Infected: Lesser Evils (35 page)

“No. But don’t avoid the question.”

He sighed like Roan was the most wearying travel companion ever. “I’ve never been a shrinking violet. You know that.”

“It’s dangerous, especially without backup.”

“Not necessarily. No one ever expects anything from me. I’m just a whore.”

“That only works once.”

“I know. But that’s usually enough.”

Holden pulled off to the soft shoulder the equivalent of a block away from the rest stop, and Roan walked toward the building, sticking to the darkness. It wasn’t too busy on the highway right now, the few cars out at the moment were a pleasant background hum. Everything in him was telling him this was stupid and would probably end in a bloodbath, and yet he didn’t care. Maybe it was the fact he was wasted, maybe it was just because he really didn’t give a shit, as long as he could beat the holy fuck out of some traffickers.

Roan smelled cigarette smoke long before he came up on the lighted oasis of the building, a squat, boxy affair that looked as appealing as a shoebox outhouse. (Wow, he was really fucked-up.) He heard two male voices too, talking about some incident involving someone else’s girlfriend, a waterbed, and the untimely return of an ex. He didn’t pay attention to what they were actually saying, but Roan picked up a few things: they were American, and they obviously expected no trouble whatsoever. He smelled gun oil somewhere beneath the tobacco and testosterone, but that wasn’t a surprise.

He was quiet, and stuck to the shadows as long as possible. They never heard him, never broke their conversational stride. As soon as Roan ran out of shadows and buildings to hide behind, he moved to the few cars in the lot (one was theirs, the one they were standing beside, and one had a missing tire and had probably been there for some time).

He listened for a minute, orienting them in space by the sound and direction of their voices. Roan used the mirrors and reflective surfaces of metal to visually locate them. They weren’t anything special to look at, two guys around six feet tall (give or take some loose change), with broad shoulders and some pretty good muscles, although that wouldn’t help them. Judging from the bulges, one had a gun in a shoulder holster, and the other had his gun in his belt, near his right hip. Roan wondered if either would have time to pull them—he’d do his best not to be that slow. They were both unremarkable men, save for the fact that one had sideburns ending in sharp points, while the other was given a greasy complexion by the sodium lights. He looked like he was melting.

Roan concentrated, thinking about these men selling kids, women, beating them, murdering them, tapping into the rich vein of rage hidden beneath the numbing calm of the drugs. It was hard to find, but he finally felt the toxic heat of it, let the blackness bubble up from beneath the narcotics, fill his veins like sour adrenaline. He heard the gentle fireplace crackle of bones in his jaw snapping, tasted blood, felt his skin go taut as if trying to peel itself away from his body, and his vision switched from myopia to hyperopia as the change worked on his eyes. They were still Human, but he was becoming something else.

The drugs not only kept most of the pain out of the partial change, but they allowed Roan to keep more of himself from getting overwhelmed by the cat. He told it to be quick and quiet, nothing showy, nothing brutal; no playing with prey tonight. Take out the sentries before they could sound the alarm.

He scuttled along the ground, almost on all fours, using the cars and shadow as cover until it became impossible, and then just simply went for surprise, bounding over the back of the men’s car and throwing himself at them. One of them made a noise of surprise as Roan’s tackle brought them both to the ground, and with one hand he rammed sideburn’s head into the asphalt, silencing him, while greasy attempted to squirm away and reach for his gun at the same time. Roan was on him first, throwing a punch that hit him square on the side of the head and knocked him out almost simultaneously. Was he dead? No, Roan didn’t smell death. But he wasn’t well; neither of them was well. They might regain consciousness by sun up, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

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. 

Greetings from the Great North Woods

H
OLDEN
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.”