Her eyes were now wide and moist, almost clear, almost like a living woman’s. The lids fluttered in something like a blink. Her mouth was slightly open, and her usually gray lips were taking on some color.
“Fuck you, Walter,” she said without much inflection.
I twisted the knife in the wound. I could feel the flesh pulling and tearing, twisting along with the knife. “Maisie, how did you do it? How did you get the flowers?”
She let out a cry of pain, and then gritted her teeth together in a sick smile. “The more you fuck me, the more you torture me, the more I can think, and all I think about is giving you what you deserve. And it doesn’t all go away. Each time I get a little stronger.” I yanked out the knife.
Eight months earlier, I was a different man. I was, at least, not a man who could have imagined he would someday soon be torturing his illegal reanimate just after having sex with her, but life throws you curveballs. That’s for sure.
Things were pretty good, and they were getting better. I was married to a woman more wonderful and clever and creative than I ever thought would look twice at me. I swear I’d fallen in love with Tori the first time I saw her at a birthday party for a mutual friend, and I could never quite believe my good fortune that she’d fallen for me.
Tori was a cellist with the local symphony. How’s that for cool? She was not, perhaps, the most accomplished musician in the world, which was fine by me. I did not want her perpetually on the road, receiving accolades wherever she went, being adored by men far wealthier, better looking, and more intelligent than I. She’d long since given up on dreams of cello stardom and was now happy to be able to make a living doing something she loved. And Tori was pregnant. We’d only just found out, and it was too early to tell anyone, but we were both excited. I was apprehensive too. I think most men are more uneasy about their first child than they like to admit, but I also thought it would be an adventure. It would be an adventure I went through with Tori, and surely that was good enough for me.
Work was another matter. It was okay, but nothing great. I was an account manager at a fairly large advertising agency, one that dealt exclusively with local businesses. There was nothing creative or even challenging about my job, and the pay was no better than decent.
Mostly I tried to get new clients and tried to keep the clients we had happy. It was a grind, trying to convince people to keep spending money on sucky radio advertising they probably didn’t need. Most of my coworkers were okay, the atmosphere was congenial enough.
My boss was a dick if my numbers slackened, but he stayed off my case if I hit my targets. Mostly I hit my targets, and that was all right.
The job paid the bills, so we could get good credit and, consequently, live way beyond our means, just like everyone else. We’d bought a house we could hardly afford, and we had two SUVs that together retailed for about half as much as the house. We usually paid our monthly balance on our credit cards, and if we didn’t, we got to it soon enough.
It all changed on a Saturday night. It was the random bullshit of the universe. One of the guys at my office, Joe, was having a bachelor party. He was one of those guys I couldn’t stand: He had belonged to a fraternity, called everyone “dude,” lived for football season and to tell dirty jokes. I don’t think he really wanted me there or at his party, but he’d ended up inviting me, and I’d ended up going. Frankly, I had no desire to drop a bunch of money to get him drunk, but it would have been bad office politics to say no.
It started out in a bar and inevitably moved on to a strip club. We went through the obligatory bullshit of lap dances and stuffing G-strings with bills and drinking too many expensive drinks. I guess it was an okay time, but nothing I couldn’t have done without.
Hanging out with Joe and his knuckleheaded friends at a strip club or spending an evening in front of the TV with Tori I’d have taken the night at home in a heartbeat.
Ryan was one of the guys there. I’d never met him before, and I couldn’t imagine I would want to meet him again. He was tall and wore his blondish hair a little too long to look rakishly long, I guess—and had the body of a guy who spends too much time in the gym. He’d grown up with Joe, and the two of them were pretty tight.
He was the one that suggested we go to the Pine Box. He said he knew a place that was just insane. We wouldn’t believe how insane it was. We had to check out this insanity.
It was a bachelor party, so we were drunk and tired and disoriented from an hour and a half in close proximity to tits. We were all, in other words, out of our right minds, and no one had the will to resist. We drunkenly piled into our car and followed Ryan to his insane place about three amazingly cop-less miles away.
The Pine Box had no markings outside to indicate it was anything, let alone a club. It looked like a warehouse. We parked in the strip mall parking lot across the street Ryan said we had to and then crossed over to the unlit building. Ryan knocked on the door, and when it opened, he spoke in quiet tones to the bouncer. Then we were in.
None of us knew what we were getting into, and in all likelihood, none of us would have agreed if we had, but we were now fired by the spirit of adventure, and so we went into the warehouse, which had been turned into a makeshift club. There were flashing red lights and pounding electronic music and the smell of beer in plastic cups.
Tables had been set up all around a trio of ugly, slapped-together stages, and atop them danced strippers. Reanimate strippers.
“Dude, no way!” Joe cried drunkenly but not without pleasure.
“This shit is sick.” Even while he complained, he forced his way deeper into the crowd. Had anyone else spoken first, had anyone objected, we might have all left. But Joe was in, and so we all were.
He found a large table and sat himself down and called over to a waitress. You could tell he was loving it—the pulsing music, the lights, the smell of beer spilled on the concrete floor.
The waitress, I saw after a few seconds, was a reanimate—not as pretty as the strippers but wearing a skimpy cocktail dress and no mask. Somehow I hadn’t noticed that the strippers weren’t wearing masks, because they were wearing nothing, but this waitress, with its brittle blond hair and dead, puffy face exposed, seemed to me inexpressibly grotesque. It had not been terribly old when it died, but 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 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 website 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 anymore.
“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 clouds and disappear or turn into rain or whatever. Maybe everyone goes on to eternal suffering more horrible than anything we can imagine.
“No way to tell, but all those assholes imagined they had angels and harps and heavenly choirs sewn up, and that’s what opened the door for all this. Soul photography was in 1973, and by 1975 the first-generation reanimates began appearing on the market.”
“I always wondered about that,” I said. “It only took them two years to figure out how to turn dead people into product.”
“That’s because they already knew. Here’s what they don’t teach you in Sunday School: The technique was actually developed by the Nazis during World War II. They were plotting some huge offensive in which they would overwhelm the Allies with an army of the dead, but fortunately the war ended before they had a chance. Americans had the secret for years but knew they could never do anything with it, that the public would flip out. But after the soul photography began, they saw an opening. Christ, do you have any idea how much money the government has made by licensing the procedure? And then there are all the regulations, you know?”
“The regulations,” I echoed. “What was that, like the Alabama Accord or something?”
“The Atlanta Convention—a big meeting between industry and government to set the ground rules. When you buy a reanimate from one of the Big Three, they’ll warn you never to remove the mask, that it messes up the preservative process, and I think just about everyone obeys. No one wants their reanimate to fall apart on them. And then there are the quarterly servicings. If you miss even one of them, your reanimate becomes unlicensed and can be confiscated by the cops.” Ryan was also very interested in where the reanimates come from.
“They pay you, like, what? Seven or eight thousand to sign up, but not a whole lot of people in this country are willing to sell their bodies for eternal slavery, so most of the reanimates come from Africa or Asia. I always thought that was one of the reasons for the masks and the uniforms. I think a lot of white Americans might be more uncomfortable if they had to stare into a black reanimate face. More zombie-ish, I guess.”
“So where do these come from?” I asked. Most of the strippers at the club were young white women.
Ryan shrugged. “Some are from Eastern Europe, though those are har
d to get because you need ones that spoke English when they were alive. Still, you have any idea how many poor assholes in Latvia are trying to learn English just so they can sell their bodies? But the Americans? They’re drug addicts, people with terminal diseases who want something for their families, whatever. A lot of them sell their bodies on the black market. They get less, but there are no taxes. Some young hottie gets pregnant and can’t afford an abortion? Maybe she hocks her body, hoping to buy it back. That’s the teaser, you know.
“You can always buy it back. How many reanimates out there do you think were convinced they could get their bodies out of hock before they died? Even the black-market dealers let you do it, because they know people can convince themselves that they’ll be able to redeem their bodies. Almost no one ever does.”
I wondered if that was what happened to Maisie Harper—some crisis she couldn’t tell her parents about, so she pawned her body, sure she would have time to buy it back.
“Bunch of morons,” Ryan said. “Convince yourself of anything. It’s crazy to think that because some chick believed she would always have more time, you can walk in here and just fucking buy her like you would buy a loaf of bread.”
Until that moment, I’d had no idea you could buy a reanimate from the Pine Box. This changed everything. “You mean I could—a person could—buy one of these girls?”
“You thinking about it? Be hard to explain to your wife, but yeah. I mean, it’s not like a showroom. You can’t just point and say, ‘I’ll take that one,’ but they are sometimes willing to sell if they have extra or if one of them isn’t working out.” He now waved his fingers at Maisie. “Like that one. I guess you’ve thought about it.”
I turned to him. “What do you mean?”
He grinned. “Oh, I don’t know. It seems to have a particular interest in you, and you in it. I’ve fucked it, you know.” He grinned at me again. “It’s good stuff. I bet you they would let it go cheap. I mean, if you wanted a messed-up reanimate, that is.”
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