Prey (12 page)

After a very long pause, she said, “Umm, I dunno. I gotta work tonight… I guess if you stop by Poison I can talk to ya for a few minutes.”

“Poison?”

“Y’know, in the mall? My shift starts at six. If you wanna show up around seven-thirty or so, it’s kinda slow.”

“Sure, I’ll see you there.” Once he hung up, he asked Paris, “Is there a place at the mall called Poison?”

Paris was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the open pizza box beside him, a slice in his hand (pepperoni and olive). He took a swig of beer to rinse down the bite he’d just taken, then said, “Uh-huh, it’s one of those trendy young adult emo gear stores. Why? You need a nipple ring?”

“That’s where Marley works.” He sat down on the bed beside him, and grabbed a slice of pizza from the box. Paris handed him a beer, and while he almost refused it, Roan figured, fuck it. One of these beers wasn’t 64

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going to affect him, and frankly, after that scene at Tweaks’s place, he could use a beer.

Paris gave him a lopsided grin. His hair was still damp, still clung to his face in a way that had to be deliberate; it made him look like a model in some kind of pretentious perfume ad. “Oh joy. You’ll love it there.”

“You think I don’t know sarcasm when I hear it?”

“When we leaving?”

“She said after seven-thirty would be good, so—” Suddenly he realized that that was around sunset. “—um, I guess I’m going solo.”

Paris’s humorous smile collapsed like a soufflé in an opera house kitchen. It was so sudden it was like he’d never been smiling at all, and he got a slightly distant look in his eye. “Oh… yeah… good luck with that.”

He tore into his pizza slice like it was a hunk of crusty bread.

Paris only had a couple hours until his transformation. Roan wasn’t going to leave him this time; he was going to make sure he got down to the basement in time and was safely contained. There’d be no chances of an accidental release this time; he’d make sure he was safe.

Roan reached over and touched Paris’s face gently, brushing his fingertips over his cheek; Paris closed his eyes and leaned against Roan’s hand, just for a moment.

“I always miss you when you’re not with me.” The frightening thing—well, frightening as far as Roan was concerned—was that was almost always true. It was like his world had been monochrome before this vibrant, Technicolor man had come into it. Paris was everything he wasn’t, and filled a void he hadn’t realized he had. Of course he drove him absolutely crazy sometimes, not in a good way, but that was the really weird thing about love. What attracted you could eventually irritate you, and vice versa. He wished things were a bit more orderly and logical, but they never were.

Paris glanced at him, lips curving in the slightest hint of a smile, and he teased, “Why detective, that sounded almost sappy.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he warned with mock-sternness.

The phone rang then, totally ruining the mood. The mood was killed even more when he glanced at the caller ID: Sikorski again. He gulped down half his beer in two swallows—he just knew he was going to need Infected: Prey

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the alcohol—and only after he was ready answered the phone. “Did you put out an APB on me?” Roan was only half joking; he was an infected at a crime scene. It didn’t matter that no transformation happened that fast; he’d be a natural suspect.

“I think you’re in the clear,” he replied, but all the lightness was missing from Gordo’s tone. Roan knew that was a major warning sign.

“We got a partial bite mark from one of the bodies, and it didn’t match any... except one. One we got very recently.”

Roan felt his stomach fall, turn to stone. Oh God, his first suspicion was right, wasn’t it? “You don’t mean....”

“I do.” Sikorski sighed heavily. “The same cat that killed DeSilvo killed these people. We have a kitty serial killer on our hands.”

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9

The Humanity Underneath

“THAT’S impossible,” Roan pointed out, rubbing his forehead. He could just feel a headache gathering there, somewhere deep within the confines of his skull. “Cats don’t have intent. Serial killers do.”

“Fine, but most people will think you’re splitting hairs, “ Sikorski argued. “This is a cat who, in its first noted instance of appearance, is known to have killed five people in two different locations. You have to at least agree it’s a mass murderer.”

Roan groaned and rubbed his eyes, pushing in on his eyelids so he could see the pretty patterns of spots dancing over his corneas. He wanted to say mass killer was more appropriate, since murder essentially implied intent, but he knew that would sound like he was parsing semantics, being a “kitty sympathizer.” (He was in one sense, but not in another.) “Have you checked the areas between Tweaks’s and DeSilvo’s?”

Sikorski scoffed. “We’re looking to see if there were any notes of trouble in the surrounding areas, but that’s a hell of a large area. Unless someone calls something in, we ain’t combing the area by foot. We are going to increase patrols tonight.”

“In prowlers? You know most cats stay away from road traffic.”

“Like we got the budget for foot patrols. If you’re worried about it, Roan, maybe you should get out there yourself.”

“Yeah, right, I’ll do that,” he grumbled, hanging up.

Paris touched his shoulder, rubbing it slightly. “Same cat?” It was hardly a question.

Roan nodded, leaning back against his touch. He gave himself a second to enjoy it before reality came crashing in, and killed any fun he could have possibly had. “Exact same. God, what’s the pattern?”

“Pattern? I thought only people with malice and forethought had Infected: Prey

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patterns.”

He stared back at him. “Malice and forethought? Have you been watching
Law and Order
again?”

“I try not to, but it has a thousand spin-offs playing on a hundred different channels. Even when you don’t want to watch it, you kinda do anyways. It’s going to be the law eventually, you know—watch
Law and
Order
or be executed.”

He shook his head, and settled against Paris, wondering if he could bear to eat another slice of pizza. Recalling the crime scene had killed his appetite. “I know, but… there was something wrong with the scene.” The more he thought about it, the more he realized it. The milk on the floor, the girl surprised coming out of the bathroom. “The kids were killed quick. A couple of brutal swipes or lunges, and that was it—evisceration, decapitation. But Tweaks… he was different.”

Paris tossed the remainder of his slice in the box, and closed the lid, giving him an evil scowl. “Jeeze, thanks.”

“Sorry, I’m trying to figure it out. Tweaks was… well, he was a chew toy, as far as I could tell. The cat must have killed him first, gnawed on him for a while, then heard the other humans and went after them. But that doesn’t make sense. Why would it kill the other humans when it could just leave? The window was right there in the kitchen where Tweaks was killed.”

Paris put his arm around him and shuddered. “Hon, I love you, but if you don’t shut the fuck up about this, I’m gonna break your jaw.”

Roan rolled his eyes. Paris could take gore as long as it was the phony Hollywood kind, or just graphics in a video game; the real kind turned him into a quivering mass of Jell-O. “Fine. It just didn’t look right.

Something in the scenario was off.”

“Well, that’s what the cops are for, to figure out things like that. And you’re not a cop anymore, Ro.”

“You’re telling me to back off.”

“I’m telling you to let go. I know you can’t help playing hero, but there’s a limit. Let the cops do the job they’re paid for, and concentrate on the job you were paid for. Okay?”

“Now you’re telling me to follow the money.”

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“Of course I am. I’m a gold digger.”

After they both took swigs of their beers (Roan finished his off, trying not to want a second one), he asked, “Why’d you turn the TV on?”

“We both missed
The Daily Show
last night. Figured we could catch a repeat.”

“Oh, okay.”

“We really need a TiVo.”

“You buy it, gold digger.” He tried very hard not to think about the scene at Tweaks’s house, because Paris had been right. Danny’s parents were paying him to find out something about their son’s whereabouts, if he could, not to get involved in a police investigation. No matter that it was kitty-related and made no sense; unless Sikorski asked him to get involved, he couldn’t.

It was surprising how hard that was for him to accept.

AFTER
The
Daily Show
, they cleaned the beer bottles and pizza box out of the bedroom, piling everything in the appropriate bags in the kitchen.

While recycling had cut their garbage output and bill by a good segment, sometimes keeping track of all the fucking bags was a pain and a half, but what could you do?

Paris took it on himself to chatter happily about trivialities to try and distract him, talking about some new colors of paint he’d seen at the hardware store and how he thought maybe he could paint the living room and touch up his study in warmer, richer colors; Paris was as much a handyman as he was a mechanic, and very good at both. But then again, he’d worked at his uncle’s garage on and off through high school, which was where he got his love of muscle cars. He’d briefly worked as a house painter one summer, which turned him off of exterior house painting for all time, but he didn’t mind interior painting. Apparently it was all a matter of degrees. But Roan couldn’t help but object. “I really don’t want a study colored ‘autumn spice’.”

“Oh, ignore the gay name—no offense. It’s this great, warm, dark orange color, very regal, it’d look perfect with—oh shit.”

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69

He turned away from the sink to see Paris leaning against the counter, bent over with an arm around his stomach and panting as if he’d just taken a shot to the gut. “It’s starting early.”

Son of a bitch. That did happen sometimes, usually when you weren’t ready for it.

There was usually a rhyme and reason to a transformation cycle, but it varied from person to person. It was based on the virus’s own cycles rather than anything else, although most infected did transform around sunset, which led some to link the virus to the lunar schedule. (It was bullshit, but people were desperate to make sense of something as senseless as this.) Roan could smell it now, the change in Paris’s body chemistry: it made him smell more like a tiger than a human.

Roan helped him to the basement as the spasms wracked Paris, his muscles jumping and seizing beneath his skin, and his pupils were already blown wider than a junkie’s pupils, his irises reduced to a hair-thin line.

The eyes were the first to change and the last to go back.

Their basement was a typical one, containing the water heater, the circuit breakers, boxes and boxes of stored crap they had no room for upstairs, washer and dryer, and one thing that made it a bit different: a cage. A cube of steel bars, nine feet by nine, there was barely enough room for a large cat to pace circles in it, and there was a key lock on it, simple and old fashioned, with the key hanging just beyond the lock itself. A person locked in the cage could get out quite easily, but an animal without an opposable thumb would be stuck. Which was exactly the point.

He helped Paris inside the cage and then locked the door, hanging the key back on its hook. The basement had nothing but a poured concrete floor, but the cold surface was usually soothing during the opening salvo of the change, when it felt like you were on fire beneath your skin. Roan sat on the basement stairs and just talked, as they both found it comforting to try and fill this awful space with noise. Paris probably lost consciousness about two minutes after he was in the cage, but Roan was talking for himself as much as for him.

Despite what the movies claimed, or edited trans-porn showed, the actual transformation process could take from forty-five minutes to over an hour, with his kind, the virus children, usually taking the least amount of time. He talked about the case, his problem with the crime scene, but was unable to completely block out the noise of bones snapping, crackling 70

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like twigs underfoot, meshing and resetting themselves, becoming something else, as Paris’s spasming heels beat out a tattoo on the floor. He didn’t look at him because he couldn’t, he couldn’t bear watching it happen to someone he cared about. He knew if he looked he’d see Paris’s flawless skin bubbling as if boiling, stretching and reforming, looking like it was melting as short, fine hairs pushed through his malleable epidermis.

The shape of his face would change, the jaw breaking as it pushed out, distended, his mandibles widening and mouth bleeding as new teeth shoved their way through tender gums, and then his pelvis would break and reshape itself into something more accommodating to the legs of a cat.

The closest that fiction had ever gotten to showing the painful and physically devastating process was
An American Werewolf In London
, but even then it happened way too fast, as if by time-lapse photography. This process was agonizing, long, and pure torture to watch if it happened to someone you loved. The only saving grace was that the process was so painful and traumatic that the changers lost consciousness as soon as it began.

After a while, Roan didn’t even know what he was saying; he was simply rambling, looking down at his own hands as he twisted them, his joints aching in sympathy for what was happening to Paris. Soon the sound of bones breaking under intense muscular strain gave way to the low, watery growl of a cat in pain, and he glanced up at the fully transmogrified Paris.

He was beautiful as a human, and beautiful as a cat, but then again, was there such a thing as an ugly tiger? He was over six feet long, which was kind of “short” for a proper tiger, but since he was three feet high at the shoulder and around two hundred pounds, still broad across the chest, no one would ever call him small in this form either. His fur was orange and white with black stripes, but oddly enough, it was the same sleek, glossy black that Paris’s hair was, giving him an indelible mark. Amber eyes as fathomless and empty as an abyss glared at him from a broad feline face, and as the tiger got shakily to its feet, its growl became far more menacing. No, Paris had no apparent consciousness in this form, no memories, and all the cat knew was that it hurt, it was penned up, and there was a man here who smelled like a rival cat. It would blame him for its circumstances, want to hurt him for the perceived pain and captivity. “I guess I’ll get ready to hit Poison,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. He had no idea when he’d started crying, but he wasn’t really surprised. He stood up with the help of the safety rail. “I’ll Infected: Prey