Prey (43 page)

The other two men were a study in contrasts. The youngest of the men was a string bean, tall and wiry, in a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and khakis, his curly brown hair tucked beneath a trucker hat advertising STP, Infected: Prey

267

his eyes as shiny and empty as small brown mirrors. He was sitting on the edge of the couch, his knee bouncing up and down with nervous tension.

Sitting at the opposite end of the couch was an average-sized man sprawled back comfortably, his stomach a small, round lump like he was smuggling a bowling ball, making his plain green T-shirt pull up and expose a small strip of skin with a few stray black hairs visible. His head was perfectly round, his skin betraying the slight flush of windburn, his scalp shaved and shiny as if waxed. His eyes were like small polished stones shoved deep in the clay of his face, and he was almost avuncular, although there was something about him that put Paris’s teeth on edge.

Tim stood up as he came in, thanked him for coming, and introduced Jack Sprat as Brad, while Humpty Dumpty was Reese. (No wonder Amy was attracted to Paris.) He shook hands with them all, noting that Brad’s hand was clammy although his grip was crushing, and Reese’s barely registered at all. Tim had a grip like a wet rag. Everyone had a Rolling Rock, save for Tim, who had a bottled water.

Paris sat in a white leather love seat across from the sofa, which gave him a perfect view of everyone and an unblocked shot, and he set the helmet on the carpet. Amy came sauntering into the room with two bottles of Rolling Rock and handed him one, sitting on the other end of the loveseat and curling her legs beneath her. She was careful not to sit too close to him, but when her husband wasn’t looking, he caught her giving him a certain look out of the corner of his eye. It was possible she was trying to play him, though; it was possible she was trying to bring him in or lull him into a false sense of security with the lure of her. Men were sadly simple—get them by the dick and you had them, gay or straight or other. But if she wanted to play the game with him, he hoped she realized she was tangling with a master of sexual manipulation; he wasn’t as easy to get by the short and curlies as other men. He’d learned his lesson the hard way.

Tim did the talking at first, and it was almost like they were pitching Amway at him. They quizzed him on what he knew about Humanity First, and his story of infected horror. He elaborated his story this time out, about his college roommate, “Perry,” who was deliberately infected and disappeared, never to be found, with the inclusion of his girlfriend,

“Darlene,” who was apparently sleeping around on him with Perry. She, too, got infected, and he said she died at her first transition. He played up the pathos, allowing himself to get genuinely angry (not hard—he just 268

Andrea

Speed

thought of Roan lying in that hospital bed, and contemplated the fact that two of the fucks in this room might have done it) and even teared up a bit, although he never cried (too girly). He took several swigs of his beer, but he actually only allowed a few drops to get through his lips; he didn’t want to let his guard down by a single iota, not until he knew the game.

Tim feigned sympathetic looks, while Brad seemed to get more wound up and anxious (judging by the increased bouncing of his leg), and Reese seemed perfectly impassive. Amy made sympathetic noises, but that was about it. Paris wasn’t impressed. He added angrily, without prompting, “I hate those fucking cats. Everybody makes excuses for them—they’re diseased, they’re victims—but most of those fucking freaks got infected by their own stupid behavior. Since when do we give special rights to people who fuck themselves up and fuck other people up? We don’t excuse rapists or killers, so why do we allow these freaks to do whatever they want?”

There were nods all around. “We should put ’em all in camps,” Brad said, his knee still bouncing like he had a neurological disorder. “I don’t care if we firebomb ’em after or just leave ’em to rot, but they ain’t people and they shouldn’t be around us. The fucking PC bleeding hearts, it’s their fault the world’s so fucked-up. If we locked the faggots up when AIDS

started, it wouldn’t have spread, it’d just have killed off the fudge packers like it was s’posed ta.”

Amy sighed dramatically. “Way to make us sound nuts, Brad.”

“Hey, Buchanan said it first, I’m just—”

“I don’t care,” she snapped, glaring at him with open contempt. “Just shut the fuck up.” Although Brad had no accent, the way she talked to him and the slightest facial resemblance made him wonder if they were related.

Brother and sister? Cousins?

Paris decided to play the “impatience” card now, as it would probably be expected at this point. “Is this the entire meeting? Just us?

Seems a bit… small, doesn’t it?”

Tim sat forward, resting his clasped hands on his knees, taking on the look of a marriage counselor about to tell you that learning to trust is the hardest but most rewarding part of any relationship. “You have to understand, Kevin, we have to be very careful about the people we let in.

We want people who are committed to the cause, who want to be proactive. We have to be careful, because there are people who wish to…

Infected: Prey

269

sabotage us.”

He pretended to be confused, all the while thinking,
Yes, people like
this fudge packer here.
“Sabotage you? For what, not liking cats?”

“It’s more than that,” Tim replied, clearly trying to think of some way to put it.

“You a cop?” Reese suddenly asked. It was the first thing he’d said all evening.

Paris’s scoff was genuine. “Do I smell like bacon to you? No, I’m not a cop. What the hell’s this about?”

He watched Amy, Tim, Brad, and Reese all exchange looks with each other, quizzical and demanding, and he had a feeling he was in.

Which meant they didn’t shoot Roan, but that didn’t make him feel better.

It just meant they were still in the running as the kitty killers.

Tim remained coy, which Paris suspected was his strength. They needed “young people like him,” full of “vitality and passion” (he was tempted to ask if he was coming on to him, but he knew no one in this room had a sense of humor), and they wanted to know if he was committed to bringing these infected “to justice,” no matter how it might seem to some people. (“Kitty fuckers.” Brad sneered. “They ain’t people.

They’re like another species entirely.”) He pretended to take a moment to work out what they were really saying, then feigned shock at the idea before gradually settling into it, letting the anger come back as he almost accepted it. But he retained some wariness as he asked how illegal the things they were discussing were. Tim explained that they weren’t “illegal per se,” just things that people wanted to do but were afraid to do.

He found himself thinking of 1984, of Orwellian doublespeak as Tim calmly and rationally sold a vague bill of goods that could have meant anything from simple vandalism to all-out murder. This was Tim’s role: he was the clear-eyed, seemingly sane cult leader, the subtle snake-oil salesman who gradually suckered you in, as insidious as the more obvious and charismatic Eli. They were two sides of the same coin, with Eli never hiding the fact that he was a pure showman in it for the ego-stroking, and Tim hiding everything behind a plain vanilla exterior that belied something truly ugly lurking beneath the surface. He never would have pegged him for the ringleader; Roan hadn’t, either. But he was. Sitting across from him in this sitcom-bland living room, Paris recognized a fellow predator, someone who, in different incarnations, had probably 270

Andrea

Speed

talked the susceptible into assassinating abortion doctors or burning down synagogues. He wondered how many he had suckered, and what he’d gotten them to do for him. Was murder still on the roster?

Paris pretended to be susceptible, to fall under the hypnotic sway of his low, metronomic voice and friendly Mr. Rogers demeanor. He didn’t become an instant soldier for Tim’s personal jihad, he still held himself back at arm’s length, only agreeing to think about his proposal, but he said it in a way as to leave little doubt what his ultimate decision would be.

And they bought it, of course, because Paris was still the king of all liars (although it was hardly anything to be proud of). Tim thought
he
was a snake oil salesman? He had no fucking idea. He let Tim think he was hypnotizing him, pulling him into the snare, while inside Paris quietly gloated over how easily Tim was falling for his trap.

By the time he’d left, Tim had given him a “special number,” one where they could discuss these things more in depth, as well as his IM

name in case he felt more comfortable speaking that way. Amy saw him out, holding his arm in an unusually friendly manner, and she let her hand linger longer than needed as she looked him in the eyes and gave him a smile that could only be described as lascivious. He was half-convinced it was an act, a honey trap, but he held her gaze longer than polite company would allow, feigning a response that she would expect. He could play the honey trap game too, and much better than her. They wanted him bad, and he suspected it was a setup. But a setup for Kevin—they needed a patsy quite badly, and he had been chosen. He was glad. Roan was great with the investigations, the motives, and the physical stuff, but this was where Paris shined.

It was dark when he went in, but it somehow seemed even darker out now, as if all the lights in the sky had been switched off, the moon hidden behind clouds as thick as cotton wool. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t run Tim through the database, but that was okay. If he was as slick as Paris suspected, he wouldn’t have a record. Just like Eli, he got people to do his dirty work for him. He drove off, not sure where he was going to go, which he figured out on the road, watching the pavement dissolve beneath his wheels.

The hospital had an underground parking garage manned by rent-acops, and Paris parked the bike down there, to get it out of the rain and hide it from any prying eyes, then took the elevator up into the hospital.

Dropkick had been right about the police presence in the place. In Infected: Prey

271

the busy lobby were two uniformed cops talking to the nurse at the front desk, with a handcuffed man between them. He had a swollen left eye and a huge gash on his forehead that was sending blood gushing down his face. He continued to rant drunkenly while the cops and the nurse talked over him. It was so noisy it was hard to tell, but it sounded like the drunk guy was going on about a moose.

No one noticed as he slipped by and ducked into one of the hospital’s inner elevators, which he shared with a nurse and a man in a wheelchair.

He got out alone on the fifth floor, the one with the isolated ICU, and was only mildly surprised to find the hallway empty and quiet. There was a male nurse manning the in-charge desk, but he was arguing on the phone with another nurse about the wrong chart being left behind. No one noticed Paris duck into Roan’s room.

It was dark and quiet, the sounds of Roan’s slow, deep breathing the only noise. He tossed his helmet on the room’s only chair and went to check on him, putting a hand on his face and waiting to see if he stirred.

He didn’t; he was probably only a few steps out from a drug-induced coma. “You must have really freaked them out when you ripped out your IVs. You bled, didn’t you? Never do that around normals—you know how they spaz.” Of course he probably couldn’t hear him, but this was the only time he could scold him without getting a smart-ass reply.

He took off his coat and the Beretta, wrapping the gun and the holster in the jacket before setting them on the chair. “We got him, babe.

The ringleader, if not the exact triggerman. Can you believe it’s the guy who looks like Doctor Phil’s replacement? He wants me as an ideological suicide bomber. I attract all types, don’t I?” He stepped out of his boots, and was relieved, as the spare clip had been poking him in the ankle for about a half an hour now. He bet it had left a dent. “No hard proof yet, but let me string him along for a bit. He’ll give us enough rope to hang him with. I’m an angry and naïve young man, after all. I have no idea when someone’s trying to play me. I just want revenge against those fucking cats.”

Roan was sleeping on his side, which was good, as the hospital bed was quite small, so much so that Paris figured he’d have to balance on the edge. Which was okay, because he didn’t expect to be comfortable at all.

He wasn’t here for himself.

He climbed carefully onto the bed and put his arms around Roan, which was again uncomfortable, but he didn’t care. The smell of his hair 272

Andrea

Speed

was instantly comforting. “You’re safe,” he whispered. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” Roan didn’t wake up, but he settled back against him, and Paris took that as forgiveness of a sort. He couldn’t turn back time and redo earlier, but he could stay here and let him know he wasn’t alone.

He’d failed him once. He wasn’t going to do that again.

Infected: Prey

273

10

Under the Flesh

APPARENTLY some nurses just had no sense of humor at all.

Paris got woken up by a very angry nurse who wondered what the hell he was doing here—did he think this was a hotel? She really didn’t appreciate his response. “If it is, your room service sucks.”

He was probably lucky he didn’t get shot full of Ebola.

He took the opportunity of the rampaging Nurse Ratched to go home and get some clothes for Roan, as well as swap the bike for the GTO. He also took the opportunity to grab a quick shower, change his clothes, and pick up some breakfast (which was a Red Bull and a nuked breakfast burrito—also known as the breakfast of champions). The rain was supposed to taper off, but of course it was now bucketing down with renewed enthusiasm, and he discovered the hard way that a couple of roads were closed or so badly flooded that they were all but impassable. It was like fall in Vancouver, only the rain was a bit warmer here.

Once he got back, he encountered Diego in the lobby of the hospital.