Page 29 of The Undead

I’d bandaged it, when I got home, from the handy-dandy hospital extras littering our utility drawers. I unwound the gauze and looked at the three-inch shallow slash, closed now and barely visible, and a feeling of nausea ran through my body like electricity. I clenched the offending hand into a fist and pressed it against my forehead. God, please … no.

When I opened my eyes, I realized what was missing in the silence of the morning. Maggie’s ride of the bed was empty, which wasn’t surprising since she was habitually an early riser, but I didn’t hear any sound of another person moving around the house. I touched the hollow in the sheets, but it was cold. So was I. Cold and scared.

“Maggie?” I called aloud, and got no answer. The effort of putting my feet on the floor was monumental, and as I put my weight on them, I felt the stretch of hamstrings that had been more vigorously exercised in the past few days than was usual. Hardly a surprise—considering the Olympic Trials run through the park the other night, plus the mad dash through the fairgrounds—but uncomfortable. I settled for balancing on my toes, and pulled on a bathrobe as I wandered into the kitchen.

There was a note lying in the exact geometric center of the kitchen table with my name written on it in large block letters. Now, Maggie has two styles of leaving notes. One is haphazard and written cursive, usually left stuck in the doorjamb or—rarely—stuck on the refrigerator. The other is the legally precise form I was looking at, which I called the Formal Notice of Being Totally Pissed Off.

That being the case, I sat down before I reached for it, and unfolded it as carefully as if it held a letter bomb. She’d written it on plain notebook paper in felt-tipped pen, apparently not trusting herself with an object as sharp as a ballpoint.

Michael,it read—not Dear Michael, or Darling Michael, or Gorgeous, or any of the other endearments I’d like to haveseen—Don’t try to call me. I’m on a case. I want to talk when I get home.

It wasn’t signed. I sighed and pushed it back to the center of the table and spent a few meaningless minutes straightening the corners to align with the table’s; when that palled, I tried compass directions, judging by the angle of the rising sun. Maggie was obviously aware I’d gotten up and sneaked off somewhere, and she didn’t like it. At all.

I wondered why she was so upset about me going missing; I’d heard her little exchange with good old Nick in the living room. Overreacting from guilt, maybe? Since she was acutely aware of Nick’s interest in her, even if she’d kept him at arm’s length, maybe she woke up in the middle of the night and wondered if I’d been finding ecstasy in the arms of some nubile young night nurse.

We had a marriage that had degenerated to scheduling romantic moments and having the most meaningful conversations of our relationship with each other’s beepers. I stopped wondering about Maggie and wondered instead why I was so surprised. Maybe shewasscrewing Nick. I damned sure hadn’t been there for her enough for it to matter one way or the other.

Wallowing in self-pity didn’t improve my appetite, but I got up and ate anyway, then went through the comforting ritual of showering and shaving and dressing as if it were another normal day and my life was no different than it had been three days ago. I stood there and looked at myself in the mirror. I certainlylookeddifferent—exhausted, for one thing, and scared. I seemed to have spent the last few days being continually scared, and I was damned tired of that.

All of this thinking was smokescreen, of course. At unguarded moments I kept seeing Adam’s eyes, crimson and savage; the face of the kid Adam had killed, the expression on that face as bones shattered in Adam’s fist. The blood—from my own veins—and Adam bending to drink it.

I wrenched myself out of that tactile, terrible memory and stared at myself in the mirror.

“Screw it,” I told my haggard reflection, and marched out to assault the world. I’d figure out what to do about my various troubles, as Scarlett O’Hara always said, tomorrow. Except I doubted Scarlett ever felt this bad, even wearing the curtains.

The hospital was a madhouse, which was about usual for Monday mornings. I tossed my jacket on the coat tree in my office and then raced down to scrub for my morning operation. I’d begged off on surgery because of my hand, but I was still professionally obligated to sit in—and, besides, I wanted to see my pinch-hitter at work. It was always an education.

“Nice of you to join us, Dr. Bowman,” Dr. Ranesh said, looking over the top of his bifocals at me. He was a gnomish little man who reminded me of Gandhi, and not just because of his heritage. He was as bald as an egg. I identified the rest of the team—an acquired skill, identifying people in surgical scrubs—and found myself in good company. Jerry Cahan, the anesthesiologist, was always my first choice when I had to cut, and the two nurses—Pirelli and Schneider—were first class, if a little humorless. “Do you have a music preference?”

I didn’t. Dr. Ranesh stuck in—God is my witness—Götter-dämmering.The patient was wheeled in, anonymously draped except for his chest, and the long, exhausting, addictive work of thoracic surgery began. I didn’t have to do much except observe and offer a spare hand on retractors and suction, but once Ranesh reached the lungs he beckoned me closer for consultation. We examined the pale fragile tissue, and Ranesh indicated the lesions near the bottom.

“What you expected?” he asked, and I nodded. “Want to lend a hand—the one you have, at least?”

Ranesh liked to throw me off balance. I took a deep breath and ordered up my working tools, then put all my concentration into assisting. When I looked up again, the clock behind Ranesh’s head said three o’clock.

“Good,” Ranesh said brusquely, and bent over to examine more closely. “I’ll do the close. How are his vitals, Jerry?”

“Steady.” Jerry shrugged, and gave the numbers. It was impossible to tell, but I thought that Ranesh might have been smiling. The dosing went as quickly and smoothly as it was possible to do it, and the patient rolled out to recovery. The OR team rolled out to dean up and relax for a few minutes, except for Ranesh; he took his family-information responsibilities seriously, and went out still untying his mask to deliver the good news. He’d watched too muchDr. Kildareas a kid, I thought. I splashed water on my face and tried to get my head in shape for the next session.

“Mind if I sit in again? If you’re going to eighty-six the Wagner, that is,” Pirelli asked me as we both caught a breath of air in the hall.

“I thought I’d get a live DJ and put together a nice dance mix, what do you think? Some rap, some disco …”

“Give me a break.” She laughed—I was wrong about the sense of humor—and stretched. Her back cracked and snapped. I winced. For a medical man I can be awfully squeamish.

We both joined the rest of the team and tried to pretend that we weren’t exhausted.

Luckily for me, the second operation was a by-the-numbers simple biopsy, which went smoothly and was over, except for the lab work, inside three hours. I was appallingly grateful to be outside the OR, though, and after delivering my news to the family I headed for the elevators and my office.

“Dr. Bowman?” somebody asked as I pushed the button. I turned and saw a woman striding toward me, nobody I’d ever met—she wasn’t the sort I’d forget. She was tall and well-built, but the first thing I noticed in the harsh fluorescent lights was the incredible glory of her bright green eyes. They were mesmerizing.

“I’m Bowman,” I admitted a little absently. She joined me at the elevators, and after the first shock of her eyes faded I realized that she was older than I, probably in her late forties. Her hair was dark and worn in a long single braid down her back, but time had streaked it liberally with silver; the braid enhanced the sharp Indian cheekbones that stretched the finely lined copper of her skin.

“Sylvia Reilly, Dr. Bowman; I just need a few minutes if you have some to spare. Is this a good time?” She offered me her hand, and I was surprised at how strong her grip was. Her eyes really were riveting, a green the color of acid or absinthe. I almost forgot what I was going to say.

“Ah—well, I’m going to my office now to clear up some paperwork. You’re welcome to come up if you’d like.” The elevator arrived with a tiredplingand disgorged three arguing children and an exhausted-looking mother. We had it all to ourselves on the way up to the office level. In the tradition of elevator-goers everywhere, we stared blankly ahead at the changing numbers instead of at each other. I finally cleared my throat. “What did you want to see me about, Ms. Reilly?” “Actually, it’s a little personal; I’d like to wait until we’re in your office, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.” The red LED spelled out each floor as we whisked past it.Pong. Pong. Pong.She was wearing some light floral perfume that reminded me of late spring and the warm scent of Maggie’s skin. “Maybe I should make it dear that I’m a surgeon, not a family medicine specialist—”

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