Page 41 of The Undead

No one was screaming now. I thought that was curious.

A hammer-blow from the rear smashed us against the rail again. Maggie went forward into the steering wheel, but the seat belt held her from fatal impact; I watched her with the distant concern of shock, the slow spread of blood down her gashed forehead just another strange special effect in this new amusement-park attraction. The guard rail was next to my face outside the car window, so we must have been tipped a little to the right. I turned to look at it, and every flake of rust and scrape of bright metal looked bright and cheerful. There was red paint from the Bronco smeared all along the bottom part of it, and the absurd thought struck me that the truck was bleeding. Was the wound mortal? Call a doctor. No, wait, I am a doctor—

Somebody hit us from the side in a shriek of metal. The smell of gas and burnt rubber filled the air, and the glass shattered next to me in a timeless instant. The impact knocked the guard rail out of the way; that was good, in a way, because now I had a beautiful view of the water below, and the metal bits spiraling down to strike sparks from the concrete blocks. Funny how fast they disappeared, even with the stretch of panic-twisted time.

My legs were pinned by the smashed wreckage of the dashboard. Given time I could have worked free—or given five minutes, firemen with some hydraulic tool could have pulled me out. It didn’t really seem to matter all that much, at the moment; I wasn’t in pain yet, though I guess I should have been. There was a lot of blood, cherry-red, making soft wet drippings all around me. Maggie was making a soft angry panting sound next to me, but I couldn’t seem to find the energy to turn toward her.

The sound of the crash seemed to echo forever.

The Bronco tilted like a domino, poised at the balance point between life and a hundred-foot fall to raging water. Wake up, some cold reptilian part of my mind prodded. I want to live, I don’t want to die like this. Do something.

“Maggie?” I whispered. My voice seemed to come from the other end of a long dark tunnel. There was blood in my mouth. I swallowed it. “Maggie, can you hear me?”

“Oh God, oh God—” She panted and turned her head to look at me, a slow jerky motion. Her eyes were huge with pupil. I heard a rising babble of voices outside. “Oh God, Mike—”

“Can you open your door?”

She pressed the handle with shaking hands. The door squealed but swung open, admitting a blast of chilly air and an indecipherable buzz of shouts and voices. Maggie worked at the catch on her seat belt while tears rolled down and mixed with blood on her chalk-white face. Her fingers were slippery and red.

A bearded Hispanic face appeared at Maggie’s door as the seat belt clicked free. He held out his hand to her, but she reached out for me.

The car rocked and shifted. I felt it with the same detached certainty I’d feel if a glass slipped out of my fingers and headed for the cold shattering floor. I forced myself back to the world, back to pain and too-bright light and this last, loving thing I could do. I shoved Maggie back from me.

“Get her out of here!” I screamed as Maggie lunged again for me; the man grabbed her and dragged her out of the car in one strong pull. She turned in his grasp, cursing and fighting and screaming my name. “Maggie, I’ll be all right. It’s okay. I love—”

The last word died in a cry of wrenched metal as the Bronco slid past the last resistance of friction. I saw her freeze in the hands of her rescuer, and saw his face go pale with shock as he realized I wasn’t coming out of the car. They dwindled and faded in the frame of the open door. I could hear the director’s calm camera moves: pull back and fade …

“No!”

Her scream was the last human sound I heard.

Chapter Nine

Curtains

Screams.

Someone screams. I hear nothing, the darkness drags me down. There is no such thing as time. Time is measured in breaths, in heartbeats, in the flow of blood in veins and the slow march of decay in cells. I have no time, or all of it. Someone screams, and the scream is too far away to hear, but it is rushing closer, dopplering higher to a pitch that vibrates in my still, quiet mind. A tuning fork might make that sound, if you tortured it long enough.

The scream saws into me like a serrated edge, laying bare my life in one instant of shattered regret. The one perfect image of Maggie’s face dissolves into a blue-white explosion of agony. I feel my body twitch in response, like a crucified frog prodded by a curious science student.Feeling.Distant, painful, nerve endings waking and echoing the pain in my mind. My fingers scratch convulsively at smooth cool metal.

Someone is speaking, a distant buzz of sound that vibrates in ears that have forgotten how to hear it. It, too, dopplers and rushes toward me, growing from a whisper to an unbearable shout that augments and does not replace the scream.

“Swallow,” it commands. I do not know the word. Something cold touches my throat, presses. I gag in response. I am not breathing.

There is something in my mouth. It trickles warmly in the back of my throat. Pressure on my throat again, harder this time. I reach for control of this heavy strange flesh around me, and fed muscles slowly contract. Something runs down my throat like a rush of molten lead. Where it touches, heat spreads; my throat contracts again, hungrily. My hands come up almost without direction to touch the thing in front of my mouth, the thing from which this warm miracle flows.

It is only on the fifth swallow that vision returns, a haze of color and shadow edged in black. And I see the bend of his arm, the wrist he holds at my mouth … the flexing of the blue veins under his white skin. I want to scream, but the pain in my head is fading, and now I am drinking as if I cannot stop.

The wrist moves away with a jerky strength that severs the connection between us. I lay, not breathing, and watch the slow flicker of the fluorescent lights burning above me. Adam slowly releases my head and lets me rest flat on the metal tray while he wraps a cotton pad over his wrist and fastens it one-handed with surgical tape.

There is a hot, rusty taste in my mouth. I know what it is. I want to vomit, but my body will not let me, and I am too weak to move. I can only wait and watch while strength slowly creeps back into this cold flesh, while the darkness recedes to a dim mist behind me.

I am not breathing. Oh, Adam, why …

The scream is silent. I hear it now.

Darkness …

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