Immortality Is the Suck (2 page)

in the weird light, and utterly still. He looked almost pristine and holy lying

there in his altogether. He had the skeletal build of an addict, practically

hairless, though the few strands on top of his head had been allowed to grow

long. I didn't know him. Maybe he was one of the guys that jumped me. Or

maybe he was another homicide that happened elsewhere. I couldn't see any

obvious sign of what had killed him, but the world is a dangerous place. I'd

seen people dead for an awful lot of stupid reasons in my career. Not all of

them were obvious at first sight.

A frickin' pair of socks would have been good. Because the concrete floor

was freezing and my feet were aching with the cold. Then, I remembered where

they kept the clothes they took off the dead bodies and I pushed through a big

swinging door into the room next door where I found the drawers that held all

the plastic bags with the names on them.

My clothes were there, but they were covered with blood. I mean, the shirt

was so soaked with blood it was stiff. Christ, I thought as I inspected it, how

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5

did I survive this? So, I went through the other boxes until I found a shirt and

a pair of jeans that more or less fit. Of course, my wallet and keys and gun

weren't in there. They were probably in Evidence. Which I could not get to

without setting off every alarm in the place.

Which I did not want to do. Because the last I remembered, my fellow

LAPD officers had just surprised me in an extremely compromising position. In

fact, I was willing to bet I would have been sitting in jail right at that moment if

they hadn't thought I was dead.

So I sat down and pondered this a bit.

While I was sitting there, I caught movement from the stiff on the dolly. I

rubbed my eyes and blinked hard. My eyes had always played tricks with me in

here. It was just one of those spooky places that made a guy imagine things.

But then, as I watched, the fucking thing, person, whatever,
sat up.

You know the ME was getting pretty sloppy. That's two guys they thought

were dead that were not.

I expected the former corpse to be as disoriented as I had been, so I was

completely unprepared for him jumping up off that table and coming at me like

a lion leaping on a zookeeper. Mouth open, making an otherworldly growling

howling noise.

Hey, I've been trained in combat and I've worked the streets of Los Angeles

for a decade. I'm not the kind of guy you generally get a drop on. But a

scrawny, ghost-white naked man leaping across the floor while screaming can

take even me aback.

I had time to throw my arms up in a defensive posture before he landed on

me and we both went backward. I heard a loud
crack
, which was my head

hitting the concrete floor. I should have been out knocked out cold. Except I

wasn't. On the contrary, I was experiencing a rush of something like adrenaline

with a speed chaser. Strength surged into my arms and legs, my whole body

6

A. M. Riley

felt euphoric, and I found myself—gleefully, mind you—thwapping the guy's

head against a wall.

This seemed not to faze him in the least. He had this wide, teeth-baring

grin. He looked like a bear trap, with fangs. No kidding. Fangs. His fingers

wrapped around my neck. And then he kneed me. It was like getting kicked by

a Clydesdale. I fell, but I kept my grip and brought him with me. A tray of

equipment came down with us and I heard the
ping ping ping
of metal

instruments raining around us.

We were rolling and clawing and choking each other. I could hear myself

snarling too. His eyes, close up, were yellow and his fangs snapped. The fangs

kept registering in some back room of my mind, but in the forefront of

consciousness I was just getting off on the violence. I let go of his neck and

started punching him repeatedly in the chest. I could feel his ribs breaking.

Then he screamed, grabbed my balls, and bit my neck.

And at this point I'd say that the squeamish among you should avert your

gaze but, seeing as you're reading this, not watching it on television, I guess I'll

just warn you that the next part gets a little ugly.

Nobody grabs my privates uninvited. I gripped his head with my hands

and twisted. His mouth popped off my neck; I heard his vertebrae crack. For

just an instant his grip on my nuts loosened and I snagged the offending hand

and snapped its wrist like it was a twig. Then, for reasons I would not

understand until later, I brought that broken wrist up to my mouth and bit

down.

His pumped up, adrenalized blood flooded my mouth. It tasted good.

Better than good. It tasted better than anything I'd ever tasted in my life. I

could feel him yanking out my hair, fingers gouging and clawing, but I still had

him while he struggled and screamed. And then I found myself just sort of lost

in the moment, as his life pumped into my mouth. Until he stopped moving

and I lifted my head from his arm. And realized what I had done.

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7

I'd done a lot of fucked-up things in my life. This one took the proverbial

cake.

There was blood all over me. I touched my face and found it wet with

blood. You'd think this would make me sick. Nope. I licked my lips and fingers

like it was Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was hungry for more. Starving. Buzzing

like I'd just snorted speed and I needed to move move move.

Considering that I had just bit a corpse to death in the Los Angeles

County Morgue, this urge to move seemed logical. I went to one of the sterile

steel sinks and splashed water on my face. Peeled off my stolen shirt and used

it to swab myself off. Then I had to go steal another shirt. This one was a worn

flannel number with what looked like a couple bullet holes in it, but I'm a big

guy and there weren't a lot of choices.

I looked around the room and, of course, it was hopelessly trashed. My

prints would be everywhere and the minute I walked out the door I'd be seen,

or the security cameras would pick up my image. But I figured as soon as they

saw it was
my
body missing, they'd know what had happened anyway, so there

was no sense in trying to cover anything up. Nope. My only chance was to come

up with a plausible excuse for everything that had happened in the past

twenty-four hours. You can imagine in the past five years or so I've become

something of an expert in the art of plausible excuses.

A digital clock in the morgue told me it was just after 7:00 p.m. There was

always a crew opening up a stiff somewhere down here, so it was just a matter

of moments before somebody came back into this room and found the mess.

And started looking for
me
.

I peeked out the door and there were lights coming from a couple labs

down the way, but there seemed to be a clear, unpeopled path to the back

stairway that led to the ivy-covered hillside and street. I was already coming up

with my excuses as I shouldered open the door. Something along the lines of

“disoriented upon finding himself in a morgue” or something.

8

A. M. Riley

Up the two flights of stairs, and of course somebody had left the door

propped open. I saw the man probably responsible for this little security

violation, standing outside having a smoke. He kind of turned his head as I

passed, but my legs were made of lightning and before he could even open his

mouth, I'd rounded the corner, leaped through the ivy, and was over the

Hurricane fencing and halfway down the block.

I paused to look down in surprise at my bad knee. Near death experiences

seemed to suit it because it was working like a kid's knee. Like the seventeen-

year-old tight end's knee it had been long ago.

East Los Angeles is no place to be without cash or credit cards, wearing a

dead man's clothes, especially in the middle of the night, so the first thing I

thought was I needed to call a friend and get out of there. Of course, the

problem with that was having a friend to call. So then I thought of Peter. Peter

who just never seemed able to say no.

We all have a Peter. Even mofobags like me have that friend who always

gets the one phone call from jail. Yeah. For me, that's Peter.

It took me three pay phones before I found one that still worked and

placed a collect call “
to Peter from Adam
.”

As soon as the operator announced the caller, Peter cursed and hung up.

Oh, right, Peter thought I was dead. So I called again, except now, while

the operator was telling him that this was a collect call for Peter from Adam, I

spoke over her. “Hey Pete, it's me. I know you think I'm dead but—”

He hung up.

This obviously was not going to work. I looked around. I was steps from

the 101 freeway overpass, the feet of the thick concrete pylons used as

makeshift beds for sleeping street persons. Looking more like trash and

bundles of rags there in the shadows. It was not my proudest moment, okay,

but I was desperate.

“Hey, gimme your cash.”

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9

The poor guy looked up at me with one eye. The other eye didn't seem able

to open. His semitoothless mouth gaped as I just searched his pockets until I

found a few bucks and some change.

Then I jogged back down to the UCLA medical center and waited at the

bus stop with a couple teenagers in colors, a night shift nurse still wearing

scrubs, and some goon who stank worse than the morgue, and took the bus

headed toward Venice, where Peter lived.

10

A. M. Riley

Chapter Three

Peter and I had a history. I sat on the bus, while it made its slow, lurching

way down Wilshire Boulevard and let myself dwell on that. Thinking about

what sort of reception I might expect. Because, you'll remember, Peter was

there when the LAPD closed in to arrest me. Or, I suspected, they would have

closed in if I hadn't bled out there in his arms.

Peter crying and begging me not to die should have warmed the cockles of

my heart, I guess, but mostly it worried me.

Because when I say
history
, I mean it in every sense of the word. I'm

talking a proverbial encyclopedia's worth of history between us.

Peter and I met at the police academy. I was out of the Marines, battle

scarred literally and figuratively. I won't go into why I mustered out, but let's

just say it was a mutual decision. There's not a hell of a lot of options for ex-

military, despite what you see on the recruitment ads, so when I heard the

LAPD was bringing in a “New Wave” of officers, I decided to give it a shot.

I passed the academy entrance exam by the skin of my teeth. An 80

percent, when the lowest possible score was an 80 percent. Peter, on the other

hand, was straight out of the UC school system with a degree in criminal

justice. He'd probably passed the academy exam with one eye shut.

We shouldn't have been best buddies, but Peter, bless him, had glommed

onto me that first week and had stuck like glue ever since.

“How's it going?” I looked up from my book. The young, buff, golden boy I'd

noticed that first day stood on the other side of the library table. LAPD blue polo

Immortality is the Suck

11

shirt stretched over hard round muscles. Strong neck, square chin, dark blue

eyes. He smiled.

I covered my paper with its erasures and unfinished equations and said,

“Great.”

A hand across the oak table. “Peter.” We exchanged greetings. “You know,”

he said, pulling out a chair and straddling it, “you're gonna be top of our class in

ballistics.”

The rifle range was the only place I didn't feel like an idiot. “I've got a leg up,

I guess. Been using a gun for five years now.”

That steady gaze. Peter could make you feel like he read your soul.

“Marines or Navy?”

I felt a smile crack my face for the first time in days. “I'm no squid.”

“Where were you stationed?”

“Used to be a little village in Afghanistan called 'Timba.' Now it's called 'pile

of rubble.'”

Years later, those dark blue eyes searching mine could still make something

turn over inside me. “That where you got that scar on your knee?”

He must have noticed it when we were doing our laps. I felt an