“Piss off, Succubus,” Mickey said sharply. Too bad he didn’t try a little harder. She stopped the kissing and groping to glare at him. Mickey, being Mickey, backed up and stumbled over his chair to get the hell away from her.
She smiled at me. “Your place or mine?”
Six - Pete
So aye, there’s probably more than a few components I could place blame on for my current situation. I could what-if myself to death if I wasn’t already a corpse. It didn’t change anything. I was still dead; worse than that I was an Animate. My employment opportunities had somewhat narrowed, and I still had rent to pay. Still, things could have been worse…
And I just had to open my big stupid mouth, didn’t I? Angie was waiting on my doorstep in the underwear she died in. I wondered how quickly I could back away and found out the answer was not quickly enough.
“There you are,” she accused, that icy stare somehow colder coming from a ghost than it had seemed just hours before. She was faintly glowing a blue-green colour and entirely see-through, yet her image was vivid enough that I could make out the tiny freckles on her folded arms.
“Would you piss off, already?” I couldn’t believe she was still hanging about like a nasty smell. Actually, I could. She’d always been a bunny-boiler. I should have tried harder to evade her mentally unhinged charms. “How long ago did I tell you to leave?”
“That isn’t funny, Petie.”
Christ, she’d broken out a cutesy term of endearment just to chew me out. I vaguely remembered her doing the same thing the night before in a slightly more disturbing context. It had me forcing down a shiver. She was in my way and I really didn’t fancy walking through her. My day really wasn’t showing any signs of improvement.
“Get out of my way.” I made it a direct order. I felt the order work a moment before she was blown out of the way by a gust of blue light. I smiled. The educational reading material I’d gotten from the cops had been helpful after all. I’d gotten through chapter two while I was waiting to be seen by the therapist. I could see spirits now apparently, and I could command them which was actually kind of awesome. I took the paperback-sized ‘Animate Manual’ out of my back pocket along with my keys.
“What the hell?” She was spitting mad at the brush off.
I gave her a nasty smile. “Get out of here.”
She disappeared like magic. Well, not entirely like magic. I’d expected a puff of smoke or a snap of lightning or something. She just faded away in a flash of blue light, her mouth dropping open. She was gone before she could make any more complaints. If only I’d been able to make her vanish that easily before.
I went into the hovel I call home and closed the door. The kitchen lights snapped on.
“Pete?”
“I’m back,” I confirmed. I pushed the bathroom door open. The disgusting mess Angie had made was probably going to be easier to get off the tiles than the mess she’d made in the kitchen. Sighing, I rolled my sleeves up, realised I was still wearing shitty temporary clothing over bloody underwear, and cursed under my breath. I changed quickly into fresh boxers, jeans and a t-shirt before I went to see Dave. He managed to wait patiently for a nice change. As soon as I opened the kitchen door he was demanding to know what had happened.
“You’re not dead then? Because it seemed like you should be but then when you started talking again I didn’t know what was going on and then you were gone…”
I knew he’d didn’t actually need to take a breath, but I really wished he would sometimes. “I’m an Animate.”
It just felt wrong saying it. Dave didn’t speak. Apparently, I’d shocked him into silence. It wasn’t something that happened very often. I stepped over the dried in blood, binned the clothes I’d been wearing earlier and went for the cupboard under the sink. The cleaning supplies didn’t get touched all that much, but miraculously enough they were still there.
“Go to the fridge,” Dave said, once I was on my hands and knees scrubbing at the remnants of my human existence. The fridge was a reflective surface. He wanted to ‘see’ for himself what I’d become.
I frowned at the chipped veneer under the dried in blood on the floor. “Why would I lie about that shit?”
“I’ve never seen one up close.” It wasn’t disbelief then but morbid curiosity.
I wasn’t sure which was worse. I kept scrubbing. “I’m busy right now, Dave. There’s a ton of blood in the bathroom once I’ve got this floor cleaned up.”
“The bathroom?”
“Angie killed herself after she finished with me.” I wasn’t going to question why or assume she’d felt any kind of remorse over what she’d done. There was no real puzzling out the reasons behind whatever crazy bitches like her chose to do, it was utterly pointless.
He gasped. Had he still been alive, he’d have slumped into a chair and stared dejectedly at the ground. There may even have been a tear or two. But this was Dave now and body-less Dave expressed himself a little differently. The tuning nobs went nuts, the radio stations flickering like mad. Eventually Sinead O’Conor was blasting out from the speaker, singing hauntingly about lost love. I had half a mind to go over there and yank the cord out the wall. But he’d just find another way to be annoying, and I’d end up with something worse than Irish songbirds pecking at my head.
“Turn that shit off, it’s not appropriate.”
He turned it off after another few seconds. “It was the best I could find. What’s the eta on my Jukebox?”
He’d been begging for one of those for the past year. I’d found out how much they cost and tried to save, but to be perfectly honest it was pretty low down on my list of priorities and the current downward spiral of events was going to push it even lower.
“How ‘bout a CD player?” I could get one of those without breaking any banks. He sighed, long and stretched out beyond anything a living breathing human could manage.
“Don’t bother.” Great, now he was in a huff he might leave me alone.
Angie had chipped the cheap crappy flooring to hell with that knife. I remembered rolling out of her way at least one of the times she’d tried to bury it in my chest. Looking back now, that seemed like a mistake. I would just need to add it to my mile-long list. Pete MacDonald’s list of life mistakes; maybe one day he’ll figure out the mistake that lead to his untimely death.
“So when do you get drafted?” Dave changed the subject to something that took the gloom out of his voice.
I felt every hair on my body stand on end. “That’s not happening.”
“But that’s why Users make Animates.”
“It’s not the only reason,” I snapped. The scary part was I had no idea why I’d been raised or who’d done it. The draft was a highly likely reason. I started to think about running. I didn’t know where I’d go, but if the draft was the alternative, I was getting the hell out of town, and fast.
“Ooh, do you think the King will come round personally?”
I’d forgotten about Dave’s man-crush on our monarch. He’d been named after the guy, after all. The weird fixation on him just seemed to run in Dave’s family.
“Don’t be stupid.” Whatever I’d thought the point was of cleaning up the flat seemed to have lost its relevance. I couldn’t handle being forced into the Royal Guard. Those men were brain dead robots blindly following orders from the highest level User in the freaking country. Once they were in the Guard there was no escape. The King was too strong to fight.
“You might get to kill things!”
“If you don’t shut up, I’m yanking your cord.”
He muttered something to himself first, but he stopped talking. I was almost done with the kitchen floor when the radio started playing the death march on low. Dave had a point. I was most likely being drafted. It wasn’t fair. A day ago I was just another twenty-three-year-old living in the city, working a menial job to pay the rent and go out at the weekends. Now I was dead and worse, unclaimed. I put the cleaning supplies in the bathroom an
d closed the door over on them. That could wait. I got out my handbook and opened it. It was about time I got to checking for loopholes.
Seven - Pete
When the banging came, I sat up straight on the couch thinking two things; one, holy crap Animates can sleep and two, holy crap they’ve found me. It was dark and the book in my lap had barely been leafed through. Reading’s never been a strong suit and the jargon it contained after the basic information in the initial chapters made my brain switch off the same way reading Shakespeare in school had. Teachers don’t like students who fall asleep in class, so I blamed my mediocre grades on their personal hatred for me.
If I could have come out in a cold sweat I knew that was the state I’d be in. As it was, I just froze on the couch, staring into the hall like I could will them away if I just didn’t move a muscle. The banging didn’t stop. Someone was still trying to break my goddamn door down. I got up, leaving the book behind. The windows didn’t open far enough to let me escape that way. I wondered what else I could do.
My feet didn’t seem to be as afraid as the rest of me. They moved towards the front door, making noises the people of the other side of it could surely hear. The banging stopped.
“Pete! Open the fuck up!” Mickey’s voice couldn’t have sounded more pleasant to my un-dead ears.
I sighed and unlocked the door.
He stared at me. It occurred to me he didn’t know I’d died. He frowned. “What is it Halloween?” He got inside and shut the door over, leaning against it and trying to listen.
“What the…”
“Shhh,” he warned, like he hadn’t just been making enough noise to wake the dead two minutes before. His suspicious behaviour made me regret letting him in. Mickey’s phone started ringing in his pocket. He stared down in complete horror.
I shrugged at him. He turned the key in the lock and walked away from the door, getting his phone out and holding it clasped in his hands like a bomb he was scared to drop.
“Eh, what’s going on?”
He shushed me again. His phone stopped ringing, and he switched it off and returned it to his pocket. With a weary sigh, he plonked himself on the couch and turned on my TV remotely.
“Thank Christ.”
“So, what is it?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, flipping channels. Typical. I didn’t bother to sweat it. He moved, picking my manual out from under him. He barely glanced at it before throwing it on the floor. “Since when do you read?” He snorted and kept on channel surfing.
I wondered when it would sink in, but knowing Mickey I figured it would be more fun to wait it out. He finally settled on a TV show about vampires. It was fair to say he was obsessed. His neck wound was fresh, like it always was. He got a fix once a day as far as I could tell. He used to be a raver, taking sweeties and downing shots like there was no tomorrow. These days as long as he got sipped on he didn’t give a crap about drugs or booze.
“So who is she?” The only thing that could make Mickey run for the hills was a woman giving him the eye.
He gave me a shady look. “None of your business.”
We’d all thought he’d outgrow his pathological fear of the opposite sex once he hit puberty. It never happened. He was only a year younger than me and he acted like a five-year-old if a girl made it overly obvious she liked him. ‘They’ve all got scabies,’ he’d said. Might have been funny if he hadn’t repeated that same line to me just last week.
“Dave thinks you’re gay.”
“Aye, well, Fat Dave can get to fuck!” He shouted, loud enough for Dave to hear.
“Hoi! I’m not fat.”
“Fatty fatty two-by-four can’t fit through the kitchen door,” Mickey chanted, lowering the sound on the TV to taunt him.
“Come here and say that to my face, Fudge-packer.” He turned the volume up and blasted Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’ at him. Mickey jumped up and over the couch. He punched the side of the fridge and picked up a knife from the block on the counter. That’s when I found out Angie had used more than one.
“I’m going to gut that radio so you can’t speak to anyone ever a… ew, what the fuck?” He dropped the knife with a disgusted look. The blood had dried in at least. I picked it up and tossed it in the sink. Mickey drew me a suspicious look. “What are you doing all gothed up, anyway? Did Angie do this to you? Are you her bitch now?”
I couldn’t help the smile. Dave switched to another song. ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story.
Mickey narrowed his eyes at the radio. He kept them narrowed when he turned back to me. “Something funny’s going on here.” He went to the fridge and helped himself to a beer. He’d always claimed it helped him think.
I really hoped this wasn’t going to take all night.
“Why couldn’t Skinny Dave be the dead guy in your kitchen?” Mickey complained, pulling a face at the radio. “He was at least mildly amusing.”
“Skinny Dave has Aids!” Dave was still pissed then. I tried not to laugh.
“You just made my point, Fat Dave. You were only funny when you were falling down stairs.”
“Leave him alone.” I couldn’t be bothered with an escalation. Mickey would beat the shit out of my appliances and Dave would taunt him until everything was too busted to use ever again. It had only happened once before and with good reason. “I will literally kill you if you try to hurt Dave.”
“I’ve seen this before,” Mickey said, gesturing to my get up. “You’re not going out the house looking like that. She’s setting you up to get the piss ripped out of you.”
Dave snorted. Mickey glowered at him. I was still waiting for the penny to drop. Mickey moved past me and plonked himself back down on the couch with his beer. “Go and wipe that shit off your face. You look like a twat.”
I picked my book up from off the floor and sat down next to him to try reading it again. He shook his head at me.
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t wash off. She really is an evil bitch. At least take the contact lenses out, they’re giving me the fucking creeps.”
He turned his attention back to his show. I tried to read. It was maybe half an hour later when the TV started to steal my attention away from the boring manual. Mickey got up and stretched. He walked away, I assumed to the kitchen to grab another beer. When he shrieked, I knew differently.
He rushed back through, eyes wide. I’m sure if his dark skin could have paled it would have.
“What the fuck happened in your bathroom?”
Angie had probably tried to spray every surface with her blood; that was what it looked like anyway. He glanced from me to the book in my hand and turned around and puked in my hallway. You really wouldn’t think someone who lets vampires bite him would be so squeamish about blood.
“She killed herself in there, after she killed me.” He wasn’t done emptying his stomach. I tried not to listen to the disturbing noises. “Clean that up when you’re done.”
Eight - Pete
It took my little cousin a while to finish decorating my hallway with the vile, partially digested contents of his stomach. It took him even longer to clean the mess up. As loathe as I was to look, I had to supervise the clean-up to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything nasty that might stink the place up later.
“There, on the wall at the skirting board,” I prompted.
“I see it, I’m not blind. Christ.” He sounded horse. He’d demanded another beer when he was done puking. I’d refused and Dave had asked what the hell that disgusting smell was. He demanded I shut the kitchen door. I took Dave’s side. Even if his sense of smell was psychosomatic I didn’t blame him for imagining how bad it was. It was pretty fucking bad.
“What the hell were you eating today?” I couldn’t help it. There was god only knows what sliding down the wall. He glowered at me and shook his head.
“You’re actually one of them,” he said, shivering violently. “This is too messed up.”
“How the hell do you think I feel?”
/>
“Like a mug for taking Angie home, I should imagine.”
“That’s really helpful, Mick.”
He sat back, looking at the floor. “I think that’s it.”
“You think wrong,” I said, pointing to the wall. He sighed and got wiping. “I should probably tell you this might be the last time you ever see me.”
“It was only puke, Bro. Disowning me for that? It was your fault, Arsehole.”
Mickey could really be exasperating. I’d known this for years and yet it always caught me unawares.
“Why do Users make Animates?” I wasn’t so sure he’d know. He tended not to pay a whole hell of a lot of attention to anything that didn’t directly affect him.
He frowned, tossing the wet rag into the bucket-o-sick. “Why do…”
There may as well have been a light-bulb over his head when he locked his eyes on mine. His slack jaw might have been comical under less depressing circumstances.
I gave him my plan as concisely as I could. “I think I’m going to run.”
“Shit.” He got up, stretching a little and cringing. “You do know that never works.”
Of course, I did. Anyone who’d ever seen the news knew that. “I’m not joining the Guard.”
“Do you really have a choice?”
“Until a User shows up to claim me, I’m thinking I do.” I could only hope I’d find something in the handbook to back that up. So far all I knew was I couldn’t legally work until my User showed up to sign an employment contract for me. I was basically a slave for hire. I folded my arms.
“So where are you going to run to?” He pushed open the kitchen door, probably thinking about that second beer again.
“I don’t know yet.” I might have been able to get across the border into England, but that was a suicide mission if I’d ever heard one. Even if I made it past all the security, there was the unknown country to navigate. I hadn’t heard anything nice about how the English treated Scotsmen, never mind dead ones.
Dead Man Running (Raised Book 1) Page 3