Page 21 of The Undead

“Easily. Don’t let him make you do it, Adam, it’s his job and he damn well knows it.” Maggie took two steps down the hall toward the living room, then came back. She and Adam exchanged a short but warm look. “I’m glad you made it.”

“Be careful with that arm,” he said. She waggled the neon-green sling.

“VeryVogue,isn’t it?”

“In that case, aren’t you supposed to wear it over your breasts?” Adam asked innocently. I cleared my throat and herded him into the kitchen, where the nachos got burned, but not at Adam’s hands.

We put the first movie in at eight-thirty. Katy Shaugnessey reached past me for a handful of chips and wrinkled up her nose as they got close.

“My God, what are these?” she asked. I passed her the whole bowl.

“Jalapeño chips. Go ahead, just don’t breathe in before they’re in your mouth.”

“Thanks, I’ll work on these,” she said doubtfully, and nibbled experimentally on one edge. I could tell just when her lips started to tingle, and shot a look past her at Adam. He smiled.

“Okay, okay, enough, hand me the remote,” Maggie ordered as she drained the last of her something-and-Coke. There was a short scramble, and she was handed three remotes, two of which she put down with exaggerated patience. And hit the play button.

“What is it?” Katy’s friend Linda asked. We all shushed her as Maggie forwarded past the FBI’s warning that we would all eventually go to jail. And the music started.

And I felt, even through the barrier of Katy’s body, Adam tense up. He knew the music. He knew the movie.

When I looked over at him, he was staring at me, not at the screen. I managed a smile.

“Oh, great, this is one of my favorites!” Linda gushed just as the credits rolled.“The Lost Boys!”

I didn’t like the way Adam was looking at me. He got up and casually inspected the tides of the movies I’d rented, then strolled on back to the kitchen. Maggie, Linda, and Katy were all enthralled by the screen, so I got up and took Maggie’s empty glass as an excuse to follow him.

“Jack and Coke, sweetheart,” she said without looking up. I hardly heard her.

He was popping the top on a beer when I came in. I opened the refrigerator and dug cubes out of the icemaker. My skin adhered to the cold metal, and I had to pull hard to get it loose. As I rubbed at the numbed places, Adam turned toward me.

He looked so neutral he nearly faded into the wallpaper.

“Vampire movies?” he asked. I didn’t say anything. “I didn’t know you liked them. Is it a recent interest?”

He very deliberately took a mouthful of beer and swallowed it. I swallowed too, for nervous reasons.

“Well, we’ve done spy movies, adventure movies, war movies, biker movies, I just thought we’d branch out a little.” He didn’t smile. Neither did I. “I just thought they looked interesting. Why, don’t you like them?”

“Love them,” Adam told me, and rolled his cold beer around and around in his long fingers. “But you always struck me as a kind of down-to-earth yuppie kind of guy, Mike. Not the sort to sit throughGraveyard Shift.”

I poured a half glass of Coke for Maggie, added a shot of Jack. Stirred it with a handy spoon. In the periphery of my vision, Adam waited. And waited.

“They just—said something to me. I don’t know why, Adam.” I looked up, my stomach churning from something other than the jalapeño chips and nachos. “Do you?”

If he did, it didn’t show in his face. He smiled a little and set his can down in the sink.

“Thanks for the beer,” he said evenly. “I’ve got to go.”

Just like that, all the friendship vanished. We were two strangers standing in my kitchen, eyeing each other warily. I tried to back up to where we’d been.

“Wait, don’t—hey, if you don’t like the movies we can rent something else—“I took a step toward him and stopped. Something about his posture told me not to take another step. “Oh, man, don’t go. Whatever I said—”

“Ihaveto go,” he said again, and this time there was a definite sound of sadness in it. “Enjoy your movies.”

I followed him down the hall and watched him take his coat from the closet. He never looked back at me, just closed the door quietly behind him. After a minute I heard his car starting up and pulling smoothly away.

Maggie came to investigate my absence and found me standing there, holding a sweating glass of Jack and Coke like a strangled puppy in my hand. She looked around with a frown. Just then, Carl Voorhees opened the door and gave us a beaming, somewhat soft-focused smile. He had a brown paper bag in his hand that certainly didn’t hold Coca-Cola.

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