Bloodbath, Part 10
10 – Breed
Technology was putting private detectives out of business. But at the same time, it was making their lives significantly easier. Case in point: the consequence of sharing too much information online.
Brittney did have a Twitter page, and she filled it with the most mundane things imaginable, often misspelled. But that allowed him to figure out where she was whenever she posted. (He refused, on principal, to call it “tweeting”.) A quick read revealed her to be at the mall, complaining about fashion (he thought – he honestly wasn’t sure; she was complaining about something), and a past read of her Facebook and Twitter page had revealed she favored the Bellevue Mall. So as soon as he read she was bitching about it, Roan rushed there, and hoped he could find her. Sure, he knew what she looked like, but it was a big mall, and she didn’t exactly say what shops she was in.
He got lucky and found her in the food court, texting as she drank a diet soda out of a cup nearly as big as her head. She looked like she weighed all of ninety eight pounds, lost in a thin turquoise dress that could have doubled as lingerie, and a pink leather jacket that barely reached her waist. Her hair was long and dyed to golden blonde, a pair of large black sunglasses perched on her head like an oversized barrette. She wore way too much make up, and seemed to be trying to look thirty, which perplexed him. Didn’t most straight men go for jailbait? So why try and look older, unless you were trying to get into a club?
He sat at her table without asking, and identified himself as she looked at him with an expression that was equal parts bored, sullen, and utterly blank. She interrupted him to say, sounding about two minutes away from a deep sleep, “You’re the guy Jordan’s dad hired, right?”
“That would be me.” He had to wrinkle his nose and hold back a sneeze, as her perfume threatened to both send him into a sneezing fit and trigger a migraine. He couldn’t identify it by scent, but oddly enough, he could smell the trace of chemicals in her bloodstream coming through her pores, in spite of all the warring food smells drifting over the food court. Prozac? An anti-depressant of some kind. Perhaps that explained her air of drugged ennui.
She blinked at him, eyelids smeared with faintly glittery purple eyeshadow like a metallic bruise. “You come with your goons? Darren said you had goons that attacked him.”
“They weren’t goons, they were hockey players.”
“What’s the diff?”
Ouch. “Hey. I’ll have you know Tank Beauvais is perhaps the coolest straight man I have ever known.”
That almost surprised a genuine reaction from her. “You’re gay? You beat up my boyfriend and you’re gay?”
There was a slight sneer to her voice that annoyed him. It seemed to suggest that all gay men were limp wristed hairdressers who would scream and faint if they saw a spider in the bathtub. That irritated him enough to reply, “I didn’t touch him. I didn’t need to, ’cause he collapsed like a Wal-Mart end table. I’m just trying to find out where Jordan ran off to.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. Now leave me alone.” She looked back down at her Blackberry and kept texting.
All the competing smells were annoying him more than she was. His sense of smell often fluctuated, usually due to if it was his “time of the month” or not, but since he no longer had a normal viral cycle, he had no idea why his sense of smell was stronger on some days than others. Probably still a viral load variance, but now inherently unpredictable since he could instigate a change at any time. Sharp odors – perfume, teriyaki, beef tallow, French fries, pepperoni, pho, cinnamon rolls, pretzels, overcooked chicken, icing, coffee, yeast, oatmeal raisin cookies, corn syrup, sered animal fat, garlic, a dozen different perfumes, colognes, hair sprays, gels, conditioners, deodorant, acne cream – all combined to make him alternately hungry and nauseous, with some scents traveling straight up his sinus passages and lodging in his brain like a bullet. He hadn’t taken enough painkillers before he came here, and he desperately wanted to swallow a couple more Vicodin, but not in front of this girl. “What I don’t get is why you’d fuck around on your boyfriend and take pictures of it with your cell.”
Now she looked annoyed. “I haven’t fucked around on Darren.” She considered a moment, frowning, and then said, “Oh, you mean Jordan. I didn’t take those photos, Darren did.”
“With your phone?”
She shrugged. “His battery was dead.”
Oh sure, that made a ton of sense. He rubbed his eyes, trying to will away the nausea. Did he have some Promethazine with him? He was pretty sure he did.
Brittney noticed his struggle, and must have thought it had something to do with her, because she said suddenly and defensively, “Jordan was a creep, you know. I had to change my email several times ’cause he kept hacking into them and reading my emails.”
That made him raise an eyebrow. In spite of the fact that he was being overwhelmed by smells, he knew she wasn’t lying. He hadn’t heard about this side of Jordan before. “He was controlling?”
She gave him a dead eyed stare that was both challenging and disinterested, a sort of bipolar look that only teens and true psychopaths could pull off. “He was a creep. And if he hadn’t run off I’d have dumped his ass. It was sorta flattering at first, but it got old.”
How could abusive behavior be considered flattering? At least he took after dear old dad. “He was good with computers then?”
Again that shrug, that look of bored disaffection. “Guess so. He talked about ‘em a lot, talked about setting up an internet business.”
“What kind of business?”
Another shrug. God, he wanted to throw her diet soda on her just to see if he could startle something genuine out of her. “How the fuck do I know? I didn’t care. Are we done? I have to meet Heaven at Hot Topic in a few minutes.”
“You have no idea where he could have gone?”
Again that starkly bored bipolar look. “No. Are we done?”
He sighed and slumped back in the hard plastic chair, aware that she had given him little worth the trouble of following her Twitter page and running down here. “Yeah, fine.”
She got up and left, not saying anything or giving him a backwards glance. He figured as much. How could she be so jaded so young? He tried to remember if he was. Maybe, or at least he was heading that way.
He decided to buy something to drink so he could have some pills, but while he was waiting in line, his cell vibrated in his coat pocket. A glance at the read out showed it was Gordo calling him, so he decided to go ahead and answer it. Maybe they knew who had tried to frame the cats for the murder. “Yeah?”
“How close are you to downtown?”
Roan was pretty sure he heard sirens in the background. Oh, this wasn’t good. “North or South?”
“North.”
“Pretty damn close.”
“Get to Stewart and 19th ASAP, and maybe you can beat the SWATs. We have a multiple cat incident inside the Arcadia insurance building, with several wounded, deaths unconfirmed, and a number of cats anywhere between three or a dozen – no one inside the building can decide on a number.”
“Oh fuck.” Arcadia. They’d been in the news lately for their underhanded manner in kicking all infecteds off their policies. They couldn’t technically discriminate, so they’d fine little niggling things to get people off their rolls and never pay for anything. They weren’t the only insurance company doing this – in fact, they were all doing it – they were just the most egregious. “How’d they get so many cats in a building?”
“How the fuck do I know, Roan?” Gordo snapped, sounding really pissed off. Not at him, not really, just pissed off at the situation. “Get here if you still have the power to control cats.” Gordo hung up abruptly.
He didn’t have “power” over cats, they were simply afraid of him. But maybe that was considered much the same thing.
Roan got out of line and ran for the exit as soon as he was clear of the crowds. The only way there could be a multiple cat incident in a place like an office building was if it was planned in advance. So basically this was a rampage, but done in animal form. Shit. Why did they have to do this now? People who didn’t already loathe them – a small number – would now.
He avoided as much of the bridge traffic as he could, and managed to reach the Arcadia Building within eight minutes. They had cordoned Stewart and 19th off to incoming traffic, so he parked over on Madison and ran around the corner. The cops had parked their cars on the sidewalk to make a cordon holding pedestrians back, but they also needed to access the scene and let the paramedics through, so there were spaces to let them through, and uniform cops on crowd duty, standing there to keep any unauthorized people from getting through. He didn’t recognize either cop he saw as he shoved through the crowd, but they must have recognized him, as they stood aside and impatiently waved him through, briefly splitting so he could squeeze past them. They weren’t the only ones who recognized him, as some man shouted, “Infecteds suck!” Roan didn’t glance back, he simply held up his middle finger, which earned some ill tempered grumbling and cursing from the crowd. One man had the decency to laugh.
Gordo and Seb were loitering in the shade of an ambulance. “Still making friends and influencing people?” Gordo asked sarcastically.
“People love me. Now what’s the situation?”
“Same as before. Cats loose in the building, an unknown number, but people have separately identified a cougar and a lion. Someone’s suggested an entire pride, but I’m not sure it works like that. Anyways, the lowest reported floor they’ve supposedly been seen on is the fifth, and all floors below have been evacuated. We believe some people maybe have been injured attempting to corral the cats.”
“Morons.”
“SWAT team ETA is seven minutes, so if you wanna try and save any, get to it.” While Gordo was talking, Seb handed Roan a tranquilizer gun, which he took if only to convince the SWAT guys that the cats were no longer a threat. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants as Gordo also handed him a radio. “Stay in touch. We’ll give you a heads up when they ingress.”
Roan nodded, and spun around, tensed, as something impacted the sidewalk behind him. It was a half empty Starbucks cup that spewed cold coffee all over the mica flecked sidewalk in front of the Arcadia Building. Gordo pointed into the crowd, and barked, “Arrest that asshole.”
One of the boys in blue plunged into the crowd, which parted uneasily, as the man who threw it yelled, “You fuckin’ cats are murderers! You should all be drowned!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Gordo snapped. Roan ignored it and headed into the glass fronted tower of Arcadia. Deciding he and Paris weren’t so bad had done wonders for Gordo’s sympathy towards infecteds.
Roan found himself in an eerily empty lobby, where signs of how much fucking money these people made were everywhere, from the marble floor to the mahogany reception desk and the super quiet air conditioning system that always kept the lobby just a couple of degrees above arctic chill. He could smell fear and panic, but it was quickly dissipating in the chilled air, and it was all Human. He smelled that no cats had been in the lobby.
How had they gotten in and where had they hidden? Someone used to be an employee here, or a customer who had been in the building enough to get a solid idea of its layout (perhaps on purpose). They knew where they could go and hide out until the change. And the change took about an hour, give or take a few minutes (not for him, but for everyone else), so they had to be places where no one would go during their change. This was a plan with a lot of “ifs” that shouldn’t have worked with so many cats, and yet it seemed to have worked. Was it an inside job? Did they have a current employee (infected or not) helping them? You’d think they’d have to.
Roan ignored the elevators and found the door to the fire stairs, which was hidden absurdly well. He felt like running, and that’s exactly what he did, pelting up the stairs like he was running a marathon. He barely felt any of the exertion, but when he reached the second floor and started up the third, a bit of a Clash song just floated through his head for no reason at all: “London calling to the imitation zone, forget it brothers, you can go it alone!” Now why had that occurred to him? It was either his subconscious attempting to be funny (or just entertaining), or a precursor to another aneurysm. (The last thing he genuinely remembered before feeling that deep, stabbing pain in his head was a These Arms Are Snakes lyric that just floated into his head for no reason. Either this was his brain’s fucked up way of trying to warn him bad things were a-brewin’ in his blood vessels, or just some random thing, a coincidence. At least it had good musical taste.)
He stopped dead as he smelled blood.
Now that he had stopped he could hear harsh breathing too, echoing in the narrow metal stairwell. It was above him, but not far. “I’m on my way,” he announced. “Can you hear me?”
At first he was sure the guy (it was a guy; you could tell from the blood) was unconscious, but when he was within view of the fourth floor landing, the guy said, gasping and weak, “You shouldn’t go up. I don’t know where they are.”
The man was infected, Roan knew that from the blood too. Panther strain. He was in human form though, splayed on the fourth floor landing, partially slumped against an exit door, bloody scratch marks on his face, arms, and torso, but most of the blood was coming from a neck wound that, while not spurting, was losing blood in copious amounts that couldn’t be healthy for anyone. A puddle had already formed around him, dying his jeans black. His t-shirt was previously black, but it gleamed wetly and clung to his torso like he was a model, except models usually weren’t drenched in blood.
He was an average looking guy in his early twenties, with the only odd thing about him being his strawberry blond hair and hazel eyes, as red hair and hazel eyes was an unusual combination. When his eyes locked on his, Roan thought he saw recognition in them, which was confirmed when he said, “Oh, you’re him.”
Before asking what that was supposed to mean – and his inflectionless, tired voice gave no tells – Roan pulled out his radio, and said, “Got a guy bleeding out on the fourth floor landing of the emergency stairwell. The area’s clear to this point, send in the paramedics.”
“Roger,” Gordo replied.
Roan tucked the radio into his waistband (which was getting crowded at this point, but fuck it), and then covered the throat wound with his hand, putting as much pressure on it as he dared. He should reach into his neck and pinch off whatever vein was leaking out so much blood, but he wasn’t a medical professional and there was a good chance he’d pinch off the wrong damn thing. Also, he would probably cause this guy pain, and he’d undoubtedly been in enough pain. There was blood on the stairs from the fifth floor, suggesting he’d dragged himself to this point or fallen. “Do we know each other?” Roan asked, sure they didn’t.
“No,” the guy confirmed. “But I know you. You’re Roan McKichan.”
He mispronounced his last name, but since he was dying, he let it go. “It’s my day for being recognized. What’s your name?”
“Ben. Ben Sawyer.”
“Well Ben, what happened? How are you the only members of the cat hit squad who didn’t change?”
All he had was his eyes now. His posture was limp, there seemed to be no strength in his body, and most of his face was obscured by blood. But his eyes, as tired as they were, still told him all he needed to know. He saw the denial, but then he saw the surrender, the decision to just tell him the truth. “We weren’t a hit squad.”
“So what were you? You had to know people might die.”
“Not if they weren’t idiots. We had nothing to lose, we’re all as good as dead anyways, and we figured it was time someone noticed what these greedy bastards were doing, letting our people die -”
“By killing some of them? Not smart.”
“No, we just wanted to bring attention to them.” He paused briefly. “You could.”
He ignored that. “What happened to you?”
“I dunno. I was supposed to change like everyone else, but somehow I didn’t. I mean, fuck, I’ve never had a cycle be so short. Why didn’t I change?”
“How long was it?”
“Three days,” he scoffed. “Three fucking days.”
That was the absolute least of a cycle. It didn’t happen a lot, it was rare, but it did occasionally occur. Obviously it did to this poor bastard. “One of your friends attacked you?”
“I thought I could leave without getting noticed, but I shoulda stayed put. It was Brandon, I think, but I don’t blame him for what happened. Shit happens.”
Roan wondered where the EMTs were, but thought he heard noises below them. They probably had trouble finding the door. Roan was kneeling beside him, and felt blood soaking into the knees of his pants even as it ran down his hand. The funny thing was there was so much blood in a person; you really had no idea how much until you had one bleeding to death right in front of you.
Ben stared at him, and Roan could almost see him falling somewhere deep inside his eyes. He wanted to sleep, and Roan knew he couldn’t let him, he had to keep him conscious. He could hear the EMTs pounding up the stairs, but they were taking much longer than Roan had. But to be fair, he wasn’t lugging equipment, and also he wasn’t quite Human. “You should be our leader,” Ben said.
Roan gave him a quizzical look. “Excuse me?”
“We need a leader. Most groups have them, but we don’t. And you’d be perfect.”
“I doubt it.”
“You would. Most normals are afraid of us because of what we could give ‘em. They’re afraid of you ’cause of what you can do to them.” His gaze was steady and strong – he honestly believed what he was saying. But that could have been the blood loss.”You’re dangerous because you remind them they’re just prey.”
Finally the EMTs reached the landing, huffing slightly. “He’s infected,” Roan told them. Both of them, a far too handsome man and a woman built like a fireplug, nodded as they put their kits down. Roan waited until EMT Handsome was ready, and then quickly removed his hand from Ben’s neck wound, where just a bit more blood spilled out before Gorgeous George put his gloved paramedic hand over it. He had a thick gauze pad too, but it would probably last only a few seconds before it was soaked with blood and utterly useless.
Roan stood up, and Ben’s hazel eyes followed him, even as the female paramedic shined a penlight into his eyes and asked him basic response questions. Roan felt bad for the kid, but there was nothing he could do for him now, and he still had friends upstairs. Which reminded him to ask, “How many?”
“Four,” Ben replied, still ignoring the EMTs.
Roan nodded and skirted them, heading for the fifth floor. “You’ve got blood on you,” Paramedic Sexy said. Bizarrely, he had a British accent, which he didn’t expect. But why not? Paramedics could be British. “It’ll draw the cats right to you.”
“Good.” He wanted them to come to him, to leave the Humans alone and respond to their alpha. It might be the only way to save them before the normals killed them all.