The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (3 page)

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Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology
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I hated the uniform - slick and stain resistant, made of some sort of soft plastic. It was oversized and baggy, making it almost impossible to tell that Maisie was female. I hated the full- face mask, but I had her wear it in case there was a fire or the building manager had to send in a repairman to fix something or even if there was a break-in. I didn’t want anyone knowing I owned an illegal reanimate. I didn’t need that kind of trouble.
 
I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me. ‘Hello, Maisie. You may take off the mask if you like.’
 
She remained motionless, as still as a mannequin.
 
‘Maisie, please take off the mask.’
 
With her left hand, she reached up and pulled it off but held on to it. I hadn’t told her to put it anywhere, and so letting it go would not occur to her dead brain. Underneath the mask, I saw her face, pale and puffy, hanging loose from her skull, but strangely still pretty. She had long, flowing curls of reddish blonde hair, her pale blue eyes - I’m sure very arresting in life - dull and cloudy in un-death.
 
I came to check in on Maisie maybe once a week. I should not have to, of course. I ought to have been able to leave her alone for months, but I knew it was a good idea for reanimates to get some exercise lest they gum up. That was part of it. The other part was that I wanted to be sure she wasn’t up to no good. Renanimates weren’t supposed to have it in them to be up to no good, but if she hadn’t been Maisie, had not acted like herself, she wouldn’t be in the apartment to begin with.
 
‘How have you been, Maisie?’
 
Of course there was no response. What was left of her brain couldn’t process so abstract a question. That’s what Ryan said, and he seemed to think he knew what he was talking about.
 
‘Maisie, get me a beer from the refrigerator.’
 
I could get my own beer, of course, but I needed to find excuses to make her move. I had to specify one from the refrigerator because otherwise she might get me a warm one from the pantry or she might end up looking for a beer in the medicine cabinet.
 
Maisie walked off to the kitchen. I followed but only for something to do. I was always bored and uneasy when I came to the apartment. I felt strange, like I was play-acting for some invisible audience, like I was a grown-up furtively trying to recapture the magic of childhood toys. Nothing I said to her or did with her felt natural. Christ, I could talk to a dog and feel less like I was talking to myself. That’s why I kept the visits so short. I would drink the beer, order her to do some light cleaning, and then get out of there.
 
I was thinking about how much I wanted to leave, how much I wanted to get back to my wife, when I walked into the kitchen and saw the fresh-cut flowers on the kitchen table. They were a gaudy assortment of cheap dyed daisies, but they were bright and fresh, very new. They’d been arranged carelessly, and water from the vase puddled on the table. Here’s the thing: I had not put the flowers there.
 
No one else had a key - no one other than the apartment-complex manager or the super. Neither of them had any business in my apartment, and if they did have something important to do, they would have called first. (They had my cell-phone number, since I sure as hell didn’t want my wife to know I had an apartment, let alone an apartment where I kept my black- market reanimate.) Even if they had not called first, neither the manager nor the super was about to leave a vase filled with flowers on my kitchen table.
 
Maisie was now closing the refrigerator and handing me a beer. She did not open the bottle, because I had not asked her to open it. That was how they worked. They did not do anything you did not ask them to do. So where had these flowers come from?
 
I twisted the cap off the beer and looked at Maisie, who, in the absence of orders, remained perfectly still. ‘Maisie, where did these flowers come from?’
 
She stared at me. It was a difficult question for a reanimate, I realized, even as I spoke it. Too abstract. I tried again.
 
‘Maisie, did you put the flowers there?’
 
It was a yes-or- no question, and she should have been able to answer it, but she said nothing.
 
‘Maisie, answer the question. Did you put those flowers there?’
 
Again, silence. Dark, looming, unblinking silence. It was like demanding answers from a stuffed animal. No; our genetic, animistic impulses gave speaking to a stuffed animal a sort of logic. This was like demanding answers from a bowl of rice.
 
I took a long drink from my beer and sighed. This was serious. More than serious. It wasn’t just that maybe my reanimate, which wasn’t supposed to want anything, somehow wanted flowers. It meant that she had somehow gotten out of the apartment, gone to the store, spent money - money she’d earned from what or stolen from whom? Had she managed to bring it with her from the Pine Box? It meant a whole spiraling vortex of Maisie chaos, and I had to know. I had to.
 
‘Maisie,’ I said. ‘Go into the bedroom, remove your clothes, and lie on your back on the bed.’
 
 
The first thing I need to make clear is that I am not a pervert. I don’t have any desire to have sex with reanimates. Given the choice between sex with a reanimate or sex with a real woman, I’ll take the real woman every time. Hell, given the choice between sex with a reanimate and no sex, I’d go without sex - at least for a good long while. Like S&M or rubber fetishes or whatever, if you’re not into it naturally, it’s hard to fake the enthusiasm. If you meet some amazingly hot woman, and she says, ‘Sure, let’s have sex, only I want to tie you up and stick needles in your dick,’ you’re probably going to, with however much regret, take a rain check. Unless you like that sort of thing. Plenty of guys like sex with reanimates. They prefer them to real women. It floats their boat. It does not float mine.
 
That said, I should point out that in most ways it’s kind of like sex with anyone else. It has some unique qualities but also lacks some things that make sex with a living woman enjoyable - for example, that unique sensation of having sex with someone you know is alive. So, if you are looking at it objectively, it’s a trade-off. That day, I looked at it objectively. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I wanted to have sex with my wife and no one else. I
liked
sex with my wife. Sure, I would look at an attractive woman when I saw one on the street, but I wasn’t about to make any moves. There had been some parties, some business trips, where I’d felt opportunities opening, but I never pursued them. I was in love with Tori. I was happy and I didn’t need complications and problems and guilt and lies.
 
If you are like most people, there are probably a lot of things you don’t know about reanimates. Ryan says you are happier that way. He says the less you have to think about what they are, the easier it is to ignore them, to enjoy the convenience. Ryan says you probably don’t know much about their history, for example, because there’s no percentage in knowing the history. You also probably don’t know much about their nature, and that’s a whole other thing. There’s a percentage in that one for you. The key thing that I’m getting at is that reanimates have a greater clarity of thought when their feelings are intensified. You can tease out this clarity either with pain or with sex - at least with the females. I’m told it is impossible for the males to have sex, not unless the penis is artificially inflated. There are rumors of male reanimate sex slaves with permanent, surgically crafted boners, but I’m not entirely sure this is true.
 
Reanimates are totally different creatures during sex. This is a big part of why guys who like to sleep with them get off on it. Also, probably because they are willing and compliant sex slaves whose needs and preferences can be handily dismissed. Then again, some guys just dig the fact that they’re dead. But for most of the true enthusiasts, the main thing is that reanimates are hungry for it. They start to feel things, they start to remember themselves, and they - well, I hate to be crass, but the bottom line is that they fuck hungry and hard, and some guys just love it. Not me. It made me feel unclean, like I’d been exposed to something vile and rotting. Even now I don’t like thinking about it in too much detail, and the less I say about the particulars, the better.
 
Adulthood, however, means doing things you don’t want to do. So I had sex with Maisie. As soon as I slid into her, it was like a switch flipped inside her soul. She was something else, something vibrant and powerful - something that felt not alive but rather
live
, like a storm or a mass of building electricity. That was how she’d been when I’d had sex with her at the Pine Box. She groaned and moaned and murmured. She thrust her hips up at me with a shocking, awkward violence. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to, so I waited until she seemed good and worked up, and then I asked, ‘Maisie, did you get those flowers?’
 
‘Fuck off, you asshole.’
 
I guess saying that she surprised me is an understatement. I leaped off of her in astonishment and fear, and I lost - shall we say - my will to continue. She, in turn, fell back on the bed like a puppet with her strings cut. Just like that, she faded back to her normal, stupefied, lifeless self - still and naked and slightly bloated, not breathing hard like I was, since reanimates did not respirate - looking at nothing, and thinking, I was sure, about nothing.
 
I began to gather up my clothes. ‘Maisie, get dressed,’ I said, ‘and come sit at the kitchen table.’
 
She complied.
 
I am a nice guy. I like children and animals. I don’t especially like violent movies, so what came next wasn’t something I enjoyed. It wasn’t something that came naturally to me. It was, however, something I had to do. I thought it over. I looked at all sides of it and tried to find another way, but it just wasn’t there.
 
When Maisie sat at the kitchen table, I told her to place her right arm on the table, on top of a thick bathroom towel. Then I asked her to roll up the sleeve of her uniform. With the puffy, pale flesh of her forearm exposed, I grabbed her wrist in one hand and, with the other, thrust a sharp kitchen knife into her arm, just below the elbow.
 
I’ve never stabbed a living person, but I’m pretty sure it feels different. Her flesh offered almost no re sistance. It was like stabbing wet dough. I felt the knife nick the bone, but it kept going, all the way through, and I felt the tip of the blade make contact with the towel.
 
Ryan says that pain works as well as sex, but sex, troubling though it is, bothers me less than torture. Anyone who might begin to think that I was a bad person should keep that in mind. I went for pain only when I had no choice.
 
Maisie did not scream. She did not stand or pull away or fight. Instead, she looked at me and winced. ‘You asshole motherfucker.’
 
‘Maisie, did you put those flowers there? How did you get them? How did you pay for them?’
 
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 grey 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.

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