Dead Man Running (Raised Book 1)

by Stevenson, Sharon

  “I’m what?” No, no that’s not what this is! I rubbed at my arms. The paint still wasn’t shifting. It hit me like a truckload of bricks. The cop on reception had been talking about dead guys! Derry’s cursing when she’d gotten out the car; I hadn’t been mishearing things. No. I shook my head. This just could not be happening.

  “Denial’s healthy,” he said, writing something down.

  “Oh, it is, is it? That makes me feel so much better.” I shuddered. It made sense but I didn’t want it to. My complete obedience to the female cop suddenly had an answer, as did the weird glow of her fingers before she’d started ordering me around. She’d been summoning magic. She was one of them, a User. I shuddered at the realisation. It was true then. I really was dead.

  “Can you tell me how you died?” The Re-Integration Officer was staring at me expectantly.

  “I don’t remember anything,” I told him, folding my arms.

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. He put the clipboard down. “You’re in shock. It’s not usual but it happens. Murder, then?”

  Dave told me Angie had stabbed me. Had she actually killed me? Waking up in the pool of sticky, drying blood would seem to suggest so. I glanced down and pulled at my t-shirt. How the hell didn’t I see that before? There were holes, lots of them.

  “I see,” the man said. “Just a moment.”

  He moved to the other side of his desk and picked up his phone.

  “I think… I signed a clause,” I said, thinking out loud. Reanimation was one of my worst nightmares. It was just as well my heart had stopped beating otherwise my t-shirt would only have suffered another hole when it pounded right out of my chest. I touched that still area and feverishly wished for a single thump that would deny everything I’d just been told. My body wasn’t hearing my silent hopes. I was sure I’d filled out one of those official ‘Do Not Reanimate’ forms to prevent the possibility of this ever happening.

  The guy shook his head at me, his mouth in a straight line as he covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “It’s the first thing we check.”

  He moved his hand and turned his attention to his phone call. Someone with a high-pitched voice had just answered, and I could make out every word the woman was saying. “Yes, I need Janice.”

  “She just got out her meeting. Will I send her along now?”

  He smiled brightly and nodded. “Oh good, please do.” He hung up and smiled at me. “Let’s see if we can get those memories back, shall we?”

  “Can I have a donut?”

  “One problem at a time.”

  Janice was a Healer, apparently. They worked with the same source of magic as Users, but that was about all I knew about them. She put her strangely glowing hands on my head and the mind-melting memory pushed through my brain, making me shudder uncontrollably with every recalled slash and tear.

  Angie came at me, fire in her eyes. She had the knife in her hand before I knew what was happening. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t be doing this.

  “What the…”

  The knife pushed into my stomach. She thrust it so hard the first thing I felt was the hilt thumping against my skin. Pain seared, white hot and ragged. She hauled the knife back out, pushing me back against the wall to free it. My hand dropped to the wound. It felt like she’d just ripped my guts out. Blood spewed through my fingers. I stared at her as her painted lips curled into a satisfied smile. Her eyes sparkled. I coughed up blood into my other hand.

  She came at me again, attacking in a rabid frenzy. I started screaming, and I couldn’t make myself stop. I punched and pushed at her, but she had seemingly acquired the inhuman strength of a horror movie psychopath. She roared as she knocked me onto the floor, burying the blade deep with every slash.

  I screamed. Dave screamed. The racket should have drowned out Angie’s demented laughter but it sounded sharp enough to my own ears. When she stopped and got off, my head was swimming. The room was darkening. The agonising pain was starting to fade. Somewhere far away Dave was sobbing. I closed my eyes.

  I should have known a woman would be the death of me.

  The restored memory felt strange. When Janice took her hands off my head, the little guy behind the desk handed me the clipboard. “Fill this out.”

  “She actually killed me.” I had to say it out loud to make it sink in.

  “I’m sure it was traumatic. Don’t forget to note an approximate time of death.”

  “I can leave after this?”

  “You can go to your appointed Adjustment Therapist. Straight across the street.”

  “Fantastic.” I wondered if I’d have time to nip in to the donut shop and then I looked at my lack of clothing and sighed heavily at myself. Even if I’d had my wallet there were probably health regulations to keep the dead from darkening their storefront.

  “Take this.” I was passed a small paperback. It was the ‘Animate Manual’; dos, don’ts and every piece of jargon-infused nonsense in between. I yawned just looking at it. Books tended to have that effect on me. “You have to read the first chapter before you can leave.”

  “Am I allowed to walk around in public like this?”

  He smiled. “We have temporary clothing in the lockers over there.”

  “Temporary? Great.” It would be the shittiest material known to man then; uncomfortable, poorly fitting and just a little bit less abrasive than sandpaper. I’d rather cut about in my underwear, but I got the feeling that wasn’t going to be an option.

  Three – Pete

  My Adjustment Therapist was an overweight Vampire. I got the feeling she’d be even less sympathetic than the stupid Re-Integration Officer, who’d taken a donut out of his desk and started eating it without even a hint of apology while I was hauling the appallingly itchy sweater and trousers on over my blood-stained clothes.

  “Peter MacDonald. Age twenty-three, marketing consultant… excuse me, unemployed… Ah, yes, and single, no dependants.”

  “Hold up, what do you mean I’m unemployed?”

  “Tyler and Co. have a reanimation clause built into their contracts. It results in instant termination on death. They don’t hire Animates, either.” She smiled pleasantly.

  “Fuck.” How the hell was I going to pay my rent?

  “Not to worry. I’m sure your User will be able to instruct you on your employment options once he claims you.” Her smug, self-satisfied smile made me desperate to leap out of my chair and strangle the living hell out of her practically non-existent neck.

  I narrowed my eyes, and she closed my file. She put it down on the coffee table next to her and picked up a notepad and pen. She took her sweet time flipping the book open and positioning her pen over the blank page.

  “You were murdered and reanimated. How does that make you feel?”

  Jam-packed full of steadily building rage, but I wasn’t telling smug-face that. It was a total joke. ‘How does that make you feel?’ It was the stupidest question I’d ever been asked in my… well, my existence, I suppose. I folded my arms tightly. “Which part? The being stabbed to death or the waking back up like… this?” My skin retained the weird bluish-grey colour, and I’d noticed from my reflection in the donut shop window my irises had darkened to a deep inky blue that was almost black.

  I drew the bitch daggers, but she wasn’t the slightest bit impressed and as I stared the hideous bright orange mound of fake hair on her thick head moved. She shoved the pen further under the wig. It made a bizarre scratching sound against her scalp, and I fought back a shudder. I was seriously beginning to regret calling the police. I mean, really. I should have known something wasn’t right; I should have noticed my heart wasn’t beating a hell of a lot sooner than I had, for one thing. The weird colour of my skin should have tipped me off, if the bloody puddle I’d woken up in hadn’t. I’d missed too many clues, stepping over them in my panic.

  I knew the therapy was compulsory, so I’d just have to suck it up. Keeping my arms folded, I steadfastly refused to sink back into the big
plush seat. I’d sit there and take her bull, but I wasn’t going to find a single thing to enjoy about it.

  The vampire is roughly the size of the armchair she’s somehow managed to squish her body into. She’s a typical specimen of her species. It’s been more than sixty years since they crashed their ship here on earth. Their blending in tactic had required picking up human eating habits, and apparently sugar was vastly superior in taste to the blood they required for sustenance because every last one of them was morbidly obese. They’re not allowed to work with live humans, for obvious reasons, so it’s only Animate suckers like me who get to put up with them.

  “Let’s start with the being killed.” Her eyes flashed orange for a half-second and that gruesome and horrifying sight reminded me of the candles being lit on a grinning jack-o-lantern, if said jack-o-lantern was salivating. A real live human would have missed it. Too bad that wasn’t me anymore. According to chapter three of the manual, this would be one of those ‘adjustments’ she was supposed to be helping me make.

  “It stung a bit,” I deadpanned.

  “Uh huh,” she muttered, taking notes I seriously suspected were actually a shopping list. I could just about make out the word ‘pants’. I really hoped it was a shopping list.

  “Okay, it stung a lot. Whatever. I’m over it.” Like anyone gets over being brutally murdered by a one night stand. Talk about morning-after regrets.

  “How do you feel about your current status?” She wasn’t quite as titillated by my reanimation as she had been by my death. Too bad, she wasn’t getting her flabby hands on my gory details. Her face stayed neutral, with no demonic eye-flash to signal desire. In fact, she looked bored. I tried not to smirk too hard. I went over the first chapter of the manual I’d been forced to choke down before I left the Re-Integration Officer’s room.

  “Let’s see. I can’t eat, I can’t drink, I can’t have sex,”—the eye-flash gave me the shivers this time— “I’m now unemployed. The crazy bitch who killed me slashed her wrists in my bathroom after covering my kitchen in my blood. My cousin insists on coming around and pissing off my room-mate, but he’s too busy having the blood sucked out of his body to spend any actual time with me anymore. I think that’s it for now.”

  “Your cousin?” Her eyes had lit up and stayed that way. Fatty wasn’t catching her own dinner anytime soon. I probably shouldn’t dangled Mickey in front of her greedy eyes, but she probably shouldn’t be salivating at the thought of a potential snack while she was supposed to be helping me re-integrate myself into society or whatever the hell she was actually supposed to be doing to help me.

  “This is about me,” I reminded her. “I’m not giving you his name.”

  “Of course not,” she scoffed, writing other things down. I couldn’t see this time. She’d purposefully coved it with her meaty fist. “Well then, that’ll be all. For now.”

  A relieved glance at the clock told me our twenty-minute allocation was up. I couldn’t really say it had been painful, not after the whole being murdered thing. I got up quickly. She didn’t move a muscle. Her ass was probably too busy eating the chair.

  “See you next week, Peter.”

  “Not if I see you first.” The mumble was likely picked up by her bat-like ears and so what if it was? It wasn’t like she could actually chase me. So, that was that. I got to go back to my dingy, poorly converted tenement flat and clean the soaked-in blood off the floors. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the question of my reanimation and what it means.

  See, that’s the thing. Corpses don’t just get up and walk around without a little help. A magic User had to cast a reanimation spell. Those spells don’t come cheap or easy. They just don’t get done without a reason. So, that’s my predicament.

  Who would have wanted to raise me from the dead, and why?

  Four - Pete

  I could say it started at six o’clock the same morning when I’d woken up with a splitting headache and a handful of best forgotten memories of the night before. Angie from the bar had finally worn me down. I groaned, realised she wasn’t in the bed and groaned some more. Her trashy clothes were still messing up the floor, so I knew she hadn’t gone far. I could only hope she wasn’t busy clogging the toilet up with puke. As it happened, she wasn’t.

  She’d found my no-longer-living room-mate Dave and she was having an overly animated conversation with him, which told me she was most likely still drunk; great news for my headache. I contemplated hiding back under the covers and hibernating until she left. It was a dickless wonder thing to do, but it mostly worked. Angie wasn’t most girls, though. For her there was no such thing as a walk of shame. She’d probably pick up another guy on the walk home in her Friday night dress and slept in make-up, without so much as a shower to remove my sweat from her skin.

  It took me a good twenty minutes to get up the balls to haul myself out of bed and creep into the hall. She laughed at something no doubt asinine Dave was saying. ‘She’s like Tequila,’ Mickey liked to say, ‘Everybody’s had a shot, or four.’

  I hauled on a t-shirt and walked to the kitchen doorway. She was standing in her pants and bra drinking a cup of coffee. I could smell it from across the room.

  “Thought you’d be gone,” I said casually.

  Her smile died and her dark eyes turned frosty. My usual reaction to her shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. It was last night she should have known was messed up. I never would have gone there if I hadn’t been blackout drunk.

  “I’m talking to Dave,” she told me icily. “Now that I know where’s he’s been all this time.”

  She petted the radio his voice came from. He giggled girlishly. She smiled fondly at the stupid radio. Looking at her, I couldn’t believe I’d actually stooped this low.

  Don’t get me wrong, she’s pretty (and she damn well knows it) but that’s about all she’s got going for her. She stretched and drew me a look that suddenly and vividly reminded me of something filthy we’d done the night before. I tried not to cringe. I was heading straight for the shower as soon as I hustled her out of my place. “Come on to fuck, I’ve got shit to do.”

  She slammed the half-full mug down on the cheap veneer floor. That’s when it all went wrong. Something snapped in her, she looked at me with venom I hadn’t known she was even capable of.

  “Woah, woah, woah!” Dave’s soothing voice tried to calm her. It was too late, and we all knew it. She had the knife in her hand before I could move. Murder in her eyes, she fell on me. The rest is history. I screamed, Dave screamed, she screamed. It was all a big scream-a-thon with no clear winner. So, maybe I shouldn’t have pissed her off but more than that, I never should have brought the crazy bitch home with me in the first place and I never would have, if only I hadn’t been so hacked off that I had to guzzle down half my own body weight in tequila.

  Five - Pete

  It was that arsey weasel-faced cunt-bag Duncan Johnston. He’d stolen my promotion out from under me. That ugly prat acted like butter wouldn’t melt but really he’d been passing my work off as his own for months, the big reveal coming when Jimmy made the announcement and proceeded to tell everyone why. That dirty little bastard smirked at me. I’d been stupid enough to use him as a go between when I couldn’t be bothered making the trip up to the top floor. He’d doctored the documents to his own signatures. I could have killed him.

  Maybe restraining myself was my one big mistake. I suppose I’ll never know.

  Mickey had agreed to the pub. I’d taken a half day sick and started in on the shots before he’d arrived. Tequila tastes like shit, but it does the job quicker and faster than any other shot I’ve ever downed. Mickey was loopy and wide-eyed from his latest fix when he eventually appeared, the bite so fresh his neck was still dribbling blood.

  I’d already stuffed my tie in my pocket and splashed tequila on my shirt.

  “So what’s up?” He picked up the shot I’d foolishly left unattended for a whole second.

  “That fu
cking prat Johnston, that’s what’s up.”

  “What Donuts?” He put my empty shot glass down with a snort. I pinged him in the arm until he coughed up the cash for a round. It usually took more to get him to haul that hefty wallet out. “He’s a wet sac. What’s he got you so pissed off for?”

  Deflated by this time, I just let out a weary sigh and grabbed up the next shot Kit put down in front of me. She gave me a mildly sympathetic smile, reserving her more salacious glances for my unkempt cousin. “Doesn’t matter anymore, it’s done.” There was bugger all I could do about it. He had the job with the fifty percent pay raise and the big office upstairs, and I had my usual dingy little cubicle next to the men’s bogs and my shitty coffee from the vending machine down the hall. Sometimes life just sucks.

  “Want me to key his car?” It was an idle offer but the best I was getting.

  I just shook my head and tapped my empty glass on the bar. He nodded to his admirer, and she refilled my glass. I had a few in quick succession and then he managed to get the buxom brunette bartender to leave the bottle, and all without uttering a single word. She fancied the pants off him. God only knew why.

  Angie didn’t show up until much later. It wasn’t her style to go out before 10pm. I was already enjoying how easily the room whirled whenever I moved my head and trying to remember the words to stupid terrible chart songs by singing them out loud. Mickey was laughing a lot and riding the fine line between leading Kit on and being a complete arsehole right to her sweet chubby face.

  The tightly wrapped bottled blonde set her sights on me the moment she walked in. My inebriated state made my staring more obvious, I supposed. As much as I detested the woman’s personality, she’d always looked gorgeous. It was a cheap, obvious beauty that she flouted with arrogance. She thought she could have anyone, or anything, she wanted. That much was written all over her face. I’d always kept my own prize out of her sleazy hands.

  She’d sat down and proceeded to physically assault me. The kiss that landed on my lips was enough to make me submit to her will. In my defence, it had been a good few weeks since I’d gotten any.