5 - Bad Sects

Roan had grabbed the gun barrel hidden in the man’s windbreaker pocket, just as the guy pulled the trigger, but the odd thing was he didn’t realize it. It was an unconscious reflex, one that had reacted to the danger faster than he ever could have consciously.

Roan had shoved the barrel aside as the gun went off, and he felt a deep pain in his hand like a wasp sting, hot and sharp, while he heard the sound of glass breaking somehow over the ringing in his ears, as well as the sound of someone’s startled yelp on the sidewalk behind him.

He was within kissing distance of this guy now, and noted he couldn’t have been older than twenty five, his short black hair greasy, as if he hadn’t washed it in a week, his face cratered and pockmarked with old acne scars and angry red bursts of more recent acne still blooming on his cheeks. His eyes were an uncomplicated blue, and as empty as a bar after two in the morning. He was quite plain, and even with some Photoshopping, he’d never be a handsome man. Or a sane one.

The man pulled the trigger again, but by this time Roan had the gun aimed away, and he was vaguely aware of a dull metal noise as the bullet slammed into a parked car by the curb. Roan had dropped his phone, dimly aware that Murphy was still talking, and drove a fist into the kid’s stomach, so hard that he doubled over and all the air seemed to leave him in a rush. He grabbed the kid’s greasy head and drove a knee hard into his face; Roan heard something crack, and then felt warm blood gush down his leg.

He threw the kid on the sidewalk and ripped his hand out of his pocket, pulling out the gun as well. The kid started to move, but Roan kicked him in the stomach, making him gag. “Don’t even think about moving, motherfucker, or I’ll stomp you into a fucking stain.” Roan retrieved his phone, which somehow hadn’t shattered and was still working, and as he brought it up to his ear, Murphy was still talking. “- ere? Roan?”

“I’m here.”

“Did I just hear gunshots?”

“Yeah. One of the cat cultists just tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“Traitor!” the kid screamed hoarsely from the sidewalk. He was still curled up in a fetal position, looking up at him with accusing eyes, but his eyes were fixed on his piece of shit Saturday Night Special, which Roan was now holding on him. “You will die in agony just like your faggot boyf -” That was as far as he got before Roan kicked him in the face. He didn’t know if it knocked him unconscious or just stunned him, but he shut the fuck up.

“Holy shit, I’m calling it in,” Murphy said. “Where are you? Are you hurt?”

He reeled off the address, and only then noticed that his right hand - the one holding the Saturday Night Special - was bleeding like a stuck pig, splattering his blood all over the sidewalk. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized it was numb, but he could move all his fingers and still had a hold of the gun, so he must have been kind of okay. “He needs an ambulance more than me, but I think he nicked my hand.”

“Nicked it? As in with a bullet?”

“Yeah.”

“Roan, oh my god, were those gunshots?” Dylan asked, exploding out of the apartment building. He was still barefoot, but had shrugged on a grey sweatshirt. He just stared at the tableau in front of him for a moment - the guy curled up on the sidewalk in a small puddle of blood, the blood gushing from Roan’s hand and the gun in it - and seemed to understand that yes, he had indeed heard gunshots. “Fuck. Were you shot? Is he shot?”

“No one’s shot,” he assured him. “Except a car. Which doesn’t count.”

A slender, bald black woman wearing wore jeans and a paint splattered t-shirt advertising a Dykes With Bikes rally came out of the apartment building and asked, “Dylan, what the hell was that noise?”

Dylan nodded at them, and Roan smiled at her. “Hi. Sorry, this guy just tried to kill me.”

She stared at him with wide brown eyes. “Are you shitting me?” She glanced at Dylan, and he shook his head no, he wasn’t shitting anyone. Dylan then said, “De’Andra, this is my boyfriend Roan. Roan, De’Andra.”

Roan nodded to her, keeping his phony smile pasted on. “Nice to meet you. I’m not usually beating down a punk ass bitch.”

The kid spit out a mouthful of blood and a tooth, and ground out in a raspy voice, “Traitor. Fucking race traitor.”

“Race traitor?” De’Andra repeated.

“We’re both infected,” Roan explained. “Only he’s a religious nut bag.”

They could all hear police sirens approaching, and presumably an ambulance as well. “This isn’t over,” the kid gurgled, staring up at him balefully with one eye. The other was facing the sidewalk.

“You’re right, it’s not,” Roan agreed.

“You’re gonna die, you arrogant fuckhead -”

“Shut the fuck up, pendejo!” Dylan exclaimed angrily, walking over and kicking him in the back. Of course he was still barefoot so it didn’t have a great deal of impact, but it was more symbolic than anything else. They exchanged a glance over the kid’s body, Dylan’s eyes sad, apologetic, asking for forgiveness. Roan felt bad, not sure why he was angry at him. Oh yeah, that painting. Why did it piss him off so much again? Damn, he still didn’t have a hold of it. Rather than give him much of anything, he crouched down, and asked the kid, “Who do you work for? Heather or David?” Those were the two still fighting for the leadership of the Church of the Divine Transformation: Heather Dow, Eli’s last girlfriend, and David Harvey, a former assistant of Eli’s.

The kid spit blood at him. It mostly missed. “Go fuck yourself.”

Finally a police car screamed up to the curb, just behind the car that got shot (the bullet had taken out the passenger side window), and a couple of cops got out. One of them, a young guy whose brush cut hair was almost totally hidden beneath his cop cap, pulled out his gun and shouted, “Drop the weapon!”

“Holster it, Tim, this is McKichan,” the other cop, Stephen Kwan, snapped. Kwan was a fairly tall, broad shouldered Asian man with a raw boned face and a cynical attitude he wore like a lead cloak. Unlike his young partner “Tim”, he was wearing his bulletproof vest.

Tim seemed reluctant to do it, but had to comply as Kwan wandered into his line of fire. “I take it this is the guy who attacked you?” Kwan asked, although it almost wasn’t a question.

“This is him. This is also his gun. You might want to put on your gloves before you take it from me.”

Kwan looked at his bleeding hand carefully, pulling out latex gloves from a pocket and snapping them on. “Yeah, I see that. He bite you or somethin‘?”

“Nicked it.”

Kwan raised an eyebrow as thick and black as a permanent marker line. “Another slug? Wow, Roan, you swallow a magnet?”

“It’s starting to feel like it.”

“Don’t touch me you fucking pigs!” the kid shouted hoarsely, as Kwan took the gun from Roan’s hand. Kwan snickered. “That’s right, guy, butter us up. That’ll look good on your record.”

“Be careful,” Roan warned them. “He’s infected.”

“Well shit,” Kwan sighed. “Tim, read him his rights, but first … Roan, can you ..?”

“Yeah, sure.” Roan stepped over the kid and turned him over, so he was face down on the sidewalk. Roan knelt on him, putting his knee on the small of his back and pinning him down, dropping his cell phone back in his pocket. He struggled, but Roan grabbed his arms as he cursed and spat, and held them so Tim could slip the plastic ties on him as he mechanically recited the kid’s Miranda rights.

An ambulance pulled up screaming to the curb, and it looked familiar. Indeed, Shep, Dee’s EMT partner, hopped out of the back as the doors opened, but Dee didn’t come out after him. No, this time he was accompanied by a reasonably muscular Latina woman with her hair cut in an unflattering bob. Her face was too round to carry it off. “I knew it,” Shep drawled, his voice still carrying a trace of a Southern accent. “Shooting in broad daylight, you’re involved. I must be psychic.”

As the woman started towards him and the kid, he said warningly, “We’re infected.”

She paused, then shrugged, continuing onward. “That’s what the gloves are for.”

“You make any aggressive moves, and I’ll taser your ass,” Kwan threatened the kid, pulling out his taser and showing it to him. “In fact, I might just do it for fun. Call me a pig again.”

The kid sunk into a sulky silence. Kwan wasn’t bluffing, and they all knew it.

Shep motioned Roan over to the ambulance rig, and he went, dimly aware that Dylan was following him. Roan sat on the back bumper as Shep cleaned off his hand with bottled water to look at the wound. It turned out it wasn’t a nick - there was a hole in the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, about the size and shape of a pencil hole, the flesh around it flash burned by the powder. Dylan, who sat on the bumper beside him, out of Shep’s working area, gasped upon seeing it. “Holy shit! That must hurt.”

He shook his head. “It’s numb.”

“Shock,” Shep said, carefully examining the wound, judging what it needed. “Sometimes after bodily trauma, you feel nothing. For up to an hour. Then it starts hurtin’ like a motherfucker.”

“Where’s Dee? You two not working together anymore?”

Shep looked at him from beneath his bushy blond eyebrows. He was a rangy guy, but solid, not too skinny, and reasonably good looking, with brownish-blond hair and grey-blue eyes, good looking enough that Dee often remarked it was a tragedy he was straight and married. For his part, Shep thought that was funny, which is probably why they’d been able to work together all these years. “You don’t know? He’s on sick leave. Lupe’s filling in for him.”

“Sick leave? I didn’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a while, though. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Naw, just the flu. We got exposed to it a couple weeks back when we picked up this lady that collapsed in her home. I didn’t get it, but he did. Them’s the breaks, I guess. I think I’m gonna wanna take you in for this, Roan. It’s too small technically for stitches, but there’s no way it’ll close on its own in anything less than a few months. They can use some surgical glue to shut it.”

Taking him in meant taking him to the hospital, but Roan was already shaking his head. “Just pack it with gauze. I’ll be okay.”

Shep raised an eyebrow at this, and Dylan said, “Hon, now’s not the time to be macho. You were shot in the hand.”

“I have surgical glue at home in one of the emergency kits,” he said, and Dylan gave him a look like he knew he was lying. “It’s gonna save me a couple hundred dollars in medical bills if I do it myself. Believe me, I know how to do it. I’ve been infected all my life, and under siege for about half of it.”

Dylan seemed to concede the point, although again it seemed he knew he was lying. Maybe this was his way of asking forgiveness, by forgiving him for being such an asshole. It was a very Buddhist way of thinking … well, as far as Roan understood it. Maybe it was just Dylan being generous.

Shep snorted in disbelief. “I’m gonna hafta record you as leaving against advice. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“You know what Dee’s gonna do to you when he hears about this?”

Roan sighed and nodded. “I’ll batten down my hatches.”

Dylan slipped his hand inside his good hand, fingers entwining with his and giving him an encouraging squeeze. Why was he mad at him again?

“I think this guy needs a dentist more than a hospital,” Lupe, the fill in paramedic, reported. She’d shoved a small twist of gauze up inside each of the boy’s nostrils, and they were already turning red. “Looks like he took a puck in the face.”

“He attacked me,” the boy shouted, blood drooling down his chin.

Shep scoffed. “Sunny Jim, he has a hand wound. Any numb nut who’s seen an episode of CSI knows hand wounds are generally defensive wounds. Try that again.” Shep prepped a needle and injected him in the palm of his hand. Roan knew it was a painkiller and was secretly thrilled, but he also knew it was probably just a localized one akin to Novocain, nothing he’d feel beyond the wrist. Shep then attached sterile cotton balls on both ends of the wound (blood made them stick), and started wrapping his hand with sterile gauze. Blood was starting to seep through already.

Kwan hauled the boy up to his feet by his plastic tie cuffs, and asked, “What’s your name?”

“I wanna lawyer,” the kid replied, still sullen. Kwan was patting down his coat, reaching into his jeans pocket, and the kid tried to squirm away, exclaiming in disgust, “Fuck, you’re a butt pirate too?”

“I’m lookin’ for your wallet, asshole. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I patted him down,” Tim said nervously. “I didn’t feel a wallet.”

“You gonna give me a name, or do I call you Dickwad all the way to the station?” Kwan asked. The funny thing about Kwan was he seemed to be in a perpetually bad mood. He’d been on the force for twelve years, and you’d think maybe he was bitter and burned out by the job, but oh no - he was always like this. He was born a grumpy bastard, and he would probably die a grumpy bastard, outliving them all and dying at the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty two. Everybody knew the grumpy, sour bastards lived longer than anyone. But besides that, he was a remarkably fair cop.

The boy seemed to think about it for a moment, then muttered, “Rollo Tomasi.”

Kwan scowled, and looked at all of them. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“It was a name used in L.A. Confidential,” Roan told him. Another team arrived, this one to secure the scene and collect forensic evidence. Not that there was must to collect - just blood splatters, maybe the bullet that took out the car window.

“Oh hey, so you’re a highbrow punk ass bitch, huh?” Kwan said to the boy, getting uncomfortably close to his face. That was just a favorite interrogation technique of Kwan’s, invading a person’s personal space, and it worked fairly well. No one liked a cop breathing down your neck. “They’re gonna love you in lock up. C’mon dickwad, move your ass.” He started shoving him towards the patrol car, and Tim moved ahead to open the rear door. Kwan shoved the kid’s head down perhaps more brusquely than necessary, and all but threw him in the backseat, Tim slamming the door on him so fast it almost caught the kid’s foot.

“You know what this was about?” Kwan asked, turning towards him. His eyes seemed to catch Dylan holding his hand, but his eyes remained impassive as they flicked back up to his face.

“He works for someone within the Church of Divine Transformation. They’ve been threatening me for a couple weeks now, ever since it got around that Eli left me his computer.”

“It’s a computer. Big fucking deal.”

“The hard drive has dirt on all the members prior to Eli’s death. And I mean quality blackmail material.”

He grunted in dark amusement. “Someone fucks a sheep, and ‘cause you know, you’re a dead man?”

“They want it back. Either to destroy it or keep others in line. Probably the latter more than the former. Knowledge is power.”

He shook his head and looked back at the squad car. “Violent religious fanatics give me the willies. What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

Roan shrugged. He’d been asking himself that ever since his brief stint in the foster home of a devoutly religious couple who saw his infection as demonic possession and tried to have him exorcised. “Everyone needs to believe in something, even if it is totally bugfuck nuts.”

“You don’t believe in that shit?” he asked, referring to the kitty cult.

“Fuck no. I believe in entropy. That makes everything else irrelevant.”

“Wow, that’s really nihilistic. Congrats.” Kwan turned back towards the cop car and told Tim, “Let’s roll.” He paused by the driver’s side door and pointed back at him. “Know the drill?”

“As soon as I’m patched up, I’ll come down to the station and make a statement.”

“There you go.” He got in the squad car and drove away without a second glance.

As soon as he was gone, Dylan turned to him and asked, “Why do I have a feeling that kid was lucky not to have gotten the full Rodney King?”

Shep snorted a laugh as he wrapped medical tape tightly around the gauze, making a semi-tourniquet in an attempt to staunch the blood flow. Roan shrugged his good shoulder. “Eh, Steve’s not that bad. He just seems unpleasant.”

“Seems or actually is?”

“Little of both. Depends on the day.”

As soon as Shep was done, he gave him the spiel about keeping his fluid levels up - oh joy, more Gatorade in his future. People only drank it because they had to; Roan was positive no one drank it because they wanted to - and told him the common sense stuff that no one should have to be told, such as if bleeding continues or his hand goes numb and he can’t move his fingers, he should report to the hospital immediately, yada yada yada. He thanked him and got up, pretending he didn’t get a bit of a head rush just doing that. Dylan stood with him. He let go of his hand, but kept a hand on his arm, in case Roan needed the help. He would have resented it if it wasn’t simply done out of kindness.

He managed to convince Dylan he’d be okay while he went back up to his apartment and got his shoes and coat on, and while Dylan was gone, Roan found his car and dug out the bottle of Tylenol-codeine in the glove compartment, popping three tablets and washing them down with a bottle of water stashed beneath his seat. He knew once he could get home, he could partially transform and heal some of the tissue damage. Maybe not all, but enough to make it a minor thing. He just didn’t know when he’d have the chance.

Dylan insisted on coming to the station with him, and when he saw he was driving, he indignantly shoved him over into the passenger seat and did the driving. Roan was fine with that, mainly because his bandaged hand was as insensate as a frozen hamburger, and the codeine was starting to kick in, a warmth spreading from his gut outward. The good part here was he didn’t have to hide being stoned, as Dylan didn’t know that Shep had only given him a localized painkiller.

Things were chaotic as usual at the station, and as such he was not the star of the freak show, just a minor player, and he was actually grateful for that. During all the formalities of giving his statement, he overheard Kwan talking to a cop he didn’t recognize. The kid who shot him had been identified, as he was in the system - he’d been processed several times as a juvenile for petty shit, mainly vandalism and drunk and disorderly: Nolan Morse. (What a name. He might have decided to become homicidal if that was his name too.)

Now he could figure out who wanted him dead, the Dow sect or the Harvey sect. Whoever Morse was attached to was the motherfucker who’d been phoning in death threats. Now, all he had to do was figure out who Nolan was working for.

Once he was done giving his statement, he excused himself to use the bathroom, and ducked into an empty hallway to make a call. He punched up the number of Rainbow’s Aunt, and left a message for Rainbow, asking her if she knew or could find out whose side a church member named Nolan Morse was on. He didn’t say why, because Rainbow knew better than to ask, and he knew she could find out, because even those in the church who didn’t like her (very few) saw her as completely harmless. She was one of those hippie-ish “earth mother” types who never wanted to hurt anyone. But the world was an awful place, and sometimes bastards - like him - would use that to their advantage.

He then went to the bathroom and discovered that his bandage was starting to soak through. It hadn’t done so all the way, but there was a deep red splotch starting to bloom beneath the snowy white bandages. He knew all he needed to do was go home, but would he be able to convince Dylan of that?

As it was, he managed. The drugs were really kicking in now; he was tired and almost nodding off on the drive home. Dylan was concerned, thought he should take him to the hospital, but he assured him he could take care of it at home. Roan went upstairs, but convinced Dylan he would be willing to drink some of his “special” green tea, which Roan was fairly certain was made from a heretofore undiscovered kind of straw, so Dylan stayed downstairs for the moment. Roan ducked into his bedroom and hid in the bathroom, where he braced himself before punching the bathroom counter with his injured hand.

The drugs Shep had injected into his palm and the codeine conspired to keep the pain from reaching his brain, but he broke the bandages and tape open, causing blood to spurt out, and finally the right synapses started firing. He concentrated on it, focusing on the pain, forcing the change. He watched the bones in his hand shift beneath his skin like it was flimsy paper, the muscles twisting and warping, but it was easy to shut off the change. He thought it was the drugs, but he didn’t know for sure. The hole was no longer all the way through his hand, but the skin was still torn on both sides, suggesting he hadn’t held onto the change long enough, and the pain in his hand was now molten. But it was good enough, so he stripped off the bandages and threw them away, ransacking his own medicine cabinet to find some gauze. He wrapped it around his hand, but couldn’t duplicate what Shep had done. He just had to hope Dylan didn’t notice right away.

Dylan came in as he came out of the bathroom, holding a cup of tea that smelled faintly of fruit and burnt hay. “Is everything okay?”

“Considering,” he lied, stripping off his shirt and only just then noticing he had blood on it. God, he was tired. Was the room starting to spin a bit?

Roan managed to collapse on his bed as Dylan continued to stare at him in concerned disbelief. Roan wondered what he was going to do when Dylan called him on his shit.