Infected: Freefall (47 page)

How weird was it that most of the important men in Roan’s life were dead, and yet he could still feel them in his life?

Wow. His existence was so much weirder than he’d thought.

I
T
WAS
like stepping out into a new world. Well, no, the same old fucked-up one, with a few minor changes.

The “Sex Tape Scandal!” headlines seemed to suggest that the Newberry sex video had been found and released to the world, and Roan knew instantly that Holden was responsible. He had found it, and he’d leaked it. Why? Because that was him. Hide something from him, and he would share it just to be an ass. Not that he would do anything different, but Holden was a bit more flamboyantly nasty.

The surprising thing was Jessie Newberry had apparently committed suicide. Reports had it happening shortly after the video was leaked on the web, and while he left no note, it was assumed the video was enough to send him over the edge. He was a troubled person, it seemed. Speaking of which, Kyle Newberry had supposedly checked into rehab ahead of the PR shitstorm. Was there an incest rehab? Well, why not? There seemed to be a rehab for everything else.

Grant was in legal custody, and many people were rather angry about the whole thing. It was understandable, but he didn’t kill anyone on purpose. No matter, many people still wanted his head. Roan wondered if Randi hated him now.

On a similar note, remains had been discovered in a wooded area, and they were assumed to be Tiffany Jones, although identification was still pending. Roan hoped it wasn’t, for Grant’s sake.

Gordo was out of the hospital, but he was still on leave from the cop shop and rather unhappy about it. He was a man who defined himself by his job, so without it, he felt lost. Roan could understand. He was the same way, sort of, but usually he had so much shit going on that he could only muster a half definition at best. There was also the fact that macho cops like them hated being labeled as fragile.

At least Dylan waited until they got home before they started arguing. Dylan thought the diagnosis was very serious, and Roan wasn’t treating it as such. That seemed unfair, as he agreed it was serious. It just wasn’t something he could get worked up about. Why, he didn’t know. It didn’t really help his side in the fight.

Roan left Dylan to stew and fume at him in private and went down to the basement, where he sat on the stairs and looked at the cage—his cage. The door was still ajar from the last time he’d used it, and Dylan didn’t touch the thing. It wasn’t so much that he was scared of it… okay, yeah, that was part of it. Most of it.

Why didn’t the prospect of dying in it bother him? Roan knew it should, but it didn’t. It bothered Paris. That’s why he’d committed suicide ahead of his final transformation. He wanted to die a Human, not a half-tiger monstrosity. He understood that totally.

But the idea of it didn’t really bother Roan. Maybe because the lion had as much claim to him as his Human form. He didn’t know what it was like to be just Human. He had always been something else, something caught between what he seemed to be and what he actually was. Human, lion, virus. A freak amongst freaks. He deserved to die as he lived, neither here nor there, torn between Human and other.

Dim sunlight was bleeding through the tiny rectangular window at the very top of the basement, casting a shaft of light inside the cage itself, a vivid line on the poured-concrete floor. Roan could still catch a whiff of tiger deep down beneath the more dominant scent of lion, or at least he thought he could. It could have been psychosomatic, something he wanted to believe.

Just like he wanted to believe his death would be as simple as transforming and causing a blood vessel to burst in his brain. In a bizarre way, Roan thought it might be nice, a peaceful, quick death.

But he had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy. Nothing ever was.

Don’t miss Roan’s story

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About the Author

A
NDREA
S
PEED
writes way too much. She is the Editor in Chief of CxPulp.com, where she reviews comics as well as movies and occasionally interviews comic creators. She also has a serial fiction blog where she writes even more, and she occasionally reviews books for Joe Bob Briggs’s site. She might be willing to review you, if you ask nicely enough, but really she should knock it off while she’s ahead.

Visit her web site at
http://www.andreaspeed.com
and find her on Facebook. She tweets at
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.