I nodded, but then realizing that he could not hear me, I told him it would be fine. I then hung up the phone and sat very, very still.
This was it, then. They had me. They didn’t know it yet, or they would be coming for me instead of asking me to come to them, but it was only a matter of time. Maisie’s dismembered body would very likely never testify in a court of law, but the cops would come after me if they could, and at the very least, Tori would leave me and I would be ruined with lawyers’ fees. I would become an object of scandal and horror. That was the best-case scenario. The worst—jail, where everyone inside would know what I had done. I would be one of those perverts who would be found murdered after a few months of unimaginable torment.
I could not face any of that. I was ruined, but I did not have to live with the ruin. And why should I? We all knew the soul left the body at death. I’d seen a hundred movies of departing souls. Unlike some cynical people, I didn’t think the soul departed only to fade into nothingness. This life was just one part of the journey, and it was time for me to get a move on.
I am not a brave man. I did not own a gun and could not have used it if I had. I did not have the courage or the strength to cut my wrists. Instead, I went back to that bottle of bourbon, and I collected some very strong pain pills Tori had gotten but not really used after she’d broken her wrist last year. I drank all the whiskey and swallowed all the pills. I looked for more pills. I found some muscle relaxers, Ambien, Xanax, and a few others things to throw into the mix. Some probably did nothing, but the whole cocktail ought to be pretty lethal.
It was. I was probably dead within an hour, though time is hard to measure now. Only when I was twinkling out did it occur to me how horribly I’d screwed up. I’d forgotten how I’d raised the money to pay for Maisie in the first place. The offices of General Reanimates had given me almost ten thousand dollars to sign the contract, and that seemed like a good short-term solution. I would buy it back eventually. I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t. I had plenty of time. It didn’t weigh on me at all, and at the moment when I should have been thinking of nothing else, I was thinking only of escape.
Somehow I’d simply forgotten.
I suppose a pill overdose must be a good deal for General Reanimates. No cosmetic work to be done. Not that it much matters. I wear the uniform, and I don’t see many living people at all these days. I’m out in the desert, working on an alternative-energy project, setting out solar panels. At least I am making myself useful.
I cannot speak. I cannot will myself even to move, only to follow orders. My mind is mostly still there, though I do not feel entirely like myself. Maybe it is because my soul is gone, and maybe it is because I am dead. I don’t know. I don’t remember dying, don’t remember my soul leaving. I only remember falling asleep and then waking up in the General Reanimates lab. I cannot even wiggle a finger of my own free will. I’ve given up trying. I cannot imagine how Maisie did it.
There is nothing for me to do but endure my lot and think. It is hot here, and I feel it. We are not insensible. Our uniforms don’t breathe, and we cannot sweat. I am miserable and I itch, and every movement is painful. My bones feel like they are scraping together, rubbing, chipping, grinding down. I work twenty-four hours a day.
There is no rest and no end. I can do nothing but what I am told, and I have no escape but my memories. I have told my story to myself I don’t know how many hundreds of times. I pretend there is an audience, but there is none, and there never will be. Someday, I hope, I will wear out, but for all I know, this torment, with regular servicing, will last a hundred years. A thousand.
Somehow Maisie could break through, if only a little. Maybe it was anger or the sense of being wronged. Maybe if my end were not so fitting, I could find the will, but I doubt it. I have tried. I don’t think anyone could try more than I have, but then I suppose we all try. The man right next to me must be trying, too, but he cannot tell me about it. I think it was just that Maisie was exceptional. Maybe in life, certainly in death. She was, and the rest of us are not, and that is what I must endure over the long, unending horizon.
Rocket Man
Stephen Graham Jones
The dead aren’t exactly known for their baseball skills, but still, if you’re a player short some afternoon, just need a body to prop up out in left field—it all comes down to how bad you want to play, really. Or, in our case—where you can understand that by “our” I mean “my,” in that I promised off four of my dad’s cigarettes, one of my big brother’s magazines, and one sleepover lie—how bad you want to impress Amber Watson on the walk back from the community pool, her lifeguard eyes already focused on everything at once.
Last week, I’d actually smacked the ball so hard that Rory at shortstop called time, to show how the cover’d rolled half back, the red stitching popped.
“You scalped it,” he said, kind of curling his lip in awe.
I should mention I’m Indian, except everybody’s always doing that for me.
The plan that day we pulled a zombie in (it had used to be Michael T from over on Oak Circle, but you’re not supposed to call zombies by their people names), my plan was to hit that same ball—I’d been saving it—even harder, so that there’d just be a cork center twirling up over our diamond, trailing leather and thread. Amber Watson would track back from that cracking sound to me, still holding my follow-through like I was posing for a trophy. And then of course I’d look through the chain link, kind of nod to her that this was me, yeah, this was who I really am, she’s just never seen it, and she’d smile and look away, and things in the halls at school would be different between us then. More awkward. She might even start timing her walks to coincide with some guess at my spot in the batting order.
Anyway, it wasn’t like there was anything else I could ever possibly do that might have a chance of impressing her.
But first, of course, we needed that body to prop up out in left field. Which, I know you’re thinking “right, right field,” these are sixth graders, they never wait, they always step out, slap the ball early, and, I mean, maybe the kids from Chesterton or Memphis City do, I don’t know. But around here, we’ve been taught to wait, to time it out, to let that ball kind of hover in the pocket before we launch it into orbit. Kids from Chesterton? None of them are ever going pro. Not like us.
It’s why we fail the spelling test each Friday, why we blow the math quiz if we’re not sitting by somebody smart. You don’t need to know how to spell “homerun” to hit one. You don’t have to add up runners in your head, so long as you knock them all in. Easy as that.
As for Michael T, none of us had had much to do with him since he got bit, started playing for the other team. There were the lunges from behind the fence on the way to school, there was that shape kind of scuffling around when you took the trash out some nights, but that could have been any zombie. It didn’t have to be Michael T. And, pulling him in that day to just stand there, let the flies buzz in and out of his mouth—it’s not like that’s not what he did before he was dead. You only picked Michael T if he was the only one to pick, I’m saying. You wouldn’t think that either, him being a year older than us and all, but he’d always just been our size, too. Most kids like that, a grade up but not taller, they’d at least be fast, or be able to fling the ball home all the way from the center fence. Not Michael T. Michael T—the best way to explain him, I guess, it’s that his big brother used to pin him down to the ground at recess, drop a line of spit down almost to his face, the rest of us looking but not looking. Glad just not to be him.