The meat was rather tough, but it tasted wonderful, oily and salty with a slight undertone of musk. He felt it breaking down in the acids of his saliva and his stomach, felt its proteins joining with his cells and becoming part of him. That was fine.

But after tonight he would have something better. A person who lived and stayed with him, whose mind belonged to him. A homemade zombie. Justin knew it was possible, if only he could destroy the right parts of the brain. If a drill and a syringeful of bleach didn’t work, he would try something else next time.

The night drew like a curtain across the window, stealing his wall view brick by brick. Sinatra’s voice was as smooth and sweet as cream. Got you. deep in the heart of me. Justin nodded reflectively. The meat left a delicately metallic flavour on his tongue, one of the myriad tastes of love. Soon it would be time to go out.

Apart from the trip to Reno and the delicious wallow in the desert, Justin had never left Los Angeles. He longed to drive out into the desert, to find again the ghost towns and nuclear moonscapes he had so loved in Nevada. But he never had. You needed a car to get out there. If you didn’t have a car in LA, you might as well curl up and die. Los Angeles was a city with an enormous central nervous system, but no brain.

Since being fired from his job at an orange juice plant for chronic absenteeism — too many bodies demanding his time, requiring that he cut them up, preserve them, consume them — Justin wasn’t even sure how much longer he would be able to afford the apartment. But he didn’t see how he could move out with things the way they were in here. The place was a terrible mess. His neighbours had started complaining about the smell.

Justin decided not to think about all that now. He still had a little money saved, and a city bus would get him from his Silver Lake apartment to the garish carnival of West Hollywood; that much he knew. It had done so countless times.