Read Joe Pitt 1 - Already Dead for Free Online Page B

room separating the
     scent into three distinct strands. There's the girl's musky undertone, the rank underarm
     stink of the one whose neck I snapped, and the hair product used by the guy I stepped on.
     Now that I have the zombie smell isolated into the three individuals I know of, I sniff
     for any other signatures hiding in the mix. It's not there. No sign of another zombie, the
     carrier.
    But the girl's musk.
    Why musky? A stale musky sex scent. That's what I smelled on her last night before I got
     distracted by Singh. Zombies don't have sex, do they? Shit, I don't know. I walk over to
     where the taped shadow of her body is outlined on the floor and take a deep breath through
     my nose.
    I filter out the other smells and focus on hers. The youth of her flesh. She was young,
     maybe seventeen, eighteen. The rot under the living flesh, brought on by the bacteria that
     was eating her alive, eating her dead. The acid smell of the cosmetics coloring her eyes
     and mouth and nails midnight black. The compost odor when her bladder and bowels released
     after I stabbed her in the neck. Perfume, sweat, a fungus in her Doc Martens. All that,
     and a sweaty musk. Someone rubbed against her, touched her. Someone fucked her. Not today,
     but recently, since she was infected. I try to imagine the sicko that would have sex with
     one of these things while it pawed at him and tried to take a bite out of his brain, the
     bastard that would mate with the bacteria inside this dead girl.
    I take one more deep breath to fix the musk smell in my mind so that I can pick it out
     when I find it again. That's when I notice something is missing. I take another whiff, and
     I catch it. An absence. Throughout the room, little patches of nothing in the matrix of
     odors. Slight erasures sprinkled across the air where something has absented itself from
     the catalogue of the room's history. I close my eyes. I inhale and try to capture one of
     the absences, to trace it step-by-step across the room and re-create what this thing might
     have done here.
    And it is this deep level of concentration that allows someone to sneak up behind me and
     hit me on the back of the head with a somewhat immature whale.
    The sound of bickering wakes me and tells me exactly where I am. I peel an eye open for
     confirmation, and sure enough, here I am in the squalid tenement basement headquarters of
     the Society. I'm on a dingy cot in an alcove. In the middle of the room three people are
     standing around a rickety card table under a single bare lightbulb. The two guys doing the
     bickering are Tom Nolan and Terry Bird.
    Tom reads about twenty-five, but carries a few more actual years. He's got the blond
     dreads and washed-out clothes of the downtown radical, along with the requisite number of
     piercings and tattoos. Terry is older looking, say fifty or so. His style is more old
     school: ponytail, beard, John Lennon glasses, Earth Day T-shirt and Birkenstocks; that
     kind of thing. The third is Lydia Miles. Call her twenty, short dark hair, leather pants,
     white tank top, bodybuilder muscles, and an upside-down pink triangle tattooed on her
     shoulder. Just another ragtag band of East Village
     radical-socialist-anarchist-revolutionaries hanging out and plotting the overthrow of The
     Man. Of course this band of revolutionaries also drinks blood.
    Lydia stands there watching while Tom goes at Terry and Terry pulls a passive-aggressive
     mellow hippie thing in response. Guess who's the topic of discussion?
    --I'm telling you he's working for the fucking Coalition. Why else would he be there?
    --Well, Tom, that may be. But to me, the real question here, and I think Lydia may agree
     with me, is what were you doing there? I was under the belief that we had agreed.
    --Fuck your agreement. You agreed, I didn't agree to shit. This creep is hip-deep in the
     Coalition. He's their ratfink spy down here and now they have him, they