Infected: Shift (49 page)

He didn’t answer. He’d figure it out or he wouldn’t.

The next floor—The sixth or seventh? He couldn’t remember; his mind refused to work that way—was empty of cats (couldn’t smell any; his roar brought no response), so he simply went up to the next floor. There, as the elevator door opened, was a panther in the hall, sleek black but kind of stocky, sitting facing conference rooms with their doors wide open. No Humans were here, meaning people had been successfully able to evacuate or this floor just hadn’t been in use yet today, meaning whoever he was, this infected had picked the wrong floor to hide out in.

The cat looked at him with empty hazel eyes and a twitching tail, and Roan came out of the elevator, growling, “Some people have no luck at all.”

The cat snarled and got to its feet, looking ready to fight or run, but Roan had enough awareness to pull the tranquilizer gun and simply shoot it. Proving that this poor son of a bitch had no luck in any form, the dart hit it right on the bridge of his nose. He was aware enough to recoil and try and knock the dart out with a paw, shaking his head, but the dart was in deep, and the drugs finally kicked in and laid it out.

Roan crouched down and concentrated on his sense of humanity. What was his sense of humanity? He focused on the pain—or at least tried—but that didn’t seem to be it. What was his humanity? Did he actually have any?

His tongue still hurt. An odd detail, but one he focused on, trying to bring himself back. He wondered if he should bite it or if the resurgent pain would make his cat side worse. A bit of a song ran through his head, almost mocking his current predicament—“If I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin.” You know, he just might be able to. He always thought that maybe in midtransition he could rip the skin off his face and maybe find out if there was a lion under there.

Insanity. Insanity and These Arms Are Snakes lyrics. They went together so perfectly, no wonder he listened to them.

He was grasping at something—awareness, some sense of self, even if it was only a mocking sense—when he heard the elevator door open again. He could smell gun oil, body armor, hear the hiss and click of radios. He knew guns were aimed at his back, the clicks of firing positions being taken, as a super-macho male voice barked, “You McKichan?”

He raised a hand and nodded, not sure if he could speak yet, the pain finding laser focus in certain parts of his body: jaw, teeth, hands, chest, eyes. He heard a familiar voice snap, “Would you let me through? Can’t you see he’s bleeding?”

Dee? Of course. There’d be more than one ambulance needed, and he probably guessed he’d be needed, so he'd either nagged, coerced, or got the okay to come along with the SWAT team.

“There’s the cat,” a voice said, butch but surprisingly female.

The macho voice from before said into his radio, “Floor secured up to the eighth. Advance agent found.”

Advance agent? Oh, was that him? Must have been. Better than kitty fucker, he supposed.

Dee knelt beside him, thunking down his heavy EMT kit. “You get caught by a cat? You getting slow in your old age?”

Roan looked at him, still snarling, but even though he thought he saw the briefest reaction in Dee’s dark eyes, his face remained stony professional, all business. The good EMTs made natural poker players, as they learned to keep all emotion from their faces. “Don’t you snap at me, mister,” Dee replied, using an antiseptic cloth to wipe the blood off his face. He examined the scratches on his face, and said, “Not too bad. Those should heal up good.” Dee lifted up his chin with his fingertips and wiped his throat with the same cooling, stinging cloth. “Might need to get some surgical glue on a couple of these. Lucky it missed your windpipe.” He then frowned at him. “Why is your mouth bleeding?”

“Bit my tongue,” he grumbled, pretty sure he could talk now. He could, but it still sounded gravelly and inhuman.

“Let’s see.” Dee put a thumb on his lower lip, and Roan let him open his mouth. He got out his penlight and had a good look, squinting slightly. If his teeth still weren’t right, Dee gave no sign of it. “Goddamn, you took a real chunk out of it.” He rummaged in his kit and took out a small square of gauze, which he put over the cut in Roan’s tongue. “Nothing we can do about it. It’ll have to heal on its own. But knowing you, that’ll happen fast.”

The gauze tasted terrible, and he could feel it filling up with blood already, but conversely it made him feel a bit more sane, a bit more Human. Even having Dee here helped. Yeah, having your ex tend to you in a medical sense was off-putting, but at least there was little Roan could do (or become) that would shock him.

Dee lifted up his shirt and clicked his tongue at all the bloody scratches on his chest, but that was when Roan told him, “Don’t worry about it. I can heal.”

“Seriously? Your torso looks like ground chuck. I don’t—”

“I can, but not here,” he assured him, feeling more like Roan McKichan, Human being, instead of Roan McKichan, lion.

Dee finally met his eyes. He hadn’t before now, which Roan only realized in retrospect. His eyes must have been more Human now, or Dee was at least confident they were. “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m in so much pain, I don’t think I can move without screaming.”

Dee gave him a slightly dubious look. “You’re not just saying that for free drugs, are you?”

“I don’t need your drugs. I have better at home.”

That honesty got him a shot of something. He didn’t honestly know what, but after a couple of minutes he began to feel warmth in his hands and feet, and the edges of the pain smoothed, became smaller and more manageable.

Dee insisted on taping some big bandages to some of the worst scratches on his chest, so he let him as the pain continued to ebb, and finally he asked, “The guy in the stairwell, the one bleeding out. How is he?”

Dee shrugged. “He was stable when they loaded him. That’s all I know.”

Stable meant nothing; stable only meant he was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. But the way Dee said it seemed to imply “don’t get your hopes up”—stable was the best possible diagnosis for him. Asking for more was too much. You could only lose so much blood before you were honestly a lost cause. Roan knew that and didn’t know why he cared.

Dee helped him up and helped him down to the street, where things were noisier and more cops had showed, their flashing red and blue lights bouncing off mirrored buildings in such a way that all they needed was a DJ spinning to make this an official dance party. He was aware of TV news vans, but they had been pushed back to a distance that must have pissed off many a cameraman and segment producer. He heard some arguments, some cursing, but since he focused on none of it, it was kind of an angry white noise.

He balked when he realized Dee was taking him to his rig, but he told him, “I’m not letting you drive home on Demerol, and besides, there’s no better way to lose the press.”

Fair enough. He got into the back of the ambulance, where Shep was, and he exclaimed, “Fuck, man, what happened to your shirt?”

An excellent question. Roan had just noticed it was not much more than fabric tatters, held together by random threads and blood. As Dee closed the ambulance doors, he made a hand gesture of some sort to Shep, who nodded in understanding. Roan got that Dee had asked him to check his vitals without knowing how he knew that’s what he asked.

The Demerol—was that really what Dee gave him?—was kicking in big time, and it was very pleasant. So he lay back on the stretcher as Shep put a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and asked, “Saved the cats?”

“Saved ’em. Don’t know why, but I did.”

“Cats are people too,” Shep said with no irony. But it did sound kind of funny.

He heard Dee get in the front of the rig and felt them drive off as Shep looked at readouts and wrote some numbers in pen on his latex glove. Blood pressure numbers probably, possibly temperature, as he’d briefly put some machine on his forehead. “So am I dead?” Roan wondered.

“You still taking calcium channel blockers?”

Those were the meds he was given in an attempt to stave off another aneurysm. He had no idea if they were helping or not, but he took them. “Yeah.”

He nodded, still writing numbers on his hand. “You have an appointment with your doctor soon?”

He’d wanted to go see Doctor Rosenberg and ask her about that sudden change, the one he didn’t quite feel. Did that count? “Soon enough.”

“Good.” Laconic Shep was yet another good paramedic, one who didn’t give too much away, one who could beat you in a poker game with nothing but a pair of twos. “Rest and lots of fluids tonight, okay? No fighting, no serious narcotics. Understood?”

“Aye aye, captain.”

Shep raised a blond eyebrow at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re on the serious narcotics already.”

Oh, ha ha. The Nelson laugh seemed so appropriate right now, he wished he could do it.

He must have dozed off for a bit, because it seemed like a second later he was home, and there was a small argument over whether Dee should help him inside or not, but Roan insisted he was walking to his own front door, and finally Dee just let him. He watched him all the way, though, arms crossed over his chest, his face as sour as an upset schoolmarm. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it, in case Dee changed his mind and decided he needed to go to the hospital.

Dylan was home, but the reason he didn’t meet him was obvious, as Roan could hear the water running upstairs. Shower or bath? Bath most likely.

Roan sat at the bottom of the steps and tried to force enough of a change to heal some of the scratches. It was extra hard, probably due to the drugs, but he felt an itchy burning in his chest as he felt a new pain knife into his jaw and figured he’d pushed it as much as he could. Veins seemed to pulse in front of his eyes, little black capillaries that appeared and disappeared with every beat of his heart, and he knew he was done. Any further attempts, and he would pay for it dearly.

He still had bloody scratches on his chest and arms, and his hand still hurt (had he broken something?) but it was all something he could live with. He gave himself a few seconds of rest, then went upstairs.

In the bedroom, he tossed his coat in the closet and threw his shredded shirt in the garbage, grabbing a T-shirt out of the dresser and pulling it on. If Dylan noticed it was a different shirt, he’d just say he spilled something on the other.

He knocked on the bathroom door before walking in where Dylan was relaxing in the tub. The air was warm and smelled strongly of the peppermint and eucalyptus bath salts he usually used after yoga class. He said it was a muscle soother, and Roan had no information to the contrary, so he let it go.

Dylan opened his eyes, and said, “Hey, I didn’t—holy shit, what happened to you?”

Roan caught a glimpse of himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, and while he was almost afraid to look, he still managed. He looked human, himself, with light, long scratches across his cheek and just beneath his eyes, one almost bisecting his lip where an older scar was. Dee had cleaned him up nice, and his partial change had closed some of the scratches up. But he was very lucky he hadn’t lost an eye.

“Cat incident downtown,” he told him, and he was so tired, his legs so rubbery, he sat on the floor beside the bathtub. “Some protest gone horribly wrong. Had to get four cats out of a building.”