Page 13 of The Undead

“I’m staying out of the way,” I pointed out evenly. Something came and went in his eyes that I couldn’t identify.

“She’s going to be fine, Dr. Bowman. I’ll sign her in for observation, but it was as dean a gunshot as I’ve ever seen.” Fikowski’s smile was sudden and wintry. “Never saw your wife before. I’ll even give you visitation rights.”

I went to Maggie’s side and touched her face. Her eyes tracked me, but very slowly. She was sliding under. I kissed her gently and stepped back. Fikowski was still watching me. His grace period lasted for almost a full minute.

“Leland! Get Mrs. Bowman upstairs, we’re done here and we need the room. Bowman, get your butt out of here.”

Leland buzzed around with the orderlies. I should have been obeying, too, but I was too busy remembering the weird, disorienting vision I’d had, the one brought on by the sight of Maggie’s blood.

I’d been in the morgue. I’d seen—red eyes. Adam had red eyes. And I’d tried to kill him.

I knew, with a cold shiver, that I was going insane.

Chapter Four

Déjà Vu

The morgue looked deserted. I eased the swinging doors shut, mindful of the noise for some reason, and took a couple of steps further inside. Adam Radburn’s cubicle stood empty, the stereo silent; there wasn’t any sound at all except for the distant sighing of the air conditioners spewing antiseptic into a room whose patients seemed least likely of all to need it. A body lay shrouded in the right corner of the room, but whoever it had been wasn’t about to give me any trouble now. I’d been down on many occasions, had coffee with Adam and the day guys, told awful jokes and swapped stories. But somehow, deserted as it was, the place looked—stark.

I’d done some midnight hauls in the anatomy labs in med school, dissecting furiously into the silent hours. That was the feeling I had now, the strange, atavistic feeling of utter loneliness. There was nothing quite so lonely as being alive among the dead.

I remembered that fragmented flash of Adam Radburn’s eyes glowing crimson, of my body launching itself blindly at him in a struggle it couldn’t possibly win. But that memory couldn’t possibly be true, could it? No. Hallucinations. Hell, I’d been whacked on the head hard enough to forgive a few hallucinations.

Except that they were soreal,and they seemed so right that my pulse rate sped up every time I thought about them.

I did a slow circle of the room and tried to recapture that eerie feeling of déjà vu. Nothing. My mind was as quiet and unresponsive as the room itself.See? I told myself sternly.Stop imagining…

Someone sighed, a gentle, terrifying sound in the stillness. I froze and turned, expecting (hoping for) Adam—no, this was day shift, it wouldn’t be Adam—but there was no one in the room at all. Just my overactive imagination, and a memory that was cooking on two and a half burners.

“Oh, bullshit,” I said aloud, and turned to go.

One of the silver morgue drawers swung open, a rasp of metal and a creak of hinges. I froze again, this time without really wanting to, and counted to three. To ten. To twenty. Nothing happened.

I could see all the way to the back of the drawer where I stood. It was utterly, completely empty. I realized with a little stab of horror that I was looking into the drawer where Julio’s girlfriend had been stored.

“Bullshit,” I repeated, less forcefully, and took a step backward. I backed into the gurney and dislodged the sheet from the corpse that lay beneath it.

Maggie’s clouded blue eyes stared back at me, wide open in a chalk-white face. Her mouth endlessly screamed horror. There was a little gash on her throat, bloodless except for a dried line that caked it almost closed. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, although the agony boiled up like acid in my throat.

Adam’s hand fell on my shoulder, white and deceptively gentle. I didn’t move. His body was behind me, but there was no sense of warmth from him at all.

“Michael,” he said very patiently, “you shouldn’t have pushed me. I never wanted to hurt you.”

There was a sudden, terrible noise echoing around the polished walls of the morgue. I thought at first that the scream had gotten up past the obstruction in my throat, but then I realized—

I realized, as I fumbled my way out of sleep and clawed at my clothes, that my beeper had gone off. I shut it off and sat there for a minute with cold sweat sliding down my back, resting my forehead against my clenched shaking fists. A dream, dear God, and not any dream I ever wanted to have again.

I was so disoriented that for a few minutes I couldn’t even place the room I was in. Not my house, of course. I didn’t own turquoise-and-green-plaid furniture. Only doctors’ lounges had such shamelessly bad taste. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank it black, to let the system shock pull me back into reality; I held the coffee in one hand and dialed the lounge phone with the other.

God, my fingers were trembling. Not a good thing to see in a surgeon, sort of like seeing the captain of the ship heaving his cookies on a rough sea.

“Sixth floor, Nurse Grant.” Grant had a nice, pleasant voice, but I was always careful with her; rumor held she had a nasty temper, when it suited her to indulge it, and I’d made it a firm and solemn rule never to get on a nurse’s bad side. You never know when you’re going to end up a patient, for one thing.

Yeah, I told myself cynically. Psycho ward, restraints and all.

“Hi, Vivian, this is Michael Bowman. What did you need?”

“I need,” Vivian Grant said, biting off each syllable, “for you to come up here and have a talk with your wife. I will not have the entire floor disrupted like this.”

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