Read The New Dead for Free Online

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 - landscapes and fruit and the kind of bland things you see in hotel