Shift: Infected, #5, page 36
He asked Dylan if he wanted to go somewhere else and spend the night, go to a hotel, and he angrily refused, saying those fucks weren’t scaring them out of their home. Which was good, as that was the response Roan was hoping to hear.
Dylan was still in a kind of shell-shocked mood, stunned by his own rage, so Roan just talked to him, trying to reassure him, and held him. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying half the time, but he was pretty sure Dylan wasn’t paying attention either. Eventually Dylan fell asleep, as the sky was starting to shade to a paler violet, and Roan stared at the ceiling and wondered. He was accustomed to someone out there—some person, unknown to him or known—wanting to kill him at all times. He knew the hate was out there, he knew it occasionally manifested, and he knew some of that hate wasn’t even personal. He became a symbol, a representative of every single infected who walked the earth, everything that was wrong with the world and his kind, his sub-human kind. Some people who might consider killing him, or might actually try and kill him, didn’t know him at all; he was just a handy target. He'd accepted that when he first joined the police force and would get anonymous phoned-in death threats, find notes shoved in his locker promising to skin him alive. He had long ago made peace with it, with the fact that his death could be sudden and at the hands of a stranger, and now more than ever was confident in his ability to beat them back (because the haters were ironically kind of right—no, he wasn’t totally human, and yes, that should really bother them). But was it fair to drag a civilian into this? At least Paris hadn’t been a civilian; he’d been an infected too, knew all about the fear, revulsion, and weirdly homicidal hatred that a medical condition (as alien as it was) could cause. But Dylan? This kind of hatred was new to him, and he didn’t deserve to be subjected to it. But how did he send him away?
When he was sure he wouldn’t wake him up, Roan slid out from beneath him and went downstairs to check out the damage the fuck had done with his rifle. Glass would have to be replaced, and he’d have to spackle and repaint a couple of walls, but he’d probably be able to get money for the windows from the crime victims fund, and it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The Modest Mouse song came and went through his brain again, and he realized he was starting to acquire a skill for dodging bullets, both literal and metaphorical.
He had some toast, popped a codeine, and checked his phone messages, glad he’d turned the ringer off when they went to bed, because his call messaging box was full. He deleted all the messages from reporters wanting statements and saved messages of concern from Gordo, Seb, and Dropkick, all of which were recent. Dropkick probably put it best when she asked, “Fuck Angus, whose corn flakes did you piss in?” He wished he knew. He might take it back.
He considered going out to the hardware store and getting what he needed to sheet up the windows (temporarily), fix the walls, maybe buy another small tree to put near the door, but he realized he didn’t want to leave Dylan alone. After thinking about it for a few minutes—would he really opt for police protection? Even though Dylan would loathe it?—he called another number. With a yawn, Scott answered, “You do know what time it is, don’t cha?”
“Need a favor.”
“More tough guy work?”
“Yeah.” He then told Scott what had transpired late last night, and soon he heard him covering the mouthpiece of the phone and repeating parts of it to Grey in the background, who went from sounding barely conscious to deeply unhappy in the space of a couple of minutes. He told Scott he needed some guys here to just kick back and keep an ear out for trouble while he was gone—and it might be work he needed on and off for the next couple of days. “Good thing for you we’re out of the playoffs,” Scott replied and said they’d be there as soon as they got dressed.
That turned out to be in about ten minutes. Grey and Scott both came over and marveled at the damage done to the front of the house, which looked even worse in daylight. “Tell me you killed him,” Grey said.
“No. But Dylan almost did, so maybe that counts.”
They said Tank was on his way—it seemed he got laid last night (good for him) and nobody knew where he was, but he'd finally answered his cell phone—and while Richie was too hung over to be much good, they'd left Jeff a message on his cell. Grey and Scott were discussing whether to bring Troy in on this, a “benchwarmer,” a guy who was on the team but played so little Roan couldn’t remember ever having seen him, but they described him as an “old school bruiser,” which was presumably good for guard duty. Roan wasn’t sure they needed so many guys (at least not yet), but Scott, acting in full captain mode, said it was good to have enough guys so anyone could fill in at a moment’s notice.
Seemed weird, but wasn’t it weird to have a hockey team protecting your boyfriend? So he agreed the idea was sound. He asked them to be quiet and not wake up Dylan, and then asked that they call Gordon instantly (he gave them his cell number) if any trouble started. They agreed, but Grey did so with a kind of unsettling smirk, a kind that said “I’ll call the police as soon as I’ve beaten them into a chunky red smear.” Which was fine with him; Grey had already beaten one of the Aryan Moronhood before, and round two was unlikely to have a different outcome.
He left them going through his DVD library and arguing over what they wanted to watch. (Scott wanted to see Slap Shot, Grey wanted to see The Venture Brothers, and both volunteered disappointment at not finding gay porn, but Scott joked you always kept your “porn drawer” out of the living room—making him wonder if Scott had just given away where his porn was, and if his porn was all straight, which he doubted.) Although you’d think watching TV would keep them distracted from guard duty, Roan didn’t see a problem—these guys loved to fight. They wouldn’t give up an opportunity through inattention. As he was leaving, he wondered why he should trust them, as really they were just acquaintances (and Scott had come on to him pretty hard—in fact, kissing him probably went over the “come-on” line), but he did have the oddest feeling that at some point they’d all become good friends without realizing it. He still wasn’t sure how. Why a bunch of young (mostly) straight boy jocks wanted to be friends with him was still utterly baffling. (Except, of course, he was a “superhero,” wasn’t he? Some people may have seen that as pretty cool.)
At the home improvement behemoth, he picked up all the stuff he needed, and in the paint section (just aisles and aisles of cans—did anyone need this many varieties of paint?) he found some paint on its own stand-alone shelving, apparently color “mis-mixed” paint being sold for five or ten dollars a can. He noticed one had a daub of paint on the lid (signifying the color inside) that was a kind of warm reddish-brown with a hint of orange. It looked almost exactly like that “Autumn Spice” color Paris had wanted to paint his office. He bet Dylan would like this color, and how would it look in the living room? So he grabbed it and added it to his cart. Why not? Try to use the disaster to make some improvements.
He had just finished loading up his car when his cell went off. Checking it, he saw it was Gordo before he answered it. “Yeah?”
“You need to come down to the church,” Gordo said, his voice sounding strained. “Divine Transformation. You need to see this. We may need you for crowd control.”
Roan could hear sirens in the background, people talking in raised, stern voices. “What’s going on?”
“You weren’t the only person targeted,” he said cryptically and broke the connection. Not a single bit of that sounded good.
On his way to the scene, he put in a quick call to the house. Everything was fine, they were all watching the Venture Brothers, Tank had apparently arrived, and they were being careful to keep it down so they didn’t wake Dylan. Grey wondered if it was okay if Tank made some toast, and Roan told him to go ahead and help themselves to whatever, although he’d appreciate it if they left Dylan’s vegetarian stuff alone. As Roan expected, that got a big chuckle from Grey. (Yeah, like those big jock boys were vegetarians.) They were not so much bodyguards right now as babysitters, but he didn’t care. They would keep Dylan safe. One attacker might be able to get past one of them, but all three, including enforcer Grey and crazyass Tank? Never. Not unless they brought submachine guns, and that was more unlikely than someone bringing a rocket launcher to a knife fight.
It turned out police cars had blocked off the street down to the Church of the Divine Transformation, so he had to double park in front of someone’s house on the next block and walk in, and even then he had to weave his way through clots of rubberneckers and reporters. Some of the reporters recognized him and asked if he knew what was going on, if he had any comment, if he knew anything about the shooter. That confirmed his worst fear before he got to the front line of the cordon. One of the cops on the other side of the sawhorse recognized him and waved him through as he slowly but surely saw the scene for himself.
Crime scene tape blocked off most of the front yard, although an ambulance had backed up on the main lawn, blocking most of the view from the front end of the street. Roan could smell blood, death, and cordite, hear the buzz of bees and flies periodically drowned out by the crackle of police radios and the low discussions of paramedics and evidence technicians. Camera flashes burst through the open door of the house-turned-church, and in their brief light he could spot liquid dark splashes of what could only be blood in the foyer. Gordo and Seb were loitering near the side of the stairs leading up to the wraparound porch, and from the sheer number of other cops walking around, he assumed homicide was in charge of the investigation. While Gordo and Seb may have been the initially responding officers, when it became clear this wasn’t a “kitty crime,” they got shoved off.
He walked up to them and didn’t even have to ask. Gordo started telling him. “A gunman came up to the door of the church at 7:38 this morning and started firing. He killed three and injured five before he was shot by the church’s part-time security guard. He’s en route to the hospital, but he was critical. He’s probably not gonna make it. There’s a possibility he’s a disgruntled cat or something, but after what we found in the front seat of his car, we don’t think so.”
Seb had it, sealed in a see-through plastic evidence envelope. Even from here, he could see written in blocky, almost elementary-level letters on a scrap of white notepaper: ALL ABOMINATIONS MUST DIE.
“I hate to say it, but you got lucky last night,” Gordo went on. “Or maybe you’re just so damn scary, that asshole couldn’t commit to trying to kill you face to face.”
“You’d have ripped his face off,” Seb noted. “Maybe he was a smarter breed of idiot.”
Roan nodded, slightly distracted. It could have been purely a coincidence, but he didn’t think so. He’d bet everything he had this guy would turn out to be a white supremacist too.
So why had they declared war on infecteds? And why now?
17
Spark
BEFORE Gordo and Seb were given their walking papers to leave the scene, Roan heard a familiar voice arguing at the barricades and went to find Rainbow trying to get in. Roan got the cop to let her past, but he knew that was a mistake almost instantly, as he had to stop her from rushing up to the door. No one could go in right now.
So Rainbow ended up clinging to him and sobbing until his shirt was soaked with snot and tears. He still felt bad for her, as he always felt bad for Rainbow. There was just something about her, about her naive sense of belief and peace, that made his cynical side shrink back and take a seat. She wasn’t a cynical opportunist or a teenager looking for a thrill or a spoiled brat looking to shock her parents by joining a religion they would disapprove of. She honestly believed this bullshit. She wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and as much as he wanted to begrudge her that, he couldn’t. It wasn’t something he would have chosen for himself—it wasn’t something he could completely understand—but there was no malice in this, no judgment of others; she just wanted to belong to something. And he had to give her that.
Eventually, a female paramedic came over—he didn’t recognize her, but Roan got the sense she knew him—and led Rainbow away from him, giving her a sedative and sitting with her on the back bumper of an ambulance, extending as much comfort as a sympathetic ear could give. He wrung out his shirt as much as possible while still wearing it, and Gordo and Seb agreed to keep him in the loop. They also agreed to check out his white supremacist angle.
When he got back to his car, he just sat there a few minutes, staring at nothing, wondering what bothered him the most about this. He wasn’t sure, to be brutally honest. He hated the church and all it stood for, but did he want some psychopath to murder them? No, of course not. But he did hate them. This was the very textbook definition of mixed feelings.
He checked his phone, in case Grey had called to report they were under siege (or, more likely, Tank had beaten someone half to death with the coat rack), but it was only Fiona who had called him in the hour (had it really been that long?) he’d been at the church. She told him he might want to stop by, as she'd found something he might like to see.
With Hatcher not answering his phone calls, he'd asked Fi, when she called to ask if he was okay, to look into the site for him. He sometimes forgot, but dominatrix wasn’t her first career. She used to work at Microsoft; she had some serious computer skills, only recently displaced by her whip-handling skills.
She lived downtown, in a shabby chic apartment block known as Sunrise Terrace. She was on the third floor, in apartment 318, and as he knocked on the green-painted door, he realized this was the first time he’d ever seen where Fiona lived. That seemed like an awful oversight on his part.
He heard a couple of locks being thrown before she opened the door and said, “Come in you—what the hell happened to your shirt?”
“I got sobbed on.”
She blinked at him for a moment. “Well, that’s not the worst thing I thought of.”
He didn’t dare ask what that was.
Fiona was dressed in a loose navy T-shirt advertising Aero Leather, black sweatpants, and orange Crocs, suggesting she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her apartment was only a three-room one, but not too small, and over the scent of recently heated-up cinnamon rolls, he smelled a cat. “Um—” he began, but he didn’t have time to finish.
“Don’t worry. I shut Mandy in the bedroom.”
“Mandy’s your cat?”
“She is indeed. I didn’t know if she’d freak out on you or what, so I thought it best we didn’t find out. Now who sobbed on you?”
“Rainbow.” At her look, he was forced to explain. At least he got a chance to look around her place while talking. The combined living room/kitchen area wasn’t overly neat. It had a lived-in look, but the clutter was just low level enough to be homey. She had your typical good quality thrift store couch and coffee table, a TV on a stand (that was supposed to be a nightstand, but what difference did it make), and a bare bones Ikea desk where an Alienware computer setup dominated the surface, with an extra (?) hard drive stack on the floor beside the desk and small neon lights of red and blue flashing inside the rectangular metal tower. What appeared to be a Bose-style CD/MP3 player sitting on the kitchen counter was softly playing Tori Amos. A dominatrix who listened to Tori Amos? Oddly enough, that sounded about right. “You a gamer?” Alienware was mostly a gamer’s computer, or at least that was his impression.
“Used to be. Rather than kill my ex, I killed trolls. But lately I haven’t had the time to game, and besides, I couldn’t give a shit about my ex anymore.” He assumed she meant her ex-husband, a person she didn’t talk about at any great length—she simply said “the ex” like he was a near-fatal disease she'd once caught. “Can I get you something? I have diet soda and tap water. Pick your poison.”
“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”
“What about another shirt?”
“Better not. Dylan smells a woman on me, he’ll get crazy jealous.”
That startled a short, sharp laugh out of her as she sat at her desk in front of the computer. She had a really nice desk chair there, high-backed padded leather, and that alone told him how much time she spent on the computer. “How are you doing, by the way?” she asked as her fingers flew over her sleek, ergonomically designed keyboard. “I felt bad about calling you, but after I found this out I felt you’d wanna know.”
“I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill me.”
“He tried to burn down your house.”
“He scorched my porch. Which almost sounds like a Dr. Seuss title.”
“How’s Dylan?”
“He was a little shaken up, but I think he’ll be okay. So what did you find?”
She looked up, her tight red ponytail swishing back with authority. “Well, I looked around for the owner of the domain name of that snuff site, and I eventually discovered—through means that might not be legal—that it was bought by Visionics Limited.”
He chewed that over for a moment. No, time wasn’t improving it. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”
“I know. But it’s a shell company, a phony thing made up by Dermot Cook.” She paused and looked up at him dramatically, like that was supposed to mean something.
“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”
“Robert Hatcher’s original business partner. The two had a big falling out, and Hatcher bought out his share of the business a couple years ago.”
“So the porn site is Cook’s new business?”
“No, he’s dead.”
“What?”
She turned back to her computer and called up a Wikipedia page. “He died last year. Dropped dead of a heart attack on a treadmill. Can you imagine that? Dying in a gym while exercising? Fuck that. I’d rather die face first in a pie.”
He was down with that, although he wasn’t a huge fan of pie (unless it was shepherd’s pie, then maybe). “This is Wikipedia. You can’t trust—”
