Even The Dead Will Bleed Read online

  CONTENTS

  The Beginning

  Chapters

  Bad Boy • Maritza • The Russian Girl • The Korean • Roy Batty • The Shooting Party • Dark Refuge • After Effects • A Bad Idea • Infected • Prayer for a Creep • Uber Alles • Dreams That Kill • Picnic at Griffith Park • Karen • Blood Fever • The Doctor Is In • St. Lazarus • True Colors • Plan B • A Bowlful of Tears • Becky • You Better Not Cry • No Hipsters • Reunion • Welcome to Paradise • Touring the Facility • How Soon Is Now? • One Last Thing • Dave’s Not Here

  A Simple Ask

  Acknowledgements

  The Playlist

  About the Author

  Even the

  Dead Will Bleed

  Book Three of Tell Me When I’m Dead

  Steven Ramirez

  Glass Highway

  Los Angeles, California

  Even the Dead Will Bleed

  Copyright © 2015 by Steven Ramirez.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at stevenramirez.com/permission.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Even The Dead Will Bleed / Steven Ramirez. —1st ed.

  ISBN 978-0-9898718-6-0

  For David Latt and David Rimawi. Your kindness and generosity continue to inspire me.

  I had had enough. The blood was pounding in my head so hard that I felt about to explode. I aimed my gun at Cathcart and shot him four times in the face.

  — James Ellroy, Brown’s Requiem

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bad Boy

  The angel woke me up before dawn. It was always the same—an electric tickle along my spine, then a whisper like wind through a tiny forest. It always happened in the midst of a thin, hard sleep. I’d open my eyes and she would already be there, standing close by. When I’d last seen her in the church she was filthy, her delicate frame covered in shorts and a bloody T-shirt with the words Li’l Princess splashed across it—identical to that little girl I’d put down in Mt. Shasta when I was new to the whole undead-killing thing.

  I had guessed she was ten, with soft blonde hair and large, hurt green eyes. She’d been singing a hymn in the church. Now here she was again—clean, her luminous hair looking like it might smell good. She called herself Holly. I didn’t know if God was trying to be cruel on purpose, since that was my late wife’s name. But I came to accept it. She was Holly.

  “What is it?” I said.

  My arm still ached—I needed to change out the bloody bandage. I’d gotten into a fight in Quartzsite, Arizona, on my way to LA. This guy thought I’d stolen his limonite cubes. It happened on a day in the early morning. He was stumbling out of a bar called The Lazy Eye and noticed that his truck had been broken into. I’d been in the mini-mart next-door buying snacks and happened to be walking across the parking lot when he saw me and jumped to conclusions.

  “Ya dirty son of a bitch!” he said. “Where are they?”

  This was typical for me—violence out of nowhere like a flash fire in a weed lot. I seemed to attract it. I set down my groceries and quickly took everything in. The bar was quiet. The clerk in the mini-mart was stocking beer—I could see him through the plate glass. No cars were coming and the lot was deserted, except for a mangy yellow dog growling and tearing at a black bag filled with trash. I couldn’t see any security cameras.

  The soak didn’t have a gun, which was good—but he did carry a hunting knife. We decided to do it in the parking lot.

  He made the first move, trying to carve a hole in my face. Huge mistake. I let him come at me and used his momentum to send him sailing past onto the dusty asphalt. It was a good plan, except the knife nicked my arm as he went by.

  “Gimme back the cubes!” he said, spitting out bloody, broken teeth as he got to his feet. His nose and forehead were scraped raw and bleeding. He looked like he wanted to puke.

  Ignoring my bleeding arm, I waited. “I didn’t take them.”

  “Give ’em back.”

  This was useless. My first instinct was to kill him and be done with it. I’d seen so much violence these last weeks and months, one more body wouldn’t be a problem. Then I remembered—I wasn’t in Tres Marias anymore. And I was still human. This person was human. But he wasn’t going to let this go and I needed it to end. So I made a judgment call. As he came at me again, I shot him in the leg. His knee buckled. He howled in pain. I waited for him to go down, then kicking away the knife, I dragged his sorry ass behind an abandoned Shell station and sat him up against the wall where he pissed himself.

  “Don’t kill me, mister!” he said, holding his bleeding leg. “You can have the limonite cubes—I don’t care.”

  When I used to get drunk with my best friend Jim, back in the day, I don’t think I ever looked even half as bad as this idiot looked now. Like me he was in his twenties. Smelled like vinegar and urine. I wondered if he’d make it to thirty. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.

  “You need to keep pressure on it,” I said, grabbing his hand and pressing it against the wound. “And I didn’t take your limonite cubes.”

  “Don’t matter.” He was blubbering now.

  Thinking about next steps, I decided to throw away the cap and the jacket, in case someone had spotted me. They were new—whatever. I was pretty sure the security camera inside the mini-mart hadn’t picked up my face. All they’d have to go on was the clothes. And my truck was parked on another street, so no one would be able to report a license plate. This was good practice for LA—staying anonymous.

  I left the tool whimpering there, though I did promise to call 911—not that he deserved it. As I walked away, he told me to go to Hell. If only he knew.

  I hadn’t slept soundly in days since arriving in Los Angeles. I only ever seemed to doze off in the early morning hours. The good news—I had real money, thanks to my former employer, Black Dragon Security. After everything that had happened up north—including Holly being murdered—they paid out big. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was, so instead of driving straight from Tres Marias to LA like I’d planned, I took that detour to Phoenix and withdrew all the cash there. Then I ditched the vehicle my friend, Guthrie Manson, had lent me, bought a used Dodge truck with cash and backtracked to LA.

  As soon as I arrived, I stashed the weapons in a public storage facility and rented a cheap room by the week off First Street in Boyle Heights near the Evergreen Cemetery. Good thing. If I died on this mission, which was likely, I’d end up in potter’s field. No name. No headstone. No one to pray for me.

  You’re wondering why I chose this life, I’ll bet. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about my friends. It was true, I didn’t care about a lot of things—not anymore. But Griffin, Fabian and Warnick were everything to me, especially now that Holly was gone. Though not related to me, they were the only family I had. But after all the badness, I vowed to kill the people responsible for what had happened in Tres Marias. And I couldn’t do that working for Black Dragon, deploying to Atlanta—or wherever the hell those other guys ended up. I needed to settle things here and now. And I would. I knew exactly what I w
as going to do. I’d thought of little else since leaving my former home.

  Baseborn Identity Research.

  The name was bizarre and nondescript. Like something out of Resident Evil. It was a small facility in an industrial park located in East Los Angeles near Monterey Park. When I Googled it, I didn’t find much. I didn’t even know what they did officially. Whatever it was, they were deeply connected to Robbin-Sear, the secretive government-backed company behind the outbreak that pretty much wiped out my town. How did I know? When Warnick, Springer and I joined the National Guard troops in raiding that hidden lab in Mt. Shasta, we found people in hazmat suits loading up big-rig trucks bearing the name Baseborn Identity Research with “patients,” presumably to be transferred to a new facility for further experimentation.

  Apparently this was Phase Two of the grand experiment. Phase One had consisted of infecting a local populace with a virus derived from rabies and watching it spread—first killing, then transforming the victims into slow-moving, undead things we called “draggers.” These unholy creatures existed for one purpose—to eat the flesh of the living. Then something unexpected happened.

  The virus mutated.

  Some of those rotting, lumbering draggers we’d been fighting since summer “survived” the transformation, retaining their human qualities. And they got faster. No longer dead they could easily pass as people. Except for one thing—they still craved meat. And with the psychotic calmness of a surgeon, they heartlessly carved their victims up and ate the warm, pulsing flesh, even as the person lay screaming. Can’t get any fresher than that. It was enough to make you go vegan.

  I call them cutters.

  All these things I witnessed myself. And sooner or later the dark forces behind the experiment would turn these evolved animals loose onto an unsuspecting society like they’d done in Tres Marias. Then it would be too late.

  “They’re coming,” the angel said.

  I looked deep into the green eyes I knew so well and must have shown my fear because she reached out a small, soft hand with perfect nails and touched my face. It was the first time she had touched me since that awful night inside St. Monica’s when I knelt at the altar, Holly’s body lying broken and bloody in front of me. I thought the angel’s hand would be warm. It was cool like a shady patch under a willow in summer.

  “Do not be afraid,” she said.

  She tried not to show her concern but she was worried about me. When I was little, I used to believe in guardian angels, thanks to my mother and Catholic school. Mine was named Maurice, after the third century Roman soldier who became a saint because he died for his faith. I never did see him, though. Not once. And he never kept me out of trouble—never fought off the bullies. Never stopped me from taking my first drink. Yeah, free will’s a bitch. But this one—the blonde angel—she was different. She was looking out for me. But for how long?

  “When?” I said.

  “Soon.”

  Wearing only boxers, I climbed out of bed and stood in front of the window that faced west. The angel didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t dressed. Cheap polyester curtains that were meant to look like cream-colored lace hung loosely over the grimy fourth floor window. I ignored the cockroach droppings on the sill and peered down at the street below.

  Traffic was light. Somewhere I could hear a police siren. In the grey, still morning, small Latinas scurried up and down the sidewalks, late for something. Many pulled along young children in blue jeans and sweaters and wearing oversized backpacks. Their movements were furtive. Did they know something bad was coming?

  The angel stood next to me, looking out the window too and held my hand. Thunder from nowhere rumbled in the distance. Raindrops hit the window and turned into rivulets that wept like Jesus at Gethsemane. For a moment I felt like I would have been lost forever to the evil in this old world if she’d let go.

  “How will I know them?” I said.

  She looked at me darkly. “By the bodies they leave behind.” Then she pointed a rosy finger. “Look.”

  A black Escalade rumbled past, never even slowing down for pedestrians. It turned at the corner and disappeared. The agents in the grey suits didn’t know where I lived—not yet—otherwise they would’ve stopped in front of my building. But they were close. There wasn’t much time.

  “Don’t do it, Dave,” she said.

  Though her green eyes implored me, I refused to look into them. “I have to.”

  “‘But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.’”

  “Listen, these devils live in the darkness,” I said. “I’m going to find them and kill them.”

  The rain became a steady patter—the sound of chittering faeries at a cocktail party. The angel’s hand evaporated in mine and when I looked over, she was gone. Though she was mad at me, it didn’t matter. At least she’d warned me. Something—or someone—bad was coming. I had the feeling it wasn’t the grey-suits. It was something worse. I thought of the thousands of innocents who had died in Tres Marias and the hundreds of nightmare-plagued survivors. And I knew that there would be more bloodshed, more suffering. What was I supposed to do, let it happen? The angel had warned me not to hate—but what else was there? Hate implied action.

  I needed to get moving.

  When you’re paranoid, everything looks like a threat. I had picked this particular building because of its underground parking. I got lucky—the stall they assigned me was located way in the back. As I walked to my truck, I noticed movement in the shadows. I didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods, and every once in a while a junkie or a gangbanger would sneak in just as the wrought iron gate lowered and would wait till someone was leaving for work. Then he’d pull a knife or a gun and rob the poor bastard. If the victim was a woman, he might do worse.

  Though I had plenty of guns, the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself. So as I moved closer, I gripped my VIPERTEK stun gun tightly, ready to deliver nineteen million volts to some asswipe’s head. Then I relaxed. It was only Cuco, the maintenance man. In a twist of bent logic only a Mexican would understand, that was the nickname his family had blessed him with. His actual name was Refugio—how in hell do you get “Cuco” from that?

  He looked to be in his mid-fifties, lean and weathered with straight black-brown hair and a missing molar you only noticed when he laughed—which was often. He didn’t talk much and was always working—whether it was fixing a leaky pipe, rewiring a light fixture or replacing a door that had been kicked in by the cops who liked to frequent the neighborhood. Today he was on his way to the dumpster, carrying two huge plastic bags filled with strips of wet Sheetrock.

  I could see by the bulging arm muscles, knife scars and black teardrop tattooed under his right eye that he’d had an interesting life. But he was a good guy. Never questioned why a gringo had decided to move into the place, and I never volunteered to tell him my story. Most of the other residents were Latino immigrants from Mexico or Central America. I was sure he knew by looking at me that I’d never done any hard time, but maybe he’d assumed that I was ex-military.

  “¿Qué tal?” I said.

  He grunted as he tossed the bags into the trash and slammed the lid shut. “Bien.”

  “Anything suspicious?”

  I slipped Cuco twenty bucks now and again to keep an eye on my truck and to alert me if he noticed anyone unusual hanging around. He was happy to comply. God knows what he did with the money.

  “Usual. Drug dealers. Putas. Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  Even though Cuco had given me the all-clear, I felt it necessary to make my own inspection. I could feel his crafty, sparkling brown eyes tracking me as I strode directly across to the opposite wall, peered out the small opening that led to the sidewalk. The rain was coming down pretty good. I turned, walked back across and did the same thing on the other side. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

&nb
sp; I walked to the front of the garage and stood at the closed gate, observing the street as sheets of rainwater slithered down the mottled driveway. Something moved in front of me and struck the gate, startling me and sending my right hand directly to the pocket where my stun gun was waiting. It was a blue-green bouncy ball. A second later, a kid in a short raincoat who looked to be around seven came after it. His exasperated mother called to him sharply in Spanish while standing on the street, sheltering an infant under an umbrella.

  “She sounds mad,” I said.

  Shrugging, he grabbed the ball, smiled at me with a mouthful of missing teeth and scurried back up the driveway.

  When I got to my truck, Cuco was grinning at me and scratching his cheek. “Want me to grab my machete and cut you a path?”

  “Make sure to clean up the blood after,” I said. He let go a belly-laugh. “Hasta luego.”

  He gave me a quick wave as I jumped into my truck and headed out, while keeping a sharp lookout for black Escalades.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maritza

  Today was the day. But first I needed coffee. I made my way through the wet of an unusual LA rain to Holy Grounds for an Ojo Rojo—coffee with espresso—watching for grey-suits. Although their coffee was awesome, I made it a point not to go there every day. I varied my routine, mixing it up with Starbucks, Peets or whatever else I could find—in case I was being monitored. But Holy Grounds. It was hard to stay away.

  Do I sound like a schiz? Maybe. Tres Marias had been like an island—cut off from the rest of the world because of the quarantine. Like Las Vegas, what we did there stayed there. But LA was different. I had to be extra careful. After everything I’d been through, I was keenly aware that a single mistake would mean I was dead. And dead is fine—after you’ve finished getting your revenge.