Shift: Infected, #5, page 35
He picked up Dylan’s tea mug and sniffed it. “LSD or ’shrooms?”
“Don’t try and make a joke out of this. I’m being profound here.”
“Profoundly full of shit?”
Luckily, he’d said this just right, and Dylan laughed, giving him a gentle elbow in the ribs for being a jerk. But Dylan had no idea how close he’d come to poking him in what was for him a profound identity issue: was there a difference between him and the lion? He felt like there was when he was actually wrestling with the beast, but other times he wasn’t sure. He was the lion and the lion was him, and they all lived together in a yellow submarine, or some bullshit like that. He didn’t know. He wasn’t even considering the virus in this, but maybe he should have, especially considering how the virus was altering him. (Or was he altering the virus? Fuck it, he wasn’t stoned enough to contemplate this.)
It was a peaceful night, kind of boring, and it ended with them watching the Colbert Report in bed. Dylan nodded off, half propped up against him, and Roan held him for a while, stroking his soft hair (always fun—how come his hair was always so silky? He must have been born with it), trying to imagine what it must have been like to be a perfectly normal person dating a person like him. He couldn’t do it. He could barely live with himself as is. Imagining himself as genuinely normal was a bridge too far.
Very carefully, he slid out of bed without waking Dylan up and went to do some work on the computer. He’d slept for about a day and just wasn’t tired.
The fact that Hatcher hadn’t gotten back to him about the owner of the server shouldn’t have struck him as suspicious, because Hatcher was just the type of asshole who would have given him a phony name rather than nothing at all and risk him using alternate channels if he was up to something. But Jordan being found on a website he clearly used often? That meant something. Did Jordan seek out the site location? How could he have known it was in Washington? There was no clue to location—a basement is a basement, whether in Berlin or Bellingham.
Unless Jordan recognized someone in a clip. Or investigated the site himself? How good were his computer skills? Even if he was only half as good as his dad, that put him years ahead of most people. Had Jordan discovered the location, and then when he discovered Brittney and Darren were fucking around on him, did he run off to join the snuff circus? It sounded slightly implausible, and yet, teenage boy? Definitely could have done something that stupid. As a teenager even he might have done something that dumb, and he’d been a total nerd. All teenagers were stupid, but there was something about having a Y chromosome that added an extra level of danger to the mix, a layer of self-destruction and total immolation that most females might actually pull back from.
He went back to the flash drive Hatcher had given him when he hired him and combed through the info again. What had he missed? He was suddenly certain there was something vital here that both he and Hatcher had missed. The telephone plea from Jordan took on a chilling new significance. Did he decide he couldn’t murder someone or just didn’t like it? Either way, he didn’t think there was any quitting a snuff film set when the snuff films were genuine and you knew who the bodies were, if not where they were buried. Would they be stupid enough to kill Hatcher’s son and film it? If Jordan was dead, he kind of hoped so, just so there was ample evidence that these fuckheads deserved everything that was coming to them.
The house was dark because it was late, with only the lights outside on and the glow from the computer monitor not visible, which probably made the house a nice target. Only because he wasn’t listening to anything on the computer or his iPod did Roan hear what happened.
It was a gentle noise really, glass breaking from a distance and a strange, soft “whoomp.” But the smell hit his sensitive nose almost instantly: grain alcohol, gasoline, fire. He was on his feet and headed for the window when he heard a loud pop outside and a more immediate noise of shattering glass. A glance through the blinds showed a brief flash of muzzle fire before glass shattered again. Someone across the road, firing a gun at his house. Flames were boiling on the porch, small now but impressively bright.
He shook Dylan awake, and gave him the telephone handset. “Call 9-1-1. Someone’s thrown a Molotov cocktail at the house, and now they’re shooting at it.”
“What?” he asked, muzzy but awake enough to be startled. Another booming gunshot—rifle? Definitely rifle—woke him up even more, and he sat up straight. “You’re serious?”
“Sadly.”
As he darted out the bedroom door, Dylan called, “Where are you going?”
“To shove that rifle up his ass.” He ran down the stairs and went out the back door into the backyard, which was eerily peaceful, although smoke and gunpowder tainted the air, giving it a sharp tang. He hopped the fence and crept around the side of the house, letting the lion come out enough to give him everything he needed: better night vision, sharper senses, power infusing his limbs as his muscles twitched and hardened, changing shape and flooding him with adrenaline to counter the pain. He could already taste blood in his mouth.
The asshole was in a Ford pickup, a beater that wasn’t a rental. Part of him that was still human enough marveled at the stupidity, but maybe he thought they were gone, or so deeply asleep that even this wouldn’t wake them in time to catch a glimpse of the truck or the plate. Roan made no mental note of the plate because the lion wasn’t any good at number recall, and besides, he wasn’t letting him get away. The guy must have realized he had pressed his luck, because he stomped on the gas and wrenched the steering wheel, pulling him off the soft shoulder with a squeal of burning rubber.
But Roan was already running, across the lawn and onto the edge of the road, and that’s where he lunged, jumping for the truck as it did a U-turn and started back the way it had come.
He landed feet first in the flatbed, with a big enough noise that the driver turned, startled, and glanced out the window in time for Roan to kick it in, sending safety glass flying around the cabin. The man fishtailed the truck but Roan hung on, a growl in his throat as the man tried to swing his rifle around one handed, and Roan grabbed the stock and made the man eat it, smashing it brutally into his face. His nose snapped and blood spurted as he let out an aborted cry of pain and the truck slewed off the road, slamming into a thick tangle of blackberry bushes as tall as the truck itself. If Roan had been standing, he might have been thrown forward off the truck, except he was already wedged in the window, trying to crawl into the cab.
The man had realized the danger as soon as he was unable to yank the rifle out of Roan’s hand, and once the truck came to a jolting halt, he blindly scrabbled for the door handle and all but fell out of his truck. He attempted to run, but Roan quickly pulled out of the cab and pounced on him with an angry roar, tackling him and throwing him to the gravel berm.
He was a nothing man, doughy, with thinning brown hair on an almost comically round scalp, and a full face that probably turned beet red when he was drunk, an anonymous sack of meat in a world full of anonymous sacks of meat, a cigarette-smelling dirtbag. He could have been anywhere between thirty and forty, with fifty ruled out simply because he wouldn’t have been physically capable of doing this.
He struggled and attempted to pull out a handgun, but Roan grabbed his wrist and with a simple squeeze crushed all the tiny bones in it; he could feel them popping under the skin like bubble wrap. Now the man screamed, and since he was on his back, partially choked on his own blood from his broken nose.
Roan meant to question him, ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing, but all that came out was a loud roar, and the dirtbag squirmed beneath him, trying to both buck him off and avoid the blood dribbling from Roan’s mouth, but Roan had his knees dug firmly into his ribs, pressing his full weight into the base of his spine and his pelvis. “Freak motherfucking faggot get offa me!” the dirtbag shouted, and the several words almost blurred into one. The fear stink coming off of him almost blended in with the gasoline.
Roan concentrated until he could speak, but he still did so while growling, unable to suppress that much rage. “I should infect you,” he snarled, the words like gravel in his mouth. The man’s eyes widened in fear, bloodshot blue, as pale as a smog-choked sky. “Make you what you hate.”
“N-no—”
“You come to my house, attack me at my house, attack my boyfriend—” The growl drowned out the final words, so he had to have a second pass. “—you better hope the cops show up before I rip your throat out.”
He let the blood dripping from his mouth splash dangerously close to the sluice of blood from the man’s broken nose, the one currently pouring into his mouth, and he continued to writhe, trying to get away from Roan but unable to. He gave off a strong scent of urine as he pissed himself.
“Roan, get off him,” Dylan said. Roan heard his footsteps slapping the asphalt as he walked up the street.
“No.”
“Get off him so I can get a clear shot,” he said, and Roan looked up to see Dylan standing there, still dressed in nothing but his boxer shorts, but now aiming Roan’s Sig Sauer down at them. This surprised Roan enough that the growling died down in his throat. Dylan pulled back the slide casually, as if he’d been handling guns all his life, racking a bullet in the chamber, and Roan recalled that Dylan had fled to Buddhism for peace away from his own violent tendencies. He was a cop’s son—he knew how to handle guns. And the look in his black eyes was one he’d never seen before, hot and hard as slivers of volcanic rock, burning like they were going to destroy the world.
He came closer, aiming the gun down at the man beneath him. “If I kill you, will you finally leave us the fuck alone?” he asked, his voice low and cold. “Is death the only thing that stops your kind?”
The man’s eyes had a wild look, like a cornered animal, and he still kept squirming, trying to get out from under Roan. “Get him offa me.”
Dylan knelt down, and planted the gun barrel on his forehead. The man instantly fell still, his eyes as wide and shiny as new silver dollars. “A plea for mercy? Really? Oh yeah, I’m a fag. I’m supposed to be wimpy and let you off, huh? Piece of shit motherfucker, you won’t leave him alone, will you? You won’t be happy until he’s dead. I’ll kill you first.”
This startled Roan enough that he came back to himself a bit more. “Dyl,” he said without growling, even though his jaw didn’t feel quite right. “I’ve got him. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. He tried to burn down our house. These fuckers aren’t going to leave you alone.”
The police siren he thought he’d heard moments before was now growing louder, as was the even-louder fire engine siren. He watched a muscle in Dylan’s jaw jump, saw the slightest tremor in his arm as he tried to get a hold of his own voluminous rage. Roan thought he had a corner on the market? Not at all.
“It’s my gun. I’m licensed to carry it. Give it to me before the cops get here.”
“I really want to kill him,” Dylan admitted, half-angry, half-despairing. Not a threat, but a simple statement of fact. This was when the guy shit himself; Roan could, sadly, smell it. “Why don’t they leave you alone?”
He had managed to shove the lion almost completely down now. Everybody had a breaking point, and it was kind of startling to learn that he was Dylan’s. “Because they don’t. But we have to be stronger than they are. Hon, give me the gun.”
Dylan’s arm was really trembling now, and it seemed he was fighting himself not to pull the trigger. Unshed tears made his eyes glisten. Roan gently put his hand on Dylan’s and slipped it around the gun. The sirens were almost on top of them.
Dylan slid his hand out from under his, ceding the gun to Roan, but as he stood up he kicked the guy in the side of the head just as tires crunched gravel behind them.
“This the moron?” A familiar voice, dripping with cop authority, asked. It was Thompson, and Roan figured he should be glad it was a cop he knew.
The lion was gone from his face; he felt it. He wiped the blood off his mouth and stood up, tucking the gun in the back of his sweatpants (the only clothes he was wearing; he’d almost forgotten he was barefoot until he stepped on a sharp piece of gravel). “He threw a Molotov cocktail on my front porch and then fired several rounds into my house, breaking windows. The rifle’s in the truck.”
“How smart was that?” Thompson asked, looming over the man. He already had his cuffs out, but hadn’t bothered with drawing his weapon, maybe because he saw how injured the man already was. He flipped him over onto his stomach and pulled his hands behind his back. “Fuckin’ with Batman at his own house. Man, you’re just askin’ to get your ass beat.”
“He isn’t human!” the guy yelled, the police being here actually giving him his courage back. “He couldn’t’ve reached my truck, but he did! And that faggot put a gun to my head! He—”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Thompson interjected, firmly and loudly. “I suggest you start usin’ it right now, dumbass.”
The fire truck roared up, but it was unnecessary, because he could see for himself the fire was out and could smell water in the gasoline smoke. Dylan must have put out the blaze with the garden hose before joining them with the gun.
Roan turned to see Dylan with his back to all of them, his posture unnaturally rigid. Roan went up to him and took him in his arms. “Dylan—”
He turned and clung to Roan desperately, burying his face in the side of his neck. Roan felt tears on his skin. “What did I almost do?” he asked, sounding like he was in agony.
“It’s okay,” he reassured him, stroking his neck. But it wasn’t, although not for the reason Dylan would have guessed.
Roan had never seen him so angry. And while he was sure now he should get Dylan to leave him for the sake of his own mental health, Roan was also fairly sure he couldn’t possibly love him more.
What did you do with a dichotomy like that?
16
Bride of the Elephant Man
IT WAS probably a good thing he wasn’t tired, as there was no sleep that night.
They gave their statements to the cops, and the firemen made sure the fire was indeed out. Roan saw for himself that the damage to the porch was slightly worse than he’d thought. The entire door was charred, the paint blistered on the jamb where it wasn’t burned, and the pine near the front door had several branches burned to black stumps, needles curled in on themselves. He told Dylan they’d have to hit Lowes in the morning and get themselves a new door. He was trying to distract Dylan, who was still miserable and now shivering in spite of the blanket a kind fireman gave him to drape over his shoulders. Roan sat with him against the side of his car, arm around his shoulders, occasionally whispering encouragement to him or just giving him a quick, surreptitious kiss. He wasn’t a fan of public displays of affection (straight or gay—he’d been tailing cheating spouses too long to have any romantic notions left), but he sensed that Dylan needed it right now, the reassurance and the comfort. He was cold, too, but didn’t care.
The cops, as he guessed (especially since it was Thompson and Bragg as the arresting officers), ignored everything the guy ranted about before shoving him in the back of the prowler. It was an open and shut case of asshattery, what with the rifle and the gasoline can in the front cab of the truck and his constant ranting references to “faggots” and “freaks” and “abominations” (all guaranteed to get you viewed as the crazy asshole they arrested about seven times a day), and Thompson just ignored him until suddenly he told him to call Fox News and walked away from the patrol car, shaking his head in disgust. “I know I can’t treat ’em differently, but I hate that shit.”
“What shit?” Roan didn’t think it was anything the perp said, as he hadn’t changed his tune (second verse, same as the first), but he doubted the basic injustice of this harassment was getting to Thompson now (especially since he still insisted on calling him Batman).
“He’s got a swastika tat,” he said and slapped his upper arm, where the tattoo presumably was.
And that little bit of information sent his synapses firing. Swastika tattoo? And Sander Lewis did time in Idaho, home of the Aryan Nation compound? “Oh holy fuck,” he exclaimed. “They’re white supremacists.”
Thompson snorted. “Nazis? Yeah.”
“No. These guys who have been harassing me? That’s the connecting thread. They’re white supremacists.” And he hoped the fact that two black police officers had arrested that bastard was making him choke on his own bile.
Thompson smirked faintly. “They know you’re white, right?”
“I’m gay and infected. Both of those things—infected edging out gay—make me a pariah to them. I’m honorarily not white.”
“Lucky you.” Thompson then edged closer and indicated Dylan without pointing at him. “Ain’t he Mexican?” he whispered.
“Mixed.”
“Could they be after him?”
He shook his head and filled Thompson in on everything, starting from the attempted stabbing incident in Panic to the guy getting in a fight with Dylan to now. Thompson listened with an ever-deepening frown and finally said, “Maybe you should talk to Chief Matthews. If you’re really being targeted, you might be able to get some protection.”
He meant police protection, which ran the gamut from random prowler patrols to a marked car sitting outside his house for several hours each day. He honestly didn’t like either idea but said, “Yeah, maybe I should talk to her.” He didn’t need protection. But Dylan? He was worried about Dylan. He’d resent being tailed by the cops, though, being protected. He may have been a cop’s son, but his father did murder his mother—he had no great love of cops.
He decided not to worry about it at the moment. As Thompson and Bragg drove off with the offending neo-Nazi and the fire truck followed in short order, he wondered why a bunch of racist fuckheads would suddenly take up a campaign of arms against him. Hate him, sure, but actively try and hurt him? Why after all this time?
