Infected: Lesser Evils (56 page)

One morning, while Dylan was folding up his blanket, Doctor Rosenberg came in and asked him to join her for a cup of coffee. She made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion but an order, so he went with her to the cafeteria. He got a tea while she got a coffee, and she also got a danish. She offered Dylan one, but he didn’t feel hungry right now.

“Are you eating at all?” she asked, dumping a sugar packet into her coffee. “It’s been three days, I don’t think I’ve seen you eat once.”

“I have,” he said, and suddenly wasn’t sure. Surely he must have or he’d be starving by now. “I’m okay.”

“Work?”

“I quit.”

She gave him a mildly scolding look, like his aunt would probably give him. “Is that wise?”

He shrugged, stirring his tea. He contemplated adding sugar to it, but there was probably no way of making it palatable. “Jamie told me I was welcome back at Panic at any time, so I figure I’ll start doing crunches again and I should be okay.”

“Crunches?” She made a negative noise. “Better you than me, kiddo.”

“So how have the tests come out? I assume some must be back by now.”

She nodded, but Dylan sensed some hesitation. He was getting to know her pretty well now, even though she didn’t share much about herself. “The biopsy’s back. I can tell you he doesn’t have cancer.”

Dylan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Oh god, what a relief.” He paused long enough to sip his tea, and found it almost too bad for words. “Should I read something into you not using the word benign?”

“Wow. Are you just that good, or have you been around Roan too long?”

“A bit of both, probably.”

She nodded grimly, gnawing on a chunk of danish like it was a piece of radial tire. “The tumor isn’t cancerous. But I don’t know what it is. It’s full of viral DNA.”

Dylan ran that sentence over again in his mind, to see if it made any sense at all. Was it just him? “Um, what?”

“Yeah, that was my feeling. We didn’t find cancerous cells, but we found the virus, which we couldn’t make sense of. I’ve sent the results to Doctor Pang, this oncologist I know over at Fred Hutchinson, I’m hoping he can tell me what the fuck it means.”

“Is this good news or bad news?”

She shrugged in a way that seemed to suggest she wished someone would take over for her. “Fuck if I know. Again, not cancer, so that’s a positive thing.”

Dylan looked down into his murky cup of tea, which he suddenly realized was the color of diseased urine, and he pushed it aside. “Since when do viruses create tumors?”

“Normally they don’t.”

“So you have no idea what this could mean?”

She sighed heavily. “Honestly no. You hafta understand that no one’s lived with the virus as long as Roan has. Setting aside his virus child start, no one’s lived with this thing for thirty plus years. The only understanding we have of its life cycle is in laboratory animals and computer models, and those are imperfect at best. This is new territory for everyone.”

He’d heard this before, and was certain Roan had heard it all his life. How awful it must be to be a test case, an anomaly, the only living petri dish around. “What does this mean? Can you just guess?”

“I hesitate, ’cause it’s just speculation. I mean, he could turn into a fucking unicorn for all I know.” She exhaled heavily, a kind of sigh, before telling him, “I think this is a secondary stage of the virus.” At his questioning look, she went on. “We don’t know its true life and death cycle. All we know is it kills the host body by eventually overwhelming it, altering it to the point that Human survival is impossible. We’ve never had a case where the body continues to adapt. The virus has a near-perfect home in Roan, but what that will cause it to do we don’t know.”

“You’re implying intelligence here.”

“I know, and I don’t mean to. But this virus seems to thrive on adversity, which is why making any kind of vaccine for it has been a pipe dream at best. It’s not coming up against anything in Roan’s body that it can’t seem to handle, therefore the response will be unpredictable.”

“But the weak spot is his brain.”

Rosenberg grimaced as if her coffee tasted as bad as his tea. “His body has proven to be resilient, almost as resilient as the virus, which may not be coincidence. But his brain just can’t have that kind of bounce back, although it’s trying. Still, can you imagine the toll it must take on him? Well, hell, I guess you can, you live with him. Poor bastard.”

How was he supposed to take that statement? Dylan decided it was probably best just to let it go for now. “So you think the virus has made his body so resilient? I’m taking it that’s what you implied.”

She nodded. “Part of the reason he’s survived so long is that the virus has almost fully incorporated itself into his DNA. He’s the perfect host because it has helped make him the perfect host. But there’re limits. He’s still Human underneath it all, and there will always be a conflict. But what the result of that conflict will be, I can’t say.”

“Except death.”

This time she didn’t really grimace, it was more of a twitch at the corner of her mouth as she looked away, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He didn’t blame her for looking; it sounded like two people were about to come to blows over who was to blame for the accident. (What accident Dylan couldn’t say—they could have had the decency to start their argument in here.) “Eventually.” She looked back at him, her hazel eyes locking on to his like she was trying to will him to believe what she was saying. “But not now. You know Roan, he’s not going without a fight, and last time I checked, he hadn’t ripped out his IVs yet.”

Dylan couldn’t argue with any of this, and yet a certain sense of despair was slowly overwhelming him, creeping through his body and diffusing like ink in water. He was so tired, and it wasn’t just physical. “So why hasn’t he woken up?”

She made a negative noise, a kind of clicking with her tongue. “’Cause the bastard doesn’t want to.”

Yes, that was the truth he’d been dreading all this time.

H
OLDEN
couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a train station. There wasn’t much call for it, as he was usually sent to the scuzzy well of everyday humanity that was the Greyhound bus station on some case or another. But Oliver wanted to do something different. Maybe he thought it would help him escape.

But Holden found the kid, trying to hide his identity with a dark-blue stocking cap pulled over his head and translucent amber sunglasses over his eyes, but he actually
looked
like he was trying to conceal his identity. The thing about going incognito was you weren’t supposed to look like you were incognito, or you fucked the whole thing up. Well, Oliver may have been a good actor, but clearly he needed a costumer.

Holden flung himself into the plastic chair beside him and looked over at Oliver with a professional, hard smile. “Hey there, where you headed today?”

Oliver looked nervous behind his tinted glasses, but he didn’t recognize him, mainly because he’d never seen him before. “Umm, Eugene.”

“Oregon? Awesome. Got cold feet, huh?”

Did he finally get it? A fleeting sort of nervousness appeared in his eyes. “What?”

“I’m Holden Krause, I’m an assistant investigator with MK Investigations.” Oliver started to get up, but Holden put a firm hand on his arm to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t. I could have you arrested if I really wanted to, so let’s not make a scene, okay?”

“Arrested?” he replied, his voice pitched to a whispering hiss. “No you can’t. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I could nail you for identity theft and fraud, and I can make it stick. And that’s if I’m being nice. Do you want to know what I can do if I’m feeling mean?” Holden met his eyes, giving him the deathly cold stare he had perfected on the street. Life in the lower strata of society was very Darwinian—the weak were beaten down, consumed, destroyed. To show weakness was to invite exploitation and death. To be an alpha male, a predator, one who destroyed rather than got destroyed, you had to appear as psychopathic as all the other beasts. Holden could do that so easily, it was frightening.

It worked. Oliver seemed to shrink back in his chair, as if trying to disappear into the plastic. “L-look, you’ve got the wrong idea—”

“Roan, in his notes, seemed to think you were lying about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. You got lucky, ’cause he’s sick and not one hundred percent, but you fucked up by having an argument at the Marriott. See, I have friends in hotels all around Seattle, and someone overheard you. Shall I repeat the key points, or do you want to knock off the bullshit?”

Oliver sighed, deflated, looking away as he muttered, “I didn’t wanna do this, okay? I just needed the money.”

While Holden did indeed have friends at most hotels, including the Marriott, no one had overheard anything of substance. This was a bluff, but he was confident he could sell it, and indeed he had. After all, what little they had heard, combined with Roan’s suspicions, had led Holden to believe Oliver wasn’t Oliver. But who he was and why was up for grabs. “So why the beating? Did you go off script?”

He tried to sink down in his chair, but he could only go so far because Holden refused to let go of his arm. “I figured the guy didn’t trust me. I thought the gig was up and I oughta get outta here before he lioned out on me or something. That’s what it’s called, right, what he does? Lioning out?”

Holden decided not to answer that, because it wasn’t any of his business and didn’t matter anyways. “Abby got wind of your cold feet? How?”

Oliver—or whoever he was—shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think she had one of those guys watching me.”

“Who were they?”

He shook his head. “Relatives of hers. Nephews, cousins, something like that. You’d think she could have sent one of those overgrown assholes to pretend to be Oliver if they were already here.”

“But they don’t look like him, not like you do.”

“I had to dye my hair, get it cut… I used to have a goatee.”

“Where is Oliver Jephson?”

“Cancun.”

Holden nodded. He’d already asked around on campus at the U-W, and discovered that Jephson was indeed supposedly in Cancun with a couple other people. But he wanted to see how honest this guy was going to be with him. “And who are you precisely?”

With a disgruntled sigh, he said. “Tyler Edwards.”

“Okay, Tyler, why did Abby hire you to pretend to be her nephew? Why does she want to find Adam so badly?”

What Tyler told Holden was what he’d pretty much expected: Abby had found the photo online, not Oliver, and wanted to discover if this was indeed Adam, but she wasn’t about to upset Oliver, especially if it wasn’t actually Adam. So she’d hired him to pretend to be Oliver for the purposes of hiring a Seattle-area detective to find out for sure, and Tyler felt a kind of personal connection to this, because his own father had left when he was five, and even though he could have had a relationship with Tyler, he chose not to. He’d remarried, had another family, and forgotten all about him.

While Holden was tempted to play the world’s tiniest violin for him, he figured it was best to stay on topic. “And this didn’t strike you as at all fishy?”

He looked at him like he was crazy. “She wants to find her brother, and doesn’t want to hurt her nephew. How is that weird?”

“Oh, I don’t know… maybe the fact that she had some family members beat the shit out of you when you tried to back out?”

Tyler squirmed in his hard plastic chair, looking around uncomfortably. There was a surprisingly long line at the check-in counter, and the windows looking out at the scruffy train tracks let in a good amount of light. Too bad there was nothing to see but dingy tile floors, and a TV set high on the wall playing CNN, for no obvious reason. Holden gave himself a moment to wonder why anyone gave a shit about news channels, and figured it was one of those straight white people things he’d never understand, like
Survivor
and leaf blowers.

“Okay, that I didn’t get,” Tyler muttered.

“And that’s why you’re leaving? You don’t want to be treated to another beat down?”

“No. It’s just….” He rubbed his mouth, sat back up so he didn’t fall out of his chair and slide onto the floor, and shook his head. Tyler was a cavalcade of tics, all raw nerves and fear. “What d’ya want me to say? Okay, yeah, I know somethin’ ain’t right here, okay? I’m goin’ home.”

“Where she knows where to find you.”

That made him pause, chewing his lower lip as he thought about it. “Oh. Shit. But she’s not gonna do anything to me. I mean… that’s just silly.”

“As silly as getting guys to beat you up?” That made Tyler do a slight double take. That hadn’t occurred to him? “Why don’t you crash at a friends’ place for a couple of days? This should blow over by then.”

“What should?”

Holden was forced to shrug. “Whatever the hell this is.” Roan, in his notes, had named Adam’s father as suspicious, and said he didn’t like the hostile vibe he was getting from Abby. Now it made sense: she was looking for Adam, probably on behest of her (their) father. They couldn’t be looking for him for anything good. How would Roan handle this? Better yet, how would
he
handle this?

Holden supposed he was about to find out.

D
YLAN
had taken to sketching in the hospital room, mainly because he didn’t feel like watching TV, and reading was something he did for Roan, not himself. Oddly enough, he felt he had stumbled upon something.

Dylan was simply doing pencil sketches, but picking odd subjects: the IV bag and stand, with an off-center window (covered with a retractable metal grate—this was a room for an infected, after all). A stack of books on the floor. The end of the hospital bed. He suddenly realized there was a stark beauty here, a sort of visual loneliness that still had a kind of appeal. Maybe it was just him, but the fact that they were perhaps the most depressing still lifes he’d ever seen made them likable to Dylan. Perhaps this was why he was never going to make a living as an artist. Still, he liked them, they made him feel better, and Dylan got so absorbed in doing it that time passed quickly. He figured Dee would come check in on him again, see his sketchpad, and have him removed by force, but maybe that was for the best.