Dead Man Running (Raised Book 1)

by Stevenson, Sharon

  Mickey grabbed his beer and put his bucket in the kitchen. I nodded at it.

  “You can take that with you when you leave.”

  “What do you care, if you’re going on the run?”

  “Something smells bad,” Dave moaned.

  “You can’t smell anything without a nose,” Mickey told him, “so shut it.”

  “It’s you, isn’t it? You reek. I remember now, half-caste.”

  “Shut him the fuck up,” Mickey growled at me.

  “There’s no smell, Dave. Quiet down.” I made for the living room and my quick-tempered cousin followed; his attention actually on my problems for once.

  “You can’t run. They’ll do all kinds of messed up shit to you when they catch you.”

  “They?”

  “The Guard. If that’s where you’re headed you’d be better off marching to the castle and knocking politely on the door. That way they won’t size you up for the torture devices in the dungeon.”

  “I’m not going to the Guard.” I’d made up my mind. They could drag me kicking and screaming but I wouldn’t be going down that road without a fight.

  “It can’t be as bad as they say,” he said, looking instantly guilty for the lie.

  I stared at his beer. It wasn’t fair; I couldn’t even soothe my troubles with alcohol. Or cake. Or a hot woman. “Balls,” I said, sinking onto the couch. I was up shit creek without a paddle. The Guard would get me and that would be that. My life was officially over, so what did it matter when it came right down to it?

  “Wait, what about Vegas?”

  “My passport expired when I died.” I really shouldn’t have called the police. The official record of my death was screwing me over in more ways than one. I could have faked being alive, at least for a while. Maybe even long enough to escape to the US.

  “Damn. Passport control’s a bitch,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the TV. “How ‘bout you use mine?”

  “Yours?” He had to be kidding. His skin tone and eye colour alone… I remembered my change of colouring, and suddenly he didn’t seem so crazy. “I’d need to find make-up or something…”

  We were about the same height so that checked out, and we shared some DNA through our mothers being sisters, which had somehow gotten us a virtually identical smile. It could work. Maybe. I tried to think it out. The entrance to the portal in Waverly Station was under constant police patrol. I’d need to have a pretty decent disguise on the off chance I got recognised.

  “It’ll never work.” Colour me pessimistic. It was too insane to actually be a good idea.

  Mickey’s eyebrows went up. “You’re accepting defeat?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” It was probably the best chance I had. I thought about how much money I had in my bank account. Then I remembered. “Shit! Shit!” As far as the bank was concerned I was dead. My accounts would be frozen until the User who raised me stepped forward and claimed me. I had about thirty quid in my wallet. That was really going to get me far.

  “What?”

  “I’m fucking dead! And everyone knows because I called the damn police. I’m a total freaking idiot.”

  “So what?”

  “Are you taking the piss? I’m surprised Mark isn’t banging down the door to chuck me out already. Christ, I’m so fucking dead!” It was probably just as well my landlord didn’t live in the building. For all I knew he had one of those reanimation clauses in the lease. Probably just as well I wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out.

  “Well, yeah, but I’m kinda glad it’s not just paint, Bro. You’re still creeping me out with those eyes, but.”

  I had to think. How to go on the run when you’ve got no passport, no money, and there’s an army of walking corpses out to get you and drag you to a terrifying fate to be a slave for King & country… No ‘Ah hah!’ moments were lighting up.

  “I don’t have money. I’ll need to stay someplace else tonight.”

  He shrugged. “Stay at my place. Or Kit’s. She’s got the space.”

  “You’ve been in Kit’s flat?” I knew she lived above the pub, but I couldn’t believe Mickey had actually been up there.

  “She’s like the sister I never wanted.”

  Sounded about right. The only reason he didn’t run screaming from her was because she didn’t make her desires overtly known. The second she did, he’d never be able to look her in the eye again.

  “Hmm.” She was nice enough, and it was probably a less expected move than going to Mickey’s place. Everyone knew we were related. It would be the second place they checked. “Can you call her for me?”

  He nodded and got his phone out. The face he pulled when he turned it on said it all.

  “Seriously, who is she?” I couldn’t help myself.

  He didn’t look amused. “I’m giving you money and my passport and you’re asking for more?” He shook his head and dialled Kit’s number.

  “You’re giving me money?” He was kind of loaded. Owning a hand-me-down casino was really working for him. He nodded and held up his hand, signalling his unwanted sister had answered.

  “Kit, hey. I’ve got a favour…”

  Nine - Pete

  The girl had been for as long as I’d been aware of her ‘cutesy’, which was to say on the chubby side, feminine, and pretty in a sweet, naive kind of way. She had a good rack, but beyond that she wasn’t my type. Her fixation on Mickey had something to do with being in the same class at primary school, but aside from that I didn’t get it. She unlocked the door and swung it inwards.

  “Come on in,” she said cheerfully.

  I followed her in to the jaw-droppingly brightly painted flat. I was surprised the hot pink hallway didn’t make my eye-balls melt in their sockets. It was very ‘Kit’. Bright and cheerful and just a little bit painful to stare at straight on. “Christ.”

  She turned with a questioning look on her face. “Bible basher?”

  I snorted. “Aye, right then.”

  “Thought as much,” she commented with a smile that was actually wry. “You can stay in here.”

  She opened a door to a room that was quite thankfully painted a deep, dark red that didn’t make my eyeballs feel over stimulated to the point of bursting. “Great, thanks for…”

  “I’m doing this for Mickey,” she cut in, not the slightest bit interested in my gratitude. “Sleep tight.”

  She walked down the hall and disappeared into another room, the door shutting with an emphatic bang. Her tight-lipped smile had seemed weird. She wasn’t happy at letting me stay, clearly. Who knew why? Not me, and being honest I didn’t care. I shut my door and lay down on the bed. Then, I got up and shifted the bedside table in front of the door. I felt tired enough to sleep, but I didn’t want anything bad happening during the night and I wasn’t altogether sure Kit would lie to the Guard if they came knocking. Her loyalty wasn’t to me, after all. She’d made that abundantly clear.

  I picked the book out of the small backpack and cracked the spine again. If nothing else, it was a sure-fire sleep-aid.

  Ten - Pete

  The smell of bacon woke me up. Apparently, I was still capable of producing drool, which came as a bit more of a surprise than being able to sleep. I’d at least gotten a few pages of info to stay in my bored brain before I’d drifted off. Like, I’d already known my body didn’t work the way it had when it was alive. Simple functions that were no longer required shut down and stayed that way. I couldn’t process food or drink, and I was no longer functioning for anything resembling pro-creational activities. My desire for those things hadn’t died though, and that just didn’t seem fair.

  I got up, chucked the book on the bed and hauled the bedside table away from the door. I followed the amazing smell down the hall to the little kitchen Kit was preparing her fry up in. She turned at my intrusion.

  “I open up downstairs in half an hour,” she told me, keeping her eyes on the pan. “You can stay one more night until Mickey gets you sorted out. The liv
ing room’s through there. There’s some channels the TV doesn’t pick up.”

  Looking up, she took in the gagging-for-it look that was no doubt plastered on my face and her lips twitched. “Hungry?”

  “Not exactly, but that smells amazing.” I wondered what would actually happen if I ate something. Would I puke it straight back up, would it lie in my stomach like lead, or would some other thing happen that I can’t think of? There was only one way to find out. She shared her late breakfast with me, passing me a plate with bacon, sausage and beans on it. It all smelled great, and I don’t even like beans. I cut a bit of bacon and put it in my mouth. She glanced at me as she sat down.

  “So you’re going on the run, Mickey says.”

  I nodded as I chewed, taking my time before swallowing. “This is… ahh, shit…”

  It felt like my oesophagus was trying to choke a ragged piece of glass out of my body. I pushed back from the table and put my head between my legs. I coughed and the bacon came back up and landed on the floor with a wet slap. Groaning, I sat back up.

  Kit was trying to look concerned but I caught the smirk she was just pushing back as I looked at her.

  “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you?”

  She shrugged. “Hey, I’m just a bar tender with a fat ass. The hell do I know about Animates?”

  She wasn’t quite as naive as she seemed. How come I hadn’t noticed that before?

  “It seems like you know a lot more than I do,” I told her, throat feeling scratchy as hell. I would have tried some water, but I didn’t want to risk choking on it.

  “Give me some credit,” she said, starting on her breakfast now that I was done with mine.

  “So you’re smart in some ways,” I said, playing with fire. She raised an eyebrow, and I smiled as I told her why she wasn’t. “Yet, you moon over Mickey like a lost puppy. What is it about my self-obsessed, vampire-addicted cousin that floats your boat, anyway? His complete lack of interest in you?”

  She frowned, but she quickly buried whatever emotion I’d poked at with a ‘who cares’ expression. I knew I’d gotten to her. Nothing was ever going to be quick enough for my super-enhanced senses now. Blinking and missing it just didn’t happen.

  “I’m not… I don’t have to explain myself to you. You’re just his creepy loser cousin.” She walked out of the room with her plate. I looked down at mine. It still smelled insanely good. I put another bit of bacon in my mouth and chewed. I chewed all the flavour out of it and spat it back onto the plate. Disgusting, I know, but needs must after all.

  I sat there a while, doing the same with the rest of the meat on the plate. It was as satisfying a meal as I was going to get. I’d just need to do all my ‘eating’ in private. I found Pepsi in the fridge and gargled it about in my mouth before spitting it out in the sink. Ah, refreshing.

  So Kit hated me, it was only surprising because I’d assumed she liked everyone. She was so damn nice all the time. The fact that this was at least partly a front kind of made me like her, a little. She wasn’t the quite the welcome mat I’d pegged her for. I could sort of see why Mickey might hang around with her sometimes.

  I scraped the food into the bin and rinsed my plate in the sink. I had a bit of waiting around to do. Mickey was going to bring me money and some kind of make-up to black my blue-grey skin up tomorrow morning. I already had his passport in my backpack along with a change of clothes.

  My phone rang a few hours after Kit had gone down to open the pub. It was a little early for Mickey to be checking in, but it was his number calling so I picked up anyway.

  “Hey, what’s happening?”

  “Right, I’ve been at your place all day and there’s been no sign of the Guard or your landlord, or anyone, really. I got a bit suspicious, so I went along the hall to your creepy neighbours door.”

  The only particularly creepy neighbour I could think of was the low-level User down the hall, and he was more weird than creepy. “What, Nick?”

  “I don’t know his name. He’s got all these face piercings, and he dresses like something out the Rocky Horror Show.”

  Definitely Nick. I snorted. “He’s harmless. What did you do that for?”

  “He’s always opening his door and nosing when someone comes up the stairs.”

  Okay, he did like to do that. Probably the only reason I knew who he was. “So?”

  “So, he says Angie was in your flat the night you took her home.”

  “Your point is?”

  “She was there when you weren’t. Before you went home with her.”

  “What?”

  “I know, right? Gave me the shudders too. So anyway, he said she was in there for half an hour tops and then she left again.”

  It really did give me the shivers. “How the hell did she get in?”

  “The creep said she had a key.”

  How in the hell did that bitch get a key to my place? This wasn’t funny anymore. “What the…”

  “So, you think she might have planned the whole murdering you and bringing you back thing?”

  “Why would she kill herself after, if she planned it? Wait a minute, what did Dave say about this?”

  He surely knew if someone had been in the flat when I was out. She couldn’t have been that quiet.

  “He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said some other things before I lost the head with the prat. You might need a new fridge, by the way.”

  I sighed. Even if I wasn’t going on the run it wasn’t as if I really needed a fridge anymore.

  “Whatever. So that’s all?”

  “Yeah, how’s things there?”

  “Just great. How come you never told me Kit hates me?”

  He snorted. “Are you serious?”

  “She seriously hates me.”

  “Stop calling her fat, then. God, you’re an idiot.”

  “I don’t…” Wait a minute, that fat ass thing she’d said earlier, it had sounded familiar. Crap, had she actually heard me saying that? Maybe making me choke on her bacon hadn’t been entirely unprovoked.

  “Every chance you get, Bro. Don’t worry about it, it’s not like she would shop you to the Guard. Right, I’m away to check on things at ‘the office’. I’ll ask Nick to keep an eye out for any visitors. I’ll call you later.” He hung up on me. I spent about two minutes feeling bad about Kit overhearing my slurs and then I realised I was all alone in her flat. Weirdly, it hadn’t occurred to me when I sat down on her bright blue couch and started channel surfing. There was nothing interesting in the living room. The décor was surprisingly sparse, if visually jarring. I raked about the magazine rack but there was nothing more than a couple of recent newspapers and a TV mag.

  My snoop around started with her bathroom. Whirl-pool tub, nice. The cabinet was unbelievably boring. Nothing but ordinary painkillers, shaving stuff, and women’s hygiene products I wasn’t going near—nothing weird, which was kind of disappointing really.

  I closed the cabinet and looked across the hall at her closed bedroom door. I stopped in front of it and had a mild crisis of conscience. Would finding me rifling through her underwear drawers really make her hate me any less? Could she hate me any more than she already did?

  I opened the door and went in. It was strangely more muted than the rest of the flat; white walls, traces of red and blue on the bed covers and curtains, a red lamp and a blue laptop on a white desk. I went for the bedside cabinet and just about tripped over the stack of comics by the side of the bed. Well worth a rifle. Hellraiser? She really didn’t seem the type. I flipped through the stack. There was nothing there that wouldn’t give me nightmares. Most of them were illegal English imports too. They couldn’t be hers, surely?

  I shook it off and opened her top drawer.

  “Good evening, Miss Chase.”

  Talk about shitting bricks! I fell back and smacked my head off the wardrobe door.

  Whatever had just greeted me thought I was Kit. It was probably one of those
stupid talking dolls. I had half a mind to kick the drawer shut before it could come clambering out, wanting to ‘play’. They were carrier monkeys for the Heebie Jeebies, those glassy-eyed spindly-limbed things.

  “Miss Chase? What will it be tonight?”

  It was a weird question for a doll. Also, it sounded like a guy; a guy with a stick up his arse but a guy.

  “Eh, who’s in there, then?” I didn’t fancy catching sight, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long until it was poking its bulbous plastic head up to take a look at me.

  “I might ask you the same question, sir! Dear me, we’ve got a burglar. Wait there ‘til I alert the constabulary.”

  “What? No. I’m a…” Friend was an outright lie. I wracked my brain. “I’m a guest of Kit’s.”

  “A guest?” He sounded aghast. I edged towards the drawer, not sure I wanted to see but sort of desperate to know anyway. I wondered if he was like Dave.

  “I stayed the night.”

  “Miss Chase is not that kind of girl!” He tutted at me.

  “Christ! That’s not what I meant…”

  “Such language. You are not a friend of Miss Chase at all.”

  “I’m Mickey’s cousin.” He had to know about Mickey. Didn’t he?

  “She told me not of this visit. What reason have you for being in her room?”

  Snippy little bugger, this one. I wondered how to deal with it. He’d tell on me to his beloved Miss Chase, no doubt. If he’d been a doll I might have been able to reset him. I peered over the stack of comics and into the open drawer. The little pewter owl with a graduation cap on its tiny head frowned at me. I was scared of that? No chance.

  “Nice hat,” I said with a snort.

  He blinked and backed up in the drawer, wings going up to cover his beak. “Get away from me, foul creature. You smell of death.”

  “Aw, aren’t you cute? I might just have to steal you.” I put my hand in the drawer. He promptly pecked my finger. “You little bugger!”

  He disappeared behind some piles of photos. The stupid thing was only about four inches tall and three wide but that was enough to be a pain in my neck. He was too interactive to be a toy and that only meant one thing.