The New Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

it had been fat. Now it moved in a slow, lumbering gait, like a mummy from an old horror movie. It took our order and served our drinks without eagerness or error.
     
    The music was loud, but not so loud that you couldn’t talk, and I had the feeling that was important. People came here to look, but also to make contact with each other. They were reanimate fetishists. I’d never heard of them or knew they existed before that night, but as Ryan told us about his friends, about his Internet groups, about the other underground places in town, I became aware of this entire subculture. There were guys out there who were just into reanimates. Go figure.
     
    Joe seemed drunkenly amused, but Ryan was in heaven. He went up to the stage and put money in their G-strings. He paid for a blocky, jerky reanimate lap dance. He had reanimates shake their reanimated tits in his face.
     
    I thought he was the biggest asshole I’d ever met, and I thought the Pine Box was disgusting. I hated looking at the pale, bloated, strangely rubbery bodies. Even the ones who had been beautiful at the time of death were grotesque now, and many of them bore the scars of the injuries that had taken their lives. One was a patchwork of gashes and rips. One of them, perhaps the one who had been most beautiful in life, had vicious red X-marks on its wrists. It was monstrous and disrespectful and wrong beyond my ability to articulate. I’d never liked dead things, and I knew full well that we only tolerated reanimates because they were hidden behind masks and uniforms that allowed us to forget what they really were.
     
    Ryan saw my mood and tried to get me into the spirit of things. He offered to buy me a lap dance, but I was a bad sport. I wasn’t having fun, and I wasn’t going to pretend to have fun.
     
    I stared into space and tried not to look at the dancers, though once in a while I would sneak a look just to make sure it was as bad as I thought. It was. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the dancers stop. It caused a little commotion, and so I turned to it. A dancer stood on the edge of the stage, its arms slack by its side, slouching and staring out into the audience. Staring, I saw, at me. At least I thought it was me. Its left hand was weirdly angled, and it took a few seconds for me to notice that it was pushing its long fingernails into the soft skin of its palm. Dark and watery reanimate blood dripped onto the stage. A couple of men in jeans and T-shirts came up to it, shouting orders and gesturing violently, but it remained still, its dead, pale eyes locked on mine.
     
    And then I knew it - I knew her , knew who she was or who she had been. It was Maisie Harper. Knowing that felt like falling, felt like a plummet toward my doom. I remembered that face, and, more horribly, she remembered mine. She had taken her secret to the grave, but then she had left the grave and brought the secret with her. She stared, and her eyes locked with mine, and I could not turn away. And then she opened her mouth and said one word. Even from a distance I could see what she said: ‘ You .’ That’s when I knew I was in trouble. It was when I knew things would never again be the same.
     
     
    In the apartment kitchen, I sat staring at that weird, unclotting reanimate black blood drying on the towel. Some of the drops had gotten onto my pants. After I’d stabbed her and Maisie had openly defied me, I’d wrapped up her arm and told her I was done with her. She had gone to stand in the living area, in that spot where she seemed most contented - or whatever passed for contentment with reanimates. Ryan said they couldn’t process much information. They had very low brain activity, and their ability to feel or experience from moment to moment was very limited. That was what Ryan said, but I was beginning to get the feeling that Ryan might not know precisely what the fuck he was talking about.
     
    I cleaned up as best I could and went home. It