Land of the Blind, Part 16
16 – Fame > Infamy
Honestly, Holden felt sorry Dylan.
Not that he’d ever admit that, it would probably piss him off (well, as much as a dedicated Buddhist could be pissed off at anyone). But he seemed too peace loving to be in Roan’s violent life, too dedicated to harmony to be attached to the bucket of chaos and crazy that was Roan. And he meant that as a compliment – good crazy was hard to find. Although sometimes you still needed a vacation from it.
And oh boy, did Dylan need a vacation. So did Roan, probably, but he couldn’t take a vacation from himself no matter how many pills he took, although that didn’t stop him from trying. Opposites did seem to attract sometimes, that was true, so that’s probably how he and Roan ended up together, Dylan being the peace Roan wanted to achieve, but it wouldn’t work. Roan was a romantic, despite how cynical he seemed (why else was he into serial monogamy?) and he would stick with this kid as long as he could, but he was going to burn him out. He wouldn’t mean to, he’d hate himself forever for hurting Dylan, but he would. It was impossible to stand on the sidelines of Roan’s car crash life and not get hit by flying debris. Dylan must have been something of a romantic himself since he stayed with him, and must have known how bad Roan was for him. But Dylan struck him as the stubborn type; he wouldn’t give up so easily, even when he should. It was a fitting epitaph.
Although he understood Roan’s angst on one level, on another he didn’t. Being Human was overrated; Humans were selfish, venal, and generally horrible to one another. His advice to Roan would simply be become the lion and stop worrying about it so much. Surround himself with loyalists who will make sure he doesn’t end up in a zoo, and embrace the big cat lifestyle. There wasn’t much to miss about humanity, or at least not as far as Holden could tell. He was pretty sure Roan would agree with him there. But …
It was probably the romantic thing again, holding him back. He still had to believe somewhere in his brain that Humans weren’t necessarily all that bad. Holden blamed Paris for that; if Paris hadn’t proved to be such a sexy firecracker, he wouldn’t be trying to hang on so desperately to a humanity that could only betray him.
Holden was aware this was his own cynicism showing. Also probably some wish fulfillment on his part, as he would love to be able to just turn into a big cat and be done with people forever, except as snacks. It wasn’t that he didn’t know he had a dark side, because of course he did; he’d been a street kid, and he did lots of things that could be considered unsavory, and for fuck’s sake, he was a hooker. But working with Roan had taught him many unflattering things about himself, had cued him into things he supposed he could have guessed, but hadn’t really known. He could kill, for instance, and it wouldn’t bother him much. Oh sure, those guys deserved it, so why would it bother him? But just the idea of it wasn’t pleasant. He was every sin his father preached against (while his father went ahead and committed others). Maybe that’s why he was kind of proud of it too.
He played good host, he offered Dylan a drink, but Dylan was content to be as stiff and fragile as a board doused in liquid nitrogen. So Holden left him there as he went into his bedroom to change. He wasn’t sure how to dress. Was he going to pretend to be Roan? Well, that would never work, for several reasons. The main one – the big one – was they didn’t look anything alike. They were both white guys, but that was pretty much where it ended; Roan was technically even paler than him, as he seemed to stay out of the sun as much as possible, and on top of that he was a redhead. Even their body shapes were incompatible – he had broader shoulders, he was healthy farm boy stock, while Roan was built more for speed. Maybe that was part of the reason why his reflexes were so good. (That and the fact that he was superhuman. More Human than Human?)
Still, Roan was a pretty simple wardrobe to grasp: weird t-shirt, jeans (never designer, never tight), and a funky coat. (Roan had no real fashion sense, except when it came to coats. He had great coats. It was like the one place where his true gayness came through, in his elegant, swoopy coats.) He thought he had a pretty nifty leather jacket, although his t-shirts probably weren’t as hip as Roan’s. Smutty, sure, but Roan rarely went for smutty. He sifted through his clean shirts, and finally found one with a giraffe on it (why a giraffe? Why not?) and it seemed funky enough to suit his purposes. He wasn’t going to be Roan, he couldn’t be Roan, but he could be a sort of analogue.
He went into the bathroom, mainly because he had to pee, but he found himself looking at himself in the mirror, which he had promised himself he wouldn’t do. But under the harsh fluorescents he got to see the hues spreading across his face, all the colors of the rainbow that a bruise or a contusion could mimic: purple, maroon, yellow, green, brown, even something akin to a low saturation blue. He scowled seeing it, but not because it marred his pretty face. His face had never been pretty; he had always been told he wasn’t beautiful, but was interesting all the same, which he supposed was some sort of odd compliment – not ugly, not pretty, but not plain. Neither Dylan with his dark eyed, swarthy handsomeness, or Roan with his strangely feline – damn it, it was – strikingness, but some sort of oddity out in his own orbit. Pluto to their Jupiter and Saturn, he supposed, something people argued over categorizing. No, he hated seeing it because it was like “Victim” was plastered all over his face, written on his forehead in blood and lipstick for all to see. He was not a victim, he was never a victim, no matter what was done to him, and it filled him with a sudden fury that made him long to start breaking things. But no, he had to collar it, stifle it, get it under control. Because if he lost control, didn’t they win?
Besides, he knew that he had done them all worse by sending Roan after them. He wasn’t an attack dog – sorry, lion, which was a million times better – but something about animal rage and Human logic combined promised you a weapon that few could deal with. In fact, it made him wonder anew if any of those internet conspiracy theories about the cat viruses were true. The most likely of all of them was some sort of genetic modification gone awry, but for what purpose? Gene therapy? Again, the most likely, but some people insisted the government (any government; didn’t really matter which one) were trying to find that new and improved soldier, like they did in every bad action film. Didn’t seem likely they’d look at the animal kingdom for that, certainly not the cat family (wouldn’t gorilla be better?) and yet, after seeing Roan in action, after hearing what he did to Garver and his fucking cop butt monkeys, he wondered if maybe someone had figured out the master plan after all. It was just so insane it was hard to believe. But he had some proof, didn’t he? Roan was a one man destruction squad. He didn’t want to be, he couldn’t always control it, but fuck if he didn’t bring that snuff house down. Holden hadn’t really needed to be there – all those men and all those guns still equaled a fight they couldn’t win and several messy deaths. The only thing Holden had to do was clean up the mess afterwards.
He noticed a look on his face, a sort of desperation, and he decided to use it. He couldn’t be Roan, he couldn’t even be an analogue, but a desperate infected? Yeah, he could play that. He made faces in the mirror until he found one he liked, and then mussed up his hair with a little mousse, trying to mimic the look of someone who hadn’t slept well for days.
He wondered if now, because his face was all messed up, he’d get a call back, and he smirked at the thought. Unbeknownst to anyone but Rocky, he’d actually auditioned for a part in a low budget horror flick some people were shooting up in the Cascades. Rocky was a friend of a friend of the casting director, and suggested Holden might be perfect for them. Seems they needed an actor who didn’t mind working for scale and didn’t mind potential nudity. If nudity bothered him, boy was he in the wrong profession.
Either the world was changing, or being friends with Rocky just meant they were more open than most. They knew he’d done some porn, and didn’t care. Gay porn? Didn’t care, even though he was reading for an ostensibly straight part. He thought the audition had gone extremely well; he made them laugh a couple of times (deliberately), and they said they’d call him back in a week or two. For more auditions, or had he gotten the job? Even Rocky hadn’t been sure, but he said that was a good sign.
Maybe this, combined with the beating, was some cosmic sign he should give up hustling and become an actor. It was just another form of whoring, with slightly less sex. He wondered if anyone in the local theater would hire him – “Hi, I’m in gay porn, and tonight, I will be Iago” – but he actually knew some people in the local theater scene. Hire him for Shakespeare, no, but some angst ridden, artsy fartsy modern piece? Probably, yeah, no problem. Now it was time to prove his acting chops in an alternate venue. If he could pass as a desperate infected, he’d consider that a good sign too.
When he came out, Dylan looked at him with unreadable dark eyes, and said, “You look like you’ve been preparing for a role.”
“Too phony?”
“No. I’m just getting that you’re not new to this.”
“Of course not. All I do is pretend. I probably wouldn’t know the real me if he came up to me in a bar and bought me a drink.” Even as he said that, he thought he might have given too much of himself away, but screw it. He could look at it as throwing Dylan a bone – poor Dylan, who never knew what to make of him.
You know, Roan did have a point with him. Dylan was the better self, the thing that both he and Roan could never achieve. Poor bastard. How did you end up that way? This was not a world for the better selves; it was not kind. What a terrible burden to live with.
Dylan was quiet, even after they got back in the car and started driving towards the Church. He was handsome; even his profile was a knockout, with his diamond cut chin and sleek jaw, now peppered with late day stubble. Roan did have an eye for beauty, you had to give him that. Finally, at a stoplight, Dylan spoke again. “Don’t you hurt?”
“Hmm?”
“You just got out of the hospital, and you still look pretty banged up. How many guys attacked you, anyways?”
“Two. Armed with clubs and tasers.”
Now he stared at him. “Cops? You were beaten by cops?”
“They had the accoutrement of cops. Doesn’t mean they were. You can’t believe everything you see.” Besides, how much did State Patrol really count as cops? More than a mall cop, sure, but less than a SWAT team member. They were somewhere in that squishy middle.
Dylan continued giving him a dubious look, but the light changed to green, and he was forced to look ahead. “Did you tell Roan this?”
“I told him nothing. I didn’t have to. He knows taser burns when he sees them.”
“Jesus.” He grimaced as if anguished, and sure he was – Dylan probably hurt for the world – before he shook his head. “Why the hell did they attack you?”
“Oh darling, that is a long and unpleasant story. Let’s just say I wouldn’t take a beating like a good for hire piece of meat should. Some men in power don’t like it when you get uppity.”
“Why do you do this to yourself? You don’t have to sell yourself.”
“That is debatable. But let’s agree to argue about that later, okay?” Actually, he skirted the issue, but he did kind of hurt. His whole face felt like a toothache. He’d been given some painkillers, but very few, and weak; Roan probably had better in his pocket. He could have asked, but fuck it, he had an emergency joint at home, and pot was usually a great painkiller. Also, it’d give him his appetite back, which was good. He knew he was hungry, but he’d had a hard time eating. Hospital food, maybe.
Dylan let it be for the moment, but finally asked, “Are you sure you can do this?”
“What, fake my way into a drug deal? Easy. This isn’t my first rodeo.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Ah. That’s very kind of you. But I’m always happy to be someone I’m not.” This was true. Was it sad? He wasn’t sure. He had to admit that right now, he didn’t much care.
The Church was busy tonight, with lights burning in every window and no parking on the street. Holden could hear the thud of repetitive deep bass that usually accompanied club music coming from somewhere nearby. Dylan had to park down the street, in front of a house where no one was apparently home. “Must be one of those infected mixers that drives Roan crazy,” Holden noted, and then, after a moment, added, “You don’t have to go, you know.”
“Yeah, I do,” Dylan said, taking the keys out of the ignition and putting them in his coat pocket. “These are the people making Roan’s life hell. I want to meet them.”
Holden just stared at him, impressed by his profile even in the dark. “What did he do to deserve you?”
He almost scoffed, but it was too weak to be much of anything. “He has a magnetism about him, doesn’t he?”
“Animal magnetism?”
“I wasn’t going to say that. But Roan has said something about him having an unstable pheromone load now that he’s out of a viral cycle. He says that could be responsible for anyone being attracted to him ever.”
“Wow. So, does he hate himself ’cause he’s a lion, or does he hate the Human part of himself more?”
“I don’t know. How do you tell?”
“Ask?”
“And do you think I’d get a straight answer?”
“Good point.” With a sigh, he put his hand on the door handle. “So are you going to be you, or are you going to use an alias?”
“Just me. You?”
“Since I doubt Roan used his first name, being that he’s anathema to the Church, I’m just gonna be me.” With a grin, he said, “I’m a lion.”
“I don’t even know what I am. If they ask, I guess I’m a lion too.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Holden tried to sound optimistic, but Dylan was clearly at the end of his rope. Shit was getting to Roan, but it was getting to Dylan too. Everyone just needed a hug and possibly some Quaaludes, but hey, who was he to judge? It wasn’t like he’d ever been in a functional relationship where he wasn’t being paid to be there. It made life uncomplicated, which was nice, but it also made him the last person who should ever give relationship advice ever.
They walked to the Church in silence, and Holden took the lead, for no other reason than he was simply the point guard. He was the one trying to pass as an infected in need of burn. Dylan was just … well, he wasn’t sure. Since he was a Buddhist he probably wasn’t on a mission of vengeance, but who knows? Maybe he was. Just because he was Buddhist didn’t mean he couldn’t snap and lose it. He just wished he had a better idea of what he was going to do so he could back his play.
The Church was all dolled up tonight. There were little white lights framing the windows, and little blue ones overhanging the doorway. It occurred to him they were called “fairy lights” in Britain, and he almost laughed. He was wondering why they were so open considering their recent troubles, then he noticed the hulking figures in the thick shadows. Church security guards, so thick on the fringes they were almost a Human cordon. So it was open within reason, apparently, but there was a brace of rent a cops in case something looked really suspect. Holden wondered why he and Dylan weren’t challenged, but after thinking about it a moment, realized an obviously beaten guy and his pretty partner just didn’t seem like the anti-cat armed fundamentalist types. He bet the mousse he put in his hair helped too; it probably made him look pretty gay, or at the very least, metrosexual.
Once inside, all was light and throbbing noise, like a dance club, although the noise was leaking from another room. There was a long table on which there was an assortment of boxed cookies, crackers, some fruit, and some bottles of water. It was a coffee pot away from looking like the spread at an AA meeting. A Stepford robotic blonde woman greeted them with a creepy smile. “Hello, and welcome to the Church of the Divine Transformation.” Her fake smile faltered as she looked at Holden’s face. “Oh my, whatever happened to you?” There was a hulking man in the corner, probably Samoan, trying as unsuccessfully to blend into the wallpaper as his coat was unsuccessful in hiding the weapons stashed underneath. The Church seemed to be prepared for an armed siege.
Holden decided to play this belligerent. He had a chip on his shoulder now, and he was done with the world. Why else was he here? “What do you think happened? Normals, that’s what.”
“Oh my god,” she gasped, with some seriousness. “Would you like to talk to one of our counselors?”
“Thanks, but I’m done with talking to counselors.” Holden walked past, deeper into the house, and Dylan followed.
Eventually they discovered the ballroom (?) where the main party was taking place, a cavernous room made to seem that much larger by the fact that it was mostly shrouded in darkness, with all the lights isolated spots or bars of neon colors. From what Dylan told him, he was looking for a guy named Pierce, who was supposedly wearing a pale blue dress shirt and a dark blazer (dressed, in other words, like a chaperon or a narc). They split up, wandering to different parts of the room, while Holden struggled to recognize the music. It was generic club DJ stuff; it could have been anything. It probably was.
Holden eventually found his man standing near the northeastern part of the room. He was standing beside a table stocked with bottled water and Vitamin water or one of its equivalents, candy colored water in plastic bottles that probably tasted exactly like they looked. Pierce was an average looking man in a reasonably expensive looking blazer. He was one of those guys with such a severe widow’s peak that it looked like an arrow, the rest of his hair thinning around and behind it, making it look like his meager hair could have been painted on. It also made him look like he had more forehead than was advisable for anyone who wasn’t a Star Trek alien. His eyes were small and deep set, their color impossible to guess in this low level lighting, his mouth wide but fairly thin under a slightly Roman nose that dominated the otherwise weak features of his face. Did he look like a bird? Maybe. Hawkish. That was the only thing he could think of.
“Pierce?” he asked.
Surprise flashed through his eyes, making Holden wonder how his bruises looked under the black lights. “You the guy who called earlier?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“You a cop?”
“No. Do I look like a cop?”
He didn’t answer that. “You wearing a wire?”
Holden didn’t answer, just lifted up his shirt to reveal his naked stomach, which had a couple of lavender bruises on it as well. “Wanna see my dick?”
Pierce looked at him sharply. “What?”
“It’s how hookers weed out the cops. You ask to see their dick, and if they don’t whip it out, odds are they’re a cop.”
That looked like too much info for Pierce, he seemed slightly nauseated at the prospect. Ah, insecure straight boys, you had to love their squeamishness. Up close, Holden realized he was probably younger than he looked. Thanks to premature balding and a nebbishy build, he looked like he was in his mid-thirties from a distance, but up close you could tell you were probably about ten years off. The eyes gave it away. “No, I don’t wanna see your dick. How do you know that about hookers?”
“I know people in all the wrong places,” he said, letting his shirt drop. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the complete truth.
Pierce looked a little stunned by this. A drug lord he wasn’t. He was new at this whole thing, wasn’t he? And yet didn’t he have the Church locked up sales wise? Hmm. Either this guy was a stringer, not the head honcho after all, or he was the head honcho only because of nepotism: he knew someone here, he was a favorite of someone here, and that was enough. How was he going to find out which?
“Gonna hook a brother up or not?” Holden asked, trying not to laugh at his use of the word “brother”. Honestly, it should be illegal for a white person to use that term in a non-ironic manner, but he was playing the type who would say something like that and never see the irony in it.
Pierce – or whoever he was – seemed reluctant, but said, “Follow me.” He left the ballroom via a small door that was really hard to spot in the gloom, and Holden followed.
The door led to a narrow corridor, and Holden was sure it had some type of architectural name, but he couldn’t place it. Was it a servant’s access or something? “How much is a hit? And how do I take this stuff? Snort it, shoot it, smoke it, what?”
The guy paused, giving him a look that suggested he didn’t think he was quite for real. “You can take it lots of ways, but I got the liquid stuff.”
“Great. Like GHB?”
The guy reached in his blazer, and pulled out what looked an Altoids tin. Inside were a few small glass vials of clear liquid. “Thirty five,” he said.
Thirty five dollars? Not too bad. Maybe that was another reason so many infecteds took it. Holden pulled out a wrinkled twenty, ten, and five, and was careful to ball it up in his fist before handing it to Pierce (he was just going to think of him as Hawkeye, because there was no way he was Pierce), so money changed hands in a way not visible to any invisible observer. (But they were alone in the hall, so who were they trying to impress?) After taking the money surreptitiously, he gave Holden one of the vials and put the tin back in his pocket.
“What’s it taste like?”
Hawkeye scowled, his thick brows meeting in a vee over his nose. “I dunno. I don’t think it has a taste.”
“You’ve never tried it?”
“Yeah, but in juice. I didn’t taste it.”
Wrong. He’d never done it. He wasn’t a great liar, was he? Holden popped the cap off the vial and took a sniff, but smelled almost nothing besides a slight chemical smell. He wondered what Roan would think of this – would this blow his head off? Would he flinch like he sometimes did at smells that almost no one else noticed? He swigged the vial, and he could feel his mouth going numb, the drug spreading like ice through his bloodstream.
He smiled at Hawkeye, who was still too uncomfortably close to him in the narrow hallway, and grabbed him by the thinning hairs on the back of his head and kissed him, forcing his tongue between his lips and letting the drugs run from his mouth to Hawkeye’s.
He tried to push him away, but Holden had a firm grip on his hair and had pinned him up against the wall, and the guy was no heavyweight anyways. To keep him quiet and confused as the drugs kicked in, he very gently fondled his balls. Even if the guy was straight – and his hair seemed to indicate that – there were simply biological responses that couldn’t be suppressed. That was the wonderful thing about men: they were so simple.
When he sagged a bit under the weight of the burn, and he started getting obviously turned on, Holden broke away from him with a smile. “Wow, yeah, this shit is fantastic.” It was. He’d hardly done any at all, but his face no longer felt like one overwhelming bruise; he felt great.
Poor Hawkeye was desperately confused, his eyes glazing over with drugs, but he remembered to at least seem to be indignant. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Bobby told me it was like Ecstasy – you didn’t wanna do it alone.” Almost everybody knew a Bobby or a Mike; these were good names to use to just muck up the issue. Holden then leaned in, cradling his balls again, and whispered in his ear, “Why don’t we find someplace private, huh? Have our own party.”
“I’m not gay.” Weird how his voice broke when he said it. He was half turned on and half scared, and all stoned. Hard to think straight in those circumstances, pun very much intended.
“I’ve been told I could suck a bowling ball through a straw. Wanna find out?” About as subtle as a six foot dildo. But the thing was, gay, straight, or other, no man could resist the lure of a blow job. Well, okay, he bet Roan and Dylan, holier than thou guys that they were, probably could under certain circumstances, but not all the time.
After a very long moment, where he listened to the guy breathe, he finally said, “There are rooms upstairs.”
“Awesome. Lead the way.”
He let Hawkeye take the lead, and glanced at his wallet, which Holden had liberated from his blazer pocket. Not that he noticed; when your balls were getting a good cuddle, you never noticed anything else.
The hall lead out to a larger hallway, and there was a staircase that lead to the upper floors of the main house. He knew the place well enough that he had been here a lot, clearly, but was he an infected? For some reason, he doubted it.
Hawkeye found a small, unoccupied bedroom, and he was really tripping balls now. He was giggling in a truly disturbing schoolgirl sort of way, and said, “You can’t tell anybody I did this.”
“Did what? What do you wanna do?” Holden asked, mock seductively, and bodily pushed him down onto the bed, straddling him as Hawkeye now laughed more hysterically.
He struggled to say it for a good long minute before spitting out, “I don’t wanna do anything! I’m not gay.”
“Getting a blowjob doesn’t make you gay. Giving a blowjob … well, that’s another story.” He started undoing Hawkeye’s pants, and then stopped. “Hey, is there a freezer around here?”
He looked at him with dazed, barely comprehending eyes. If he was infected and this stuff was tainted, he’d probably start shifting any minute now. “Umm … downstairs. Why?”
”Cause I know this great trick with an ice cube. It feels so good you won’t believe it. Wait for me, tiger, I’ll be right back.” As he got up and went to the door, he paused long enough to look back and asked, “Should I grab a beer while I’m there?”
“If you can find one in this dump, yeah,” he agreed, still cackling giddily.
“Got it. Be back in a minute.”
Holden had already dropped the remainder of Hawkeye’s wallet on the floor. He only wanted one thing in it and he had it slipped in his jeans pocket, next to other thing he’d grabbed from Hawkeye’s jacket. Once he shut the door of the bedroom, he went back down the stairs and found his way outside the church, oblivious to Stepford blonde and her big Samoan bodyguard. (For a guy built like a Winnebago, he was kind of cute.)
The cool air outside was like a refreshing slap to the face. He took a few deep breaths on his walk back to the car. Dylan wasn’t there, and he decided to give him ten minutes before he called him and asked him to come out. He looked at Hawkeye’s ID – just as he thought, he wasn’t Pierce; his driver’s license said he was one Joseph Cullen (he knew it). Holden pulled out the other thing he lifted from Joe, his phone, and started looking through the menu. He found the number of Pierce in no time, and as soon as he determined this was the type of phone with internet capabilities, he began searching for a wi-fi signal. There was one here, but it was weak. He was doing a search when Dylan returned to the car.
“Guy show?” he asked.
“A proxy showed, guy named Cullen, but he never said that,” Holden said, tossing Joe’s ID into his lap.
Dylan looked at it curiously before he realized what Holden had done. “You picked his pocket?”
“If he wasn’t going to tell me the truth – and he wasn’t – how else was I supposed to find the truth?”
He must have figured out there was more wrong, as his eyes narrowed. “Please tell me that’s your phone.”
He didn’t answer, just showed him the tiny screen. “Pierce Hockney’s address. Our next stop.”
“He had his address on his phone?”
“No, he had his number. I used a reverse directory to find his address. Come on, Dyl, new technology is your friend. Keep up.”
He answered that with a glare. For a long moment he didn’t say anything, then finally asked, “You’re a menace to society, aren’t you?”
That just made him smile. “Why d’ya think Roan took me on as an assistant? Wasn’t ’cause of my typing skills.”
Once again, he had nothing, so after a moment’s consideration, he got his keys out and started the car.
He really didn’t belong in this world, did he? Poor, poor Dylan.