Page 16 of The Undead

I sat down across from him in a blue chair that squeaked uncomfortably at the strain. His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t look up.

“You okay?” I finally asked. He nodded and straightened. His eyes were dry and bright, strangely disconcerting without the glasses. Adam fished the frames out of his pocket and slid them on, rendering himself distant and harmless, at least to the casual observer. “What’s going on?”

“I needed to get out of there for a while,” he said faintly, and stared over my head at a dated earthtone abstract on the wall. “It gets to me sometimes. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” I hunted for words. “Maggie got shot today.”

His eyes snapped down, wide and alert. The bluntness of it surprised me as much as it did him. I shook my head, searching for words around a knot of hard fear.

“She’s okay, she’ll be okay, but—Jesus, sweet Jesus, I didn’t—” I stopped talking, because all of a sudden the terror got loose and hit me, the knowledge that she might have been gone forever. I struggled to hold back a rush of grief and rage. “It’s all so useless sometimes. Caring for somebody. It doesn’t seem to make any difference, does it?”

He looked at me a long time, eyes huge and dark behind the glasses, face still and pale. And smiled.

“No,” he agreed softly. “It doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have a friend down there in a drawer right now, and I can’t seem to make any sense out of that, either. I cared for her and she’s dead for no reason at all. It’s very hard to understand.”

I waited, fingers automatically gliding up and down the peeling chrome arms of my chair. The flakes of metal felt sharp and rough at the same time. Adam’s eyes went back to the abstract art behind me, a safe distant focus.

“Who—” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

“You checked her in, I think. Julie Gilmore.”

Jesus.What a day.

“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know you even knew her. I would have told you,” I said, and wondered what the hell good it would have done if I had.

Adam shook his head, not looking my direction at all, and answered my thought. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I don’t think there was anything that could have been done that wasn’t done, and my presence—well, it might have been disturbing for her, considering.”

“Considering the rape?” I asked. He nodded slowly. “Was she a close friend?”

Adam blinked and looked at me. He understood well enough what I meant, that delicate convention of our times. A close friend, a lover, a warm and intimate partner in fantasy. At least, I think he understood. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Adam.

“Not too close,” he told me, “but not too for, either. Listen, I’ve got to get back down.”

“Now? Can’t I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”

His eyes, already dark, turned the color of old blood and bitterness.

“I can’t leave her alone with Foster.”

I felt a chill go up my spine, both at the bleak flatness of his voice and the image he’d conjured up. I’d never heard him speak about Foster—or anyone else—in a tone that close to hatred. As if he’d caught my thought, Adam smiled slightly and made an effort to lighten his voice.

“Foster doesn’t like me very much, you know. Or anyone I like. She particularly doesn’t care for you, Mike.”

“Oh, no, I guess my life’s just over.”

Adam’s smile took on just the faintest shadow of humor before it winked out. He stood up, a strangely disjointed and graceful move, and offered me his hand. I ignored it and pulled him into a sudden embrace. He was as tense as a piece of wood against me, and as cold.

“Be careful,” he said, and pushed away. He didn’t look at me directly, but I had the oddest impression that his eyes were changing, growing larger and redder. No, that was the dreams again. Nightmares. “Take care of Maggie for me.” “For you?” I jibed at his retreating back. He waved and turned the corner. “Yeah, okay. For you too.”

My dream of Maggie in the morgue hit me blindside, shooting my pulse up uncomfortably high. I stared after him for a long moment, then went back to my wife, and a long, long night.

I slept in a chair next to Maggie’s bed, stretched uncomfortably out with my neck at an angle previously thought impossible to achieve without actual dislocation of the vertebrae. The only thing that happened, during the night or in the morning, was that I developed a bitch of a crick in my neck.

Maggie was judged healthy enough to be cut loose on the unsuspecting city again, and I was relieved to notice that her morning mood was back in full force. She got dressed (with a little help from me—no hanky-panky involved, though) and hummed her way through two Mozart somethings on the way to the car.

“So,” I asked as I pulled out into the rush-hour traffic, “do you think you’ll ever play the violin again?”

Maggie muttered something that might conceivably have been derogatory, leaned over, and kissed me on my rough cheek. Her good hand scraped over the aspiring beard.

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