For Love of the Dead Read online

  For Love of the Dead

  Hal Bodner

  www.wehovampire.com

  For Love of the Dead

  Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Hal Bodner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  ISBN-13: 978-1467936361

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Author’s note

  For Love of the Dead

  All books change as they’re being written—characters lead the author into new places, events conspire to derail and re-rail the plot, themes morph as one explores them. For Love of the Dead is the one book I’ve written that changed the most from inception to finish.

  Originally, it was supposed to be a story about second chances. What would happen, I wondered, if a truly despicable person were brought back from the dead with no memory of what he had done while alive and had to live with the consequences of his former actions? That, as you will see once you’ve delved into this book, was not at all how things turned out! Instead, in an odd way, it became a spiritual sequel to my earlier book, In Flesh and Stone.

  In Flesh and Stone dealt with the various aspects of grief and the process of losing a loved one. For Love of the Dead deals with the aftermath. How does one get past a loss which feels like it has taken half of your heart and three-quarters of your soul along with it, and move on? That is the deeper theme of this book.

  Closer to the surface, I was excited to begin exploring the zombie folklore. Yes, dear reader, For Love of the Dead very well may be the first erotic zombie romance novel. It is certainly the first male/male one.

  When my horror buddies found out I was writing this book, they scoffed. There was no possible way, they assured me, of making decomposing corpses with body parts falling off into anything that remotely resembled erotica—unless the target audience was truly disturbed and got their jollies in some rather sick ways. I sat with several big names in Zombie-ology in Las Vegas not too long ago to debate the point. The nature of my advantage became immediately clear to me.

  Most zombie “literature” is actually in cinema. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and other such films have never held any attraction for me and, thus, I never saw them. To me, the word “zombie” conjures up an entirely different connotation—one which is not only highly erotic but also has thematic ramifications that intrigue me as an author. In my mind’s eye, I don’t picture a zombie as a shambling, decrepit corpse mindlessly seeking out living human brains to devour. No, I see zombies quite differently...

  I see Caribbean islands on hot, sultry nights where the spice from native cooking mingles with the scent of exotic tropical flowering trees. I hear the distant twangy jangle of sticks on tin drums and wild piping on handmade flutes, frenetic and joyous while at the same time alien and vaguely disturbing to the Western ear, backed by the rushing hum of the surf breaking on a vast moonlit beach of virgin sand. I smell the sweat of young, nubile bodies dancing to exhaustion in some primitive ritualistic dance to appease earthy and terrible gods. Through the fronds of palm trees, I catch glimpses of brightly colored skirts of the women and the glint of firelight off the bodies of the young men, dripping with perspiration.

  Yes, it’s a stereotype and very probably not too politically correct. But what a stereotype! Especially when I allow my fantasy to take me further...

  There’s a man—a zombie—not the decomposing corpse we’re all to accustomed to, but rather a tall, beautiful young man with creamy café au lait skin, lithe and hard muscled from days of harvesting banana trees and hauling the heavy stalks to market slung over shoulders rippling with muscle. He’s dead, of course, but he’s been summoned from the grave at the height of his youth and virility. And—now, pay attention—though he may retain some of his living personality depending on what folklore I chose to access, he has... no soul!

  Doesn’t that raise some interesting prospects, hmm?

  On the one hand, without a soul, is he truly human any more? Do the morals and mores which help us to get through our daily “civilized” life apply to him? I could ask a dozen more philosophical and ethical questions but they all end up at the same place. My zombie would be a ravishingly beautiful man and in the absence of his having a soul, I would get to do whatever I wanted with him!

  No convenient headaches to cover the fact that he’s “not in the mood.” No worries about his having to find me attractive. No hesitancy if I decide I want to add a little unusual “spice” to our dalliances. We’re talking sexual nirvana here! (Even better, in the “off” times, I could always instruct him to clean the bathroom or mow the lawn and he would have no choice but to obey without complaint.)

  Of course, then the issue that troubles me rears its ugly head. What does having such a sex slave do to my morality? What dark things would emerge from my psyche were I given absolute power over such a beautiful man? How far would my indulgences take me?

  The flip side is equally fascinating to me. Imagine yourself as the zombie and imagine the same lack of a soul but with a complete retention of your personality. Suddenly, accountability vanishes and you can do...anything you want! I suppose what one chooses to do would depend on one’s strength of character, but in the reflection of such temptation, how far would some of us go when the possibility of suffering consequences for our actions had been removed?

  These are the questions which stirred my interest and I hope I’ve managed to explore some of them in For Love of the Dead, alongside of the less fantastical issues of how one recovers from a great loss.

  Besides the above, this book gave me the opportunity to expand my skills into writing a darker side of sex. Unless we are extraordinarily catholic in our sexual tastes, there are few of us who haven’t dabbled, even if just by way of fantasy, in some aspect of S&M or kink. We may find it exciting, invigorating, delightfully forbidden or ego-bolstering. In the course of writing this book, I’ve also spoken to some members of the local alternative sex communities and find they use words like trust and power exchange and aftercare and, I realize, it’s not all just whips and chains—there’s an emotional component as well.

  So, no, For Love of the Dead did not allow me to explore the darker sides of sex as much as I wanted to. I did, however, discover some things about what I call Dark Seduction, as you’ll soon find out. But as I wrote, I began wondering about other things, things which I will undoubtedly delve into in later books. Why, for example, does a hot guy look even hotter when he’s stretched out shirtless on a bondage rack than he does merely lying in the exact same position, more or less, on a bed unbound? (You don’t believe me? Well, then, if you have even a scintilla of kink in your sexual mentality, I urge you to try it. You’ll discover I’m right!) But these are themes for exploration in later novels. For now, I have this adorable young gymnast bound and gagged naked in my cellar and I really must get back to him!

  Hal Bodner

  October 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  Death is rarely completely silent.

  Even in a mortuary, the dressing room of Death’s mansion, sounds penetrate the thick paneled walls: muffled reminders of the activity of the living going about their business on nearby streets and sidewalks, unconsciously avoiding all thoughts of the polished steel tables with wide drains, the huge freezer, and the jars of acrid-smelling preservatives. Within the room itself, where the messiness of death is cleaned up and prettified, sounds abound.

  The soft hum of computers, the clicks and pops of metal cooling, the whir of Freon coils as they stave off the rank stench of decomposition from d
ecaying bodies so recently vibrant, the mild gurgle from the depths of the drains where water and other less wholesome fluids drained away, a steady slow drip from a sink where the handle had not been twisted quite hard enough—all of this contributes to a quiet background noise which is repressed by the living, ignored and called the Silence of Death.

  At the Gentle Rest Funeral Home, the chamber of the dead contained more subtle sounds as well. Slumped at her desk with her mouth hanging open slightly, Lucille Graymare, the last surviving scion of almost a century of the family business, snored softly, providing a dull counterpoint to the occasional beep from her computer terminal. Her sleep was deep, and not entirely natural; a thin strand of saliva dangled from the corner of her mouth and puddled on the keyboard. A few strands of gunmetal hair had worked their way loose from the rubber band binding it into a tight bun and had fallen across her face, fluttering lazily with her heavy breath.

  Splayed out in a nearby chair, arms flopping to his sides and with legs akimbo, Jake Marshall’s mouth was closed, his head fallen backwards to expose the sinews of his throat and neck, his open shirt revealing a smattering of silky black hair covering the swell of his muscled chest. Beefy but slim-waisted, Jake looked more like a college athlete than he did a junior funeral director. Most people, when they got over their instinctive discomfort at discovering what the boyishly handsome young man did for a living, still found the disparity between his looks and his employment at least mildly disconcerting.

  As good-looking as Jake was, the other young man in the room could only be called breathtaking. An even six feet tall, his body was as if sculpted from marble. Pale and creamy skin accentuated every slash of toned muscle, every sharp ridge of his stomach, every striation of his chest and thighs, the bulges of his biceps. Hairless but for a curly thatch of caramel-colored blond hair at the groin framing a thick veined penis which, even though flaccid, was of impressive length. The glans at the end was round and mushroom-shaped, darker than the shaft and the balls were heavy and as big as golf balls, covered lightly with a dusting of the same caramel hair. His chest was virtually smooth, with only a thin circle of short blond strands of hair ringing the circumference of his plump nipples, the aureoles dark beige against the whiter skin.

  When the man moved, it was with leonine confidence which surpassed the boundaries of blatant arrogance and, with every breath, he emitted a raw sensuality. His dark gray eyes gleamed with mischievous yet cruel carnality. This was a man who knew anyone who saw him would desire him; would crave to touch and taste his body which seemed crafted for one purpose alone; would long to drink his juices, to explore every crevice of muscle and plane of sleek flesh. His uncaring and superior-than-thou expression identified him as a man who used his attractiveness to his own selfish advantage, who leveraged other people’s lust to achieve his own ends. Though his face could have modeled for a Renaissance artist’s painting of an angel, there was something in the shape of his lips, the line of his jaw that bespoke a narcissism which bordered on psychopathic. Nature had designed him to be worshiped by ardent lovers and, it was clear, this man would demand nothing less than complete and total slavish devotion from his admirers.

  But he was not moving now.

  Mark Hartner lay on his back atop the stainless steel dissection table, entirely and gloriously nude. The sterile overhead lighting of the preparation room brought the details of his magnificent physique into stark relief but was as cold as the air caressing his skin, tickling it with chilly invisible fingers and raising not a single goose bump. His chest, which so many other beautiful young men had licked and stroked, nibbled, and often even bitten, did not move with breath. No shivers from the chill of the air conditioning shimmered across the columns of his thighs or the hard mounds of his upper arms. He did not shift his weight to make himself more comfortable and grant relief from the unforgiving metal of the table pressing against the flesh of his rippled shoulders and back and flattening the rock solid globes of his butt.

  For Mark was quite, quite dead.

  Life had been ripped from this godlike specimen of perfect manhood only a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday. Esthetically, his death was a great loss; Mark was a peacock to be admired and lusted after, his physical perfection a work of art reflecting the paragon of manhood. As for Mark himself and the kind of person he had been, no one—except for those beautiful youths whom he had not yet fucked and discarded, and some misguided few whom he already had fucked but who foolishly wanted to repeat the experience—no one would mourn.

  His family had long ago abandoned him in disgust; if they ever learned he had died, they would not have cared. Co-workers barely gave his loss a thought, unless it was from relief they would not have to see him again, nor have to guard their words and watch their backs against his ruthless machinations and jockeying for advantage. As for his supposed friends, in truth they could more aptly be called cronies. While some might regret no longer being able to be seen publicly in his company, to be the envy of less fortunate men for being the groupies of a youth of Mark’s spectacular beauty, they would merely shrug off his absence and, shallowly, would move on to attach themselves to a new gym-toned icon.

  Artistically, it was a shame Mark’s beauty had been marred by the autopsy. His body, once so pristine, his skin so pampered it was like a fine silk sheath over rippled muscles and taut sinew, had been violated by keenly edged scalpels and the whirring blades of serrated saws. Undoubtedly though, there were many men who, had they been given the opportunity, would have gladly wielded the cutting tools on Mark’s living body. Loathing was too gentle a word to describe the emotions Mark had universally inspired in others.

  A jagged rent bisected him from sternum to belly, the tattered pinkish edges of skin sloppily sewn together with coarse, tarry thread. Another wound ran across his chest in a line just below the nipples, looking equally vicious and as haphazardly repaired. The slash at his hairline was almost hidden by his tousled hair—almost, but not quite. Bits of fluid still seeped from it, trickling down the side of his face and neck to pool on the steel table.

  His heart, so stony in affection, had been removed, carefully weighed and thrust back into his chest. Pieces of his lungs, once providing him with breath to laugh at the misfortunes of others and to support his derisive words and scornful and sarcastic comments, had been sectioned, stained, and placed on glass slides to be examined later. Some of his blood, which had pumped through veins where never the proverbial milk of human kindness flowed, now filled several test tubes in the medical examiner’s lab at Wrightwood County Hospital two miles away; the rest congealed in his cold body. Mark’s physical secrets were slowly being revealed to the doctors who had so casually sliced him open, but the secrets of his soul would remain a mystery to the examiners—not that they were interested in them anyway.

  The mutter and murmur of the preparation room continued for long moments, punctuated by the occasional snuffle or snort from Lucy Graymare and, once or twice, when Jake coughed lightly through his stupor. There was a soft whoosh from the entrance when the baffled door was pushed open, sucking free of the frame. Someone new entered.

  He was tall, terribly tall, several inches above six feet with broad shoulders that would have been considered bony if not sheathed with the muscled evidence of a man no stranger to physical labor. His torso was long and lean, his stomach sculpted like armor, his chest flat and muscled like an athlete’s—a runner or decathlete perhaps. The arms were sinewed and corded with whippet strands of muscle, and the tendons of his thighs rippling like adolescent pythons with every step.

  His skin was tightly drawn against his frame, a deep rich mahogany with overcasts of a golden hue, not a pure African black but rather a mixture from island stock or South American ancestors. Each movement was a study in feral grace, reminiscent of some jungle cat or forest predator, his steps light on the balls of his feet and silent—more silent than any the funeral home had ever known from a living man. Not a strand of hair could be se
en to interrupt the rich hues of his flesh; even his armpits were smooth and clean and his skull had been shaved smooth.

  It was as if he had been painstakingly carved from a solid block of exotic dark wood, every detail lovingly rendered. When he ceased movement, his coloring was such that the skin tones smoothed out completely, without any mottling or variance to indicate he was a living being rather than a mere statue. Even his nipples, tiny and plump like currants, could barely be distinguished as they emerged from his chest only infinitesimally darker than the rest of his flesh.

  He was nude like some primitive warrior, except for a tiny breech cloth wound tightly about his waist, and the paint on his face. Only a fluttering twitch of the large muscle in one of his tautly corded thighs betrayed the fact that he was not a wooden effigy as he stood staring down at the nude young man on the table and ignoring the two other people lost in slumber. His eyes, the pupils so dark brown they appeared black under the fluorescent lights, were huge and filled with an ineffable sorrow, moist with unshed tears. But they contained something else as well; hatred burned there, bubbling and seething like a vile brew in a witch’s cauldron.

  The newcomer’s face looked like it might be handsome, but it was hard to tell. His brow bore two slashes of white paint, one atop the other, and his eye sockets were ringed with scarlet redder than Mark’s blood in the test tubes nearby. An imperfectly drawn forest green triangle graced each cheek and his full, lush lips were outlined by smears of cobalt blue. There was a clownish quality to the makeup to be sure, but one look at the man’s expression, at the fury which emanated from his eyes in palpable waves, and any thoughts of laughter would be quelled.

  His name was Tyler Deauxfines. And he had come to take his revenge.