Infected: Shift by Andrea Speed Read Free Book Online Page A

any more than he wants to see that happen.”
     
    He was sure there was something strange about that statement, but he couldn’t quite decide what. “You’ve never told anyone about him?”
     
    “Oh, I have. I’ve written papers about Patient X—as I call him—and shared it with a few colleagues, but most think it’s my attempt at fiction. They don’t believe he could exist, that a medical oddity this extreme is even possible. But that’s what they said about the virus when it first appeared, so what the hell?”
     
    Dylan just sat there in the chair, wondering if he was going to wake up at home on the sofa, where he must have fallen asleep trying to decide if he should cut his latest canvas in half or set it on fire. This couldn’t actually be happening, could it? “Is, um, there any chance the virus will mutate further?”
     
    She did something you never wanted to see a doctor do: she shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so, but I didn’t think it could mutate further to begin with, so who knows?”
     
    He scratched his head, wondering what the appropriate response was here. Surely throwing a chair through the window was out of bounds, but the fact that he felt like crying made about as much sense. “Why, um, why did you ask me here?”
     
    “Because I’m gonna get him out of his coma tonight, and I want you to lie with me that his cycle came to a sudden end. Then, once he’s had a day to prove that he won’t change, I’m gonna call him back in here and tell him the truth. You don’t have to participate in that. I’m sure it won’t be pretty, but I’ll tell him I set you up for it so he won’t be mad at you.”
     
    He nodded and found himself blinking tears away from his eyes. “Okay, sure.”
     
    “You’re upset.”
     
    “I don’t know. I don’t know why I would be upset.” He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. Calmness; he had to think calm thoughts. He was water, he was stone.
     
    “’Cause it’s hard to be the loved one of an infected, especially when you’re normal.”
     
    “I’m normal?” he replied, almost laughing.
     
    “You’re not infected. And the fact that he’s been living under a death sentence must have added nothing but stress.”
     
    “He’s not going to die,” he said, and his voice cracked. He was water, and now it was coming out of his eyes.
     
    “Well, the possibility is still there. Aneurysms will always be a threat, and I’m sure he’ll die just like we all die. But we don’t have to worry about it on a month-by-month basis anymore. Here, have a tissue.”
     
    “I’m okay,” he lied, not sure why he felt like curling up in the corner and bawling like a little kid.
     
    Maybe because this should have been good news, extraordinary news, but he was afraid that Roan wouldn’t take it that way.
     
    If he really wanted to die, this actually made it easier to accomplish. He would have to decide between the living and the dead.
     
    And Dylan was pretty certain that was an argument lost before it was even made.
     

     

     
    Holden wondered if fighting was the only thing that kept people from realizing hockey was kind of gay.
     
    All the skating, all the body contact, guys hugging after a winning goal… kinda gay. But maybe that was his own prejudice talking. Maybe he was seeing everything through a gay glass. But no one could deny there were obvious homoerotic overtones, although not as much as in mixed martial arts fighting—now that was totally, completely fag-tastic. Guys in shorts, sweaty and grappling with each other in a cage as other men cheered them on… it was like soft-core porn at times. You could jerk off to it.
     
    Holden caught the end of a home game between the Falcons and the curiously named Wheat Kings (“ All bow before the mighty Wheat King, or I will blight your crops with fungus! ”), which the Falcons lost in overtime. Holden didn’t care, as he was just trying to spot the client, which he did