Page 22 of The Undead

“Hi, Carl. Where’s Adam?” Maggie asked me.

He’s gone,I thought very clearly. And, even more dearly,but he’ll be back.

A chill crawled up my spine that had nothing to do with the cold glass I held.

I woke up to the muted murmur of voices. They had that peculiar muffled quality typical of people who didn’t want to be overheard.

“—no,” Maggie was saying as I drifted far enough out of sleep to understand her. They were somewhere in the front of the house, but the silence carried the words farther than they expected.

“Jesus, why not? Don’t you trust me? What the hell is all this, anyway?”

“No, Nick, I said no and I meant it. I’m tired and I want you to leave.”

I lay there in the falling darkness, my eyes wide open, and heard the rustle of fabric as it was crushed under a pair of big strong hands.

“You sure?” Nick asked her softly, so softly the susurrant echo barely reached to the bedroom. “I want to take care of you, you know that.”

Another rustle. I couldn’t identify this one.

“I’ve got somebody to take care of me, Nick. Please. Just go.” Maggie sounded tired and on the verge of tears. I sat up and ignored the brief vertigo that warned me my head injuries weren’t exactly gone. Nick didn’t say anything else. I heard the carpeted hiss of his footsteps crossing to the door, and then the slam. I got out of bed and went out into the hall. At the end of it, Maggie stood with her back to me, her forehead resting wearily against the door. Her arm was still in a sling, but the other hand was outspread against the dark wood, and the fingers were trembling.

“Maggie,” I said. She jumped as if I’d fired a gun behind her, then turned to look at me. Her eyes were shiny with tears. “You okay?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, and attempted a smile. It was a dismal failure. “I could arrest you for indecent exposure.”

“Nah. No raincoat. Come here.” I held out my arms, and she came into them, returned the hug as much as she could with one arm still in a sling. Unfortunately, I still felt the tension in her, wary hesitation that kept her locked away from me. So much time gone, so many long months where we hadn’t exchanged anything more than smiles over our morning cereal and telephone tag on the answering machine. Oh, sure, I’d made the annual anniversary effort, but that hardly made up for all that wasted time. God, how had I let it go so for?

How far hadshegone, anyway? Nick had always been a bastard, I knew that, and I’d seen him looking at Maggie when he thought I wasn’t paying attention—or even when I was; he was the kind of man who thought that since he could break me in two, I wouldn’t particularly mind him leering at my wife. Or if I minded, that I wouldn’t do anything about it. I was only just beginning to understand the pressures Maggie operated under. I’d never even thought about it before.

It might, I realized with terrible sadness, already be too late for that anyway.

Her body gave a shudder against mine, and the tension dissolved. She rested her head against my shoulder.

“I love you, Mikey,” the whispered.

Maybe it wasn’t too late, after all.

“What did Nick want?” I asked. She tensed again, but she didn’t pull away.

“Nick wants a lot of things,” she said wearily, “but mostly he wanted to pump me for information.”

“Why?”

“Angelo. Nick knows I was up there, and he’s wondering just what it was that I saw. I told him I don’t know of anything going on.”

No, nothing much. Hallucinations, hysteria, weird dreams. And Adam’s odd reaction to the vampire movies. I rested my chin on top of her head and tried not to think about it. I’d seen Adam last night, after all, and he’d been perfectly normal, so far as Adam could ever be considered normal.

“What time is it, anyway?” I finally had the presence of mind to ask. Maggie stirred and lifted her wrist to eye level.

“Seven-thirty. We’ve slept most of the morning. I guess we both needed the rest, so I’m not going to feel guilty—how about some breakfast?”

“You going to work tomorrow?” I asked her bluntly.

She looked up at me, face serious and a little apologetic. “Tomorrow’s Monday, Mike.”

“Damn it, Maggie, you need the time off”

“You’re going to work tomorrow. I know you are.”

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