Infected: Lesser Evils (8 page)

He knew he’d bit Dylan’s lip as well, but he had to double-check it to make sure he hadn’t bit a chunk of it off. As he cleared away some blood on Dylan’s lip with his thumb, he noticed it was starting to swell, like he’d been punched in the face. “Shit. Did I hurt you?”

“Too many endorphins. I’m not feeling any pain right now,” Dylan replied. Then, after a moment, “It is throbbing a bit.”

“Shit, what about work?”

“What about it? If anyone asks, I’ll say I took a hit while sparring, just to see the look on Trevor’s face.”

“Trevor the maître’d?”

“That’s him.”

“Figured. He looks like a Trevor.”

Dylan gave him a lopsided grin, and wiped some of the blood off Roan’s chin. “I missed you, you know.”

“How? I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Yes you have. Stop keeping me at arm’s length, Ro. I signed up for this crazy ride, you can’t scare me away.”

“You should be scared. This was fucking freaky.”

“And yet, pretty amazing.”

“Yeah, well….” He was saved from further response by the ringing of the phone. It had actually rung before, while they were having sex, but they’d both ignored it. He didn’t have that excuse now.

Dylan got up, stepped into his yoga pants, and said, “I’m gonna go get some ice for the lip. Maybe you should answer that. Although I won’t accept any excuse that keeps you away tonight.”

“Why, what’s tonight?”

“Gallery showing, remember?”

“Oh shit.” One of Dylan’s art school friends, a guy named Dominik Loncar, was in town tonight for a showing of his art photos. Dylan said they had to go, because he’d promised he would, but he also warned him that Dominik had been pretentious as hell back in school, and that condition had worsened since graduation. Since he had guessed Roan wouldn’t be able to be on his best behavior for more than thirty minutes, he had also agreed they’d make an appearance, look at Dominik’s photos, and leave reasonably quickly. At least now Dylan had the excuse of work. Also, Roan was convinced most of Dyl’s arty friends hated his guts, which Dylan always denied, but he knew that, since he was an ex-cop, most of Dylan’s arty friends thought he was a fascist. Hanging around with a hockey team hadn’t helped.

Roan sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, feeling truly crazy. His boyfriend now had to cut himself so they could have sex without the lion trying to turn it into a slaughter. This was fucking bizarre and it couldn’t continue, and as good as it had felt, he thought he should really pull his SIG Sauer out from his dresser and blow his brains out. But first, he answered the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Hello Captain Sunshine,” Seb replied sarcastically. “Do I take it this means you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“The thing down in Tacoma.”

“What thing down in Tacoma?”

He sighed heavily. “Shit. The cat freak-out is no longer an isolated incident.”

Wonderful. The universe just kept churning out these reasons to live. “What now?”

“A lion went on a rampage near Commencement Bay. The cops down there are still trying to piece together the whole story, but he caused a shitload of damage. Charged a wedding party in a church, killed three, mauled six, ate someone’s yappy little purse dog—the only good thing that happened—and three tranquilizer darts couldn’t put him down, so the rapid response team just blasted his ass back to the stone age. Took twelve shots to drop him, and by that time he was a red smear in the vestibule. We have a tentative ID as Philip Roland, best man’s brother.”

“Fuck. Did he have that chemical in his system?”

“That’s the working theory, although there may not be enough of him left to test. I’ve been going through some of the old reports on weird cat behaviors and other oddities, and I’ve found a couple that might be of interest. There was a domestic incident last week, where a woman shot her transformed husband with a shotgun, she said he broke down the basement door and started attacking furniture before going after her, and she was shocked because his transformation cycle had ended three days before. The evidence seems to back up her story, but now I’m wondering if I should have his tox screen fast tracked.”

“Where was this?”

“Bremerton.”

“Huh. No wonder I hadn’t heard about it.”

“Hey, neither did I ’til I started going through files. ’Cause you know how we cops love our paperwork.”

“It’s the funnest thing in the world.” Roan wedged the receiver between his shoulder and ear, so he could free his hands to open his top dresser drawer and pull out a pair of boxers, mainly because he was cold. “So you think this is a thing.”

“Both you and your crazy old doctor lady have convinced me this is a thing. I don’t think Ava was the first, just the first one we noticed because her behavior was so atypical.”

“Has Rosenberg found anything?”

“So far? Well, she found a near chemical match last I heard. The weird stuff in Ava’s bloodstream seems pretty close to burn.”

Had he heard that right, or was the combined and dichotomous feeling of postcoital afterglow and self-loathing making him slightly aphasic? “Burn?”

“You know, M80, glowstick, gleam—it’s a new club drug. From what I understand, a new, “cleaner” form of Ecstasy with a cokelike kick.”

“Wow, how out of the loop am I? I’ve never heard of this.”

“And you call yourself a gay guy? I always knew you were really straight.”

“Yeah, I’m just into buttfucking for the affirmative action benefit.” That got a chuckle out of Seb, which was nice because it was so rare. Seb was often loath to show any kind of emotion at all on the job, but Roan had come to understand it was a protective measure on his part. He didn’t want to get too hurt, to be disappointed by the people he couldn’t help, so he kept himself numb. “Is acting like Cujo a side effect?”

“See, now that’s the real weird thing. The known side effects of the stuff seem to be dehydration, nosebleeds, heart palpitations, respiratory distress, a lot of Ecstasy-style stuff. To my knowledge, this hasn’t caused a psychotic break in anyone, although it’s a new drug and seems to be Northwest in origin. Maybe it hasn’t been around long enough for the psychotic breaks to be noticed.”

“Or maybe it’s only in infecteds.” There was no way that made any kind of sense, but as soon as Roan said it, it felt true. Was that it? Had it not been noted because normal people taking it didn’t have that kind of reaction?

He heard the squeak of Seb’s chair as he sat forward. Somewhere behind him in the station, an audibly drunk guy was repeatedly yelling, “What about my rights?” “How would that work, Roan?” He wasn’t dismissing it; he sounded intrigued.

“I don’t know. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to ask Rosenberg.”

“Could a drug do that?” Roan almost answered, but realized it was rhetorical; Seb was just musing out loud, weighing the possibilities. “We just don’t know enough about the virus, do we? We still don’t know where this fucker came from.”

“My personal favorite is alien PETA members.”

“It would explain a lot.”

“Tons.”

“Ah shit, gotta go, Dixon’s headed this way.”

“Duck under the desk.” Dixon was one of those cops who was a terminal fuck-up. No one ever knew how they kept their jobs, or why they persisted at it when they were so bad at it. It was one of those mysteries with no answer.

“Too late. Let me know if there’re any developments.”

“You too.” He hung up wondering if a drug could possibly be responsible for all the cat freak-outs. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but why infecteds only? That part didn’t make sense.

Once he was sure he wasn’t going to put a gun barrel against his temple, he went downstairs and told Dylan that was too dangerous to ever attempt again, mainly because he was an infected and Dylan wasn’t, and having an open wound around an infected was a bad idea. Dylan, holding an ice cube wrapped in cheesecloth against his lip, said it wasn’t, because the only body fluid he was exposed to was saliva, and the virus had never been passed by saliva. Somehow it figured that Dylan would know that, because, being the guy he was, he had probably gone to infectedfacts.org when they started dating and read all about it. He told him he didn’t want him to be the first known case, so that was that. But Roan had a sneaking suspicion they would argue about this in the future.

Roan called Doctor Rosenberg, but had to leave a message because she didn’t pick up her phone. She was probably getting some sleep. So Roan did some searching on his computer.

The first result on “burn” as a drug turned up three months ago in someone’s Facebook post, and then it increased exponentially, although it still wasn’t widespread. If LexisNexis could be trusted, it had gone as far north as Vancouver and as far south as Eugene, but so far it had been limited to the West Coast… for now. These things never stayed regional.

He then did a search of odd cat incidents in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and it took hours to sort them out, but he flagged five. One was an article about the case in Bremerton that Seb had mentioned, but the others were new to him. At the last minute, he decided to add an article about a panther that had killed a horse in Cle Elum and mauled another (and got shot and killed for the trouble).

The gallery opening to the public was at eight, but there was a “private” opening starting at six thirty, which was the one they were heading to, and while Dylan’s bottom lip was no longer swollen, it did have a bit of a scab on it. It looked like he’d been punched, and Roan was certain that Dylan’s friends, who already thought he was a fascist, would think he’d hit him. Considering he basically drank his blood during sex, hitting Dylan was actually the better option than the truth.

They were supposed to dress up a bit but not get too fancy, so in honor of Dylan’s pretentious friend, Roan wore paint-splattered black jeans and a T-shirt that said in bold, fancy, framed letters, “I Hate Attention Seekers.” Dylan, for his part, wore saggy jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming “Where The White Women At?” (Dominik was a friend in a technical sense, but Dylan didn’t care for him much, and the more pretentious he became, the more Dylan agreed that pissing him off was the only way forward).

They were the most dressed-down people to show up at a gallery so small Roan actually drove past it without seeing it the first time. They got a couple of evil looks from women so thin Roan felt like he should give them twenty bucks to go get a sandwich, and men so camp they couldn’t have been gayer if they were wearing outfits made of dildos. Still, Dylan knew a lot of people there and was greeted warmly by many. When Dylan turned to introduce him to people, Roan always held out his hand and smiled warmly while saying, “Hi, I’m his asshole husband, Roan. You may have seen me in
Truncheon Beating Weekly
.”

Although there were a couple of awkward handshakes and uncertain looks, a small Asian woman named Clea burst out laughing, and a relatively good-looking emo guy named Keenan snickered and said he was more of a dickhead, but he was aspiring to be an asshole someday. Roan told Dylan he could invite Clea and Keenan over anytime.

Dominik decided to be fashionably late to his own show, so they wandered around the small gallery, looking at his photos. Most were blown up to poster sizes, although a few were smaller, and they were following a theme: half-naked, scrawny guy with bleached hair and black roots (Dylan confirmed it was Dominik) in a Southwestern desert landscape, usually on or near a road. Every now and then there was a plaque or a sign, declaring “Isolation is a place” or some pretentious shit like that, but then they came to the photos where he was lying on black strips of asphalt with his pants pulled down to expose his ass. “Is he gay?” Roan wondered, trying to make sense of the photo in front of him.

“No. He’s very vain, though.”

“So I’m gathering. The composition’s nice, but why’s he humping a road?”

“He’s not humping a road.” Dylan paused, and leaned in to study the photo more closely. “Is he? Oh dear god, tell me he’s not humping a pothole.”

“I can’t tell from this angle. Is this a stage of madness? Is he so crazy from isolation he’s now fucking a freeway system?”

“I—” Dylan shook his head helplessly. “I am now scared. Is it wrong of me to hope he’s on drugs?”

“If he’s not on drugs, he should be put on them immediately.”

When Dominik showed up around seven, he was wearing black sunglasses and an apricot orange ascot, and Dylan had to hold Roan back from going over and strangling him with his own scarf. Not because he hated him—he didn’t know him well enough to hate him—but because he looked like such a pretentious prick Roan almost couldn’t stand it. He was having a full-body allergic reaction to this guy, but rather than seize, his hands were making involuntary fists, and he had to resist the urge to shout, “Roadhumper, nice of you to show up.”

Dylan had decided they’d had enough, and he went to greet Dominik before they left. Dominik treated him with an almost fey curtness, and he seemed to have a slight hint of an obviously fake Eurotrash accent. Rather than introduce himself, Roan gave him a toothy smile, and asked, “So, you bleached your butthole, huh? Just for the photos, or is it a hobby?”

Dylan quickly grabbed him and hustled him out the door as Roan shouted, “Ta ta, toots. Great ass!”

Once outside, he exclaimed, “I can’t believe you’d say that to a friend of mine! Do you want to—” It was here that Dylan had to stop talking because he was laughing so hard. He leaned against the stucco outer wall of the gallery, and Roan joined him, mainly chuckling at Dylan’s response.

After a moment, when he caught his breath and wiped away tears from his eyes, he asked, “Did he really bleach? I didn’t notice.”

“I think he shaved too.”

“Oh god,” Dylan replied, laughing again. Once he’d gotten a hold of himself, he said, “I love you, hon, but I can’t take you anywhere.”

“No, you can’t,” Roan agreed. “I’m too much of a smartass.”

They shared a smile at what was now a private reference. After all, hadn’t Dylan told him he was too much of a smartass to become a lion permanently? Maybe he had a point after all.