Page 15 of The Undead

“What do you think?” I asked her softly. She closed her eyes, breathed in sharply, and then shook her head.

“I don’t. Anyway, I just wanted to have a look, that was all. So I just wandered on up there.”

“To Intensive Care.” I shook my head. “Honey, wandering unnoticed into IC is about as likely as strolling into Fort Knox.”

“I didn’t go in. I went up the stairs and came in the door at the end of the hall. I just looked.” Maggie stopped and fiddled with a tie of her gown, looking unsure.

“Okay, sure. What did you see?” Never mind, I thought, that doped as she was she’d probably willingly attend the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. I was just so glad to see her breathing.

Maggie opened her eyes and looked at me, and there was something between us that hadn’t been there before. Something dark and strange, a slick transparent wall where there’d only been warm space. She stared at me for a minute and I could clearly see the thoughts passing behind her eyes like fish in a clear cold stream. Then the stream iced over, and became opaque.

“Nothing,” she said then. “I didn’t see anything. I was drugged up, Mikey. Listen, how’s the asshole doing, anyway? Angelo, I mean?”

I hesitated a minute, looking at her, then reached out and smoothed her hair back from her face. The cool eyes didn’t warm, didn’t soften.

“Looks like we lost him. He’s still on the life support, but …”

Her hands tensed on the ties of her gown, then deliberately relaxed. She looked away, but her eyes came inevitably back to me. I don’t really know what they said, except that they were undeniably shaken.

“Maggie, please take something and sleep,” I begged her.

“I can’t,” she whispered. Her face got paler, if that was possible. Something like anger flared deep in her eyes. “Not yet.”

“This isn’t doing anybody any good. I’m going to give you some more Valium, and you’re going to take it if I have to sit on you and feed them to you myself, you got it? You’re scaring me. Stop.”

Something in my face must have gotten through to her, because she looked at me and forced a smile. She reached for my hand again and touched my fingers to her lips.

“Sorry, baby. It’s been kind of a tough day, you know? I didn’t mean to push it. Promise me you’ll rest too.”

“Me? You’re the one in bed.” I kissed her again and traced the fine bones of her face with a fingertip. “If you promise to sleep, I promise to keep it in mind. Fair?”

“No,” she sighed, and then smiled. “You look worse than I feel. I’ll split the Valium with you, fifty-fifty.”

“Forget it.” Grant ducked in and slid another paper cup into my hand; I looked at the capsules and offered them to Maggie. “Here. The alternative is that I whack you in the head with a large mallet.”

“Medievalist,” she murmured, but tossed the capsules down. I stayed with her until she got drowsy, and then I looked at myself in the mirror. Yep, she was right. I was coming down with a bad case of the exhaustions. Dark circles under blue eyes, a day’s growth of beard poking up in straggly patches on a face that wasn’t suited to it.

What had she really seen? I wondered as I splashed cold water on my face. It wasn’t any coincidence that Angelo had come up flat-line. It couldn’t be. What had she seen that she was afraid to tell me?

“Maggie was there,” I told myself in the mirror. My reflection solemnly agreed. “If she was there, and the staff didn’t notice, could be somebody else was there too. Could be.”

And maybe, given that tiny possibility, she wasn’t so safe here in the hospital after all. My dream shimmered in front of my eyes like the water running down my face, and I was really, really afraid.

Maggie …

She slept, eventually. I ducked out to make some calls and cadge some coffee from the lounge, where a young resident I didn’t know was sacked out on the turquoise-and-green-plaid couch and two more sat examining the latest issue ofPenthouse.None of them seemed disturbed by my entry. I poured my coffee—it looked like the sediment in a road-tarring machine, and tasted worse—and hunted around for a place to sit. There wasn’t one. I went back out into the hall and captured a bench seat; blowing on my coffee didn’t make it taste any better, but it wafted the stench away from my nose.

Adam Radburn was sitting across from me in the hospitality area, head sunk in his hands.

Jesus.I felt my hands get cold in spite of the hot cup between them, felt my face getting paler as adrenaline slammed into my bloodstream and looked for a place to hide. My memory careened from thing to thing to thing, none of them any clearer than shadows but black with menace. Here in the bright fluorescent lights it was easy to believe what my logic told me, that I’d dreamed or at least hallucinated most of what I “remembered” from the morgue.

Fuck logic. I was getting the hell out of here, for my own peace of mind. I gulped down several burning mouthfuls of coffee-flavored road tar and got up to leave.

He glanced up just as I did, a quick flash of a pale face and glinting eyes. I waited for the fear to hit me, but nothing did, nothing but a faint sense of shame. He looked utterly miserable, and this was Adam, my friend. I couldn’t ignore him, even when that was what my guts urged me to do.

But it was the hardest walk of my life, harder than the walk to my dad’s casket, harder than the walk to where Maggie’d lain on the gurney. My whole body screamedDon’t do this.

I did it anyway, of course.

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