The New Dead Read Online Free PDF

was a Saturday afternoon, and Tori had been out shopping for baby things with a friend, spending more than we could probably afford, which might once have bothered me, but now I had other things on my mind. She’d been long home by the time I got there, and she wanted to know where I’d been. She stood there, still strangely thin despite her advanced pregnancy, looking like a toothpick that had swallowed a grape. She wanted to know what I’d been doing to get blood all over my jeans. I was too uneasy even to lie to her, and so I got angry. I hated to get angry with her, but I was frustrated. I might have told her to fuck off. I was not patient, that much is certain. There was some screaming and crying. She accused me of being insensitive, and I told her she was being irrational because she was pregnant and hormonal. As a rule, pregnant women don’t respond well to that sort of thing.
     
    The bottom line is that we didn’t usually fight like that. I didn’t usually speak to her that way, and it left her confused and angry.
     
    Sunday was no better, and Monday at work was a disaster. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and when a client called in with a complaint, I probably wasn’t as sympathetic or attentive as is appropriate for a competitive industry like advertising. There was an argument with my boss, who acted like a total asshole, even though he was probably right in this case. Things were falling apart, and I was going to have to figure out what I could do to put them back together.
     
     
    The Pine Box had a Web site with a password. You got the password for the site at the club, and you got the password for the club at the site. The passwords changed every two weeks or so. It was a clever system designed both to keep the circle of information tight and to insure that regulars kept coming back.
     
    I became a regular. I kept coming back. I had to know just how much Maisie could recall.
     
    Almost every time I went I saw Ryan. It wasn’t like we were friends or anything, because I couldn’t stand him and thought he was a dick, but he didn’t have to know that. Truth was, I needed him or someone like him to guide me though this fucked-up world, and if buying him a few drinks and pretending to laugh at his jokes was what I had to do, then I was willing to take my lumps.
     
    He was into reanimates. That much was probably obvious, but he was into them not just in some weird sexual way. It was the whole package, and he was into them the way some guys are into Hitler or the Civil War. He loved the information most people didn’t want. He read books and blogs and articles in scholarly journals. He liked facts and dates and statistics and hidden histories.
     
    We would sit at the bar with nearly naked dead women dancing around us, and Ryan would go on and on about reanimate history. Some of it was stuff I already knew, and other things I’d never heard before.
     
    ‘Were you old enough to remember when they first began to capture pictures of the soul leaving the body?’ he asked me. ‘You’re a few years younger than me, I guess. I was six. It was amazing.’
     
    I was too young to remember it, but we’d all seen the pictures, watched documentaries on late-night television. The first pictures were taken by an MIT grad student whose grandfather was dying, and he set up his modified camera in the hospital room. When the pictures first came out, everyone thought it was a hoax, but then they found the process could be repeated every time. Suddenly people knew the soul was a real thing and that it left the body upon death. It changed the way we thought about life, the afterlife, dead bodies - the whole deal. In some way, it changed the nature of humanity. Our mortality defined us, but with that mortality seriously in question, no one was really sure what we were any more.
     
    ‘It was all a crock of shit, anyhow,’ Ryan was saying. ‘No one knew where the soul went, did they? It could just go up to the