Undead L.A. 1 Read Online Free Page A

who had lost her hand.
    “What the fuck is going on?”
    He turned in wide circles. The hotel lobby looked empty, but it too was covered with dark, coagulated blood. There were bloody handprints smeared on the glass windows and doors at the entrance. He turned back to the street and saw in the distance that there were figures moving out onto Century Boulevard. Then he spotted an Asian man limping away at the far end of the parking lot. Without thinking he jogged toward him, doing his best to catch up with the slow moving man in the tattered business suit.
    “Hey,” he called out. The man stopped but did not turn around or reply. “Hey, man! What's going on out here? Are you all right?”
    Edgar could see the street more clearly now. It was filled with abandoned cars; some had smashed into each other and were left behind, others were left idling. In between the cars were what looked like dead people slowly moving around. They were all ages and from all walks of life. Men, women, and children, all races, all dressed differently. Some were missing body parts like arms or legs. Some had huge bloody wounds showing through their tattered clothing. Some had blood pouring from their eyes like tears. All of them had the gray skin associated with long-dead corpses. Edgar thought about an article he'd read in an in-flight magazine about a Zombie Walk in Las Vegas during a horror convention. He thought about the images in the article, but they were nothing like this. Those were happy, smiling faces covered in bright red makeup and hand-torn clothing. This was something else altogether.
    The Asian businessman turned around to face Edgar. It felt like having the wind knocked out of him in slow motion. The whole world seemed to tilt sidewise as his half-eaten face came into full view. Edgar fought back the sudden urge to throw up at the gruesome sight of him. Frayed skin tissue radiated out from where huge chunks of flesh had been ripped clean. There were grooves in the remaining skin that made it look like it had been peeled off or scratched away by dull instruments.
    Like human teeth, Edgar thought, or clawing fingernails .
    In some places, Edgar could see down to the boney material he assumed was part of the man's skull, especially near the temples. The man was grinding his jaw absentmindedly like a drug addict. With each movement Edgar could see deeper into the layers of exposed muscle as a dark red, mucus-like substance leaked out over the remaining flesh. Worst of all were the man’s eyes. There was a jaundiced haze forming over them with evidence of blood in the right eye, partially obscuring the cornea. The pupils themselves were dilated and empty of consciousness, like two wide-angle-lens closed circuit cameras pulling everything around them into some unspeakable void.
    What could have happened to him to leave him in this condition?
    Edgar realized he could hear the man moaning, even though he was over a hundred feet away. There were no car horns, no traffic sounds, and worst of all, no planes. Edgar glanced up nervously to confirm his suspicion and saw not a single aircraft in the sky. As he looked back down, the man with the gnarled face raised his puss-covered hands in his direction and let out a delirious howl of hunger. The next thing Edgar knew the man was charging at him, his limbs oddly flailing as he moved.
    “What the fuck?”
    It was all he could manage before his 'fight or flight' instinct finally kicked in. He felt his legs go from being two solid and unyielding slabs of concrete to feeling like thin, rubbery trees as they abruptly unlocked, threatening to pitch him to the already hot asphalt of the parking lot. He wobbled for a millisecond as the awareness reached him and his adrenaline kicked in, then he pivoted and turned to run. His arms moved like two unattached windmills; his heart was racing now, pumping hot fear and fresh panic into him. It felt like he'd just slammed down ten shots of espresso all at