Undead L.A. (Book 2) Read online

  Praise for Undead L.A. 1

  "It's exciting and encouraging to see any creative artist come into their own; grow, mature and flourish into a virtual prodigy to be reckoned with...Sagliani hits the nail on the head time and again making the action translatable unto a vast readership audience...even Clive Barker would be proud."

  – Dave Gammon, Horror News

  "...a novel that has many virtues and not a single flaw within its pages. I cannot begin to commend the author on the merits of the read. It's an impressive piece of zombie themed prose."

  – Living Dead Media

  "I challenge readers to dive into his work and not fall in love. Riddled with powerful story lines and intense characters, Undead L.A. 1 delivers its readers with a riveting roller coaster read."

  – Shana Festa, The Bookie Monster

  "There is literally something for everyone in this book. I highly recommend it for zombie and horror fans."

  – Lori, Contagious Reads

  Undead L.A. 2

  by Devan Sagliani

  Laughing Crow Media. © 2015.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by STK Kreations

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be

  re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Kindle and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book

  are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and is in no way intended by the author. All right reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Fever Dream

  Black Crow Laughing

  We Are the Hunters

  Californication

  The Chosen Ones

  Ghosts in the Machine

  May They Not Be Forgotten

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Devan Sagliani

  INTRODUCTION

  On September 20, the zombie virus was released into the dense population of transients on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. It spread like unstoppable wildfire in all directions, decimating everything in its path for six full weeks before measures were taken to cleanse the scourge. These stories take place in those final times.

  They are told through the eyes of several different Angelinos, each offering a unique perspective to the events as they unfolded and to the aftermath of the virus. They have not been edited for content but remain preserved in their initial capturing. They bear witness not only to the tragedies of that unforgettable period, but also to the city's former glory.

  May they not be forgotten but remain uncensored for future generations, so they may understand the choices that we made. And may they also serve as a reminder; not only of mankind’s infinite potential for good, but also of their latent animal desire for cruelty and suffering, and how the constant struggle between these two opposing forces defined what it meant to be alive in the era commonly referred to as the 21st century.

  ***

  Los Angeles, also known as the City of Angels, once had a racially and culturally diverse population of nearly 4,000,000 people.

  Prior to its fall it was the most populated city in California and the second most populated in the entire United States.

  It covered an area of nearly 500 square miles.

  In fact the Greater L.A. Area region contained approximately 18,000,000 people, making it one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas on the entire planet.

  The city's inhabitants were referred to as Angelenos.

  ***

  FEVER DREAM

  Diora woke with a start, as if something harsh and electric had just washed over her. She was still alone, shivering on a flat mattress on the cold concrete. A thin sheen of dope sickness covered her already aching skin. Her body demanded more junk, from the tips of her rats nest hair to her persistently itching skin that felt like a thousand insects were crawling all over every inch of her. Even her teeth seemed to throb dully with need. A rumble in the distance brought her mind back from focusing on her various, unhappy extremities and the raw hunger to jam her veins full of sweet brown sugar freshly cooked in a bent spoon.

  What the…? Was that an explosion?

  She languidly mulled over the possibility that the army had come to rescue her, then thought better of it. She'd been on her own long before the world had ended. She'd come to a fragile peace with that fact, that no one ever really knows anyone else, that you can't trust people, and that sooner or later they all let you down. It was comforting to have life reduced down to this immutable truth in her opinion. It was only when other people tried to disabuse her of the notion that things got dicey, that she became so uncomfortable in her own skin she couldn't stand it, that she wanted to scratch away her flesh and pull her hair out and gouge out her own eyes to stop the creeping feeling from rising up from the pit of her stomach. Over the years she had learned there were a lot of ways to turn that feeling off, but none worked so well as a shot of heroin. She understood that human beings were by their very nature delusional, that they needed to cling to their fantasies to function in the hostile world around them, holding tightly to concepts like love and family and community—but to her they meant nothing. In the end she understood that humans were nothing more than mutated animals, and that consciousness was a cruel joke of evolution inflicted upon them.

  Jamal doesn't ask me to believe in him or anything else, she thought with a wry smirk. Our arrangement is simple—he provides the drugs and I give him all the pleasures my body can provide. He protects me, feeds me, sometimes even beats me when I'm having one of my moments, but he keeps me safe and flush at the end of the day. He makes sure I have everything I need.

  There was more to their arrangement, but it always seemed like an afterthought to her, since she would have come to the same conclusion on her own if Jamal hadn't presented the idea of being her full-time pimp first. Before he came along it was just random tricks, and sometimes she got paid, and sometimes she got kicked out of a moving car into the gutter with a mouth full of semen instead. She knew it should bother her, the fact that he was selling her to survive, but the truth was it simply didn't. If anything she thought it was his way of doing her a favor—keeping things honest—making the most of what she had before the ravages of time stole what little beauty was left in her. Still it was important to be honest, not to sugar coat the shit stew her life had always been from day one, at least that was her unsolicited opinion, so she went ahead and let herself remember the rest of their arrangement.

  He sells me, sure, finds men willing to pay cold hard cash or sweet junk in tiny balloons for a quick release in a parked car or behind the dumpster in the alley, but he's never forced himself on me or made me do anything I wasn't already willing to do. He's never sold me a bullshit fantasy of a better life one day or getting off the streets or making me 'an honest woman,' whatever the hell that means. He's not one for small talk or poisonous lies or pretty words that don't mean nothing.

  They were both transplants when they met in front of Ralphs on Sunset, her makeup still smeared from blowing the fat guy in his lime green Cadillac Eldorado with the cream colored leather interior that reeked of stale fast-food French fries and back sw
eat. Images flashed through her mind at the memory, his jingling belt and pasty white stomach with all those crinkly brown hairs brushing against her cheek, the way he bucked his hips right before he shot his oily, bitter load into her mouth, causing the back of her head to bump painfully into the steering wheel, his refusal to pay the measly twenty bucks they'd agreed upon, her high pitched screeching...

  Then out of nowhere came my hero to rescue me.

  Jamal had been her black knight in a Chicago White Sox cap, reaching through the car window and throttling the teary eyed John until he passed his entire wallet to him with pudgy, fumbling fingers. They'd been a team ever since, and a successful one by most standards. Jamal had moved them from cheap motel to cheap motel, crisscrossing the city from downtown to LAX and back in his old Honda Civic, before they'd discovered the half-finished apartment building on Sunset near the Seventh Veil. Jamal had cut a hole in the chain link fencing to let them in, then torn down the plywood board hammered across the back entrance. The first floor was still littered with construction supplies, and all the windows were covered by clear plastic sheeting that had been tacked down on the corners with a staple gun. Jamal said he’d read about the place in the papers. Caught in a legal battle that hinged on a nasty divorce, the owners had simply left the building as a wooden and concrete skeleton to be finished once the appeals were all exhausted and a final ruling was made in the case. There was a tall shaft in the lobby where the elevator would one day go that let in an ugly howl as hot Santa Ana winds blew down, echoing like a beasts growling stomach as it whistled past each empty floor. The staircase between the fourth and fifth floor was incomplete.

  They'd used a beam to climb up to it the first night, pulling it up behind them. Later that week Jamal wove together a makeshift ladder, like something from a kids tree house, out of materials he'd boosted from Home Depot. He said he'd intended to keep other squatters and homeless addicts out of their space by taking it with them during the day, but after the bodies began rising up from the streets and biting people, the rope bridge had another, more useful purpose—protecting them from the undead.

  There were so many of them, she thought. They came from all sides at us, like a wave of gnashing teeth and torn flesh. If Jamal hadn't been there to protect me I'd almost certainly be one of them right now, out wandering around in search of fresh meat.

  When the shit hit the fan she'd been blowing a guy with slick hair and gold chains who looked like an undercover cop in his silver Chrysler, while he fingered her ass with a condom. Jamal had been lurking nearby, making sure the John paid for his trick and didn't try anything stupid like driving off with her in the car. They'd come up the street from the opposite direction, a riot of hungry demons ripping apart anything living they came in contact with. Jamal had pulled the door open and grabbed her by the hair, freeing the man’s saliva-slicked genitals from her mouth in the process. The creep began to holler, but Jamal silenced him with two hard punches to the face before grabbing Diora by her clothes and pulling her onto the sidewalk. He bent the driver’s side door back and began kicking it as hard as he could until it came loose. The trick lay slumped in his seat as Jamal picked up his smashed door, holding it like a shield, and began retreating back to their hideout, his other arm pulling her in so tightly it hurt.

  Diora didn't dare scream for fear of luring the human looking monsters closer to them. She trusted Jamal completely, and knew he'd see them through this just as he had with everything else. She watched in terror as two men covered from head to toe in ripped-apart bites, their skin nearly peeling off of them, leaned into the car and began tearing chunks of the man's face off—the man she'd just been servicing. The last thing she saw was one leaning in to chew off his face.

  Served him right, cheap fucker, she thought, recalling how he'd haggled with Jamal on prices for services as if she wasn't standing there listening the whole time. I hate it when they treat me like a piece of meat. Now that asshole knows first hand how it feels.

  They'd waited out the rioting in the streets, listening to guns going off and the terrified screams that echoed in the predawn stillness. By the third day there were only car alarms and the low groaning sounds of flesh-hungry demons roaming the streets, a sound like wind whistling through a screen door. Jamal had begun to make runs for food, water, and drugs after that.

  The first place he'd gone was to her dealer’s house, kicking down the door and storming in. He'd found Billy, the skinny, white USC dropout who'd been her best supplier, cowering in the corner of his apartment, waving a .38 Special at him as he approached. Jamal yanked the loaded weapon free from Billy and used the pistol grip at the back end of it to knock the little wigger out cold. They'd hit the dealers place at just the right time, too. From what Diora could tell he'd just gotten in a big shipment of junk before the whole world fell apart, and he’d been unable to move most of it. Jamal came back with several bricks of the cleanest dope she'd ever tasted, not like the usual stepped on shit she fed her system most days. She had enough to last her practically forever without having to dial back on her habit at all. Jamal even got something out of the deal, since Billy had a backpack full of Blue Dream stuffed in his closet as well. He'd been a heavy marijuana user since he was a kid, but had stopped once he started pimping—knowing that he needed to stay sharp to keep one step ahead of the cops. That night they both got wasted out of their minds and laughed so hard their sides hurt, over nothing, over silly shit, like fart jokes and bad puns and other nonsense.

  On top of all of that, Jamal had managed to bring back enough cigarettes and lighters to keep her puffing pretty the rest of the year, after clearing out the pharmacy of a CVS of all its painkillers and antibiotics on his way back to the crash pad. But even with all of that he still had to wander out to find food for them, which generally meant scrounging through corpse-infested apartments in search of canned goods. At first they'd managed to stockpile a healthy amount of grub, and not just fruit and vegetables. There were containers of beans and stew and raviolis and even juice boxes. They'd stacked them up in the far right corner, declaring the unfinished space to be their de facto kitchen. Jamal never had to go for long, since there were still plenty of well-stocked apartments in the area. But as time went by the good stuff dwindled down and Jamal's trips began to take longer and longer, extending from hours to days that Diora was left alone. This was the longest he'd been gone so far, three days if she had counted correctly. He'd never been away this long before, but Diora wasn't worried. Jamal didn't like taking chances. If he was gone longer it was to ensure he wasn't seen, or worse—followed home.

  Still I could use a fresh fix, she thought. If I have to wait much longer it's going to be a long, miserable day.

  She needed him to be back before she took care of herself, otherwise she might fall into the bliss of the high and leave him waiting for the rope ladder on the lower landing. Jamal did not like to be kept waiting. She'd learned that the hard way. He asked for very little considering what he gave her, but he would not tolerate her disrespecting him. For her the disappointed look in his eyes stung far worse than the beatings he gave her with his belt, or the welts they left on her legs.

  Maybe just a little taste, she thought. Something to get me going.

  She looked over and saw that there was still some left in the needle. There was no way she could go cold turkey without getting ill, so she'd been taking nips over the last couple of twenty-four-hour periods to keep from drying out. She was really looking forward to Jamal coming back so she could get all the way out of her mind. Until then one last bump would have to do the trick. She sat up and tied off with the length of panty hose she'd cut for just such a purpose. Slapping her arm, she saw the familiar vein rise to greet her.

  Hello, old friend.

  There were bruises and track marks all around it, but that big bulge still worked better than any other vein in her body to deliver her sweet medicine. There was a brief sting as she sank the needle in, piercing the flesh, and then
a warm rush as the dope blossomed into her system, burning away all the pain and worry.

  Maybe I can clean up a little, throw some of this stuff down the chute. That will make him happy.

  She wanted to get up, but she didn't quite have the strength for it once the heroin hit her system. She pushed with her skinny arms, but they did little to assist her and soon she sank back to the bed, feeling dizzy and overwhelmed. Her vision was obscured by blurry patches as the drug took hold. She felt blissfully disoriented. Her mind would not fully focus. It was as if she was slipping back into the world inside her head—the world she'd been vividly dreaming about. The floor rose up to greet her and she fully surrendered to it.

  Now what was I dreaming about again?

  Images came flickering back as she let her eyes close. She'd been talking with her third grade teacher, Mr. Sparks, but somehow it wasn't really the same person she'd known back then. He was different, more like her first boyfriend Jake, but wearing a sweater vest and loafers. This made the comparison all the more ironic, owing to Jake's obsession with Kurt Cobain.

  Jake wouldn't have been caught dead in those, Diora laughed. He was strictly into ripped jeans, cheap plain white T's he could scribble idiotic phrases on to freak people out with, and endless plaid flannel shirts. If he had shoes on they were always Converse high tops, the ones that eventually wore out in the sole, so he wrapped duct tape around the front and the bottom of the sneaker several times and continued wearing them for another six months until the tape wore out and broke.