Undead L.A. (Book 2)

by Devan Sagliani

  “Looks like the sorry prick got exactly what he deserved after all,” Adam said with a dry laugh. “Pardon my French.”

  “Fuck him,” Sarah fired back, stopping afterwards to spit on the ground in disgust.

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Adam laughed. “Let's get inside and lock up quick before we end up joining him.”

  There was a metal door on the side of the furniture shop, which was shuttered. Adam reached into his shirt and removed a key that was hanging from a thin piece of silver around his neck. He fitted it into the lock. The ruse of circling the fast food building and cutting through the strip mall across from the hospital had bought them time, but that didn't mean they had been completely forgotten by their pursuers. There were now almost a hundred zombies bearing down on them like rabid animals locked onto injured prey; all were flooding across the boulevard past cars and bodies, like a disgusting river of rotting flesh and biting teeth. Adam jiggled the key in the lock, trying to get it to turn while cursing it under his breath.

  “Fucking...thing...gets stuck at the...oddest times,” he hissed in between attempts to force it open.

  “Hurry,” the girl pleaded in a worried voice. “They're almost here!”

  At last the key clicked into place and turned. Adam let out a sigh of relief as he swung the door open and pulled Sarah inside, slamming it behind him. There was a narrow alley between the two buildings that lead to a side door. Adam popped it open and motioned for her to go on in.

  “Ladies first,” he offered with a flourish, and added, “after you, my dear.”

  Sarah paused, looking as nervous as a plump rat in an owlery, then darted into the darkened office building. Adam followed her in and shut and locked the door. Sarah felt her thighs connect with the soft side of a cushy couch. She paused, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the dark before walking further. When they finally adjusted, she could clearly see that she was inside a furniture sales floor. To the right of her, alongside the showroom wall, there was a white staircase leading up to an open door. A wall of glass windows just beyond it suggested the upstairs was filled with offices.

  “This place belonged to my folks,” Adam explained.

  A hole in the ceiling allowed the last rays of sunlight to illuminate a path towards the staircase. Adam set off ahead of her and Sarah scurried behind him to keep up, not wanting to be trapped in the darkness of the warehouse space. Outside she could hear muffled cries of frustration as the small zombie horde pounded on the metal door in search of a fresh kill.

  “I've never seen anything like it before,” Sarah gushed.

  “Originally, they built this place to be some kind of assembly line,” Adam explained. “The people who owned it manufactured essential oils down on the floor, and management and sales worked upstairs. Then I guess they went out of business, or moved, or something. The realtor admitted it sat on the market for years. No one wanted it. In fact he had to beg my old man to see it, according to the way my mom tells it. I guess my father fell in love when he saw the upstairs. He kept the main office the same, but turned the others into rooms to entertain celebrity clients. It was the Seventies. Shag rugs, fondue parties, and who knows what else?”

  Sarah nodded, not having much to add. They reached the top of the stairs and Adam led them through the main door, shutting and locking it behind him. He walked down the hallway and turned left towards a small kitchen area. He came back out with two flashlights, handing one to her.

  “I spent most of my childhood here,” Adam revealed in a confessional tone. “Playing hide and seek down there and making microwave burritos in here. Naturally, with the power off you can't nuke a frozen meal anymore, but don't you worry. I grabbed a huge supply of canned heat from Home Depot when the shit hit the fan. I could cook us a full Thanksgiving meal and more with what I've got. Of course, I'd have to find a turkey first. It's not like you can just pop over to Whole Foods these days and pick up a Step 5 humanely raised antibiotic free turkey. Hell, you'd be lucky to find a plain old Butterball still frozen in someone's garage fridge at this point.”

  “Is there some place I can clean up?” Sarah asked.

  “You bet,” Adam said, feeling happy to have some company for the first time since the world ended. “Bathroom is the last door on the right. I've got over a month's supply of water up here, but no working plumbing so I've brought up a few buckets for flushing the toilet. I generally only use it as a last resort. I'm guessing one day it will back up on me, but for now it still works if you flush it manually.”

  “You have over a month's supply of water inside?”

  “And more downstairs,” Adam added. “We can even boil you some hot water for a bath after dinner if you’d like.”

  “I'd like that,” she decided, softening for the first time since he'd met her.

  “Okay then,” he said with an easy smile. “Then that is what we'll do. First I wanna make dinner, if you don't mind. I'm starving.”

  “What about all the blood?” she asked, staring pointedly at the mess running from his fingertips all the way up his arms. There was even a spray of dried blood splashed across his face.

  “I've got soap in the kitchen,” he assured her. “Don't you worry about me. Just go take care of business.”

  Sarah nodded, but didn't move. Adam smirked at her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Thank you,” she offered at last. “For saving me.”

  “I'm glad I did. It was the right thing to do,” he murmured, shrugging his shoulders. “Now go on so I can get to cooking.”

  She rushed at him without warning, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing him into a big hug. The sudden and unexpected outpouring of emotion caught him off guard. He'd grown used to being alone, used to having no one to share his thoughts with but the roaches and rats and an old notebook he kept near his bed. He had his mission, and up until that moment it had been the only thing that mattered, the only thing that kept him sane, maybe even the only reason left to live. He'd only been doing what was right. He'd only been doing what he believed in. He hadn't stopped to think about the consequences. And he realized, for the first time since he'd lost his parents, he was no longer alone in the world.

  There is no way I can let her go back out there on her own now, he acknowledged. Maybe it won't be so bad having someone around after all. I can teach her to fight. I can train her to help me put more biters to rest. She's like the little sister I never had and always wanted!

  He stood there awkwardly at first, not sure of what to do, but when it became clear she had no intention of letting go, he hugged her back. He didn't realize he was crying until the hot tears had already rolled down his dirty face and splashed onto his arms.

  ***

  At last estimate the adult entertainment industry generated a whopping $97 billion a year, with $12 billion coming from the United States alone.

  The heart of the industry was the San Fernando Valley, an urbanized area located north of the larger and more populous Los Angeles Basin.

  While some famous porn stars like Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick managed to earn millions from their pornographic fame most of the talent involved in sex films earned significantly less, particularly male performers who earned just a fraction of what their female counterparts made.

  ***

  CALIFORNICATION

  Samantha was walking in the middle of a large field, the sun high overhead beating down on her naked skin, arms outstretched, finger tips gliding silently over the soft dry tips of golden wheat stalks. She could feel the cool earth beneath her with each step, her feet sinking slightly into the unnaturally dark soil.

  Why does it always make me think of coffee grinds?

  She could feel the prickly tickle of the grains as she parted them with her long, smooth legs. She was back in Kansas. She was sure of it, even if she didn't know how she'd gotten there. She was on her parents’ farm again, the one she'd worked so hard to escape just over a ye
ar ago. Located out in the middle of nowhere the property seemed to go on for miles in all directions, a wide swath of amber thrush yawning with a million golden fiery tongues towards the sunset on the horizon. They lived in an extreme rural area, and often Samantha went days without seeing people other than her immediate family or the hired help. But privacy had its privileges too, as she'd discovered in her early teen years when she began taking regular walks alone in the fields, naked as a jay bird.

  It's the only time I feel totally free, she thought, like how things were in the Garden of Eden.

  Samantha had grown up being sheltered from the rest of the world by overly controlling parents who saw to her religious instruction, as well as her formal education. She'd never been allowed within fifty feet of a public school. Her father swore he'd rather burn down the building than let one of his kids step inside an institution hell bent on teaching nonsense such as evolution.

  “I ain't gonna let no liberal idiot tell ya that we came from monkeys,” he spat in disgust. “We're made in the image of the Lord our God, not some dirty ape with no more common sense than to play with its own shit.”

  He was full of clever one-liners like that, along with a litany of ugly jokes about fairies, homos, crooked politicians, and dizzy, good-for-nothing broads—the kind that would get you a free drink in the right company at the local watering hole. Not that she'd known much about it, other than her mother's derogatory comments when they passed by the Silver Shoe on Main the few times she'd been allowed to wander into town to help with a supply run. Sam attributed her desire to rebel against her family and run away the minute she turned eighteen to this terrible sin of keeping her in a protective bubble her whole life. Unlike her older brothers, who were free to come and go as they pleased and get into all manner of trouble without incurring more than a token lecture, she had been fastidiously guarded every second of the day well into her early teens. It left her feeling more like a prisoner than a beloved daughter.

  I couldn't wait to get away from here, she thought. So why did I return?

  One thing she knew about herself was that she was never particularly sentimental. She didn't understand, in fact, why people spent so much time reminiscing over how things were better in the past, polishing up those old memories until they were larger than life and cleaned of all the thorns.

  Maybe the reason I've never felt that way was because my past didn't have a lot of moments like that, she thought, pushing away a tiny stabbing dagger of guilt at the thought of her mother's condemning voice howling up from the depths of her subconscious.

  She caught a lift with one of the work hands all the way to Colorado, staying in Colorado Springs for a week before hitchhiking to Vegas. Getting from there to Hollywood was as easy as flirting with a young and overeager gambler on a winning streak at the craps table at Caesar's Palace. She bolted when he stopped at a gas station on Vine, taking all of his winnings with her. She'd called home from a payphone inside Hollywood and Highlands, and her mother had let her know in no uncertain terms that she was “nothing more than a harlot out to embarrass her parents with the wickedness in her heart.” With a voice distorted by hurt and disgust, she informed Samantha that only a hardhearted concubine for the devil would turn her back on her family and run off in the middle of the night—and that Samantha was a coward for not saying goodbye to their faces. It went without saying that she would not be welcome back home again, but her mother made sure to throw it in anyway, just in case.

  “As far as your father and I are concerned, you are dead to us.”

  And yet here I am, she thought, back home, fully exposed, and unashamed of the person I've become.

  A part of her knew it couldn't be real, that she must be dreaming. She had to be. That field was where she came to feel safe, to be alone with her thoughts, but it was also where she had her first sexual encounter after bumping into Dylan, the kid from the next farm over.

  I'll never forget the way his mouth hung open when he saw me wandering around with no clothing on, she thought, or the rush it gave me having the ability to make him act like a drooling idiot!

  She'd quickly grown to love the feeling of power she had over men as she began to develop. By the time she was fifteen she had the body of a woman, and many of the hired hands on the farm had a hard time pretending they didn't notice. She'd grown tired of messing with Dylan, the only boy around that was her own age, and quickly moved on to seducing the traveling migrant workers that came to spend seasons on the farm with them. It was like a game to her, luring them in, pretending to be innocent, then letting them make the first move before rejecting them and threatening to tell her father. There was a thrill in knowing that she could not only cost them their jobs, but also have them arrested for messing around with an underage girl.

  That initial look of fear is the best, she thought. It's when you know for sure that you've got them by the balls, that you can make them do anything you want.

  Once she'd sufficiently wound them up in her mind games, she'd work on getting them alone and fucking them. It didn't always turn out how she expected, but that was just part of the fun. On more than one occasion the men had been so angry by her scheming that they'd gotten rough with her. She hated to admit that those terrifying moments of being slapped and choked and having her hair pulled and her clothing ripped off of her were easily the most erotically satisfying. If the men degraded her verbally, or threatened her and her family, she'd involuntarily squirt. She didn't like giving up her power, but she loved to be dominated, loved the dark streak growing inside of her, so naughty, so subversive, so completely unacceptable. Somewhere between the violence and helplessness she'd discovered a surrender that lead to bliss, and orgasms so strong she'd all but seen the face of God as they wracked her body with involuntary spasms.

  Our Dark Father, with rough hands and a throbbing hard prick that knows no mercy, hallowed by thy name...

  She got to the edge of the field and came to an abrupt stop. She could see the farm that Dylan's parents had owned before going bankrupt. By the time she'd left home the place was a ghost town of dead, rusting equipment. She'd gotten a closer look as she passed by on the way to the interstate and been astonished by how quickly it had fallen into disarray, weeds overtaking the fields in less than a year. Now the barn was freshly painted and the fields looked well tended. There was even a paved road leading to the main house. The door had been left ajar. It wagged back and forth in an unseen breeze, like a tongue, while human shadows flitted behind it. Samantha’s heart froze as she waited to see who would emerge. She became acutely aware of her nakedness.

  Just like Eve, she thought, moments after biting the apple.

  Suddenly her nipples felt cold and stiff. Dark storm clouds formed overhead, threatening rain. The billows moved in, rapidly obscuring the house and preventing her from seeing who it was that came shuffling out. She raised her arms and covered herself. There were more shapes emerging from the house—two, then three, then four people slowly moving, their bodies seemingly twisted into unnatural positions. A sudden crack of thunder made her jump and cry out. The people coming out of the farmhouse turned and looked up in her direction. A flash of lightning tore through the sky, illuminating their shadowy features. Terror shot through her, freezing her in place like a statue. Loose flaps of skin peeling from their faces waved grotesquely in the harsh storm winds, like the flag of an alien invader come to conquer and plunder. Round gelatinous eyes rolled loosely in their decaying sockets, while deep grooves and tears in the skin and muscle seemed to ring their dark, bloodstained mouths. Some were missing patches of hair from their scalps. Some had chewed holes in their faces, exposing bone and skull for the world to see. They were all dressed in their Sunday best. Standing in the middle of them was Dylan, his throat a bloody shredded mess of torn and rotting flesh that dangled merrily, like the deep scarlet beard of a nightmare Santa Claus straight from the twisted bowels of hell.

  Oh my God, she thought. Their corpses have climbed
out of their graves and come back to haunt me.

  Dylan threw back his head and let out a howl that sounded like a timber wolf, the animal cry putting his other dead relatives on high alert. They began to move much more quickly now, as if they had previously been conserving their limited energy, but would now be willing to burn their last calorie to reach and feast on her luscious body.

  It's like a dinner bell, she thought. And I'm the main course.

  She turned and bolted, her thin legs moving faster than she'd normally be capable of running. In spite of the spikes of fear in her chest she tore on at full speed, knowing that she was capable of escaping. She'd done it before and she'd do it again. She set her mind to reach her parents’ barn and lock herself in. It was warm inside, and there was always water and food in the supply shed. She darted back into the high wheat just as the heavy rain reached her and began to pelt her uncovered flesh with stinging beads of frigid water. It came down hard on all sides like a final judgment, obscuring her vision, like stones being cast at an adulterer being punished for her life of sin and pleasure. She yelped as the wet ground gave way and the soles of her feet found thorns and sharp sticks where previously there had been none, causing her to tumble to the ground and skin her knees on a patch of rocks.

  You've still got time to make it, she thought, yanking the large thorns from her feet and watching bright red blood ooze out. Just get up and keep running, bitch!

  But she couldn't even stand, a dismal fact she discovered when she leaped to her feet to give it one more go. The pain was overwhelming; she might as well have been running on shards of broken glass. She fell forward onto her hands and knees, ignoring the shrill jolt of fresh agony that shot through her cold body. The earth beneath her had turned to saturated gravel, and it felt like she was crawling over a pit of wet razor blades with each movement she made. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up as a cold chill ran through her. The desire to turn and look back overwhelmed her, and she gave in to the primal instinct. Dylan and his family were within feet of her now. She rolled onto her back feeling like needles were sinking deep into her body, rigidly holding her in place. Dylan reached her first, his terrible face now clearly revealed by a fresh flash of lightning tearing through the clouds overhead. He was missing most of his bottom lip. She could see the horrible, cracked lower teeth jutting through. He moved with preternatural speed, lunging at her mouth first like a wild cat, teeth out and dripping with dark blood.