Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey

Author:Richard Kadrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

IF KASABIAN WASN’T such a drama queen he’d remember that things weren’t so bad at the Beat Hotel. We stayed there a few weeks after an ill-­behaved zombie horde overran L.A. and trashed Max Overdrive early last year.

The hotel is near the glamorous strip mall and parking lot by the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Gower, and right across from the Museum of Death. The front of the hotel is painted a shade of green no one asks for, but just sort of happens. The place is a dump, but I love it. The rooms are reasonably sized and the decor is sort of a cross between seventies swinger and halfway house. The kitchens are the best rooms, explosions of reds, yellows, and glitter, like someone’s bell-­bottoms exploded on the way to a Ziggy Stardust concert.

Candy and I get settled into our room and Kasabian and Vincent settle into theirs. None of us are on the hotel’s register because we don’t know how long we’re going to have to crash here and we don’t want anyone knowing where we are. While I put away our clothes on the crooked wire hangers in the closet, Candy calls Julie back.

I can only hear one side of the conversation, but I can tell when Julie asks about the stakeout because Candy turns a little white and changes the subject.

“Max Overdrive was padlocked shut and the county put a spell on the place to keep ­people out. Be careful to take your work with you whenever you leave and back up everything else off-­site.”

There’s a pause as Candy listens. Then she says, “I’ll get you a report in the morning.”

Another pause and she says, “What? Are you sure?”

She goes to the little kitchen and opens her laptop on the plastic table, types in a URL.

“Oh shit.”

I sit down beside her.

“What’s wrong?”

She turns the laptop so I can see the screen.

“Julie just told me about it.”

It’s a headline on the New York Times site. Two ­people have died. A young boy in Tulsa and an old woman in São Paulo.

It’s starting.

The new Death is finally getting the hang of things. How soon will it be before he takes the thousands in comas all around the world? And then what does he want?

Candy cruises around the Web, looking at other sites to confirm the Times’s story. It’s all over the place, the first story on every news site on the planet. Naturally, my favorites are the lunatics. Fundamentalist Chris­tians claiming it’s the Tribulation. Other, even crazier groups claiming that somehow it’s the fault of gays and unwed mothers. Techno-­hippies recalculating the Mayan calendar to prove that the 2012ers got it all wrong. Conspiracy freaks linking the situation to everything from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11 to lizard-­men flying-­saucer bases in the center of the earth. And then there’s the hucksters, selling everything from magnetic prayer beads that cure your arthritis while mainlining your prayers to God to homeopathic cures for “the death virus released by global warming.

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