approx's Blog

Writing is like plunging your own hand inside your chest and ripping your own heart out, then throwing it on a plate and presenting it to complete strangers.

Even when the characters just come to you fully formed, ones you think you can't have anything in common with by any stretch of the imagination - zombies, ghost whores, insurance salesman - there is some thread of commonality, some part of you in there, whether you want to admit it or not. These are your children, and as much as they horrify you, you are related to them somehow, by some meager aspect. You can claim distance, but the DNA tests don't lie.

So why do we do it? Why do we write and send our bastard children to stranger's doorsteps, where they could get molested and bludgeoned to death by demonic clowns, or even closeted, self-loathing Republican congressmen? What is our damage that we do this to ourselves? Is it mental illness? Is it a deep seated need to get approval from people we don't even know? Is this some form of acting out? If we actually took our medication, would it put an end to this?

I was just thinking about this while it occurred to me I haven't written a single "normal" character in my life. Could I write "normal" on a bet? If someone held a gun to my head? In all honesty, I couldn't say, but my feeling is no.

But I could just be totally up my own ass. I hear the weather's nice up there.

I keep getting constant error messages every time I try and put up a new post. So if you'd like to read Infected in its entirety - and the end, which would have been here (but isn't), please go to Fiction Press. Thank you.

In this segment from chapter 16, Stockholm Syndrome, Roan has found and rescued his client's son, although he had to extract him violently from a bad situation. Now at the hospital, Roan talks with an old boyfriend about an oddity he discovered in Mitchell Henstridge's family, and thinks he figures out who killed Hank DeSilvo.

Although things weren't perfectly clear at the moment, Roan had figured out a workable scenario. LadyLeopard, the not-so-secret secret admirer on Danny's MySpace page? It was either Hatch or Hatch's wife, using infection and the Church of the Divine Transformation as a lure to meet impressionable, lonely kids in their general vicinity, and fuck them up royal. Hatch was nothing more than a bargain basement predator, who simply adapted tactics to use the taboo "thrill" of infection to lead them to victims who would inadvertently help them. After all, if you were running away to get infected, you'd hardly announce it to your parents would you?

And the kicker? He wasn't infected; neither was his wife. Presumably Danny got lucky, but he was being tested anyways, because it was unclear if Danny had been "shared" by other people.

When the Nakamuras arrived, he was prepared to break the news to them, but in an odd act of sympathy Gordo came over and helped him do it. Although horrified by what had happened to Danny, they seemed glad the cops had the perpetrators in custody (although for the moment one was in surgery; he had apparently did a real number on Hatch's leg), and Sara had hugged him for "rescuing" their son. Maybe they were a bit hard on him, but they loved Danny, and that was probably what counted the most.

He went and sat in a currently unused exam room afterwards, feeling like he wanted to be alone. He didn't know why exactly, technically this had to count as a good resolution - he'd found Danny, he was still alive, he'd gotten at least one predator off the street (and fucked him up pretty good) - but in an ideal world, Danny never would have been hurt in the first place. In an ideal world, he'd have just been crashing on a friend's couch and smoking pot all day. But this world was not ideal and he didn't know why he suddenly wanted it to be.

Diego tracked him down, coming to join him sitting on the edge of the exam table. Dee was his height but much more slender in frame, almost willowy (although he would object to that description), a light skinned black man with male model cheekbones and sleepy but expressive dark eyes. He was, as he liked to say "half black, half Mexican, all man". He was good looking, funny, smart, but they just didn't work as a couple, which was kind of a shame. They were, sadly, better friends.

Dee squeezed his bicep as he sat down, and Roan scowled at him. "What are you doing?"

"Seeing how strong you are now, macho man. Jesus, have you been working out?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He scoffed. "It means what it means. Did you see how you fucked up that perv's arm? To get a complete spiral fracture like that you must be in the bodybuilder category now. How much do you bench?"

That made no sense, except in retrospect he remembered how liquid his muscles felt when he got mad, when he let the beast peek out, and suddenly he wondered if the shift made him stronger. It must have. Hadn't he always been aware that he was at his strongest when he was mad or hurt? The transformation from human to cat did change your body - why wouldn't it effect your strength levels? "I dunno. I've just been borrowing Paris's weight set from time to time."

"Time to time? Somebody's being modest. Have you been replaced by a pod person?" Roan glared at him, but it only made him grin, flashing blinding white teeth. "How's Paris?"

Dee was one of the few exes that Paris knew about; in fact, they'd met. They got on so well it made him wonder if he really was attracted to a certain type of guy. If asked, he would have claimed he had no type, but he was no longer sure. "He's good. He's going in for his routine check up next week." Tiger strain people always needed to go in for check ups after the high point in the viral cycle, just to make sure there weren't any aneurysms waiting to explode or that their hearts weren't damaged. The older they got, the more vital this became.

"Good. And let me say, on behalf of the entire gay male community, we hate your fucking guts 'cause you landed him. Share, you selfish bastard."

Roan chuckled although he really hadn't wanted to. Dee and Par had that in common: they could always make him laugh. "Let me officially say, to the entire community, tough titties."

"I just knew you'd say something like that. Creep." He sighed dramatically, but then changed the subject. "By the way, your arm isn't fractured; you just have some tissue damage."

"I figured." His fingers on his right arm tingled a bit, but mostly his arm just ached. He'd get over it.

"Why didn't someone get you an ice pack? I'll go get you one -"

"No, it's okay. I don't need it, really."

"Being macho again?"

"No. I've just had worse. I'll live." He felt his suspicious glare, but didn't turn to acknowledge it. "Can I ask you a bizarre question?"

"Do you ask any others?"

He ignored that. "Do you know anything about polycythemia vera, a blood cell disorder?"

Dee thought about that a moment, staring down at the foam green tiled floor and frowning. "Specifically? No, I'd have to look it up. Why?"

"Do you have any idea why a thirteen year old boy would get a blood disorder specific to middle aged men?"

He gave him a suspicious look, one that seemed to say What are you up to now, freak-o? but he did give him a serious answer. "Well, if the kid had an immune system disorder, he could be susceptible to almost anything. Age would be irrelevant."

"What kind of immune system disorders are we talking about? AIDS?"

"That would be the most devastating, sure; people with that have been known to die from diseases that humans aren't supposed to be susceptible to." After a pause, he added, "Being infected can do that to people sometimes too."

That was news to him. "Since when?"

"Well, some infectees systems don't take the major infections quite well, mostly tiger. But mainly it's the virus children. You're a bit of a miracle, Roan, although I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at that. You're a fully functional virus child - that's about as rare as surviving a tiger infection. Most viral kids are damaged on the genetic level; they get diseases that come out of nowhere within their respective families, like progeria, Tay-Sachs -"

" - and maybe something like polycythemia vera?" he interrupted, feeling his skin prickle as the answer seemed to explode in his mind. Oh shit. It all made sense now. He didn't have all the answers, but damn if he couldn't see the through line, the connecting thread between it all, the bits and pieces falling into a shattered picture. He jumped off the exam table, no longer aware of how much his arm hurt or how bad he felt for not finding Danny sooner. "Oh god, I know who killed Hank DeSilvo." He grabbed Dee's face in his hands and planted a quick, friendly kiss on his lips. "Thank you. Remind me to buy you a drink sometime."

As he left the exam room, wondering where the hell Sikorski was now, Dee called out, sounding flustered, "What the hell did I say?"

In this segment from chapter 15, titled Bloodshift, Roan discovers that Henstridge left the police force after the death of his wife and the continued illness of his son. But the illness is unusual ,and even the cause of his wife's death is vague. Considering the odd financial information Randi uncovered for him, is this related? He considers this while he continues following up leads in the Nakamura case, and that's when he finds something a bit unusual ....

****

Roan didn't understand how Henstridge's son could have polycythemia vera. Was it a lie?

A quick check of his personnel file confirmed his son, Michael, would only be thirteen, but polycythemia vera was an abnormal increase in blood cells caused by excessive production in the bone marrow. It was extremely rare, it was almost never diagnosed in people under forty, and yet if he used Henstridge's requests for personal time off as a measure, the kid might have been diagnosed as early as eight. Maybe if the kid had had leukemia at some point it could have been the cause, except oddly enough, polycythemia vera could actually lead to a form of leukemia. So was this just a kid doomed with an strange illness, or was his father lying for some unfathomable reason?

He searched on line for what happened to Henstridge's wife, who was listed on his personnel file as Anita (Havner) Henstridge. He found an old newspaper obituary from ten years ago, saying only that she died after a "long illness" that was never specified. Could it have been something related to polycythemia vera? Another weird thing, though: PV was more likely to affect men than women. This didn't make too much sense, but what in this case did? Maybe Anita used to be Arnold, pre-surgery.

He made sure Paris was locked in and safe before heading out, and while he wondered briefly if he could make the tiger become as submissive as Eli and the other cats, he decided that he didn't want to know. He felt it would confirm something about the cat in him, and he was still embracing denial at this point.

He set the Henstridge/DeSilvo case aside for the moment, and drove out to Hatch's place. The same beat up red Mazda Miata that he'd seen in the driveway when he talked to the acne riddled woman was here, as was a white Ford pick-up with some minor body damage and peeling paint. (He could almost hear Paris giving him an itemized run down on how much it would cost to fix the damage.)

Lights were on in the house, although the curtains were drawn and most of what he could see was bleeding though cracks, places where the drapes weren't closed all the way. Their closest neighbors weren't apparently home - there was no car in the drive, no lights on, their gate locked - so he parked just in front of their house, hidden from direct view by a large ponderosa pine. He was in what Par called his "ninja clothes" (black t-shirt, black pants, black hiking boots) and since it was a warm night he didn't wear his coat. He tucked his HK in a belt holster and pulled out his shirt to cover it, and wore his binoculars around his neck. He had a digital camera small enough to shove in his pocket; he could have just gone with the cell phone camera, but he didn't like their generally poor definition.

He got out of the car and walked towards the house, sticking to the faint but growing shadows in the blue twilight, and the wind came up against him back, warm and dry, making dead leaves scrape down the road with a sound like claws. It was like he was the only living thing on earth.

The Hatch's dog caught his scent and began to yip and growl, but as he came across their yard, he started to growl too, a low sound that almost got lost in the wind, but the dog heard it and stopped. Roan approached the chain link fence where the dog waited, reeking as if marinating in its own shit, and his growl grew louder as he looked down and met the dog's empty brown eyes, feeling his lip pull back and bare one of his sharp canine teeth. The dog whimpered and ran for the back of the yard to hide.

He heard the low murmur of a television inside the house, as well as a woman's voice slightly raised, yelling at some one to get their ass out here. Did Hatch have a kid?

He was on the verge of moving towards the front when a bright flash of light caught his eye.

It came from the large outbuilding in the backyard, which was shut up completely, but there were some gaps in black paint covering the tiny windows that allowed that light to pulse through. Roan stared at the shed, almost willing it to happen again, but it didn't. No matter how muffled a gunshot, he'd have heard it from here, so it must have been a picture flash. Now who would be taking pictures in a blacked out, locked shed?

Roan grabbed the top of the fence and easily pulled himself over it, jumping down and landing quietly in the dead grass. The dog was too scared and too busy hiding from him to comment, and the woman was still arguing with someone in the house.

There was only way to find out what that flash had been. He just hoped it was worth risking a trespassing charge for.

At the start of chapter 14, Watching The Detective, Paris discoevers Roan in a strangely self-pitying mood. How bad is the fall out from Roan's unfortunate self-discovery? Can he hold it together to solve the case?

Only after the painkillers started to work did Paris realize the thudding he was feeling was actually coming from above.

As he climbed up the basement stairs, he realized it was music, a bass line and drums pulsing through the floor, and as he pushed open the basement door he recognized it as a song from Absurd Pop Song Romance, Roan's favorite Pansy Division album. He'd heard it enough now that he could recognize it from a single guitar riff.

The sound washed over him as he stumbled blearily into the living room, and found Roan sprawled on the sofa, swigging directly from a bottle of rum. That was shocking for several reasons. Roan didn't like rum (the bottle was a Christmas gift from a totally clueless passing acquaintance); Roan drank very sparingly, and when he did, he had a preference for microbrews; and, perhaps most shockingly of all, it was just after seven in the fucking morning! Since when did he drink in the morning?

"Ro?" he asked, padding around the sofa.

Roan looked up at him slowly, his bottle glass green eyes glazed, red rimmed, and strangely unfocused. "Oh, sorry hon," he slurred, his syllables an almost inaudible mush. "I didn't think I'd wake ya."

"You're drunk." Yes, it was an idiotic thing to say, but it was startling to see him this way; he couldn't help but be stupid.

Roan shrugged in a strangely defeated way. "Con always liked it, so I thought now was as good a time as any to give it a serious shot."

"Con?" he repeated, puzzled. Or had he said Vaughn? Either way, he had no idea who that was.

"I guess I get the appeal of drunkenness, but fentanyl's easier." He took a swig from the rum bottle, then grimaced as if it was the worst thing he'd ever tasted. "God, this is horrible. It's like drinking hairspray."

"Then why drink it?"

"It's the only hard liquor we have in the house." He sighed heavily, and let the bottle thunk onto the carpet, where it still managed to remain upright. His voice was scratchy, hoarse, and Paris wondered if he was coming down with something. (Which would be about time, really. The whole time he'd known him, Roan had never gotten a single cold.) "I didn't want to think anymore; I wanna stop thinking. I wanna shut off my head." He dry washed his face, and that's when he saw that the knuckles on Roan's right hand were red and slightly swollen, filaments of blood marking the back of his hand like a henna tattoo.

He reached out and grabbed his hand, examining the injury close up. "Holy shit, Ro, did you get in a fight?"

Roan yanked his hand away violently before he could get a cursory glance. "Naw, I I broke the bathroom mirror. Sorry; I'll replace it."

"How'd you break it? Are you all right?" But even as he asked that, he realized that the injuries on Roan's hand could only have come if he'd punched the mirror, possibly more than once.

He shook his hand in the air as if it did actually ache, but then he let it fall casually to his lap. "I'm fine; I'm so fine I'm golden," he replied, but with a derisive, sarcastic snicker, and he got a pained look in his eye. "I'm the king of the fucking cats. I'm the alpha male."

Paris sat on the couch beside him, and it was a fight to catch Roan's eyes, as he seemed to be looking everywhere but at him. "Sweetheart, you're not making sense."

Roan's eyes started to turn liquid as tears welled in them, and once again he was quietly amazed at how perfectly, richly green they were. When he first met him, he thought he was wearing colored contact lens. "They knew I could kill all of them. How'd they know that when I didn't know that?"

Paris shook his head, trying hard to make sense of this. Well, drunken rambling wasn't new, it was just new for Ro.

He sniffed and wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. "There was this social worker once, her name was Allison, Rainbow reminds me of her in a way; very hippie-ish, kinda mousy. Allison was the only one who would touch me; she'd take my hand or give me awkward hugs. She would always tell me at the end of our sessions "You are not your disease". She'd look me in the eye and say that, and I didn't know why she was telling me that; it was other people who needed that info, not me. But I'm starting to think she was smarter than everyone else. I'm more my disease than I've ever wanted to admit."

Paris reached out and touched his face, cupping his cheek and turning him towards him. "That's nonsense -"

Roan pushed his hand away and shoved himself farther into the corner of the couch, like he was in one of his moods where he didn't want to be touched. They were rare, but every now and then he'd get in these dark places inside his own head where he wanted no one near him, where a casual touch, no matter how gentle or affectionate, would make him nearly jump out of his skin. Roan never wanted to talk about it, and Paris respected him enough not to ask. He could imagine what it meant, though, and it made him a little sick to think about it. "It's not. I wish it was. I've known for some time that too much of the cat is bleeding into me, but I liked to pretend it didn't mean anything. But it does. What d'ya think'll happen one day? Do you think I'll change and never change back?"

What in the fucking hell was he talking about?! Was he serious? "That doesn't happen. Infecteds don't become cats and stay that way. You know that."

"Infecteds like you. Functional virus children the medical profession still doesn't know what to make of us. We're the freaks of freaks." he continued wiping away snot and tears, as he wasn't crying, but tears were still streaming from his eyes as he stared resolutely down at the carpet. "And I've just gotten confirmation that I'm King Freak. I suppose I should be glad. If I gotta be a freak, at least I'm the biggest one."

He wanted to tell him that was total bullshit, he was not a freak and he was not his disease - what kind of thing was that to say anyways? - but Roan was not in a mood to listen right now. He reached out tentatively, letting him see his hand in the corner of his eye before gently touching his face, feeling if his forehead was hot. His skin did seem abnormally warm, but that could have just been the booze; he'd been to enough keggers to know that. "Come on, let's get you upstairs. You need to get some sleep."

Paris stood and took his arm, and Roan reluctantly let him help him up to his feet, not so much stumbling as taking a moment to find his balance. He leaned against him, and buried his face in the side of his neck. "You smell good," he said, his breath hot against his neck.

Oh joy. You had to love these drunken mood swings. "No I don't, I haven't had a shower yet."

"Doesn't matter. Tigers smell good." He scraped his teeth along his neck, not quite a love bite but very much in the same spirit.

"Are you serious? Have you ever been to the zoo?" He held Roan back by the shoulders, and said, "I'm on a supposedly lethal dose of illegal painkillers, and you're falling down drunk. Do you actually think we're capable of doing anything at the moment?"

Roan stared back at him in glazed, bemused defiance. "Nobody likes a quitter."

Pariis frowned, trying not to laugh. At least Roan was still in there, beneath all the self-pity and alcohol, still being a smart ass. "Come on, horndog, let's go."

"Shouldn't that be horncat?" He suggested, but not very seriously.

In this segment from chapter 13, Putting Out Fire With Gasoline, Roan is called to the precinct to help get a "bite print" on the transformed Eli. But things take a very strange turn ...

He followed him down a cool corridor of easy to hose down cement, although the air was redolent of that curious odor of industrial soap, vomit, body odor, and piss, with the lingering tang of cat; many different ones, all blending into a sharp, indefinable stink.

A metal door opened into what could best be called an antechamber, with a concrete floor and industrial white painted walls, and a guard's observation post, where a pudgy uniformed woman sat, observing the cell block on the monitors. Each cell was separated from others by soundproofed portable walls, but the cats could still smell each other and generally spent their nights (or days) pacing in agitation. A quick glance showed that six of the twenty available cells were occupied, five by cats in various states and one by a woman curled up in a fetal position on the floor, one who had probably just metamorphosed out of her cat form. Also in the room was Sikorski's usual partner, the almost abnormally calm and stoic Detective Sebastian "Seb" Estes (if he was white, he could have very well been Joe Friday), a guy from the tech branch he only knew as Allen, Officer Jeremy Brown, a cop he knew (and loathed ), and the Chief herself, Julia Matthews. Chief Matthews stepped forward, and gave him a courteous if slightly strained smile. "Thank you for coming in, Roan."

"Anything for you, Chief." And she was yards better than McClarty, who retired ahead of a minor scandal involving all those "good" families whose rebellious offspring's names he kept off the books. The first female chief of this particular precinct, she ran a really tight ship, as if appearing as anything less than a ball buster might open her up to charges that she was too "weak" to run the place. She was on the far side of forty, her almond brown hair cut almost military short, her uniform seemingly so starched and tailored you could have cut yourself on its crisp edges. She was above average in height, almost six feet tall in flats, and fairly solidly built; she claimed that that's just "how Montana farm girls turned out", but Roan knew that was just deflective self-deprecation. She was a good cop; he didn't hold it against her that she asked for his badge after that whole Jenkins' incident, and she always seemed shocked that he didn't resent her for it. But how could he? She was simply doing her job, and he had already concluded that he couldn't remain on the force. It seemed like a momentary lapse of reason that he ever even became a cop; he suspected he only had because people told him he couldn't.

Little Allen - not an insult; at barely five five he was the shortest person in the room - stepped forward with what looked like a thick, square dustpan on the end of a pole, the dustpan coated with a thick layer of a whitish-orange compound that smelled of antiseptic, filling amalgam, and plaster. "You know how to use one of these, I presume? You -"

"Yeah, I know the drill," he said, taking it from Allen. The dustpan thing was the "bite plate", the thing he had to make Eli the cat bite so they could get an accurate bite print. The stuff set pretty fast and tasted nasty, so after a cat bit it it was more than likely to let go quickly, but there had been instances where the cat tore the whole thing to pieces. You had to be careful - which was also why it was on a long pole, so you didn't have to get too close to the bars. "What cage is he in?"

"3-B," the female officer at the observation post reported, sounding so bored she could have been half asleep. The name patch on her uniform shirt said Stahl. "Go in, take a right; he's the second one down."

He nodded, and headed to the metal door plastered with all the warning signs in English and Spanish. "Got it." Stahl hit a button that unlocked the inner door with a mechanical clank, and then he was within the small maze of cat cages, the tiny wing smelling like a disreputable zoo. The door clanked shut behind him and locked with an ominous thunk.

As he walked the aisle around the cages, he remembered bringing Paris here when he was homeless and living in his car, on the verge of a shift but having nowhere to go. Paris was just getting his sanity back, his self, and he told him he hated police stations and hospitals, he hated places where there were so many people he could hurt if things went wrong. Roan had to soothingly talk him in here, and promised him he would watch from the monitors and make sure he didn't get out and hurt anyone; he promised he'd watch him all night. Roan had no intention of doing so, because even a tiger had no hope of getting out of here, and certainly not into the heart of the station. But as soon as his shift was over, he did come back, and the poor schlub on watch duty was more than happy to cede the chair to him. He told himself he just wanted to see what an actual tiger looked like, if they looked like the ones you saw in zoos, and yes, they did, or Paris did at any rate. He was the most magnificent cat he'd ever seen in his entire life, as well as one of the largest - no wonder he was worried about hurting someone.

He did end up watching him all night. He just hadn't meant to.

As cats went, Eli wasn't that big, just as he wasn't in real life. He was a lean, almost scrawny leopard, wheat colored fur short, his spots mere suggestions on his thin coat, ghost echoes of circles like the rings of enlarged moles. His lean, almost vulpine shaped head turned towards him and he snarled, stopping his restless pacing to run snarling at the bars, reaching a paw through to try and swipe at him.

Roan was too far back for the cat to even get close to scratching him, but he swore he could almost see Eli's arrogance in those yellowish eyes, something more Human than cat, and something in him bristled. "Back down, Eli," he snapped. "Be a good loser for once."

The cat looked up at him and snarled, black lips pulling over ivory teeth, and Roan snarled back, the growl rising easily to his throat. He crouched down so he could be at eye level with him, and the cat's ears went back flat against its head in what could very well have been confusion, if cats were even capable of that. Roan felt his snarl and growl become one, a thrumming like the engine of his bike, and the leopard charged forward again with a roar, and Roan roared right back, stopping it in its track.

It was a roar, although it was also half angry scream, and it scoured his throat raw the moment it was pushed out. But the growl continued throughout it all, and Roan didn't know how. He didn't know a lot of things, actually. He was feeling oddly dizzy, almost detached from himself, and he felt his anger like a physical entity inside his own body, making his muscles bunch together beneath his skin, smooth fibers flowing into hard knots. He leaned forward on his hands, now on all fours, closer to the cage than he should have been, and somehow he roared once more, the force of the noise making blood well up in his throat, as he felt the muscles in his back tense, the hair on his neck bristle as his lips pulled back and revealed his teeth to the cat, growling as he moved forward slowly towards the bars of the cage.

The Eli leopard backed up, its posture one of submission, but that wasn't enough for him. His blood pounded in his ears as his head seemed to swim in its own internal fog, and he could feel his muscles become liquid steel as the anger rose inside him, drowning his vision in red as he realized this cat had to die; he wanted to feel its warm blood gush in his mouth as he ripped open its throat, and -

[What the fuck?!]

It was an effort of will to reassert himself over the beast in his system, the one rising up to take him over, and he nearly threw himself backwards, shoving himself away from the cage as he panted for breath and finally stopped growling. What the fuck was that? [What the fuck was that?!]His own blood was coppery in his mouth, his throat ached as if it had been rubbed with a steel scouring brush. His muscle shifted back into their usual places as -

- his muscles shifted?

He looked at his hands, almost expecting to see fur and claws, but they were just hands; he could see the black curl of his Leo tattoo and his ghost scar, and he could see his hands were shaking. His whole body was quivering, and again it was an effort of will to make it stop, and it was almost painful since his muscles wanted to spasm. He felt like he was coming back to himself, but he had no idea where or when he had gone. He didn't even remember dropping the bite plate.

His head spun, swam, and he felt almost unable to deal with his own thought processes. Was he going to become ..? Was he going to change? That was impossible; the change couldn't be forced, it couldn't be controlled or made to happen outside the viral cycle. It couldn't happen; it had [never] happened.

(He felt the muscles move. He didn't roar; he couldn't make that noise. The second one wasn't even remotely Human. He had no idea where all that rage had come from, or why he was so mad.)

His first urge was to run, to get as far away from here and cats as he could, to barricade himself in his house and try to hold on to his humanity against an enemy that lived inside his own body, in his own head, but that was such a chickenshit reaction he was ashamed of it. He swallowed down his own blood, the very act of swallowing making him wince in pain, and he picked up the bite plate as he got up to his knees and shoved the thing sideways through the bars, only turning it level once it was inside. "Come on and bite the thing, you stupid cat," he grumbled, and his voice was gravelly hoarse, painful to listen to.

The leopard had laid down on the floor of its cage, its head down on its paws like a person in a guillotine waiting for the blade to come down. He jabbed the plate at its face, annoying it, and finally it raised its head and bit the thing, but it was strangely perfunctory, with almost no aggression in it at all. After he pulled the plate out of the bars, it resumed its submissive posture, its tail twitching in mild irritation.

Roan used the wall to get back to his feet, and as he walked back to the exit, he saw something that horrified him to his very core: the other cats were all in submissive postures. The lion, the panther he had a feeling if he walked the entire block, they would all be that way. They had somehow all heard him, or smelled him, or no, no, he couldn't deal with this. It suddenly felt as if the air was thickening, the walls closing in on him.