by Riley, A. M.
Immortality is the Suck
A. M. Riley
Immortality is the Suck
Copyright © August 2009 by A. M. Riley
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ISBN 978-1-59632-999-7
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About this Title
Genre: LGBT Vampire Paranormal
Related Title: What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything
Adam's an undercover vice cop dealing with a dark past. He's no stranger
to bad nights; in fact, he's lived a lot of them. But he won't survive this one.
First, a drug deal he's working goes south. Then his partner and sometimes-
fuck-buddy Peter has to watch him bleed to death. But the kicker: he's not
sure what's worse. Watching Peter cry over him or waking up undead.
Peter's a good cop in love with a bad man. Or a bad vampire, now.
Watching Adam die was the worst thing he could imagine. Until he woke up.
Now their relationship's in crisis. Adam's in the middle of a vampire enclave at
the center of Los Angeles motorcycle clubs and Peter just can't hack it.
Adam thinks he's fine with that. He's a commitment-phobe. But he's
about to discover, immortality is seriously the suck.
Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic
language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Anal
play/intercourse, male/male sexual practices, violence.
“Life is a moment between two eternities.”
—Blaise Pascal
Chapter One
“Adam! Adam! Stay with me here, man.”
Peter's nuts. The pain was so bad I couldn't breathe and all I wanted to do
was pass out. Just wake me when the morphine drip arrives.
“Adam!”
The son of a bitch shook me. I opened my mouth to tell him to fuck off
and liquid clogged my throat. I felt it spill over my chin. That can't be good.
Peter's face was a blob of fear in front of me, a little slice of the warehouse door
behind it. The lights of the Marina beyond all that.
“There's a bus on the way,” said Peter.
The pain ebbed and then flowed away like the tide. I was aware of Peter's
hand on my face, the cold, wet concrete beneath my skull. The smell of diesel. I
heard sirens.
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. God, Adam, it's going to be all right. We'll get you
through this. All you have to do is hang on.”
I don't remember exactly what just went down. I came here to meet
someone, but the wrong person stepped out of the shadows, and then there
was shouting. Peter suddenly appeared, which didn't make sense. And then,
I'm pretty sure, I fell in the proverbial hail of bullets. Just like I always knew I
would. Just like I deserve. And was Peter crying?
“Adam, you son of a bitch, don't you die on me.”
Poor Peter. Sucks to be you, man. Me, I'm just gonna bleed out all over
this nice filthy floor here. Finally. It's done.
Good-bye.
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A. M. Riley
Chapter Two
Except I woke up. I opened my eyes to darkness, wondering where I was.
Not a new experience. I've come to in plenty of strange places, under plenty of
strange circumstances. And then I remembered that I had died. Or, at least, I
thought I had.
Excuse me if I indulged in a moment of disappointment.
I've died before. In the Marines I took a hit, and they tell me my heart
stopped during surgery. When I woke, though, I felt like shit. There were
needles in my arm and the sound of machinery around me. I knew I was in a
hospital. When I finally could make sense of the faces leaning over me and the
words they spoke, I understood that I was a hero. What a fucking joke.
God, don't let that happen again.
This time, though, I felt fine. Numb, maybe, but not in the lovely morphine
drip way. The pain in my leg, which had been my constant companion since
the service, was gone. A respite that only happened when I was stoned off my
ass or dreaming. So, maybe there was some wishful thinking mixed in, but I
figured there were still odds that I might be really, truly, dead.
So now my thoughts went something like this:
1) Fuck, there is an afterlife,
2) And it's cold,
3) And dark.
4) This must be Hell.
Immortality is the Suck
3
Which is what I'd always expected, but still it was a sobering thought. I
hadn't paid much attention those maybe five times I sat in a church, so I
needed a little reconnaissance.
I cracked my eyes open and tried to see around myself. Hell was pitch
black. I could hear a drip, drip of something and my imagination conjured
bottomless pits full of icy cold water. The dark gradually yielded shapes,
though, and I could make out a form next to me, looked like a sheet. No, wait,
it was a body on a table under a sheet, proverbial toe with tag sticking out.
Crap, I wasn't in Hell. I was in a morgue.
I almost fell from wherever I lay, trying to get away from that thought. And
that's when I realized that I was on some kind of table too. Stainless steel, by
the feel of it. The sheet covering me fell to the floor and I looked down and there
was my toe with a tag on it.
I kid you not. They th
ought I was dead. Hey, so did I. I pinched myself to
make sure. Ouch.
It occurred to me that this might be some kind of trick. Some kind of
Hellish mind game trick. But my head hurt too much to do that Rubik's Cube,
and I just worked on getting the tag off my toe and my feet on the floor. Then,
with my sheet wrapped around me, I walked around, trying to get my bearings.
I knew this place; it was the Los Angeles County Morgue. I'd been a cop
for twenty years, and in Homicide for six of those, before the Vice Department
decided I was more their type. Christ, did they hit that nail on the proverbial
head. So, anyway, I knew this morgue.
I knew the sights and the sounds and the smells. The smell was what had
usually gotten to me. The formaldehyde, mixed in with the smell of human
flesh rotting, creates an odor the human body seems wired to reject. And then
the ammonia they used to try to keep everything sterile just punched the other
smells home and pretty soon big tough former marines were spewing into a
trash can in the hallway.
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A. M. Riley
So, I could smell that smell but it didn't bother me as much. And the room
was now kind of blueish, even though there was nothing but a couple of power
strip lights glowing for illumination. So the whole lying alone in darkness thing,
which had always given me the gibbering freak ever since I'd been buried under
that house in Afghanistan, was lessened a little.
This particular room was empty and dark, but in my experience, the place
was usually a zoo. They must be busily cutting up someone in another room.
I checked out the guy laid out on the table next to mine. He was a helluva
lot cleaner than he had been the last time I saw him, but I was pretty sure it
was that dude Starz. The one that I had gone to meet in the Marina. There were
two good-sized bullet holes in his chest. One of them looked like it had gone
right through the heart. So, he was dead too, I guessed. Careful not to assume
here, seeing as I had thought I was dead also.
There was another guy lying over there, without a sheet, on the table with
the molded-in gutters along the sides and the drains. He was whiter than white
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
Immortality is the Suck
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 p
umped into my mouth. Until he stopped moving
and I lifted my head from his arm. And realized what I had done.
Immortality is the Suck
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