Authors: Andrea Speed
So anger and discontent wasn’t hard to imagine; it was
understandable. But mass slaughter? That was an impossible pill to swallow.
They parked a block over from the church in a Safeway parking lot, because a restored and souped-up bright blue metallic ’69 Mustang was a very memorable car (see, if he had a “normal” gay boyfriend, this wouldn’t even be a consideration). If they were going to keep this up for a while, they’d probably have to borrow Randi’s Saturn or get a rental; God knows Eli’s check gave them more than enough cash to even buy some anonymous piece-of-crap car just for these kinds of situations. But as Paris would surely point out, what was the fun of a normal piece-of-crap car when you could have an unusual piece-of-crap car?
The church was a typical one. Not a converted house like Divine Transformation, this was a “proper” one: small, with a starkly peaked roof leading up to a steeple, the lawn neatly scalped, with an old-fashioned wooden sign that hadn’t even been graffiti-tagged yet (or if it had, it had been cleaned up well). It looked like the kind of church you’d see in a Infected: Prey
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Currier and Ives Christmas card, only there it would be frosted with snow and have a horse-drawn carriage out front. Lights inside made the leaded windows glow, and the small parking lot off to the right side of the complex looked reasonably full.
Churches always made him feel strange. They were places for other people, places where people were married and buried, places where he was an odd and unwelcome guest. He couldn’t walk into one without immediately wondering when he was going to be thrown out. There were few places where his alienation became so acute it was almost a physical pain, but churches were at the top of that small list. He didn’t get them, and no one who went to one ever seemed to want anything to do with him.
People’s devotion to them would always remain an abstract puzzle for him.
They paused, and Roan took a deep breath. “Ready to go into the lion’s den?”
They were standing a regulation six inches apart so they couldn’t even accidentally touch, although when Par looked at him, it was with a wry, weary affection. They were alone out here, so it was okay. “I wish it was a lion’s den. I’d feel more comfortable.”
Actually, come to think of it, so would he. But if they wanted to learn anything about Humanity First, they had to see it for themselves.
Hearsay was nothing next to witnessing it for yourself.
“Cowards die a thousand times,” Roan replied, going to the second to last refuge of scoundrels, the cliché. “Brave men only once.”
Paris stared at him, raising an eyebrow. “You suck as a motivational speaker.”
He could only shrug. “I’m more accustomed to discouraging.”
Paris shook his head and started toward the front door of the church.
“See if I ever take you to a Leafs game again,” he muttered.
He laughed, he couldn’t help it, but it felt good and was probably necessary anyway.
The real tension was just about to begin.
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4
Cry for a Shadow
THE church’s rec room was a sizable, perfectly rectangular room that reminded him a bit of a basement apartment, only with dimensions too small to live in. (A New York basement apartment?) The walls, unlike the rest of the church, were cool, industrial drywall that was supposed to be white but was really an off-cream color now bleeding toward sickly gray.
The floor was concrete, but they’d tried to soften it with threadbare industrial carpeting of gold-flecked brown that was so unattractive if you blurred your vision and looked at it, you could almost believe someone had vomited all over the floor. There were two dozen metal folding chairs set up facing a small, impromptu dais, and a folding table in the back of the room holding a large metal coffee urn, plates of stale cookies, and neat rows of Styrofoam cups. It looked like a room where an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting might happen, and judging from the pin-ups tacked to a corkboard, that happened every Friday night. The Narcotics Anonymous meetings were on Wednesday.
A little over a dozen chairs were already taken, so he and Paris took chairs in the very back row near the snack table. Unpleasantly harsh florescent lights buzzed overhead like angry insects, and he was glad he’d brought his coat, as there seemed to be a chill breeze, although it was perfectly unclear where it was coming from. The strong coffee scent almost covered up the sharp, lingering smell of carpet glue.
Paris slumped down in his chair and put his feet up on the back of the empty chair in front of him—rude, but a very straight male thing to do (God, he was good at this; perhaps being bi helped.)—and chewed gum nosily as Roan scanned the existing crowd. They all seemed to be in their twenties and thirties, white males (with the exception of a single woman on the far left), the perfect demographic for frustrated violence. But they also looked very normal, the guys you might wait in line at the supermarket with, the guys you would pass on the street without a second Infected: Prey
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glance; no one looked like an extra from
The Road Warrior
or a foaming at the mouth Jerry Springer guest (except that guy in the front row with the buzz cut—he had a swastika tattoo on his exposed right bicep, only it had the unsure construction and spidery black lines of a prison tattoo).
A couple more people came in, and at five-thirty-six, a pale man with prematurely graying hair and small square glasses came in, wearing a blue cable-knit sweater and chinos and holding a sheaf of papers to his chest like a prized object. Just his wardrobe and demeanor marked him as a speaker, not a crowd member. God, he looked like the middle manager of a paper company in Slough on casual day.
At the dais, he made a show of neatening papers that were already neat, and cleared his throat before speaking in a voice that managed to be soft and loud at once; the consonants timorous, and yet full enough to fill the enclosed space. He introduced himself as Tim and welcomed them all—not counting Paris and Roan, there were nineteen people here—and much like a group therapy counseling session, asked if there was anyone who had a story they would like to share about “encounters with infecteds.” Roan felt like crossing his arms, but since that could be interpreted as a defensive or hostile gesture, he didn’t.
It was the woman who stood up first, and really, that didn’t surprise him. She was a medium-sized, stout woman with stringy brown hair the color of mud and surprisingly bony hands, her face a knife blade of anger and pain. Something haunted her and twisted her, something that made her look about fifteen years older than she actually was.
In a voice that grew more strident as the tale went on, she told the story of her daughter, whom she said was “preyed upon” by “fucking cats”
(she never said cats without the “fucking” modifier first), who convinced her that being infected was a good thing, and infected her. She didn’t survive her first transformation, and this woman felt it was murder, but the cops said if her daughter voluntarily sought to get infected there really wasn’t anything they could do. Even if they figured out who infected her, it wasn’t assault because she had sought it out. (If you infected someone without their knowledge, that was legally considered assault, unless you had the tiger strain, then it was considered attempted murder.) Her growing rage seemed to galvanize the crowd, bringing them together in a way they hadn’t been.
Roan felt bad for her; it was an awful thing that had happened, and her grief had not only aged her but warped her, turning her into this 206
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jagged, fragile person who clung to hate in lieu of hope. She was probably the most dangerous person in this room, although he was certain only he and she knew that.
People started speaking up after her, with the lamest complaint being a cat damaging one man’s property and the insurance company raising his rates because of it, and one of the most harrowing being the neo-Nazi in the front admitting that he came upon a cat gnawing on his girlfriend’s younger brother (the boy lost his arm).
In the cacophony of people talking over one another, Paris added with convincing anger, “One of those damn cats deliberately infected my roommate in college just to get revenge on the guy who infected her. He went fucking nuts and no one’s seen him since.” It was a change to the backstory—which only mattered on a consistency level because they’d told no one their stories yet—but Roan fought to keep his expression neutral, his posture and feelings a studious blank.
The anger was convincing because the anger was genuine; Paris had been talking about himself in the third person. Paris did seem to split his life into two halves, before infection and after, and sometimes he talked about his “then” self as if that was indeed a different person. He was. In Paris’s own words, “that Paris” was selfish and pleasure-obsessed, vain and extremely manipulative, something he couldn’t quite imagine this quick-witted, sweet, frustrating man being (okay, the manipulative part tracked, yet he tried to use that only for good). But Roan sometimes wondered if Paris still mourned everything he had lost. How could he not?
He wanted to sympathize, and he tried very hard, but Roan knew he could only do it in a sort of abstract way, as he’d never lost himself. He was born with this disease; he didn’t know life without it. But Paris did; Paris had had a good life, an enjoyable one. He had been popular and loved and a golden boy, one destined for great things even though he was probably going to fuck and manipulate his way there; his life was set. Then he was infected, and his life imploded. Roan was born in rubble and grew up in the craters; he didn’t know what it meant to have a home, a life beyond this. It must have been devastating to have something to lose and then lose it all in one fell swoop.
He wanted to touch him, just put a hand on his back and let him know that he understood his pain even if he couldn’t quite share it, but he didn’t dare; he couldn’t here. So he allowed himself to cross his arms over his chest and slumped slightly to the opposite side, adopting a posture of Infected: Prey
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impatience and boredom. If he couldn’t communicate anything to Paris, he could at least send out a message to the room.
Tim managed to get control of the group, and started to explain that Humanity First was trying to channel this “discontent” (ha!) into action on the political stage; they felt that the infected were not getting equal rights but “special” rights, ones that allowed them to terrorize and kill normal people with little fear of punishment. Paris leaned over and whispered so quietly Roan could barely hear him over the muttering of the crowd,
“Those fucking cats want to get married and not get fired ’cause they’re trans-species abominations… or am I thinking of gays? Which ones are the butt fuckers again?”
Roan covered his mouth with his hand, pretending to scratch his jaw, and bit the inside of his cheek until the urge to laugh passed as Paris offered him a stick of gum, a lame cover for him being so close to him, but Tim was holding the room and no one noticed. Roan took the proffered gum, and murmured under his breath, “I can’t take you anywhere.”
Looking at him directly so no one else could see him, Paris mouthed,
“You love it and you know it,” and raised his eyebrows in a mock-suggestive manner before slumping back in his chair and assuming a blank, almost surly look on his face. Paris was such a natural actor it was frightening—but which part was the act? He chewed the gum and wondered.
Tim started handing out pamphlets that looked hand-stapled and seemed to be the Humanity First manifesto, although cleaned up a bit, not so rabidly zealous. The ready-for-prime-time version. But Tim was saying that they were always looking for volunteers to be more “proactive in their communities” and had a sign-up sheet up front for those interested. He exchanged a glance with Paris to make sure they were on the same wavelength—they were—and waited until almost everyone else in the room was standing before they got up as well.
Roan waited until almost everyone else who was going to sign up did; this included Paris, who even managed a brief chat with the neo-Nazi.
How did he do it? Seriously, how? Roan had an almost
unquenchable urge to sucker punch anyone who had a racist tattoo; he just wanted to smash their heads into walls until they left dents. There were so many good reasons for hating people on an individual basis that mass, generic hatred seemed idiotic. Hate a person for who they were, God 208
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knows he did, but for what they were? Moronic and lazy.
As Roan printed his fake name and address (he gave the address of his old apartment building, but his current cell phone number), he scanned and memorized the names and phone numbers of the other people on the list (he skipped “Kevin Stiles”; he’d given Randi’s address as his own), making a note to get the only female name on the list. Her name was Karen Hammond.
It was unlikely anyone in this room had committed violence against infecteds or would, but the most likely person to do something was Karen.
Yes, she was a woman in her late thirties to early forties—it was hard to guess her age, considering how weathered her face was—and demographically not the most likely to commit violence. But what the demographics never included was how rage and the need for revenge—not a desire, a
need
, a physical ache that begged to be sated—could push the most timid person over the edge. Karen radiated rage like a low-level electrical current; she hated because she didn’t dare feel anything else. It was almost a smell, something like flop sweat, sour adrenaline, and slagged metal. Killing some dirty cat would probably dull her pain, but not for long; there might not be enough people for her to kill to make her feel even remotely better. He felt for her, he really did, but he also knew that she was a potential suspect.
He waited until they had left and turned the corner away from the church before pulling out his small notebook and scribbling down the names he could remember. Unless you had perfectly eidetic recall, your memories were bound to screw things up the more time passed.