Infected: Lesser Evils (40 page)

Tanner agreed to keep an eye out and spread the word, see if anyone knew of the guy, and Roan thanked him before leaving the bar and cutting his way toward the back bathrooms, which were coincidentally far too
cramped and uncomfortable to ever have sex in. It was in the
claustrophobic corridor, paneled in dark wood and safe sex posters featuring attractive naked men from the neck down, that a sudden cramp of cold seemed to seize his guts, making him stop in his tracks as the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Roan had an almost undeniable urge to run, to leave the place through the walls if need be, just get the fuck out of there now.

It took him a moment to pinpoint the problem: the music. The bar’s sound system was playing “Don’t Save Us From the Flames,” a song by M83 from the CD
Before The Dawn Heals Us
—the CD Paris was playing when he killed himself. It was… logically, it was stupid and pointless, but Roan ran out of the bar like it was on fire.

He stopped and leaned against the brick wall outside the tapas restaurant, doubled over in pain and trying to catch his breath. The pain had made his solar plexus a fist, it was radiating pain outward into his torso and away, like he was a vessel that existed simply for this agony. There were tears in his eyes, but he wasn’t sure if they were from physical pain or some other kind of pain. So much for Percocets, huh? Couldn’t fight this.

The worst thing about grief was it laid little booby traps for you. Oh sure, you moved on with your life, you could fool yourself you were past it, and then the trap would spring and those metal teeth of sorrow would crush you, puncture your lungs and tear your heart and split your brain down the center like your skull was made of silk.

Roan was gulping air and trying to get a grip, trying to fight back pain as he felt his jaw ache with the force with which he was clenching his teeth, and belatedly he realized he was growling, a sort of sad, muted sound born purely of pain.

He was shaking and trying to keep from whimpering when he realized not all the shaking was coming from his body—his phone was vibrating. He didn’t want to answer it, but fuck, he probably needed the distraction. He sank down to the cold asphalt as he answered, seeing Seb’s number on the display. “What?” he grumbled, hoping Seb couldn’t hear anything in his voice he shouldn’t.

“Whoa, ain’t you in a bad mood?” he replied. “Well, it’s gonna get worse. You know Jefferson Heights?” Rather than talk, Roan simply grunted an affirmative as he wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “We got a cat loose, and it may have taken refuge in one of these squatter’s shacks. We’ve been ordered not to make a move, to leave it to the cat squad, but I figured you might wanna crack at it first.”

Jefferson Heights was actually an unofficial name, given to one of the poorer parts of the city. It was filled with slums always being condemned or burned down, and as a result, there might be twelve apartment buildings on one block, and half would be officially empty (unofficially was a different story) at any one time. It was a minor maze, and most cops didn’t go in there without serious backup first, mainly because you never knew what you’d find. Crack den, shooting gallery, homeless encampment, neo-Nazi squatters (this was true; he had been on the force when that particular incident had happened), dog fighting ring, maybe even, if you were lucky, an unlicensed takeout joint. If you didn’t absolutely have to be there, most people avoided it.

And as coincidence would have it, it wasn’t far from where Roan was right now. Maybe eight miles, tops. He cleared his throat and finally said, “I’ll be right there.”

“Fine, Catmandu, but are you sure you’re all right? You sound weird.”

“Catmandu?”

“You’re a superhero, you need a superhero name.”

“Are you fucking serious? That’s horrible.”

“What? I know it’s cheesy, but most superhero names are kinda cheesy.”

“If you ever call me that again, I’ll break your fucking nose,” he snapped, and hung up the phone. “Catmandu. How fucking gay does he think I am?” Well, at least that distracted him from the pain.

In the car on the way to the Heights, he listened to Mr. Bungle on his iPod and shouted along with the lyrics he could make out or knew. It made him laugh and cry a bit at the same time. Mr. Bungle was the perfect soundtrack to a psychotic break, so much so that he felt they were almost a community service. If you were crazy or going crazy, you could listen to them and not feel so alone. “Your lips say one thing but the drugs say another” was perhaps the most insightful lyric about his life since “And if I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin.” Considering it, that was pretty fucking sad.

Before getting out of the car, Roan checked in the rearview to make sure he wasn’t crying still. He looked a bit like he had been, but he tried to force a partial change, enough to flush his skin and just make him look fucked-up, not like he had been crying. He could settle for that.

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, and 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?

Hell’s Bank Notes

R
OAN
knew the cops would do this differently for murdered cats than murdered people, he knew it.