The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Read Free Page B

beer in the medicine cabinet.
     
    Maisie walked off to the kitchen. I followed but only for something to do. I was always bored and uneasy when I came to the apartment. I felt strange, like I was play-acting for some invisible audience, like I was a grown-up furtively trying to recapture the magic of childhood toys. Nothing I said to her or did with her felt natural. Christ, I could talk to a dog and feel less like I was talking to myself. That’s why I kept the visits so short. I would drink the beer, order her to do some light cleaning, and then get out of there.
     
    I was thinking about how much I wanted to leave, how much I wanted to get back to my wife, when I walked into the kitchen and saw the fresh-cut flowers on the kitchen table. They were a gaudy assortment of cheap dyed daisies, but they were bright and fresh, very new. They’d been arranged carelessly, and water from the vase puddled on the table. Here’s the thing: I had not put the flowers there.
     
    No one else had a key - no one other than the apartment-complex manager or the super. Neither of them had any business in my apartment, and if they did have something important to do, they would have called first. (They had my cell-phone number, since I sure as hell didn’t want my wife to know I had an apartment, let alone an apartment where I kept my black- market reanimate.) Even if they had not called first, neither the manager nor the super was about to leave a vase filled with flowers on my kitchen table.
     
    Maisie was now closing the refrigerator and handing me a beer. She did not open the bottle, because I had not asked her to open it. That was how they worked. They did not do anything you did not ask them to do. So where had these flowers come from?
     
    I twisted the cap off the beer and looked at Maisie, who, in the absence of orders, remained perfectly still. ‘Maisie, where did these flowers come from?’
     
    She stared at me. It was a difficult question for a reanimate, I realized, even as I spoke it. Too abstract. I tried again.
     
    ‘Maisie, did you put the flowers there?’
     
    It was a yes-or- no question, and she should have been able to answer it, but she said nothing.
     
    ‘Maisie, answer the question. Did you put those flowers there?’
     
    Again, silence. Dark, looming, unblinking silence. It was like demanding answers from a stuffed animal. No; our genetic, animistic impulses gave speaking to a stuffed animal a sort of logic. This was like demanding answers from a bowl of rice.
     
    I took a long drink from my beer and sighed. This was serious. More than serious. It wasn’t just that maybe my reanimate, which wasn’t supposed to want anything, somehow wanted flowers. It meant that she had somehow gotten out of the apartment, gone to the store, spent money - money she’d earned from what or stolen from whom? Had she managed to bring it with her from the Pine Box? It meant a whole spiraling vortex of Maisie chaos, and I had to know. I had to.
     
    ‘Maisie,’ I said. ‘Go into the bedroom, remove your clothes, and lie on your back on the bed.’
     
     
    The first thing I need to make clear is that I am not a pervert. I don’t have any desire to have sex with reanimates. Given the choice between sex with a reanimate or sex with a real woman, I’ll take the real woman every time. Hell, given the choice between sex with a reanimate and no sex, I’d go without sex - at least for a good long while. Like S&M or rubber fetishes or whatever, if you’re not into it naturally, it’s hard to fake the enthusiasm. If you meet some amazingly hot woman, and she says, ‘Sure, let’s have sex, only I want to tie you up and stick needles in your dick,’ you’re probably going to, with however much regret, take a rain check. Unless you like that sort of thing. Plenty of guys like sex with reanimates. They prefer them to real women. It floats their boat. It does not float mine.
     
    That said, I should point out that in most ways