Undead L.A. 2 by Devan Sagliani Page B

as the late afternoon drifted into the dark of an early fall evening, were already losing their burning luster. Adam didn't like to be out after dark unless he absolutely had no other choice. There were just too many things that could go wrong, too many people for his taste—living and dead—who preferred to do their dirty business under the cover of shadows.
    He'd been hunting a small pack of the afflicted who had made their way past his spot on La Cienega, down where the discount shoe warehouse used to take up the last few blocks just before the freeway onramp, across from the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Cadillac. He'd managed to put to rest six of the turned, and was heading back up with a canned ham he'd scavenged from the stockroom of a hair extension store, as well as a bottle of Manischewitz he’d found digging through the rubble of the old abandoned florist next door, when he heard her screams. He'd assumed she was just another victim of the biters, another one that would have to be put to rest. The sound of her cries made it clear that it was already too late to save her. At least, that's what he told himself. That's why he took his time crossing the street. It was better to go slow. He'd found he made fewer mistakes that way and in the new world, the one he had inherited at the tail end of September, a single mistake was all it took to end your life, or alter it forever.
    When he saw the men holding her down his first instinct was to rush in screaming and stabbing, but he fought back the urge. The truth was he'd get himself killed if he did that. It was just the kind of rash, impetuous move that had earned him a dishonorable discharge from the Army, in a situation not entirely unlike the one he was in now. Then it had been his lieutenant forcing himself on an underage cadet. What Adam hadn't known was that the two had been secretly dating and that the whole thing had been part of a kinky sex dare. So when he saw his boss consensually raping her in the storage room, he'd hauled off and broken his nose in two places without hesitation. The cadet had screamed and cried and attacked him for saving her.
    Later they both claimed under oath that he'd simply been helping her get more food for the kitchen when Adam burst into the room in a jealous rage and accused him of trying to steal her away. They claimed that he'd been obsessed with her, stalking her, and that he'd concocted a paranoid fantasy of another man stealing her away. They planted pictures of her in his footlocker, photos that had been pilfered from hers. He'd been on his way to becoming a Ranger back then, but ended up heading back home to Los Angeles to work for his parents.
    But this was no consensual sex happening before his eyes. This was clearly a child. The men accosting her had managed to get her shirt off and he could see that her small breasts weren't even beginning to blossom, the bright pink nipples resting flat on her chest.
    “Get her pants off already, Scott,” Ronald barked. “I'm ready to fuck.”
    “What the fuck does it look like I'm doing?” the one with the high-pitched nasal voice shot back.
    “No. Not like that,” Marcus argued. “You gotta take off the shoes first.”
    “Sounds like you've done this before,” Scott said in a nasty tone of voice. “You wanna show us how they do it up in Chino? Is that it?”
    Marcus's eyes flashed with pure evil, a hint of a smile curling at the corners of his mouth.
    “That's right, white boy,” he sang. “I've been to prison. Whatchoo know bout doin' time? I've killed before too, guys twice your size and a helluvalot more smarter.”
    The smile vanished. Marcus looked like he was seconds away from slitting Richie Rich's throat. Adam realized that for the first time the “rich kid” was truly scared. Marcus seemed to be feeding off of that fear, like one of those wispy smoke creatures from the Harry Potter movies.
    “So shut your mouth, Richie Rich, and get this bitch's pants off