Lesser Evils, Part 17
17 – Crazy Woman Dirty Train
The good thing about being at the university hospital was Rosenberg was the queen bee, so whatever she wanted, she got. This was good for Dylan, because as soon as she dubbed Roan stable enough, she had a cot put in his hospital room, so Dylan could stay with him if he wanted. Since he found himself up at night since Roan ended up in the hospital, unable to sleep and watching more cable television than was probably healthy, he’d ended up staying here ever since.
The cot wasn’t comfortable, and Roan’s machines bleeped loudly, but he slept better here than at home in the house that wasn’t even his home. Rosenberg encouraged him to bring stuff in, to make it more like home, and while she didn’t say it was for Roan, it was. Just like she didn’t say he was in a coma, but he was.
At first it was deliberate. After his surgery, they induced coma to reduce pressure on his brain and ease the healing process, according to her. Was it still an induced coma? He doubted it. But it was better perhaps. After all, they shaved Roan’s head for the brain surgery, and he was sure Roan would hate it. But the funny thing was he already had dark red fuzz growing in, making a shadow on his scalp, and even one of the nurses had commented that was weird. “I’ve never seen hair growing in so fast,” the nurse, whom he now knew as Leona, had commented when she came in to check Roan’s vitals. But Roan had a fairly impressive beard too, and the last time Dylan had seen him he’d been perfectly clean shaven. It was the partial change of course, the one that had almost killed him. Since he knew Roan would hate it, he spent the afternoon carefully shaving his face. He’d never shaved someone else’s face before, but he thought he’d done a pretty good job.
Dylan brought his iPod, the book that Roan had been reading (well, one of them – he usually had more than one going, and you could find them scattered all over the house, books with tiny scraps of paper sticking out of them, ad hoc bookmarks), a blanket from their real house, and he sometimes played Roan’s iPod for him, or read aloud from the book. It made him feel better, like he was doing something, like he wasn’t completely useless. While Rosenberg encouraged this, said it was good for Roan, he did get complaints about Roan’s iPod. But of course he would. Sometimes he wondered if Roan actually liked this music, or if he only listened to it to piss people off. Seriously, who had all the Mr. Bungle albums on their play list and genuinely meant it?
One morning, while he was folding up his blanket, Doctor Rosenberg came in and asked him to join her for a cup of coffee. She made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion but an order, so he went with her to the cafeteria. He got a tea while she got a coffee, and she also got a Danish. She offered him one, but he didn’t feel hungry right now. “Are you eating at all?” she asked, dumping a sugar packet into her coffee. “It’s been three days, I don’t think I’ve seen you eat once.”
“I have,” he said, and suddenly wasn’t sure. Surely he must have or he’d be starving by now. “I’m okay.”
“Work?”
“I quit.”
She gave him a mildly scolding look, like his Aunt would probably give him. “Is that wise?”
He shrugged, stirring his tea. He contemplated adding sugar to it, but there was probably no way of making it palatable. “Jamie told me I was welcome back at Panic at any time, so I figure I’ll start doing crunches again and I should be okay.”
“Crunches?” She made a negative noise. “Better you than me, kiddo.”
“So how have the tests come out? I assume some must be back by now.”
She nodded, but he sensed some hesitation. He was getting to know her pretty well now, even though she didn’t share much about herself. In some respects, she was a less dickish, elderly female House. Without the limp and the pill addiction (he was assuming that last bit – he’d seen no evidence of her pill popping). “The biopsy’s back. I can tell you he doesn’t have cancer.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Oh god, what a relief.” He paused long enough to sip his tea, and find it almost too bad for words. “Should I read something into you not using the word benign?”
“Wow. Are you just that good, or have you been around Roan too long?”
“A bit of both, probably.”
She nodded grimly, gnawing on a chunk of Danish like it was a piece of radial tire. “The tumor isn’t cancerous. But I don’t know what it is. It’s full of viral DNA.”
Dylan ran that sentence over again in his mind, to see if it made any sense at all. Was it just him? “Um, what?”
“Yeah, that was my feeling. We didn’t find cancerous cells, but we found the virus, which we couldn’t make sense of. I’ve sent the results to Doctor Pang, this oncologist I know over at Fred Hutchinson, I’m hoping he can tell me what the fuck it means.”
“Is this good news or bad news?”
She shrugged in a way that seemed to suggest that she wished someone would take over for her. “Fuck if I know. Again, not cancer, so that’s a positive thing.”
Dylan looked down into his murky cup of tea, which he suddenly realized was the color of diseased urine, and he pushed it aside. “Since when do viruses create tumors?”
“Normally they don’t.”
“So you have no idea what this could mean?”
She sighed heavily. “Honestly no. You hafta understand that no one’s lived with the virus as long as Roan has. Setting aside his virus child start, no one’s lived with this thing for thirty plus years. The only understanding we have of its life cycle is in laboratory animals and computer models, and those are imperfect at best. This is new territory for everyone.”
He’d heard this before, and was certain Roan had heard it all his life. How awful it must be to be a test case, an anomaly, the only living Petri dish around. “What does this mean? Can you just guess?”
“I hesitate, ‘cause it’s just speculation. I mean, he could turn into a fucking unicorn for all I know.” She exhaled heavily, a kind of sigh, before telling him, “I think this is a secondary stage of the virus.” At his questioning look, she went on. “We don’t know its true life and death cycle. All we know is it kills the host body by eventually overwhelming it, altering it to the point that Human survival is impossible. We’ve never had a case where the body continues to adapt. The virus has a near perfect home in Roan, but what that will cause the virus to do we don’t know.”
“You’re implying intelligence here.”
“I know, and I don’t mean to. But this virus seems to thrive on adversity, which is why making any kind of vaccine for it has been a pipe dream at best. It’s not coming up against anything in Roan’s body that it can’t seem to handle, therefore the response will be unpredictable.”
“But the weak spot is his brain.”
She grimaced as if her coffee tasted as bad as his tea. “His body has proven to be resilient, almost as resilient as the virus, which may not be coincidence. But his brain just can’t have that kind of bounce back, although it’s trying. Still, can you imagine the toll it must take on him? Well, hell, I guess you can, you live with him. Poor bastard.”
How was he supposed to take that statement? He decided it was probably best just to let it go for now. “So you think the virus has made his body so resilient? I’m taking that’s what you implied.”
She nodded. “Part of the reason he’s survived so long is that the virus has almost fully incorporated into his DNA. He’s the perfect host because it has helped make him the perfect host. But there’s limits. He’s still human underneath it all, and there will always be a conflict. But what the result of that conflict will be I can’t say.”
“Except death.”
This time she didn’t really grimace, it was more of a twitch at the corner of her mouth as she looked away, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He didn’t blame her for looking, it sounded like two people were about to come to blows over who was to blame for the accident. (What accident he couldn’t say – they could have had the decency to start their argument here.) “Eventually.” She looked back at him, her hazel eyes locking on to his like she was trying to will him to believe what she was saying. “But not now. You know Roan, he’s not going without a fight, and last time I checked, he hadn’t ripped out his IV’s yet.”
He couldn’t argue with any of this, and yet a certain sense of despair was slowly overwhelming him, creeping through his body and diffusing like ink in water. He was so tired, and it wasn’t just physical. “So why hasn’t he woken up?”
She made a negative noise, a kind of clicking with her tongue. “’Cause the bastard doesn’t want to.”
Yes, that was the truth he’d been dreading all this time.
****
Holden couldn’t remember the last time he was in a train station. There wasn’t much call for it, as he was usually dispatched to the skuzzy well of everyday humanity that was the Greyhound bus station. But Oliver wanted to do something different. Maybe he thought it would help him escape.
But he found the kid, trying to hide his identity with a dark blue stocking cap pulled over his head and translucent gray sunglasses over his eyes, but he actually looked like he was trying to conceal his identity. The thing about going incognito was you weren’t supposed to look like you were incognito, or you fucked the whole thing up. Well, Oliver may have been a good actor, but clearly he needed a costumer.
Holden flung himself into the plastic chair beside him, and looked over at him with a professional, hard smile. “Hey there, where you headed today?”
Oliver looked nervous behind his tinted glasses, but he didn’t recognize him, mainly because he’d never seen him before. “Umm, Eugene.”
“Oregon? Awesome. Got cold feet, huh?”
Did he finally get it? A fleeting sort of nervousness appeared in his eyes. “What?”
“I’m Holden Krause, I’m an assistant investigator with MK Investigations.” Oliver started to get up, but Holden put a firm hand on his arm to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t. I could have you arrested if you I really wanted to, so let’s not make a scene, okay?”
“Arrested?” he replied, his voice pitched to a whispering hiss. “No you can’t. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I could nail you for identity theft and fraud, and I can make it stick. And that’s if I’m being nice. Do you want to know what I can do if I’m feeling mean?” He met his eyes, giving him the deathly cold stare he had perfected on the street. Life in the lower strata of society was very Darwinian – the weak were beaten down, consumed, destroyed. To show weakness was to invite exploitation and death. To be an alpha male, a predator, one who destroyed rather than got destroyed, you had to appear as psychopathic as all the other beasts. Holden could do that so easily, it was frightening.
It worked. Oliver seemed to shrink back in his chair, as if trying to disappear into the plastic. “L-look, you’ve got the wrong idea -”
“Roan, in his notes, seemed to think you were lying about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. You got lucky, ‘cause he’s sick and not one hundred percent, but you fucked up by having an argument at the Marriott. See, I have friends in hotels all around Seattle, and someone overheard you. Shall I repeat the key points, or do you want to knock off the bullshit?”
He sighed, deflated, looking away as he muttered, “I didn’t wanna do this, okay? I just needed the money.”
While Holden did indeed have friends at most hotels, including the Marriott, no one had overheard anything of substance. This was a bluff, but he was confident he could sell it, and indeed he had. After all, what they had heard, combined with Roan‘s suspicions, had led Holden to believe Oliver wasn‘t Oliver. But who he was and why was up for grabs. “So why the beating? Did you go off script?”
He tried to sink down in his chair, but he could only go so far because Holden refused to let go of his arm. “I figured the guy didn’t trust me. I thought the gig was up and I oughta get outta here before he lioned out on me or something. That’s what it’s called, right, what he does? Lioning out?”
He decided not to answer that, because it wasn’t any of his business and didn’t matter anyways. “Abby got wind of it? How?”
Oliver – or whoever he was – shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think she had one of those guys watching me.”
“Who were they?”
He shook his head. “Relatives of hers. Nephews, cousins, something like that. You’d think she could have sent one of those overgrown assholes to pretend to be Oliver if they were already here.”
“But they don’t look like him, not like you do.”
“I had to dye my hair, get it cut … I used to have a goatee.”
“Where is Oliver Jephson?”
“Cancun.”
Holden nodded. He’d already asked around on campus at the U-W, and discovered that Jephson was indeed supposedly in Cancun with a couple other people. But he wanted to see how honest this guy was going to be with him. “And who are you precisely?”
With a disgruntled sigh, he said. “Tyler Edwards.”
“Okay, Tyler, why did Abby hire you to pretend to be her nephew? Why does she want to find Adam so badly?”
What Tyler told him was what he pretty much expected: Abby found the photo online, not Oliver, and wanted to discover if this was indeed Adam, but she wasn’t about to upset Oliver, especially if it wasn’t actually Adam. So she hired him to pretend to be Oliver for the purposes of hiring a Seattle area detective to find out for sure, and Tyler felt a kind of personal connection to this, because his own father left when he was five, and even though he could have had a relationship with him, he chose not to. He remarried, had another family, and forgot all about him.
While Holden was tempted to play the world’s tiniest violin for him, he figured it was best to stay on topic. “And this didn’t strike you as at all fishy?”
He looked at him like he was crazy. “She wants to find her brother, and doesn’t want to hurt her nephew. How is that weird?”
“Oh, I don’t know … maybe the fact that she had some family members beat the shit out of you when you tried to back out?”
He squirmed in his hard plastic chair, looking around uncomfortably. There was a surprisingly long line at the check in counter, and the windows looking out at the surprisingly scruffy train tracks let in a good amount of light. Too bad there was nothing to see but dingy tile floors, and a TV set high on the wall playing CNN, for no obvious reason. Holden gave himself a moment to wonder why anyone gave a shit about news channels, and figured it was one of those straight white people things he’d never understand, like Family Guy and leaf blowers.
“Okay, that I didn’t get,” Tyler muttered.
“And that’s why you’re leaving? You don’t want to be treated to another beat down?”
“No. It’s just …” he rubbed his mouth, sat back up so he didn’t fall out of his chair and slide onto the floor, and shook his head. He was a cavalcade of tics, all raw nerves and fear. “What d’ya want me to say? Okay, yeah, I know somethin’ ain’t right here, okay? I’m goin’ home.”
“Where she knows where to find you.”
That made him pause, chewing his lower lip as he thought about it. “Oh. Shit. But she’s not gonna do anything to me. I mean … that’s just silly.”
“As silly as getting guys to beat you up?” That made him do a slight double take. That hadn’t occurred to him? “Why don’t you crash at a friends’ place for a couple of days? This should blow over by then.”
“What should?”
Holden was forced to shrug. “Whatever the hell this is.” Roan, in his notes, had named Adam’s father as suspicious, and said he didn’t like the hostile vibe he was getting from Abby. Now it made sense: she was looking for Adam, probably on behest of her (their) father. They couldn’t be looking for him for anything good. How would Roan handle this? Better yet, how would he handle this?
He supposed he was about to find out.
****
Dylan had taken to sketching in the hospital room, mainly because he didn’t feel like watching TV, and reading was something he did for Roan, not himself. Oddly enough, he felt he had stumbled upon something.
He was simply doing pencil sketches, but picking odd subjects: the IV bag and stand, with an off center window (covered with a retractable metal grate – this was a room for an infected after all). A stack of books on the floor. The end of the hospital bed. He suddenly realized there was a stark beauty here, a sort of visual loneliness that still had a kind of appeal. Maybe it was just him, but the fact that they were perhaps the most depressing still lifes he’d ever seen made them likable to him. Perhaps this was why he was never going to make a living as an artist. Still, he liked them, they made him feel better, and he got so absorbed in doing it that time passed quickly. He figured Dee would come check in on him again, see his sketchpad, and have him removed by force, but maybe that was for the best.
He was so absorbed in shading the curtains just so that at first, when he heard the noise, he thought it was a car in the parking lot. Except you couldn’t really hear the cars this high up, not well at any rate, and the sound was very close. It was then his mind finally made the connection: not a rumbling car engine, but a low level growl.
He looked up, startled, to see Roan looking at him. Except it wasn’t Roan.
He hadn’t changed, he was still Human … save for his eyes, which seemed wrong. There was something flat and animalistic about them, devoid of emotion and intelligence. He was growling low, a warning more than anything, but it still made his skin crawl. “Roan?” he asked.
There was no response, but there wouldn’t be. He got up slowly, and walked just as slowly to the door, despite his urge to run. Roan had once told him that big cats wanted you to run, so the best strategy was to leave slowly, never turning your back. It seemed logical, but in the heat of the moment, it was hard to ignore the screaming in your own head.
Roan didn’t move a muscle, but his eyes tracked him as he moved, with an unseemly hunger in them. At the door, Dylan asked one more time, “Roan?” But there was nothing, no familiarity, no response, just the constant growling.
Dylan shut the door, which closed with the same pneumatic thunk that all reinforced doors seemed to make. He leaned his forehead against it and sighed, not too concerned about what anyone in the hallway was saying to him.
So the lion woke up, but Roan hadn’t yet. What did that mean? Somehow he thought it couldn’t be anything good.
