Zombies: More Recent Dead (20 page)

“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 hard 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.”

I felt as though I were floating outside my body. Was Ryan hinting that he knew about me and Maisie? How was such a thing possible? But if he did, so what? We were brothers in sick, fucked-up, reanimate enthusiasm, weren’t we? And even more importantly, he raised this new thought: They sold reanimates here.

Buying Maisie. It seemed too good to be true. It seemed like all the stars were lining up to make my life easy, or at least to give me an out from unbearable complications. They sold the reanimates, and they might be willing to sell Maisie in particular.

Ryan must have noticed how thoughtful I looked. He laughed.

“Before you do something rash like buy, you might want to sample the goods.”

“Sample the goods?”

He nodded. “It’s only a hundred dollars. They have rooms in the back, and you get a full hour. You can pick any girl you want. If she’s on the stage, she’s available, but if you are thinking of buying that one, you should check her out first.”

I looked over at Maisie. She was dancing around a pole very slowly, and she was looking at me. The idea of having sex with her, with any of them, was utterly repulsive to me. “No way,” I said.

“Don’t knock it. If you’ve never had sex with a reanimate, you have no idea what you are missing. They
love
it, man. You wouldn’t believe how into it they are. It’s like they feel alive when they’re doing it. They talk, almost like normal people. Sex and pain do that.” “How do you know about pain?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Different guys have different interests. You meet all sorts of reanimate enthusiasts here. Some are into sex, some are into . . . crazy things.”

I was already dismissing this. If people wanted to torture the dead, that was their own business. I was thinking about Maisie and sex. I was thinking about what Ryan had said, that they seemed more human during sex, and they spoke. That meant that Maisie could be telling anyone anything. I really didn’t want to try it myself, but I had to know.

I paid my hundred dollars to Yiorgio, one of the Pine Box’s owners.

He was a good-looking Greek guy with long hair in a ponytail and a linebacker’s physique. He looked like someone who would be curt and dismissive, but he was actually very friendly. He spoke with a heavy accent, but he was very gregarious and casual, like paying to have sex with a reanimate was no big deal. He made his customers feel at home, which I supposed made him a good businessman.

The thing with Maisie was awkward. Wearing nothing but a G-string, she came over to stand in front of us. “You want to go with Mr. Walter Molson?” Yiorgio asked her. “He is true gentleman.” I winced when he spoke my name. I didn’t want her to know it.

She recognized my face, but until that moment, I don’t see how she could have known my name. She did not react, and I hoped that maybe the information was lost on her dead brain.

She followed me to the room Yiorgio had given us. I was expecting something unspeakably seedy—a dusty room with cinder-block walls and a stained mattress on the floor—but the space was actually very neat and pleasant, with a bed and some chairs. The room was well lit, the walls newly wallpapered and with paintings of landscapes and fruit and the kind of bland things you see in hotel rooms. The bed looked freshly made. Yiorgio was clearly a class act.

I closed the door, and Maisie stood there looking at me, not blinking. Yiorgio had told me that whenever I spoke to her, I needed to begin the command with her name or she might not listen. I said, “Maisie, sit down on the bed.”

She sat.

There I was in that small room with Maisie. She sat on the side of the bed, her face empty and her eyes as unblinking as a doll’s. She was all but naked, but totally oblivious. She’d been beautiful when she was alive, I knew, and she was still beautiful in death if you liked that sort of thing. But even though I felt the surprising heat of her proximity, I had no intention of having sex with her—with it. She was a dead thing, a corpse made active by some mysterious mad science, and that did not get me all worked up. Plus there was the guilt, I didn’t want to be the sort of person who would both kill a woman and then fuck her dead body. That wasn’t how I saw myself.

“Maisie,” I said. “Do you know who I am?”

She did not react.

“Maisie, do you remember ever seeing me before?” Again, nothing. It was better than getting an answer, but it didn’t put my fears to rest. Ryan said it all came out during sex, and I knew I was procrastinating. I was looking for some other way to find out what I wanted to know, but I didn’t see it. Taking in a long, deep breath, I told her to take off her G-string and lie on the bed. She did that.

I took off my clothes. I’d been afraid I was not going to be able to perform, but I think her nudity and mine were enough to get things going. Her body was strangely warm, almost hot, but it didn’t feel like body heat. It was more like there was a chemical reaction happening just below her skin. And the texture was all wrong. It didn’t feel like skin, and her flesh didn’t feel like flesh. Lying on top of her felt like lying on top of a water balloon. I didn’t want to lick or suck or bite or even run my hands over her. I just wanted to do what I had to do and see what happened.

It was like Ryan had said: She was into it. Really into it. She bucked wildly, grabbed onto me, she grunted, groaned, and murmured. And in the middle, she began to speak. “God damn it,” she said, “you killed me. I’m fucking you, and you killed me. Walter Molson, you killed me.”

I pushed myself off her and staggered backward to the wall. It was worse than I thought. Far worse. By arranging to have sex with her, by putting her in a position where she could learn my name, I had made it worse. I was going to have to do something about this, and I was going to have to do it soon.

The real beginning of the story was two years before all this. Tori’s sister was going through a bad patch with her husband, was maybe thinking of getting divorced, and Tori wanted to go out to California to be with her for a few days. We hadn’t been married all that long, and this was going to be my first time alone in the new house. I loved my wife, and I loved living with her, but I was also excited for the solitude, which I missed sometimes. You get to thinking about it and you realize you can’t remember the last time you spent more than an hour or two without someone else around.

The first night she was gone I was exhausted from work, and basically fell asleep right away. The second night, a Saturday, was something else. I thought about calling up a couple of friends and going out, but somehow it seemed a waste of an empty house to leave it. I was in it for the quiet, for the privacy, and I didn’t want to waste it with socializing. I ordered a pizza, turned on a baseball game, and prepared to enjoy a night of not picking up after myself, of leaving the pizza box on the coffee table until morning.

I took out my bottle of Old Charter, and I swear I only planned to do one shot. Two at the most. I wasn’t interested in getting drunk, and I was sure that drinking too much would put me right to sleep.

But somehow I didn’t stop. The game on TV was exciting, and one shot followed the next with an unremarked ferocity. Come eleven o’clock, I was good and drunk.

Come one o’clock, it seemed to me like a crime against humanity that there was no ice cream in the house, like the UN Office on Desserts was going to come gunning for me if I didn’t take care of things.

I understood that I was drunk, very drunk, and that driving under those conditions was somewhere between ill advised and fucking moronic. I also understood that there was a convenience store not half a mile from my house. A straight shot out of my driveway, past four stop signs, and there you are. No need even to turn the wheel. I might have walked. The air would have done me good, but since the idea didn’t occur to me, it saved me the trouble of deciding I was too lazy to walk. Something else never occurred to me—turning on my headlights.

That was bad enough, but running that second stop sign was worse. I wasn’t fiddling with the radio or distracted by anything. I just didn’t see it, and I didn’t remember it. With no headlights to reflect against it, the sign was invisible. I had a vague sense that I ought to be slowing down somewhere around there, which was when I felt my car hit something. Sometime thereafter, I knew I had to stop, and after spending a little bit of time trying to find the brake pedal, I did in fact stop. I was a drunk moron, no doubt about it, and I realized I ought to have turned on my headlights before, but I knew enough not to turn on my headlights now.

I grabbed the emergency flashlight from the glove compartment, spent a little while trying to remember how to turn it on, but soon enough everything was under control. I got out of the car and stumbled the hundred or so feet since I hit the thing. My worst fear, I swear it, was that I had hit a garbage can, maybe a dog or cat, but when I approached the stop sign I saw her lying on the side of the road, her eyes open, blood pooling out of her mouth. There was a terrible rattling in her breath, and her upper body twitched violently.