Page 11 of The Undead

“Just trying to be friendly,” I told her amiably.

“Ruth,” she snapped shortly, and hung up. I sighed, looking at the receiver, and then hung up myself and headed downstairs for the emergency room.

Daytime in the ER wasn’t the hysteria of night shift, thank God. I’d worked for five years on the night shift, patching up stab wounds and gunshot wounds and bloody car wrecks, and it wasn’t an experience I cared to repeat. They’d switched me to day shift, briefly, but even the relative calm of days wasn’t what I wanted. I preferred to do my work on patients who weren’t consistently critical.

Who, except for Julio, had a chance at living a few more days.

I came through the ER doors and stepped aside to let a running lab tech pass; he carried samples in both hands, balancing them like a busy waiter in the lunch rush as he dodged around obstacles. Somebody was coming in at the far end, screaming and weeping, accompanied by two paramedics and two uniformed cops. I headed for the nurse’s station, and there she was, with a nametag that plainly readR. LELAND, R.N.

“Hello, Ruth, I’m Michael Bowman. Where’s the patient?”

Ruth Leland looked me over with a critical eye. She was an old-schooler, too, a starched, perfect nurse who probably ran ER like an aid station on the Vietnam front lines. I looked like a young pup to her—worse, a young pup with MD after his name. Her kind really do hate doctors.

She gave me a frosty anile and led me over to one of the treatment rooms.

“She’s stable. As soon as you sign her in, I’ll have her sent upstairs.” Leland—I couldn’t, after all, think of her as Ruth—thrust a clipboard and pen in my hand and stepped bade. I put them just as firmly down and went to look the woman over for myself.

Even after all these years, it still saddens me to see the damage one person can do to another. She was a pretty thing under the bruises, maybe twenty-five years old and delicately featured. I felt a chill when I looked at her neck, though. She’d been choked, but not with bare hands; there was a livid ligature mark around her throat, bruises so deep I could see the imprint of holes, which probably made it a belt of some kind. The skin had torn from the pressure at three or four of the worst indentations, but rather than disguising the extent of the damage, the blood just seemed to highlight it.

Cervical fracture between third and fourth vertebrae. She probably should have died instantly, except that somehow she’d missed having her spinal cord severed; I looked over at Leland, who was holding her mouth in a regulation-straight line that Fikowski probably checked with a level, and gestured her back with a jerk of my head. Her lips thinned further, but she went.

“Hello, Julie. Julie Gilmore, right?” I slipped back into my emergency-room voice without any sense of transition, and her eyes moved to my face. Widened. She probably thought I was a ghost. “Julie, my name is Michael Bowman. You’re in City Square Hospital, and we’ll be taking you upstairs in a few minutes. You’re in good hands now, so relax, okay?”

She kept staring at me, blinking in random agitation. I readied over and put my hand on her forehead. I think if she could have flinched, she would have.

“Julie, we’re going to do everything we can for you. Just relax. After we get you upstairs I’ll have some tests done and see how things are.” From the chill of her skin and the involuntary spasms in her hands and feet, there wasn’t a whole lot we were going to be able to do, but I wasn’t about to admit defeat just yet. I talked to her a few more minutes until I could see her heart rate quieting a little on the monitor, then went out and gestured for Leland to join me.

“Where’d they pick her up?” I asked. She smoothed her hands down the seams of her white dress.

“The police brought her in. Rape victim. They found her on the floor of her house. Oh, don’t worry, they’ve already taken all the evidence samples.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. No wonder she’d flinched. Leland looked at me curiously.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” I could tell from her tone that she seriously doubted it. I realized that I was gripping the chart too tightly, so for something to do I lifted it and signed off on it. My signature looked like a palsy victim’s. Didn’t matter, of course. Doctor’s signatures weren’t supposed to be legible. God, I hated rape cases. Came from having a cop for a wife, and attending trials that would have turned even Adam Radbum’s stomach. I was never comfortable with it, even after all those ER years.

“Is there a cop waiting?” I asked her. She nodded down the hall to the reception area; I walked off in that direction.

“Doctor! Intensive Care?”

I nodded and kept walking. The patrolmen sitting in the reception area looked like they’d done it a lot; I shook hands with them and gave them a quick and dirty rundown of what I knew. It didn’t take long. I searched for a way to pump the cops for information—never an easy task—but the younger one saved me the trouble.

“Do you think she’ll be able to talk?” he asked—not eagerly, he was too well seasoned for that—and shrugged when I shook my head. “Too bad. She’d have something to tell, all right; best we can figure, she’d been laying there in the kitchen floor for a good six hours before her roommate came home. Must have taken a lot of guts to hang on like that.”

“Anything else, Doc?” the older cop rumbled, looking at me strangely. My pity must have been showing. “Then we’ll call later, see if there’s any change. You’ve got our names if you want us.”

I stood there at the end of a long, dark, soundproofed tunnel and watched them walk away, out through the automatic glass doors and into the glaring sunshine. I hated Emergency. It always made me feel helpless.

“Damn it,” I whispered angrily, and went to the coffee warming on the table. I had just poured a cup when the doors crashed open again and the first of two gurneys came hurtling in, attended by a paramedic holding a bag above his head and a cop in a suit. Leland came to meet it and began taking over in a coolly competent way that made me admire her in spite of her starch.

I saw her glance my way and interpreted it as a demand for help; right now, an activity seemed preferable to dwelling on my frustration, so I put the coffee aside and began to walk toward the gurney.

I knew from the moment I saw the golden hair fanning out over the silver bars, faintly flecked with blood. The braid had come loose. I looked up and saw Nick Gianoulos’s hard, set face and recognized panic in his eyes. I know I started running, but it seemed to me as if I moved through syrup, as if someone wheeled the gurney in the opposite direction fester than I could run.

Snap.Memory hit me dizzily, dissolved the room around me.

Looking at him now, I couldn’t understand why I’d ever thought him human. Adam wore human shape like a cloak, but this was ml, this crimson-eyed creature of fear and darkness. His skin was the same, but it no longer merely looked pale. It was sulfurously white, a color living skin could not sustain, and it looked hard and unyielding. But his face was Adam Radburn’s, his half-smile, his curious till to his head.

“What are you?” I breathed. Adam lowered his gaze; when he looked up again, his eyes were brown again. I wasn’t deceived.

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