Kill the Dead (Sandman Slim, #2)

by Richard Kadrey

It doesn’t matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don’t say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it out loud enough and it becomes a wall you can’t get through.

I might not have been a good guy before, but I loved someone and I wasn’t broken into a million little pieces.

The place looks like the house of the month in Better Homes & Monsters.

I hand Brigitte the number and she looks it over. I let her hold on to it because her clothes probably don’t get destroyed as often as mine.

“Your JD is under the bed, in case you forgot.” I shake my head. “I don’t want that. You have any water in your fridge?” “Oh shit. You really are dead.” “Do you have any water?” “I have beer. That’s kind of like water.” “No. That’s kind of like beer.”

When the dead are through with us, they’ll wander into the hills and the canyons will fill up with nouveaux Drifters. The civilians up there won’t have anyplace to go. The mansions won’t hold and the woods will be death traps. Once again the future has screwed us because we never got the jetpacks we were promised as kids.