Prey (6 page)

Sara led him across marble-tiled floors and up a sweeping staircase to Danny’s room, which was almost as large as Roan’s living room. Right Infected: Prey

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away, he noticed how strange Danny’s room was. Namely, there was nothing on the walls at all, no pictures, no posters, nothing but sky blue paint. Teenagers usually hung things up; they usually started personalizing their space with a vengeance. But nothing marred the crisp walls, or the immaculately clean royal blue carpet, or the neatly made bed with its indigo duvet cover and plump pillows, or the tiny corner desk where his chair was neatly pulled in and his blue iMac miraculously free of dust. He also had an entertainment hutch directly across from his bed, where a TV, DVD, and stereo system all sat on their own shelves, and there were shelves beneath, containing DVDs and CDs in racks.

Christ… a snot-nosed kid had better shit than he did. He must have lived the wrong way. Or simply erred in not being born the scion of a wealthy family. He wondered why they’d hired him, but he supposed one of the cops recommended him to the family, just to annoy him.

He told Sara he’d just search around for a bit, but he wouldn’t take anything without informing her first, and she seemed to accept that warily, but then he heard a phone ringing and that tore her away from him. He shut the door of Danny’s room, just leaving it open the merest crack, and started booting up his computer. He also tried to think like a kid who had maids coming into his room, and perhaps overbearing parents. If he wanted to hide something, where would he hide it?

The closet was obvious, and a dead end, because along with hung-up clothes there were drawers of clothes—see-through drawers. He could see everything neatly folded and stacked inside, and Roan instantly felt bad for Danny. Where did he put his skin mags, or whatever passed for masturbatory material? What secrets could he have in a house of glass? No wonder he ran away.

He checked Danny’s computer, but his bookmarks were relatively bland, and a search proved he had a system scrubber that cleaned out his history and his cookies. Could be just a tech-savvy teen… or proof that he was paranoid, afraid his parents might be checking his computer. So what was he hiding? Just the same porn shit everybody hid if they were smart?

Or something else?

He checked out the kid’s CD and DVD collection, and the CDs were a lot more wild than his DVDs, which were pretty much an assortment of the raunchy comedies, mindless action flicks, and inexplicably popular Adam Sandler films that you might find in any random person’s DVD

collection. Looking through them, he realized there was one thing that just 24

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didn’t fit the established pattern in both cases. For some reason, among all his emo and punk pop, he had a Motorhead CD, and among all of his DVDs, he had one called “Classic Albums—Queen: The Making of A Night At The Opera.” Neither of these fit in the context of the collections, but they could have been oners, gifts by clueless relatives or friends trying to foist their tastes on him, perhaps sudden whimsies. Still, they were worth checking out.

Looking inside the Motorhead CD case, he found a compact disc that was quite clearly an unmarked CD-ROM. He inserted it in the iMac’s CD

drive, while he pulled out the DVD from the Queen case and put it in the DVD player. The DVD was one of a National Geographic special… on big cats. A beautiful Siberian tiger showed up on screen, its amber eyes staring at the camera in almost lazy disgust, and he knew how a person could find it rapturous to look at tigers; there was something magnificent about them, powerful. You just wanted to run your fingers through their fur… even though they’d take off your arm, and oh yeah, partially eat you and then bury the rest of you for later dining. They were pretty poison, and he knew that better than most, living with one (in a manner of speaking).

But why would you hide a National Geographic special? How educational and innocuous. Unless it represented something else, something secret and shameful. The masturbatory material he was wondering about.

The CD-ROM confirmed it. It was Internet porn all right: what was called “trans-porn,” showing the transformations of people into cat forms.

It took a while, and the noises made during the process could make a person faint; it was not a pretty process, or a pain-free one. But many of these were cut in such a way that it looked quicker and cleaner than it was.

It was disingenuous, but worse yet, dangerous: it made wannabes believe that changing into a cat form was almost painless, and had few consequences.

He turned off the set and replaced the DVD in its case, but when he ejected the CD-ROM, he instantly slipped the disc in his coat pocket, and put the Motorhead CD case back in its place, empty. The parents didn’t need to find that accidentally or otherwise; what was bad enough was that it was probably too late.

Roan was sure he knew exactly what happened. Danny became fascinated by the kitty culture, and got sucked into it. And in an act of total rebellion, he ran away, although there were two possibilities. The best-case scenario, he ran off to join a cult of kitty worshipers. The worst-case Infected: Prey

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scenario, he ran off to join a cult of kitty worshipers, and was trying very hard to get infected.

Son of a bitch, why did these hard-luck cases always fall into his lap?

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Hello, My Name Is ...…

HE WENT downstairs to talk with Sara, mainly to pump her for expected information. It took her a while to think of the name of one of Danny’s friends—again a very telling bit of information—but he wrote it down, a kid named Marley Hanson, whom Sara said lived in Crescent Heights. He thanked her and told her he’d be in touch, just as the phone rang again.

She was a very busy person, it seemed.

Roan knew exactly where he had to go, but his stomach growled very loudly, objecting to all the coffee and bad feelings he’d had up to this point, and he decided to grab a bite to eat on the way back home.

Stopping at a fast-food place was such a risky proposition that he could only use the drive-through windows, if that. The smell was too much for him; there were just too many people in and out, too much rancid cooking grease, too much smell of processed foods and cleaning supplies. It made him vaguely nauseous and sometimes gave him a headache. Of course, reading “Fast Food Nation” had much the same effect, but that was just happy coincidence.

At the drive-through window, he decided to order extra food on the chance that Paris was up and about. Technically the drugs should have kept him down until next Thursday, but the change had pretty wacky effects on your metabolism. For instance, he felt as if doing so much desk work was making him soft and pudgy, but it’d be gone after his next change. You could be twenty-five pounds overweight, but after your time, you’d be ten pounds underweight. He was shocked that no one had advertised being infected as a weight loss plan… but come to think of it, someone probably already had. People were just so fucked up it was incredible.

He hated people who talked on their phones, did their hair, texted their friends, and ate a four-course meal while they were supposed to be driving, but he was so hungry he went ahead and ate his chicken sandwich Infected: Prey

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while driving home. He never took his eyes off the road, though, so he didn’t feel like too much of a hypocrite. The landscape slid by in an almost featureless blur, slowly transforming from concrete gray to grass green as he moved out of the city and deeper into the surrounding countryside.

Everything seemed unchanged at home, the engineless GTO still parked in the drive, the lawn still slightly overgrown and weedy (they didn’t use herbicides or pesticides, mainly because the smell killed him, no matter how minor the concentration), but as soon as he killed the engine, he heard a faint, rhythmic banging coming from around back.

Roan was glad he’d got the extra food, but he was also unaccountably nervous, as he had to figure out how much Paris knew before deciding on how to lie to him. That was always the toughest part about bullshit—

deciding what people were willing to buy. Everyone had a limit, a level that they could accept, but if it was crossed, you were screwed. There really wasn’t much of a talent to lying; it was simply figuring out what people wanted to believe and giving it to them.

The front door was unlocked, so he walked in and wasn’t surprised to see a large plank of plywood where the shattered sliding glass door had been. He waited for a break in the hammering before yelling, “Honey, I’m home.”

Paris stuck his head around the plywood after moving it slightly. It seemed to be only nailed to one side of the doorframe at the moment. Paris had knocked any remaining jagged shards of glass out of the frame, and vacuumed up what had fallen on the carpet. Thank the hardware gods for Shop-Vacs. “Ooh, do I smell food?”

“Yeah yeah, come on, chowhound,” Roan said, shaking his head.

Paris was dressed at least, in khaki cargo shorts (he had his hammer in one of the loops on the right side leg) and a plain blue T-shirt, looking remarkably bright-eyed and alert considering he’d been in a drug coma when Roan had left him.

Paris looked good; far better than should have been allowable without plastic surgery and extensive airbrushing. He had clear blue eyes in a face too finely featured to be rugged, but too masculine to be called pretty. His hair was deep black and seemingly always glossy, like a pelt, although when he’d first met him, Paris’s hair was lank and dull, and his face mostly hidden by a scraggly beard. But even then Roan had found his eyes slightly mesmerizing, glowing with a bit more than simply madness.

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He oozed charisma like some people oozed sweat, and sometimes he seemed so alive it was almost overpowering, almost frightening.

Since he was originally human and not born infected, not a virus child, there was no way the cat could have any influence on the person (or vice versa), but Roan sometimes wondered if tigers were different.

Something about Paris seemed too powerful to be merely human. But maybe it was just his imagination.

Everyone found Paris attractive; he was a secret weapon in getting people to talk. People who would never talk to Roan would be relaxed around Paris, be charmed, and suddenly they’d start telling him things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. While it was true women were best at ferreting out information like that—it was a psychological thing—

apparently a handsome bisexual was the next best thing.

Paris was also five years younger than him, although sometimes he felt like he had twenty years on him. There was no way a guy like Paris would be with a guy like him if he hadn’t met Paris when he was at a personal nadir; Roan didn’t fool himself there. He also figured Paris would leave him eventually, find someone more good-looking (man or woman) and a bit less jaded, but Roan decided to enjoy things while he could.

Roan sat on a stool at the breakfast bar, and Paris came over and joined him, taking the stool beside him. Roan shoved two of the brown paper bags over toward him, because most of the food was for him. (The change gave you a huge appetite on either side of it; that was part of the metabolism wonkiness.) “So where’ve you been?” Paris wondered, pulling out wrapped cheeseburgers and noshing on a fry. “Was there an appointment I missed?”

“It was last minute,” he lied. “Thanks for fixing the window.”

“Oh shit, man, I did that. I should fix it.” He ate a couple more fries, then said nervously, “While I was getting ready to go to the hardware store, I heard there was a… an incident a couple miles from here, and—”

“It was a cougar.”

“What?” His tone of voice was split between disbelief and hope.

This would be an easy sell.

“Sikorski called me in to see if I could help, but it didn’t matter too much. The print guy got a pretty solid paw, and it was a cougar.”

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Paris sighed in obvious relief, his shoulders sagging as the tension fled. “Oh thank God. I thought I killed somebody.”

“Nope.”

Paris bit into his cheeseburger with gusto, even though Roan caught a faint scent of slightly overdone toast, and he saw the bottle of ginger pills on the counter near the toaster. Both the drugs and the change could leave you feeling nauseous, so he always had a bottle of ginger pills in the kitchen—it was a vital part of his (and Paris’s) recovery kit.

There used to be an acupuncturist with a clinic across the way from the office, and he had become good friends with the main practitioner, Mei Ling, who told him that ginger pills would cure nausea faster than anything on the market. He thought that was homeopathic bullshit, but he was actually desperate enough to try it once, and he was shocked to discover she was right; it worked better than Dramamine. Just because of that, he gave acupuncture a shot when his headaches came back, and it actually seemed to help. Mei Ling had to close up shop a couple months ago and move to San Francisco to take care of her aging aunt, which he was sorry about, as he liked her. Sure, her English was a bit broken, but she seemed extremely tolerant, and knew lots of obscure things. He liked people who knew weird things, just because it seemed to hint at some odd inner life.

Before Paris could ask more about the dead man, Roan told him about the Nakamura case. Paris listened intently, although he never stopped eating, and at one point got up to get a soda from the fridge. Paris tossed him a can of decaf tea, and Roan wondered if the fact that he’d had too much caffeine was obvious.

As soon as he was done, Paris took his seat, cracked open his soda, and decided to play devil’s advocate. “This is all supposition, you know.

Maybe he was a bit obsessed with infecteds, but ran off to join the Hare Krishnas.”

“Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Roan replied, playing along.

“The Evangelicals.”

“The Mormons.”

“The Shakers,” Paris insisted, raising his eyebrows in a comic manner.