Page 42 of The Undead

Wind rushed in my face and my dry open eyes. I blinked, the slow sleepy motion of a lizard, and watched the streetlights stream by in a bright river. My muscles obeyed my silent command to turn my head, but it was a rusty, protesting movement. Unnatural. I was reminded of those late-night creature features where the corpse rises from the coffin and turns his head to smile … Don’t think, I commanded myself, Christ, please, don’t think. Even so, the thoughts scratched at my consciousness like a bony finger tapping on a locked door. I ignored it with the desperate intensity of insanity.

The top was down on the car, and Adam’s hair wasn’t tied back in his habitual ponytail. It blew in the breeze like a copper flag, tinted amber by the lights. His face seemed lit from within, as if he’d swallowed the moon.

His eyes, when he looked my direction, seemed uncommonly dark.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told me quietly. If I could have laughed, I would have howled. “It’s alarming at first. It takes a while to fully recover, Mike, so try to let it come gradually. I’m here to help you.”

With a great effort I winched my jaws open; it must have looked as eerie as a marionette in slow motion. Once I’d gotten my mouth open, though, the effort of moving my vocal cords, tongue, and lips was too much. I couldn’t manage it. A fiery sense of rage swept over me, frustration that felt frighteningly real considering my surreal state; I shook with the force of it.

Adam put one gentling hand on my shoulder and turned his eyes back to the road. The streetlights whipped by us, torches flickering in the modern darkness. With another huge effort I closed my mouth.

“You’re relearning your body, that’s all,” he said, as if I’d asked a question. “Things have changed inside. You’ve probably noticed that you don’t need to breathe anymore; that’s because you’ll absorb oxygen from the blood you drink. From what Sylvia and I have discovered, your stomach is about the same size, but it isn’t as elastic as it once was, and you don’t have digestive juices. I guess the hardest thing to get used to is the lack of a heartbeat, but it’s because your veins have changed, too, and they act like your intestines did, pushing the food along. Since your blood pressure is so much lower, you don’t need much of a pumping organ. What else? Your muscles have altered, too; once you recover, you’ll find that you’re stronger and faster, and immune to most mortal dangers. There are whole new dangers, though, more than you can imagine.”

His lips tightened briefly on some personal pain, then relaxed again. He drove with easy competence, never taking his eyes off the road; we were in some strange part of town I couldn’t recognize from the little I could see. He wasn’t looking for landmarks, though; it was a drive he’d made so often it was automatic.

“You’ll need more blood. It’ll help you recover.” Adam drummed his fingertips lightly on the steering wheel, evidently uncomfortable with that idea. Funny. So was I. I summoned up enough command of my body to shake my head like a palsy victim. Adam glanced over and smiled. “Relax, Mikey. Trust me.

Hah-hah.

By the time I’d mastered swiveling my head with something like normality we’d turned down a dark residential street and pulled up at the end of a cul-de-sac. The house was one of those restored Victorians you occasionally run into in the South, this one less gingerbreaded than most and retaining an elegantly dignified air. Lights were on in the front windows. Adam sat for a moment as if debating with himself, then got out and walked around to my side of the car. I fumbled clumsily for the door handle, but he reached down and lifted me out—without bothering with the inconvenience of the door.

I’d known he was strong, but the experience of being hefted straight up like a two-year-old was eerie and humiliating. As if he knew it, Adam lowered me until my feet touched the ground, then braced me there.

“Try to move your feet,” he suggested. I did. All that I accomplished was a dull scuffing. “Hold on.”

It was a graceful lie, and a frightening demonstration of his strength; Adam put my arm around his shoulders, put his around mine, and carried me an inch above the ground so that I had at least the illusion of proceeding under my own power. Also—not coincidentally—so that any insomniac neighbors who might be peeking through their bedroom sheers wouldn’t find anything odd in the sight of two drunks wandering home. My legs swished aimlessly in the air, swimming in the wrong element.

Details were, at that moment, all that was keeping the scream out of my mouth. I was interested to note that vampires seemed to need keys as much as anybody. Adam fished his out of his pocket and unlocked the door—a massive washed-oak affair-then ushered me inside. The lights were all set on some kind of dimmer switch, and dialed to a low setting that seemed comfortable to me; I observed, since there was little else I could do at the moment.

It was unquestionably Adam’s house. Itfeltright, from the pale oak floor to the simple clean lines of the pottery jar that occupied the entryway. The house looked bare and elegant. Adam shut the door and escorted me through a doorway into a large, spotlessly scrubbed white-tiled kitchen. He pulled out a chair from the small table in the corner and sat me in it, then used his keys to open a small locked cabinet above the sink. It held a small refrigerator—the size you’d expect behind a personal bar, or in a college dorm. He opened it up and took out a bottle filled with dark liquid.

You’ve got to be kidding, Adam.

He wasn’t. He poured from the bottle into a small juice glass, replaced the bottle, and came back to me. The white tile floor reflected up on his glasses, reminding me of Orphan Annie eyes and the morgue. For a moment, neither one of us moved, then Adam slowly sank down on his heels facing me. He watched me while he toyed with the glass in his fingers.

“My blood won’t nourish you,” he finally said softly. “It’s a catalyst, not a nutrient. This—this is what you need. Nobody died for it, Michael. I have my own donors, and they give it freely. I’m not going to force it down your throat; this is your choice, this time. Live or die.”

I could move, a little. Enough to reach out and take the glass, maybe—or enough to knock it out of his hand and spill a tide of thick red across the tile. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t, not yet. I just sat.

Adam let the minutes tick by, but it finally became clear that I wasn’t going for it. He stood up and set the glass carefully on the counter, then pressed his palms flat on the Formica on either side of it and stared down into the red depths. His lack of expression revealed something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

“Don’t you think this is easy for me, Mike. I’ve been changed a long, long time, and I get tired, sometimes, and lazy, and I forget how hard I had to fight to live through what you face now. At least you didn’t wake up in a grave, I spared you that.” Adam hesitated a few seconds, then continued in a soft, eerily distant voice. “They buried me in a mass grave at Appomattox, under the bodies of nearly thirty men. I had to dig my way past the corpses of my friends, Michael. I thought I knew what horror was, then. I thought …”

His voice faded away. Adam kept staring down into the dark glass; his face almost concealed the agony underneath it, the vivid claustrophobic horror. I watched him, unable to do anything else. When his voice came again, it was thick and rough.

“I knewnothing.The only thing I had was a burning will to live, and that’s what kept me going, that’s what brought you back tonight. Stupid, stubborn passion. I’ve seen too many give up; we’re not a numerous species, or a prolific one. I’ve tracked as many as possible, but out of the twenty-seven I’ve tried to revive, you’re only the second who’s responded.” His lips curved up in a thin, sharp line that wasn’t a smile. “I watched sweet Caroline die twice.”

If I’d had voice, I would have howled my reply at him. I didn’t want to live like this, like a predator, a scavenger, a jackal—iflivingwas a name for it. The thought of drinking that. congealing gore made my stomach clench in revulsion. A cold feather stroked my spine. Revulsion or hunger?

No. Let me die. Better the dark than this …

Adam seemed frozen in place. In some other room of the house a clock chimed four, a distant music that taunted me with memories of real life. Or was it only me? Adam’s shoulders tightened as if the sound had sprouted claws and climbed on his back.

“You’ve been gone for two days,” he suddenly said. “Don’t you want to hear about Maggie?”

My hand shot out convulsively toward him, a wild uncontrolled grab. He didn’t look at me. I forced a sound out of my throat, as wild as the gesture and not half so understandable; it was an agony that started somewhere in the base of my spine and tore its way bloodily free to be birthed in that one incoherent grunt. He shifted slightly, but didn’t look at me. Couldn’t, I thought. His face was white and masklike, only his eyes betraying anything close to feeling. They seemed to reflect the red of the blood in the glass.

“The driver of the Jag was dead, went right through the windshield with his bottle of Southern Comfort,” my friend said, very softly. Each word fell with deliberate measured speed. “If you want to know about Maggie, drink. The news won’t matter to you if you want to die that badly.”

---