Page 48 of How (Not) To Raise The Dead

“Look at this,” I demand, pointing at the shoddy skeleton. “Do you see this, Eden?”

She peeks out from behind my shoulder, flinching as a hidden speaker pumps out the sound of a chainsaw revving. “See what? The gory dead body?”

“The anatomical impossibility,” I correct, appalled, tapping the white plastic hard enough to make it swing. “That is a femur. The thigh bone. Yet, somehow, the geniuses running this establishment have decided to attach it directly to a clavicle.”

Her grip on my arm loosens just a fraction. “A… what?”

“A collarbone. They have connected a leg directly to a shoulder. Where is the ribcage? Where is the pelvic girdle? Who designed this?” I demand, my voice dripping with disdain. “I’ve seen more coherent skeletal structures in a bucket of butcher’s scraps.”

Beside me, a strange, wet sound bubbles up. I look down, expecting a sob or a gasp of terror. But instead, Eden has a hand pressed over her mouth, her shoulders shaking as a tiny, breathless giggle slips through her fingers. “A bucket of scraps?”

“It isn't funny,” I say, genuinely affronted on behalf of the dead. “It’s sloppy craftsmanship. It is an insult to anatomy.”

She stifles another laugh, a ragged sound that catches in her throat, and then—without warning—a soft, warm weight bleeds into my side.

Electricity surges through my body as she willingly presses her fragile, mortal softness against the rigid line of my body, effectively treating me like a her own personal furnace.

I’m overcome with the urge to bury my face in her hair to soak up that delicious scent of peaches and skin. It would be so easy. I could slide my hand from her shoulder to her throat, feel the frantic flutter of her pulse under my thumb...

“You’re ruining the scary vibe, you know,” she murmurs against my arm, though she doesn’t sound upset about it. In fact, she sounds relieved.

“I am improving the educational standards,” I counter, dropping my arm so it rests heavily across her shoulders, pulling her flush against me until there isn’t a molecule of air between us. “If you’re going to be traumatized, it should at least be anatomically correct. Come along.”

We step through a curtain of dry ice, and are immediately enveloped in a cacophony of recorded wails, grinding metal, and the guttural roar of engines blasting from hidden speakers. Eden stumbles immediately, her equilibrium shattered by the flashing lights.

“Finally,” I shout over the roar of a simulated amputation. “A bit of atmosphere! It’s just like the Slag Heaps on a Friday!”

Eden’s response is completely swallowed by the chaos, her eyes squeezed shut, her other hand flailing blindly for purchase. I slide my hand from her shoulder, down her arm and capture her fingers, interlacing them with my own.

“Walk, Eden,” I command. “I have you. Do not let go, unless you wish to become part of the décor.”

She clings to me like a barnacle on a hull as I tow her forward through the soup, just as a wall of vinyl strips explodes outward, vomiting a herd of young mortals directly into our path in a tsunami of cheap body spray.

“Move!” one of them screams, slamming his shoulder into my chest.

“Watch your step, you little flesh-bag,” I snarl, attempting to shove the boy aside while keeping my hand held firmly in Eden’s.

“Malachi!” she yelps, her voice thin with panic as the tide of filth surges between us.

Her clammy fingers slip from my grip like wet silk and I lunge, my fingertips barely grazing the pulse point of her wrist, but I’m shoved violently into a dark alcove on the left, and she’s swept into a corridor on the right. Before I can grab her back, a heavy, spring-loaded prop door—triggered by the stampede—slams down between us like a guillotine.

The wood groans as I slam my fist against it, vibrating with the force of the blow, but the fucking thing holds.

I press my face against the slats, but I can't hear her. The deafening, manufactured thunder of industrial bass and screaming animatronics swallows everything whole. Not a gasp. Not a cry. Just absolute, suffocating sensory cutoff. She’s moving. Or being moved. The current of the crowd is carrying her away into the dark, severing the distance between us in a matter of seconds.

A cold vacuum tears open behind my ribs, sucking the oxygen from my lungs. The strobe-lit room fractures into shards of static and red. I can’t smell her anymore, only the reek of unwashed bodies and cheap fog, and the agonizing void where she’s supposed to be.

I need to be in her space. I need to breathe her air. I need her.

“Eden, stay still,” I snarl, though it comes out as a wet, choked rasp that doesn't even reach my own ears. I’m doubled over, one hand clutching the wall, the other clawing at my throat as if I can dig the suffocation out of my trachea.

Through the haze of my own unraveling, a new, deafening noise erupts. A figure wearing a mask of stitched-together skin lumbers toward me. He’s wielding a chainsaw, the motor screaming in a blur of manufactured menace, entirely drowning out any hope I had of hearing her voice. He lets out a rehearsed, guttural caterwaul, the light of his buzzing toy glinting in wide, vacuous eyes.

“Rev that thing at me one more time, I will feed you your own gallbladder,” I growl, shoving him backward so hard his boots leave the floor.

The world is spinning. The dark is closing in. And if I don't get back to her within the next thirty seconds, I’m going to paint this room with the remains of my dignity.

The cheap strobe lights are a technological migraine, pulsing against my retinas like a shuttering sun. Every flash reveals a new piece of pathetic plastic horror—a rubber bat, a neon-painted skeleton, a portrait of a weeping woman. I smash through a fake coffin, splintering the fiberglass under my shoulder as I blindly tear into the next room.