by Jack Ketchum
John offered her his barstool. She said she'd stand, thank you. And that was fine with us because leaning on the bar the way she was her breasts were straining one way through the tank top and her butt the other. In those jeans it was a sight to see. She was beautiful.
I didn't like her one bit. But she was beautiful.
Her blonde hair glowed, a luscious fog about her head. She smelled like musk and roses. Her eyes were so damn bright they seemed to blur like neon whenever she moved her head.
Men are from Mars, they say. And women are from Venus. War on the one side, love on the other. Well, sometimes that's simply not the case. Sometimes it's the woman who wants a conquest, sexually speaking. Wants sex the way a man will. Doesn't care to be wined and dined, doesn't want to hold hands in the park and get flowers on Valentine's Day, couldn't care less for kissy-face and all that lovey-dovey bullshit.
She wanted what we wanted. You didn't see it every day. It was intriguing.
"I know what you're thinking," she said to me.
"Huh?"
"I know what you're thinking. You do play the game, don't you? Most of you guys do."
"What game? What am I thinking?"
Her entire face seemed to give off light. "You're thinking, 'is she or isn't she?'"
I just looked at her. I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. "Is she or isn't she what?" John slurred. By now he was piss-drunk. Her gaze scanned us.
"Is she or isn't she dead?"
She reached over for Neal's cocktail fork and no! I thought as she buried the fork into the wide-open palm of her left hand, slamming it through like a ball into a baseball glove and suddenly I could see the tiny pitchfork tines sticking out the other side.
No blood.
She didn't even flinch.
She just kept looking at me. And smiled.
"Fooled you, didn't I. All three of you."
I think we breathed then. I know what we must have looked like, open-mouthed, staring down at her hand while she pulled the fork out again and tossed it on Neal's plate. There were still a couple of oysters there. She held her hand up and turned it, showing us the bloodless punctures. "Fooled us?" Neal said. "Ma'am, that's an understatement."
What you have to realize is that for us this girl was a fucking bombshell, and I don't just mean in the looks department. If anybody in this freaky city were experts on telling the dead from the living we figured it was us, or at least that we were well into the running. And we didn't have a clue—not with her. She was right. She'd fooled us all completely. "Your skin," I said, "your hair...?"
"Diet supplements. Magnesium, Vitamin E and Potassium mostly. Some of us are learning." She sighed. "Okay, boys, who wants to blow this pit stop and get on with it?"
"Wait a minute," I said. "If you're dead, how come you're drinking...whatever the hell it is you're drinking and...?"
"Eating octopus?" Her eyes narrowed. "You believe everything you hear? What? We can't go into bars but you can? We don't like a drink now and then? You buy into all those moronic stories about how we can't eat anything but human flesh? Isn't that the same thing as saying all Irish are drunks, all blacks like watermelon? I'd hoped you guys were a little more evolved than that."
I saw her point. She was whitebread just like us but now that she was dead she was different too, she'd slipped into a new minority group—and one we little understood. So who were we to make judgments about her?
"It's a different society now," I said. "We hear things about you, you hear things about us. I guess the only way any of us is going to get it right is to talk to one another."
"Oh, gee, isn't that sensitive," she laughed. "Get real. You don't want to understand the dead any more than we want to understand you. There's plenty of what I guess you'd call common ground though." Her eyes went to my pants. "Isn't that what this is all about?"
She was putting it right on the line. I wondered why the living so rarely did that. Why we always played these goddamn games.
"I hear you," I said. "You call it."
The next piece of octopus she picked off Neal's plate she seemed to swallow whole.
"Okay. Who's going home with me?"
The question was for all three of us but she directed it straight at me. Those eyes again. A beautiful, perfect dead girl's eyes.
"Who wants to know what it's really like...to do it with someone like me?"
I finished my drink and called for the tab. "She's not beating around the bush," I said, sounding a whole lot more confident than I felt. "Gentlemen? Neal?"
He shook his head. "I'm a married man, boys. No can do.”
“John?"
His face went blank. You could practically hear his brain ticking off the countless possibilities, all the pros and cons. Then he stood up. "I'm there," he said.
We paid and followed her to the street.
It was hot that day but the night seemed hotter still. The streets were more crowded than usual, a forced march of barhoppers searching out liquid relief.
"If you don't mind my asking," I said, "how did you...?"
"Die?" The question didn't faze her. "Brain tumor. Simple."
I wanted to ask her more. It was common wisdom that it was the brain that mobilized the dead and that destroying it was how you put them down for good. So it stood to reason that any damage there, like a tumor, would at least cause some dysfunction. But she was functioning perfectly. I wondered why.
I didn't ask, though. Too clinical, too damn anti-erotic. And we were moving along at the fast pace she set for us like a couple of slightly woozy dogs trotting behind their mistress.
Booze, beauty and forbidden sex. It'll make a dog of you every time. "Can you believe we're actually doing this?" I whispered to John.
He shot me a look and a grin. "Well, yeah!"
"I dunno...something's not right."
"Hey. You're the one who's always mouthing off about how the dead should have equal rights. So what about equal shtupping rights? She wants some action, we're the guys who're gonna give it to her. And she's the one who asked for it. So what's the problem?"
It made sense, I guess.
He nudged me. "And if she gets froggy? Relax." He flipped up the front of his shirt and I saw the snubnose stuck in his belt.
"Come on, guys," she called over her shoulder. Her voice lilting like a song. "I mean, exactly who's dead here?"
She lived in a split row house up on 89th and Amsterdam. Welfare housing. Not exactly a total dump but pretty damn close. Her high heels tapped up the stairs. You could smell piss faintly in the dimly-lit stairwell—did the dead still piss?—and half-erased graffiti swirls decorated the walls. Nothing to deter us. Not when you could look up and see that Class-A butt riding up and down in those jeans. We were beyond the point of no return now. That primordial toggle in the male brain had been switched to the on position for the duration.
She unlocked triple deadbolts. It looked like somebody'd smeared shit on the door. I hoped it was just more bad graffiti. Then she opened the door and switched on the lights and stepped inside. For a moment we just stood there.
"You gotta be shitting me," John said.
Inside it looked like the Presidential Suite at the St. Regis. Whatever that might look like. Russet wall-to-wall carpet, long sable couches, finely crafted Hepplewhite furniture and one of those fifty-inch-screen tube TV’s in the corner. Some pretty high-end art hung from the walls and the curtains could've been Byzantine tapestries.
We stepped inside.
"Some joint," John said.
Our hostess didn't respond. She just stood there appraising us while we moved into the room and looked around. I finally stated the obvious question.
"I thought that...that the dead lived on public assistance.”
“Only because that's all that people like you will allow us.”
“Come again?"
"Hey! What's this 'people like you' bullshit? You invited us here, remember?" said John.
"True.
I don't have to appreciate your politics though, do I?"
"No, you don't. Though my buddy here's a liberal Democrat. But how about you cool it with the big bitch attitude, okay? Be nice."
She nodded, smiling. "Okay. Back to the subject. You wanted to know how I can afford all this, right?"
"Yeah."
She slipped the tank top up over her head. Underneath she was naked.
And perfect.
"What do you think?" she said.
John groaned. "Ah, I should've known. A fuckin' hooker. Hey, are we fuckin' morons or what?"
"That's not the deal," I told her. I was seriously pissed off. "You came on to us and all we did was go along. We don't pay for it."
"You will tonight," she said.
She slipped a big semi-auto out from behind the phone stand by the door in less time than it takes me to swallow. The gun had a long black can on the end of it. A silencer.
She pointed it at John. "And Johnny," she said, "don't even think about pulling that little pea-shooter in your belt. Between your shirt and your beer-gut that thing's been harder to miss than what passes for your dick. Thumb and forefinger, champ. Take it out and drop it on the floor. Slow." John hesitated. She cocked her gun.
"If you don't, I'll punch so many holes in you you'll whistle when the wind blows. Count of three, tough guy. One, two..."
He parted the shirt, reached down and dropped the gun to the floor. "Now wallets. Toss 'em over here by my feet."
We did that too. You didn't have to have a doctorate from M.I.T. to figure out now how she'd furnished her apartment. She wasn't a whore, she was an armed robber, luring guys to her apartment and then ripping them off.
A dead armed robber.
And we knew what she looked like. And we knew where she lived. She wasn't letting us out of here alive.
John looked at me and I looked at him. And I thought we were saying something a whole lot like goodbye when she fired the shot into his chest. The silenced report sounded like a single light clap of hands. He went down like a wall of mason blocks. She'd hit him directly in the heart, blood arcing a yard up out of the bullet hole.
I watched the arc dwindle. To nothing.
"I hope you sad fucks have some decent credit cards."
Now the gun was on me. She was enjoying this. Her nipples were as long as thumbnails. I wondered if she'd always been this way or if the tumor had turned her vicious.
"Listen," I said. I was shaking. "We can work this out somehow. We can..."
"Shut up." She fired two more rounds into the side of John's head. The side of his skull blew off and brains like old clotted oatmeal flecked with red were suddenly all over the floor.
I understood the russet carpet.
"Wouldn't want him to come back. Would we? The world's a better place without that drunken troll."
All I could do was stand there expecting to die in seconds. I couldn't move. I felt stupid and slightly sad, like I'd lost an old friend. And not John, either.
"So now me?" I managed to say. "Just like that?"
She laughed. "You mean, 'after all we've had together?' Not necessarily."
She was holding the gun almost lazily—like you'd hold a phone receiver you weren't exactly going to use right away. But there was a good ten feet between us. If I went for it I'd be dead on the floor right next to John.
"You can't get out," she said. "The door locks automatically, the windows are barred and you can yell and scream all you want to but let me tell you, the neighbors won't complain."
Of course not. The neighbors were all dead, like her.
"So what do you mean, 'not necessarily?'"
She shrugged a smooth bare shoulder. "Whether you live or die depends on you."
My stare told her I didn't get it.
"I see assholes like you every day. We're not even people anymore, to you we're not even human. We're nothing more than a bunch of animals."
"That's not true. Yes, there are tons of bigots out there. But I've been trying to tell you all night long. I'm not one of them."
I was pleading for my life, not my principles. And she knew it.
"Sure you are. You're no different. Liberal Democrat, my ass. The proof is the fact that you're here in the first place. You goddamn guys, you all think it would be a riot to have sex with the dead. Something to laugh about, something you can brag about to your buddies. Well guess what? Here's your big chance."
She ran her finger down the gun barrel.
"And if you do a real good job, I won't kill you."
It was crazy. It made no sense. It was what we'd come here to do in the first place and now she was turning it into some kind of weird life-and-death challenge. But could I believe her?
What choice did I have?
Strangest thing was, I knew I could do it. Even with the gun in her hand. Even with John dead on the floor. I could put the blocks to her then and there. I looked from her mouth to her breasts and was I hard already. Maybe death and fear are aphrodisiacs.
I took off my shirt and dropped it to the floor. I slid off my belt and dropped that too. "All right," I said quietly and took a step toward her. She started to laugh.
"You should be so lucky!"
Now I really was lost.
"Not with me, you jackass." She reached for a door back near the drapes that opened to a block of darkness. "Mom? Billy? Come on out." Their stench preceded them. I could barely breathe.
"Mom burned up in a car accident," she said. "My brother Billy drowned in the Hudson. But they both came back. I take care of them now."
They shuffled across the room, knelt awkwardly at John's body. The woman had no face at all, just char. Her body looked like a skeleton covered with blackened bacon. The boy's flesh was mostly green and hung slack now that he'd lost his floaters' bloat over a naked ribcage that seemed stuffed with meatloaf. Two eyes gleamed from a mottled blood-pudding face. And what we'd heard about the dead—that they were sometimes far more powerful than they'd been in life—was true. Effortlessly these two palsied-ruined creatures opened John's gut and pulled things out of him and then for a while there were nothing but munching noises until she broke the silence.
"Mom likes it hard and fast," she said. "But not too hard. You know, pieces could fall off. You've got to be careful."
The faceless thing looked up at me through black clotted eyes and did something with its mouth that might have been a smile. I could see the crisped breasts, the scorched sex between its stick legs.
"And Billy's gay. Try to get him off with your mouth, otherwise he's gonna put the whole thing up your ass. Ouch!"
Already its cock was getting hard. The glans looked like a spoiled green tomato.
They both began to crawl in my direction.
"You're the one who wanted to have sex with the dead," she said. The gun was cocked and pointed at me. "So get to it."
She kept her promise—she obviously didn't kill me. So I guess I got it right. They keep me in the back room now with Mom and Billy, shackled.
I hear her bring in other guys all the time. None of them last long. I hear a pop and that's the end of them. So far I'm their favorite. I figure she must have singled me out after all that evening at the bar. And the sex? It's horrible, sure, it's hideous. But it's better than being their next meal. You'd be surprised what you can do if it means staying alive just one more day.
But their appetites are...awful, tremendous.
My only hope is that Neal's out there somewhere looking for me. Looking for his buddies, John and me. That he's got the cops onto it, maybe. That somehow, against all odds he'll find me. That maybe one of these days she'll slip up, make a mistake—she'll go by the World Cafe again and Neal will be On Point that day at the big plate glass window watching the ladies go by in their short summer skirts and tees and tank tops and see one who looks just like Daryl Hannah.
Eyes left.
Meantime it's winter now. The City's cold in winter. And it's very cold in here.
Sleep Disorder
Bill Dumont never dreamed.
Hadn't for as long as he could remember. The popular wisdom was that you simply had to dream or you'd go crazy—you'd maybe already be crazy—so he assumed he did, really. He just couldn't recall a thing. Not a single image. Practically speaking that was as good as not dreaming at all. Which was fine with him because he doubted that his dreams were going to enlighten him much.
Bill Dumont was a Grade-A, All-American bastard and he damn well knew it. His father had been before him and probably his father before that. He got to live the life every day. He didn't need to dream about it too.
But there had to be dreams. Or elsewhere would all this talking come from?
He talked in his sleep.
Pretty much every night if you were to believe Annie, his current live-in girlfriend. Or Laura, his soon-to-be-ex wife. Or any of the squeeze he got on the side. And he guessed it had started way back in college because he remembered he'd sure scared the hell out of Harry, his last roommate, the second night in their apartment together by sitting bolt upright in bed and saying, "I have come to you through space and time—but not through New Jersey." And then going back to sleep again.
Harry was kind of leery of him for the next week or so. Couldn't blame him.
New Jersey for god's sake.
"What you dream," he'd said, "is how you see others, seeing you."
Well, Harry was a psych major so what could you expect? He could talk some mean Freudian, Jungian or Reichian dynamics but Bill was less interested in Harry's analysis than in his wallet back in those penny-pinching college days. Harry was a rich kid. Harry also had a crush on the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Bill Dumont—and Bill didn't want to fork out all that tuition money if he didn't have to. And as the saying went, it was all pink on the inside.
Bill feigned a fervent affection for the entire senior year, secretly boffing cheerleaders and business majors on the side, taking them to nice expensive restaurants on Harry's cash. Between the tuition and party money, Bill took the poor chump for a small fortune. When Harry got the gist, he blew his head off—day after graduation. Too bad. But hey, Harry's mental problems weren't Bill's problem.
