“Maisie,” I said, “do you want something? Do you need something? Is there anything I can get you that will make you happy?”
She didn’t answer.
“I like your fish,” I tried.
Nothing.
“Maisie, I order you not to leave this apartment.”
Her head moved, just a little. Nothing else, but I knew that deep down she was laughing at me. This dead thing was laughing at me, and she meant to fuck up my life any way she could. Christ, the flowers, the fish—she was toying with me, torturing me. She could ruin me any damn time she wanted to, but she wanted to draw it out. She wanted revenge.
The next day at work was a nightmare. Crap from my boss, fatigue from lack of sleep. As soon as I got out I drove over to Maisie’s apartment. Nothing new happened. Maisie seemed like any ordinary reanimate, and I began to think that maybe I had panicked for nothing. Maybe it was a bad patch and now everything had blown over.
Then, on Tuesday, everything changed.
I was halfway through another crappy day when the receptionist rang. “Um, Walter, you need to get out here. There is someone here for you.”
“Who is it?”
“Christ, Walter, just get out here.”
I went to the reception area, and there was Maisie, uniform on, mask off, her hair and eyes wild. She stood in front of the receptionist’s desk, one palm out, raw and bloodied. The other hand held a piece of glass. She brought the glass down into her palm. Around her were the receptionist, one of the agency creatives, and a guy from the mail room. They were just staring.
“Ahh,” she cried. “Walter. Walter Molson. Walter Molson.” Now here was Xander, my boss.
“What the hell is this, Walter?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Get that thing out of here,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re into, but take your perverted, illegal shit somewhere else.”
I managed to get her into the elevator—empty, thank God—and into my car. I shoved her in the back and drove her to her apartment.
I put her in the bedroom, and I called a locksmith to change the locks to the kind that had to be opened with a key even from the inside. I wasn’t supposed to change the locks on these doors, but I didn’t give much of a shit at this point. We were into the endgame now. I knew it. I had to get rid of Maisie, and I knew just how to do it.
Once the locks were taken care of, I called Ryan to get the number, and then I called Charlie.
“Hey,” I said to him. “How often do you have those little parties?” I could hear cloth scraping as he shrugged against the phone.
“Two or three times a year, I guess.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I have a unit—” I didn’t want to talk about reanimates over the phone. You never knew who might be listening. “I need to get rid of it.”
“Maisie, huh?” I could practically hear the grin in his voice. “I wondered if things weren’t going to come to this. Now, we don’t need a full-blown party to have a good time. Something more casual can be whipped up pretty easily. You bring her over Saturday night; we’ll fix things up for you.”
I didn’t go into work for the rest of the week. I didn’t call the office, and the office didn’t call me. I guessed that job was done. On Saturday night I went out, and Tori didn’t bother to argue. Things had never been the same since that fight we’d had after Charlie’s last party. They would get better, I knew. Things would improve once I’d dealt with Maisie. Everything would be patched up very, very soon.
I picked up Maisie and brought her to Charlie’s house. I was expecting just a half dozen guys or less, but there were twenty-five or thirty people there—almost as big as the last party. I brought Maisie out of the car and led her inside.
“Christ,” said Charlie. “You sure you want to get rid of it? It’s pretty sweet.”
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s gone haywire. You don’t want it.”
That was good enough for him. We ordered Maisie to stand in the middle of the living room, and we all got beers from a big bucket in the kitchen. A couple of the guys, including Ryan, said they wanted to taste her before the end, and I knew it would be ungracious to refuse. I just nodded and let them take her into the bedroom. There were probably eight guys in all who went with her. I was worried she would speak, but these were not exactly the sort of people who go to the police with their suspicions.
It was maybe eleven before they brought her outside to stand on the plastic sheeting. She was still naked from the antics in the bedroom, and I arranged her so that she was facing the crowd. I knew this was something I had to do, but I didn’t feel right about it. I mean, it didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. She’d been stripping long before I stumbled into that club, and she’d been subjected to far more degrading things. I’d subjected her to them myself. What did one more indignity matter to an animated corpse running on some kind of weird biological batteries? But I knew that she wasn’t as oblivious as we’d always thought they were. I knew that it would be an indignity, that whatever Maisie was now, I thought she deserved to end this miserable existence with whatever measure of respect I could provide.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t provide any. I needed her destroyed, and I didn’t have the guts to do it myself. I knew that much. I needed these guys to do my dirty work, and I would give them whatever they wanted, let them take their pleasure with her any way they chose, if only they would get rid of her for me. Anyhow, I knew that Maisie had some kind of will of her own. She could refuse if she wanted to.
I wished she would. It would make me feel better, and it would demonstrate to the others why she needed to be destroyed.
Charlie stepped forward with the hatchet, and though I meant to turn away, I could not resist taking one last look at Maisie as she stood naked in the night air. She looked in my direction, but her glassy eyes did not meet mine; they aimed themselves instead at nothingness.
In that moment, I felt justified. It really just was some sort of misfiring biological machine. This wasn’t murder. It wasn’t anything like it. It was a mercy, really.
Then Charlie handed me the ax. “You first,” he said.
I shook my head.
He thrust the ax forward again. “No way, bucko. You have to get this party started.”
Well,
fuck,
I thought. I was just standing on ceremony now. I’d already killed her once. There was no point in being squeamish. I told her to hold out her arm, and she did. She didn’t look at me, and there was no expression on her face.
Maybe she wants this,
I thought.
Maybe she doesn’t want to be a reanimate anymore. I sucked in my breath, and I tried to think about nothing as I swung the ax.
It was like slicing butter. The arm came right off. It was so easy. I probably would have gone for the other arm, but Maisie started screaming, and that distracted me. It wasn’t like a normal scream, like a human scream. She opened her mouth wide, impossibly wide, like a snake unhinging its jaws to swallow a rat. Her eyes went wide and wild. There was a pause, only a beat, but it felt long and unnatural, and then she began to let out a long, loud, unnatural scream, not of pain, but of anguish, unimaginable anguish.
With Johnny Boy, the guests had loved the shrieking, but there was something different here, something conscious, and we all knew it. Everyone remained still in a moment of stunned confusion, and then, snapping out of his daze, Charlie took the ax from my hands.
He swung with a kind of madness, as though he recognized that Maisie was not a plaything but an abomination, something that had to be destroyed before he was forced to consider what she was, what she meant by her mere existence.
The second arm came off. She had not raised it, and Charlie swung at it as it hung by her side, slicing through just above the elbow and slashing deep into her body.
Maisie screamed again, and Charlie this time swung at her leg. It was a clean cut, and her torso tumbled to the ground, twisting and turning spraying blood in a sickening, black ooze. Still she screamed.
She would not stop screaming.
It was my mess, but I could not bear it any longer. I ran to my car, and I drove home and came crashing through the door like a man possessed. I found my bottle of Old Charter and filled half a water glass and drank it down. Only when I was done gagging on its burn did I realize Tori was awake and on the couch. She’d barely noticed my commotion. She was sitting in front of the TV, and she was talking to me.
“I can’t believe how sick some people are,” she was saying. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
And there it was on the TV. The local news anchor was talking, and the words
Reporting Live
flashed over and over again. I saw Charlie’s house in the distance behind the reporter, who spoke about shocking scenes of carnage, a twisted sex cult devoted to the rape and mutilation of reanimates. He could barely restrain his disgust as he spoke. In the picture I could see police cars, their lights flashing, and a figure too dim and distant to recognize being pushed into the back.
Would they mention me to the police? I had no idea. I didn’t know these guys, not really. They were well and truly fucked, and so maybe they didn’t have any reason to betray anyone else. Charlie owned the house, and he would seem like the big fish to the cops. Maybe they wouldn’t ask too many questions.
I looked at Tori, so disgusted by the scene before her. She glanced at me, and as saddened as she was by this spectacle of human depravity, something passed between us, some sort of unspoken code, communicated only with our eyes. It said that we were a team, we were alike. People like this were practically of a different species, and they had nothing to do with us.
Maybe I should have confessed everything then. Maybe I should have come clean. I was never one of those guys. Not really. I was drawn in by circumstance. A terrible accident, a split-second decision to do the wrong thing, and then the terrible fallout. But I wasn’t one of those monsters. I didn’t
like
mutilating or having sex with reanimates. I thought it was sick, beyond sick. So maybe Tori would understand if I controlled the story.
I said nothing, though, because I held on to the belief that there would be no story to control. Maybe the guys at the party would keep their mouths shut and this horrible chapter of my life would finally be closed. In fact, maybe this was the best thing that could happen. Maisie was gone, and the people who knew about me and Maisie were gone. It was perfect.
I went to bed with Tori, and enflamed by this mutual bond of righteousness, she made it clear she wanted to make love. I felt too disgusting to violate her pregnant body. I felt like a polluter. Afterward, however, I was glad we’d done it. One last, sweet memory to hang on to.
The next day when the phone rang, I was sure it was my doom calling. It was, but doom rarely takes the shape we most fear.
“Mr. Molson,” said a voice on the other end in tones of practiced official blandness. “This is Detective Mike Gutierrez. I need you to come speak to us, today if you can.”
My heart pounded so hard I feared it would burst, but my brain was racing. If they wanted to arrest me, they would not call. Maybe I was safe.
“Regarding what?” I asked.
“Well, it’s an unusual matter. I suppose you saw on the TV about the raid on the reanimate mutilators last night?”
“I saw something about that, yes,” I said.
“Well, in addition to the arrests, we confiscated the, urn, remains of one of their, well, victims, I suppose. Thing was all hacked to bits, but the torso and head were still there. And the thing is, the head is still talking. You see, the damn thing is still alive—or animated or whatever—and it’s mentioning a name. Mr. Molson, it’s mentioning your name, and you are the only person with that name in this city.”
I tried to sound casual. “How odd. What is it saying?”
“I think it’s best to discuss that in person. Can you come in today at, say, noon?”
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.