I’ve never stabbed a living person, but I’m pretty sure it feels different. Her flesh offered almost no resistance. 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 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.