimes did at smells that almost no one else noticed? He swigged the vial, and he could feel his mouth going numb, the drug spreading like ice through his bloodstream.

Holden smiled at Hawkeye, who was still too uncomfortably close to him in the narrow hallway, and grabbed him by the thinning hairs on the back of his head and kissed him, forcing his tongue between his lips and letting the drugs run from his mouth to Hawkeye’s.

He tried to push him away, but Holden had a firm grip on his hair and had pinned him up against the wall, and the guy was no heavyweight anyways. To keep him quiet and confused as the drugs kicked in, he very gently fondled his balls. Even if the guy was straight—and his hair seemed to indicate that—there were simple biological responses that couldn’t be suppressed. That was the wonderful thing about men: they were so simple.

When Hawkeye sagged a bit under the weight of the burn, and he started getting obviously turned on, Holden broke away from him with a smile. “Wow, yeah, this shit is fantastic.” It was. He’d hardly done any at all, but his face no longer felt like one overwhelming bruise; he felt great.

Poor Hawkeye was desperately confused, his eyes glazing over with drugs, but he remembered to at least seem to be indignant. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“Bobby told me it was like Ecstasy—you didn’t wanna do it alone.” Almost everybody knew a Bobby or a Mike; these were good names to use to just muck up the issue. Holden then leaned in, cradling his balls again, and whispered in his ear, “Why don’t we find someplace private, huh? Have our own party.”

“I’m not gay.” Weird how his voice broke when he said it. He was half turned on and half scared, and all stoned. Hard to think straight in those circumstances, pun very much intended.

“I’ve been told I could suck a bowling ball through a straw. Wanna find out?” About as subtle as a six-foot dildo. But the thing was, gay, straight, or other, no man could resist the lure of a blow job. Well, okay, he bet Roan and Dylan, holier than thou guys that they were, probably could under certain circumstances, but not all the time.

After a very long moment, where he listened to the guy breathe, Hawkeye finally said, “There are rooms upstairs.”

“Awesome. Lead the way.”

He let Hawkeye take the lead, and glanced at his wallet, which Holden had liberated from his blazer pocket. Not that he noticed; when your balls were getting a good cuddle, you never noticed anything else.

The hall lead out to a larger hallway, and there was a staircase that lead to the upper floors of the main house. Hawkeye knew the place well enough that he had been here a lot, clearly, but was he an infected? For some reason, Holden doubted it.

Hawkeye found a small, unoccupied bedroom, and he was really tripping balls now. He was giggling in a truly disturbing schoolgirl sort of way, and said, “You can’t tell anybody I did this.”

“Did what? What do you wanna do?” Holden asked, mock seductively, and bodily pushed him down onto the bed, straddling him as Hawkeye now laughed more hysterically.

Hawkeye struggled to say it for a good long minute before spitting out, “I don’t wanna do anything! I’m not gay.”

“Getting a blow job doesn’t make you gay.
Giving
a blow job… well, that’s another story.” He started undoing Hawkeye’s pants, and then stopped. “Hey, is there a freezer around here?”

Hawkeye looked at him with dazed, barely comprehending eyes. If he was infected and this stuff was tainted, he’d probably start shifting any minute now. “Umm… downstairs. Why?”

“’Cause I know this great trick with an ice cube. It feels so good you won’t believe it. Wait for me, tiger, I’ll be right back.” As he got up and went to the door, Holden paused long enough to look back and ask, “Should I grab a beer while I’m there?”

“If you can find one in this dump, yeah,” Hawkeye agreed, still cackling giddily.

“Got it. Be back in a minute.”

Holden had already dropped the remainder of Hawkeye’s wallet on the floor. He only wanted one thing in it and he had it slipped in his jeans pocket, next to other thing he’d grabbed from Hawkeye’s jacket. Once he shut the door of the bedroom, he went back down the stairs and found his way outside the church, unnoticed by the Stepford blonde and her big Samoan bodyguard. (For a guy built like a Winnebago, he was kind of cute.)

The cool air outside was like a refreshing slap to the face. He took a few deep breaths on his walk back to the car. Dylan wasn’t there, and he decided to give him ten minutes before he called him and asked him to come out. He looked at Hawkeye’s ID—just as he’d thought, he wasn’t Pierce. His driver’s license said he was one Joseph Cullen (he knew it). Holden pulled out the other thing he’d lifted from Joe, his phone, and started looking through the menu. He found Pierce’s number in no time, and as soon as he determined this was the type of phone with Internet capabilities, he began searching for a Wi-Fi signal. There was one here, but it was weak. He was doing a search when Dylan returned to the car.

“Guy show?” he asked.

“A proxy showed, guy named Cullen, but he never said that,” Holden said, tossing Joe’s ID into his lap.

Dylan looked at it curiously before he realized what Holden had done. “You picked his pocket?”

“If he wasn’t going to tell me the truth—and he wasn’t—how else was I supposed to find the truth?”

He must have figured out there was more wrong, as his eyes narrowed. “Please tell me that’s your phone.”

He didn’t answer, just showed him the tiny screen. “Pierce Hockney’s address. Our next stop.”

“He had his address on his phone?”

“No, he had his number. I used a reverse directory to find his address. Come on, Dyl, technology is your friend. Keep up.”

Dylan answered that with a glare. For a long moment he didn’t say anything, then finally asked, “You’re a menace to society, aren’t you?”

That just made him smile. “Why d’ya think Roan took me on as an assistant? Wasn’t ’cause of my typing skills.”

Once again, Dylan had nothing, so after a moment’s consideration, he got his keys out and started the car.

He really didn’t belong in this world, did he? Poor, poor Dylan.

Blood

R
OAN
woke up, stuffed up, headachy, and feeling like a complete dick. Did anyone know how to make an ass of himself like he did? He wished they gave a medal for that, as he’d have a shelf full of them, which at least he could melt down for scrap.

The room he was in didn’t look or smell familiar, but Dylan was sleeping beside him, so he wasn’t too worried. He was unlikely to transform and go on a rampage and bring Dylan with him.

He remembered everything as he walked to the bathroom. Kevin’s place, right. Did they ever settle that? No, probably not. Hard to settle things when you’re out cold. He had taken way too many fucking pills. But the worst part? He needed more. His head really hurt.

He washed his face in the hottest water he could stand, until his entire face was the same uniform color of red, so no one could tell he’d been crying. He was starving too, his stomach one solid knot of need, although the rest of him felt strangely hollow, save for a residual ache in all his joints. He flexed his fingers and wondered if he could feel the bone spur claws. He thought he could, he thought he could feel their points beneath the thin skin of his hand, but it could have just been his knuckles. He could have been feeling what he wanted or expected to feel.

He needed pills and dug a couple of Percocet out of his bag, but he knew if he didn’t eat something first he’d just vomit it back up. He changed into sweatpants and a tank top and padded downstairs, being as quiet as possible.

It was impossible to say what time it was, as it was light gray outside (could be very early in the morning, could be midafternoon; you had to love murky Western Washington weather). But once he was downstairs, he saw Kevin’s goofy living room clock (it was one of those that looked like Felix the Cat, with moving eyes and a “wagging” tail as a pendulum), he saw it was just shy of six thirty in the morning, and heard someone moving around in the kitchen. There was a smell of coffee and toasted bread, which was enough to make his stomach growl. Somehow he knew it was just Kevin in the kitchen, so he decided to bite the bullet, swallow his pride, or whatever euphemism, metaphor, or saying was applicable here.

He appeared in the kitchen archway as Kevin was pouring himself a mug of coffee from a classic glass coffee pot. “Hey, Roan. Want some coffee?”

“I don’t know if my stomach can take raw caffeine right now.”