The New Dead Read Online Free Page B

if my numbers slackened, but he stayed off my case if I hit my targets. Mostly I hit my targets, and that was all right. The job paid the bills, so we could get good credit and, consequently, live way beyond our means, just like everyone else. We’d bought a house we could hardly afford, and we had two SUVs that together retailed for about half as much as the house. We usually paid our monthly balance on our credit cards, and if we didn’t, we got to it soon enough.
     
    It all changed on a Saturday night. It was the random bullshit of the universe. One of the guys at my office, Joe, was having a bachelor party. He was one of those guys I couldn’t stand: he had belonged to a fraternity, called everyone ‘dude’, lived for football season and to tell dirty jokes. I don’t think he really wanted me there or at his party, but he’d ended up inviting me, and I’d ended up going. Frankly, I had no desire to drop a bunch of money to get him drunk, but it would have been bad office politics to say no.
     
    It started out in a bar and inevitably moved on to a strip club. We went through the obligatory bullshit of lap dances and stuffing G-strings with bills and drinking too many expensive drinks. I guess it was an okay time, but nothing I couldn’t have done without. Hanging out with Joe and his knuckleheaded friends at a strip club or spending an evening in front of the TV with Tori - I’d have taken the night at home in a heartbeat.
     
    Ryan was one of the guys there. I’d never met him before, and I couldn’t imagine I would want to meet him again. He was tall and wore his blondish hair a little too long - to look rakishly long, I guess - and had the body of a guy who spends too much time in the gym. He’d grown up with Joe, and the two of them were pretty tight. He was the one that suggested we go to the Pine Box. He said he knew a place that was just insane . We wouldn’t believe how insane it was. We had to check out this insanity.
     
    It was a bachelor party, so we were drunk and tired and disoriented from an hour and a half in close proximity to tits. We were all, in other words, out of our right minds, and no one had the will to resist. We drunkenly piled into our car and followed Ryan to his insane place about three amazingly cop-less miles away.
     
    The Pine Box had no markings outside to indicate it was anything, let alone a club. It looked like a warehouse. We parked in the strip-mall parking lot across the street - Ryan said we had to - and then crossed over to the unlit building. Ryan knocked on the door, and when it opened, he spoke in quiet tones to the bouncer. Then we were in.
     
    None of us knew what we were getting into, and in all likelihood, none of us would have agreed if we had, but we were now fired by the spirit of adventure, and so we went into the ware house, which had been turned into a makeshift club. There were flashing red lights and pounding electronic music and the smell of beer in plastic cups. Tables had been set up all around a trio of ugly, slapped-together stages, and atop them danced strippers. Reanimate strippers.
     
    ‘Dude, no way!’ Joe cried drunkenly but not without pleasure. ‘This shit is sick.’ Even while he complained, he forced his way deeper into the crowd. Had anyone else spoken first, had anyone objected, we might have all left. But Joe was in, and so we all were. He found a large table and sat himself down and called over to a waitress. You could tell he was loving it - the pulsing music, the lights, the smell of beer spilled on the concrete floor.
     
    The waitress, I saw after a few seconds, was a reanimate - not as pretty as the strippers but wearing a skimpy cocktail dress and no mask. Somehow I hadn’t noticed that the strippers weren’t wearing masks, because they were wearing nothing, but this waitress, with its brittle blonde hair and dead, puffy face exposed, seemed to me inexpressibly grotesque. It had not been terribly old when it died, but