Prey (29 page)

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say, “Because sometimes I like to complain about things that have no consequence whatsoever. Sometimes I like to think about silly things that aren’t life and death.”
You know what my favorite part about these imaginary conversations between us is? I always win the argument. I’m ten for ten, baby!” He pumped his fist in the air in triumph.

The lion continued to stare at him with Roan’s green eyes, its tail flicking once more. The oddest thing? Roan rarely growled at him. Oh, he supposed he would if he went right up to the cage, he might make a lunge at him, but as long as he kept his distance he just regarded Paris with what seemed to be haughty indifference. It was almost a “We both know I can kick your ass, so why go through the motions” kind of deal. And that kind of attitude seemed more human than cat, although he supposed that was debatable.

Paris opened the newspaper and looked inside, looking for something new to complain about, and maybe a movie they could go see on the weekend when Roan’s transitional phase was over. He glanced up at the cat to see it continuing to watch him in a way that could have been annoyed, or one that was almost—dare he even think it?—somewhat affectionate. “Isn’t it nice to spend a cozy evening at home?” Paris asked, flashing the cat a big, slightly sarcastic smile.

The lion’s tail twitched once more, and he figured that, as answers went, that was good enough.

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1

The Fallen

THERE was something unbelievably depressing about preparing to jail yourself for the night.

Ashley liked to think she’d feel better about it if she had someone to help, a boyfriend perhaps, or maybe a friend, but she’d only moved here a month ago and hadn’t exactly made a lot of friends yet. She wasn’t good at the club scene, and while being a barista was certainly a job that exposed you to a lot of people, most didn’t seem to notice you unless you got their order wrong. There was that one guy with the piercings—she knew him best by his regular order, a half-caff macchiato with a shot of caramel syrup—who seemed to flirt with her, but the whole idea of dating anyone made her nervous.

All her life she’d only had one boyfriend, Jack, her high school sweetheart, and she’d thought they’d be together forever. Until she discovered he had infected her because he’d been fucking around quite a bit, including with hookers down in Tijuana, where he assumed he’d been infected. He claimed to be drunk, that he “didn’t know what he was doing,” but then two other girls (including Savannah, that skank) at school turned up infected with the same strain. The fucking bastard!

So he’d cursed her to this, to this lonely, nomadic existence as a diseased freak. The irony? She never even liked cats; she’d always been a dog person.

Her family claimed to want to “support” her, but clearly she made them nervous, and her mother started drinking again. When Ashley accidentally cut her finger on a paring knife, everyone acted like there had been a toxic waste spill and wouldn’t come near her. So she took the money that was in her college fund and simply moved on, hoping to start over in a larger city with a larger infected population, so she wouldn’t be considered such a freak. She intended to lose herself in the crowd, become just another damned leper among all the other damned lepers.

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But San Francisco and New York were both too expensive, and she didn’t like Los Angeles. She’d heard there was a big group near Helena of all places (lots of wide open spaces—it almost made sense), but there was something about Montana that made her feel slightly agoraphobic. So finally she’d drifted here, near the Church of the Divine Transformation.

She’d never been there, although she’d been encouraged to go since she was an infected and supposedly they helped all infecteds. But she couldn’t quite get over the fact that they were blasphemers.

Her mother would have been proud. Ashley had never been quite the radically devoted Christian her mother was, but some of those boring Sunday sermons from her childhood had obviously sunk in, and she couldn’t quite embrace the idea that this infection was somehow a “gift,”

the actions of a god who favored them above all. She was alone with Goodwill furniture in a dingy apartment building, with barely enough to cover her rent and expenses, living on macaroni and cheese three days out of the week: she didn’t feel “blessed.” That’s where therapy kind of helped; the doctor told her she was “self-sabotaging” because she hated herself, hated her disease. He was trying to help her “come to terms” with it, and frankly she wished him luck, because she felt it was all bullshit. But she liked having someone to talk to, which was all the doctor was to her.

She let down the metal shutters over the dirt-smeared windows, glad that the government at least made sure even the poorest infecteds had some protections (even if the rich always got the best stuff), and was surprised by a sharp knock on her front door. No one ever knocked on her door, unless it was the landlord inquiring about the rent check or a neighbor complaining about something. As she approached the door, she asked, “Who is it?” She didn’t like the way her voice went up half an octave. She was trying to sound mean, and she only sounded jittery.

“UPS, ma’am,” a man replied, his voice almost robotically flat.

She peered out the door, and saw a sort of plain-faced young man with curly almond brown hair tucked under a backward-turned baseball cap that was the same shit brown as his shirt—the unfortunate color of UPS uniforms everywhere. He held a box wrapped in brown paper, but she couldn’t see who it was from. Had he gotten the wrong address? Who would send her something? Who would know where to find her?

She undid the chain lock and deadbolt, and looked out the door curiously. His eyes were pale blue and had a sort of bored vacancy to them, as if he’d been working all day long and had already left it inside his Infected: Prey

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own head. He had the type of broad, oval face that would keep him looking youthful until his mid-forties. He was a bit average-looking, but not bad; better-looking than your typical delivery guy.

He glanced down at the package, and asked, “Ashley Cryer?”

“Yes?” She looked down at the package, trying to see what the return address was.

He moved the package, pulling his hand out from underneath it, and it took her a moment to realize that he was now pointing a gun at her, and then another moment to actually grasp the reality of it. Why the hell would a UPS guy be aiming a gun at her?

It occurred to her that he wasn’t a delivery man just as the gun went off.

ROAN pulled himself up to the chin-up bar, and wondered which one this was. He’d forgotten the number. Forty? Fifty? Three? No, probably more than three; he could feel the sweat dripping down his back, running down his face, plastering his hair to his scalp. He switched to one arm, letting his right arm dangle as he pulled himself up with only the left, did five reps, and then did the same with his other arm. His muscles were starting to burn, but it quickly faded away.

He dropped down to the floor and decided to go have a quick shower before making breakfast ahead of Paris getting up.

He’d taken to sneaking out in the dead of night, leaving Paris sleeping peacefully and obliviously, just to see what he could do. Did he even know what the fuck he was doing? This was probably insanity, but so far he couldn’t stop. Rather than ease his anxiety, it just increased it. Roan knew that Paris knew he was taking on cat traits—after all, what was that dinner all about?

He should have known it was a trap. Paris had made some great pad Thai and found this hard-to-find pale ale microbrew that he absolutely loved, and as soon as he’d dug in, Paris just dropped it on him like a bomb: he knew Roan was keeping cat traits and manifesting other things, and he wanted to know why he wasn’t talking to him about it. That was a fun night. Denial became reluctant admittance became an argument, and 180

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he’d stormed out for a while. Roan had considered going to a bar, but found himself instead at this run-down apartment building he used to visit quite a bit in his cop days (lots of domestics and the occasional incident of gang violence). Before he even realized what he was doing, he’d climbed out on the fourth-floor fire escape, looked down at the garbage-strewn alley below to make sure there were no homeless guys Dumpster diving, and then jumped off the edge.

He’d landed on his feet, and while he felt a pained shock up his legs on initial impact with the pavement, he was perfectly fine. He walked to the end of the alley, looked around, and then started running.

Four stories. He should have broken his ankles, his legs, both; four stories could even be a fatal distance, depending on how you landed. But he was fine; he had no problem landing on his feet at all. His legs didn’t hurt.

Four fucking stories.

He wondered how high he could jump from without hurting himself, how high he’d have to be before landing on his feet was impossible. Five?

Six? A dozen? He almost wanted to know—he was terrified to find out. At what point did he cross the threshold permanently? When did “cat traits”

become inhuman? If he had already crossed the line, when had it happened and why hadn’t he noticed? How could he notice everybody else’s flaws but never see his own?

When he’d come home that night, he was flushed and shaking, so much that Par asked him if he’d been in a fight. Roan assured him he hadn’t been, it was just colder than he thought. Whether Par had believed him or not he had no idea, but they both apologized and had absolutely fantastic makeup sex. Sometimes that was even better than angry sex.

He’d never mentioned the jump. Sometimes he could almost believe that he’d imagined the whole thing, that it was a delusion, but even he wasn’t that masochistic.

He’d been getting up in the dead of night, unable to sleep and happy to exploit the fact that there were fewer prying eyes out at three and four in the morning so he could experiment, see where his “abilities” could take him. So far he had determined that he didn’t pull muscles like a normal person, like he used to do; that if he could get his adrenaline up it increased his strength as much as getting angry did; that he could see quite sharply in very dim light; that even though he’d never been much of a Infected: Prey

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runner and had a desk job, he could run three miles without getting tired or winded or sore. He didn’t time himself, but he figured he’d actually made really good time for a rank amateur. About the only thing left was to lock himself in the cage and see if he could force a change… but he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready.

Roan found himself wondering what else he could test himself on, and he was telling himself to stop. He didn’t want to know anymore; he was freaked out enough. He’d spent quiet times at work pouring over the results he got on his MedNet searches for virus children and unusual conditions. Most of the stories so far had been about kids like Michael Henstridge, ones with multiple illnesses and brain damage. He’d found none that mentioned anything about lingering cat traits. He didn’t want to believe he was somehow, through some bizarre fluke, alone, but… maybe others were reacting the same way as him, pretending their powers didn’t exist.

Once he got out of the downstairs shower and dried off, he put on his work clothes, which he’d taken to stashing downstairs beneath the sink.

When he pulled on his pale green Arrow shirt, he noticed the sleeves seemed tight at the biceps. His testing was giving him more muscle mass?

Apparently so. There was another reason to knock it off; he’d never be able to hide that from Paris.

He heard the shower go on upstairs, and busied himself heating up the croissants and making scrambled eggs, a dish even he couldn’t fuck up too much. He was just emptying the eggs into a huge salad bowl when Par came downstairs, looking crisp and frighteningly awake in a deep red shirt the color of old blood and black sharkskin pants that looked a bit like an oil slick. He was starting to grow his hair out longer, so now it fell softly to his shoulders and looked almost as shiny sleek as his pants. All he needed was a look of haughty disdain, a slight pout, and a personality removal, and he could be a male model.

They ate in companionable silence, splitting the paper up without even thinking about it, and it was just another day of bland domesticity, piling the dirty dishes in the sink before heading out to the Mustang, Roan just naturally taking the driver’s seat as Par slid into the passenger seat and started fiddling with the radio as he drove. Roan had left it on NPR, the voices kind of soothing as he trailed yet another cheating husband (he didn’t have a single mistress, just a penchant for a “massage parlor” near the airport), but Paris jumped between stations with obvious restlessness 182

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until finally settling on a station playing Green Day.

Traffic wasn’t too bad, and they got to the “office” with a couple minutes to spare. Oh joy, a day of background and credit checks. All day he got to stare at the computer and wait for a server elsewhere to spit out the past of these poor sods on his list. It never felt like proper work, but Vicuna Software and Edwards Financial paid well enough, so he couldn’t complain.

Paris sighed heavily and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Is there someone else?” he finally asked.

Roan looked at him so sharply he almost gave himself whiplash.

“What? Are you shitting me? Hell no! Why would you ask me that?”

Paris met his gaze with the slightest frown, mimicked in the crease between his eyebrows. “Because I woke up at three-thirty this morning and you were gone. It’s not the first time either. I figured you either had a bit on the side that worked the day shift, or you were out… testing yourself again. And frankly, I preferred you fucking around over you not trusting me enough to tell me about it.”

Oh good. That was a nice boot in the ribs. He rubbed his eyes, buying himself time to think as well as giving him an excuse not to look at Par’s wounded expression. “It’s not you—”