Undead L.A. 2 (3 page)

“Hold still now,” the demon whispered darkly, its voice made up of a thousand tortured whispers stolen from previous victims. “I'm almost there.”

She closed her eyes tight as she shook her head back and forth in the dream. It was time to wake up, if only she knew how.

“DIORA!”

No
, she screamed inside her mind, but it didn't stop.
 

“
NO!”
She shouted it with all her might, lifting her head to see the laughing puddle of darkness. It was too late. It had laid something evil up inside of her. There was blood and dark filth pooling between her legs onto her torn panties. The screaming grew louder.

“NO!” She yelled aloud this time, as loud as she could, her lungs burning with fire, her throat sore from the force of her protest. She sat up awake, not knowing if the sound came from the dream or from outside on the street.

“Diora, what the fuck is going on up there?”

She crawled to the edge of the landing, peeking over to see his angry face glaring up at her, bags of food and candles at both sides. It was Jamal. He had returned at last. She reached a shaky hand out to him, a faltering smile breaching her lips.

“Jamal.”

“I know you didn't go and get wasted and leave me down here shouting for you for the last fifteen minutes, bitch! Throw down the mutherfuckin rope.”

How long had she been out? It seemed like just minutes earlier she'd given herself a small dose, but that couldn't be right because she could already feel it leaving her system. She was itching all over. She sprang up and ran to the hook where they kept the rope bridge tied up. He glared at her with deliberate cruelty in his eyes as he silently waited. She hesitated.

“You gotta promise me you're not gonna be mad when you get up here,” she demanded, holding back the rope. “Promise me you won't kick my ass if I let you up here.”

“I promise,” he said unconvincingly. “Now give it here.” Diora held on, not quite ready to trust him. She could see it clear as day on his face, the beating she was gonna catch the minute he got things squared away.

“I only did a little because you were gone so long and I couldn't wait anymore,” she whined. “Promise me, baby. Promise you won't hurt me.”

“Give me the rope,” Jamal said evenly, staring up with unblinking and remorseless eyes. Diora relented. Jamal looped the bags over his hands, then climbed up the rope bridge with the agility of an alley cat, setting his loot out on the top of the landing. When he'd gotten his footing he leaned over and yanked the bridge back up, looping it over the hook they'd driven into the wall their first night. Diora backed away as he turned, but she wasn't fast enough. Jamal's open palm connected with her right cheek, causing an explosion of light behind her eyes and sending her tumbling back to the floor.

“We had a deal, bitch,” he spat at her, huffing to catch his breath. “You don't get wasted while I'm gone and leave me to those fucking things and I let you do all the dope you want when I get back. You remember that?”

“Yes,” she whimpered, curling up in a ball, her hand stroking the burning patch of skin from where he'd struck her. There was an odd sense of relief flooding through her, and it turned the burning in her cheeks into a form of satisfaction.
 

The worst is likely over now
, she thought, fighting back the urge to laugh.

“I'm not trying to be hard on you, woman. I ain't like those other pimps who get off on beating a sad bitch to death. I'm trying to make sure we survive, just like I promised you we would. I'm a man of my word.”

He wouldn’t yell if he didn’t really care. He wouldn’t bother hitting me
either. One of these days though he probably give up on me, no matter what I do. In the end they all go away.

“I'm sorry, Jamal,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes as she turned to him. The look of disappointment was already etched in. It was a look she abhorred more than anything in the world.

“You think I like treating you like a child?”

“No sir,” she blubbered, crawling towards him on her hands and knees. “It's my fault. I got scared you weren't coming back.”

“How many times I gotta tell you, woman? I ain't never leaving you. You belong to me, just like how I belong to you. But if you gonna keep acting like that don't matter, then maybe I'd be better off on my own. Is that what you want?”

She pulled at the front of his jeans, trying to get him to look down at her, but his eyes were cast up and away in disgust. A burst of anxiety bloomed in her chest at the thought of him leaving. She couldn't survive on her own without him. It was the one thing she was absolutely sure of.
 

“Please, baby,” she pleaded. “I fucked up. Please. Let me make it up to you.”

She fumbled with the zipper on his jeans, working his flaccid cock out from between the front flap of his boxers and sucking it into her warm mouth. It took a minute to get him to relax enough to get hard, but she kept at it. This was her specialty. This was what she was the best at in the world and there wasn't a man alive—gay or straight—who could resist her charms once she got going. She felt a tingle of pride as he stiffened in her mouth, lacing his fingers into her dirty hair and gagging her with greedy thrusts. His breath grew short and rapid, his muscles tensing up as he reached his climax, thrusting into her face and holding her in place. In less than ten minutes it was done. Diora felt a flush of excitement, knowing that she'd fixed the problem and that soon he'd be tying her off and giving her a real fix, one that would last for the next few hours.
 

***

Diora relaxed as Jamal pushed the plunger on the needle down, sending the drugs deep into her system. He'd calmed down considerably after she'd sucked him off, becoming more tender in how he spoke to her as he laid out the meager supplies he'd managed to acquire on his last trip.

“Seems like they everywhere now,” Jamal explained defensively, shaking his head. “Ain't no sign of normal people like you and me no more, but I know they out there, hiding in the shadows I suppose. Someone is eating up all the canned food. That's for sure. And it ain't those things. All they care about is biting people and making more like them.”

“You're so brave,” Diora said, feeling the drugs starting to take hold.
 

“I ain't got but four cans this time, and some candles,” he said. “We gotta make it last.”

“I don't need much,” she said, meaning food, which was true since she would spend most of her days high instead of eating, if she could.

“I can't have you getting too skinny on me,” Jamal warned, pulling the needle out of her arm. “A skinny hooker ain't no good for business.”

“There's no business left,” she giggled, sliding down to the ground. “But I'll do whatever my daddy asks me to.”

“I haven't tried going down Fairfax yet,” Jamal said. “I might make a go of it later tonight if things are calm out there. Maybe the shadows give me some extra cover.”

His words were starting to not make sense anymore, but she didn't care. She was sliding away, off to Yama, to her safe place, far beyond where anything or anyone could hurt her. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander once more.

How did I get here?

Diora could not remember coming to Los Angeles. She could remember Portland and everything that happened before it, but not how she'd come to the City of Angels. In her mind everything got cloudy the further she moved away from the day she was raped at the homeless camp by the river. While the memory of that event was full of holes that didn't make sense, her little sister had witnessed the whole thing. According to Makayla, Diora never made a peep while she was being violated. She just lay there while it happened, waiting for it to end.

Of all the things I can't remember anymore, why is it I never forget those memories?
 

It was true. No matter how much dope she did, no matter how much of her brain she fried out, those early memories of her childhood always eventually returned to haunt her. It was as if she was being punished for some crime she had committed in another life, starting all the way back from the very moment she was born to her life as an unhappy stripper and her alcoholic dad.

My father is the only man I've ever missed or cared about. I'd do anything to see him one last time.

Things had started out simply for her tiny, dysfunctional family. Her dad, Randy Tremaine, was a dreamer growing up, an impractical man who expected things to magically work out and seemed genuinely surprised that they never did. Cursed with a strong sense of adventure, Randy had left the small factory town where he'd been raised the minute he graduated from high school. His father, the grandfather she'd never met, was an abusive drunk who worked most of the time. His mother, her grandmother, had died when he was a kid. No matter how many times they'd asked him how she'd passed, he just brushed the question off.

“What does it matter?” He would get a look in his eyes like he was remembering something too painful for words. “It was a long time ago and she ain't here now.”

He'd flirted with the idea of joining the armed services for a while, but dreaded the thought of having to kill anyone.

It's ironic,
she thought.
It's almost as if he knew it was coming one day, as if he was squeamishly working his way up to the event.

He'd moved from Hico, West Virginia, with his closest buddy from high school, 'Franky the Freak,' to Norfolk, Virginia, in search of any kind of work that didn't involve working on a factory floor for sixteen hours a day to pay the rent. Frank swore his aunt had a line on good jobs, but like most of what Franky the Freak had told him, it was just bluster. Still it got them out of Hico, which was a blessing as far as he was concerned. When they'd asked him if he ever thought of returning home, he'd always brushed it off.

“Nothing to see there now,” he'd chuckle, pushing his pink tongue through the open gap left by his missing front teeth in the end, “never really was, neither.”

Randy and Frank set up in her cat-infested apartment for three weeks, but never came up with anything worthy of their big dreams. Frank's aunt worked nights as a nurse and slept all day, leaving them to their own designs, which meant drinking beers and flirting with local girls. Three weeks later she invited Randy to find a job or move the hell out. The next day he caught a position cleaning dishes and busing tables at a local crab shack. Whenever he told the story he made sure to point out that he hated that job with a passion.

“My hands were scalded red by the end of the first week,” he used to tell them. “Red raw from the water and chemicals. I reeked to high heaven of fish guts and whale piss, so bad that no girl would gimme a second look, and I didn't have enough in a month to move into my own place. Plus the people I worked with were all fucking world class assholes.”

According to his version of events, recalled in snippets during his more lucid moments, Frank started talking about maybe going to community college shortly thereafter, but he wasn't having it. She remembered fondly the way he'd shake his head back and forth and smile when he told her.

“There was a whole big world out there and he wanted to bury his head in a book for another four years! Can you believe that?”

That's when things changed. One of his coworkers, “feller by the name 'er Perry,” had begun talking about leaving for Alaska to work the rest of the summer in a fish cannery.

“He starts telling me about how they make five grand a month with nothing to spend it on,” her father would say. “Five thousand dollars a month for stuffing fish in a can. I never heard of so much money. My old man worked his fingers to the bone every day of his life and never made no money like that. I had dollar signs floating in my eyes. It was all I could think about.”

Randy left Frank behind and took off with Perry to Alaska, using his wages to buy a plane ticket to San Francisco, then up to Anchorage. From there they hopped a long bus ride to Bristol Bay and over to the red salmon cannery where they'd spend the rest of the summer working in Naknek.

“You know that army marching song new recruits sing in the movies?”

Diora would shake her head yes, but he'd sing it every time anyway, the alcohol making him slur.

“I don't know, but I've been told,” he'd croon like he was an old time folk singer. “Eskimo pussy is mighty cold. Well let me tell you something, I do know, and they ain't lying.”

Daddy always treated us like adults
, Diora thought, smiling at the memory.
He never knew the right way to talk to kids, especially two little girls, but we loved him for it. We must have been the only kids allowed to use the F word at will in front of our parents.

“What are you little shit birds up to now?” He'd ask, catching them down by the water making crawdaddy traps.
 

“Fucking, pissing, and shitting,” they'd happily reply, and he'd laugh.

“You catch anything with that garbage?”

“Not a damn thing,” they'd sing back.
 

“Well, whatcha been doing out here all day then? Just standing around with your dicks in your hands?”

Makayla would fall apart every time he said it. He'd always make a face to go along with the saying and gesture towards his crotch like he was taking the most idiotic piss of his life. It brought her to tears and he knew it. He'd laugh at the way she'd roll on the ground, beating her fists into the dirt as tears poured down her face. He'd take another swig and walk back to camp, satisfied that he'd checked in on us.

“Yes sir, indeed,” he'd told the girls on more than one occasion. “Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.”

The first time he'd told her that story she was eight years old. He'd finished off a fifth of cheap bourbon and winked at her with a smile on his face. She had no idea what it meant, but she didn't care. She just loved getting her daddy's attention. He was always more fun to be around when he'd been drinking. She imagined a big white cat walking through the snow with frozen paws, mewling for fish.