Page 64 of The Undead

“Please …” Adam whispered. William yawned, licking Sylvia’s blood off his fangs with a leisurely tongue. “Don’t do this.”

“Too late,” he replied flatly. “Come get me, Adam, my boy. Maybe you’ll even be in time.”

Without any apparent effort, William hefted Sylvia with one arm, turned, and ran. Ran. For all his alien disjointedness, he ran quickly, legs covering vast strides and taking them into darkness and damp night air. I didn’t even hear him move. Adam, released from his paralysis, ran after them, but he stopped after only a few feet and grabbed hold of a thick low-hanging branch to support himself. I came up behind him and waited.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Adam whispered. His voice trembled, but it sounded perfectly normal. The branch he held creaked slightly. “If I go after him he’ll kill her. All I can do is pray—pray he isn’t ready to do that. Pray this is still the beginning of the game.”

I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t think of a thing to say that would ease the pain for him. His fingers tightened, as if they were around William’s neck. The tree branch, nearly a foot in diameter, shrieked and ripped loose from the bole with a meaty crack.

Adam, in a frenzy of rage, ripped it apart with his bare hands until the sidewalk was littered with fragments of pulpy wood and shredded bark. His hands were covered with dark splinters that, as I watched, oozed dark blood around the cuts. He regarded them with red, mad eyes and raised them to his lips.

“Morning’s coming,” he finally said in a thick, hopeless voice. He was right. The fog was turning pearly-bright on the ground, and the eastern sky was slowly lighting up. More important than that, I had begun to feel the lethargy of daysleep. “We’ll never find a cab and get home in time. Got to find shelter. Come on.”

“Where?”

Adam vaulted the fence, demonstrating an ease and grace that made me look humanly clumsy by comparison. We ran like ghosts through the pale gray fog, darting around grave markers and strewn flowers until in the distance we sighted the small cluster of marble mausoleums.

“You,” I said as I came to a halt, “have got to be kidding.”

Adam looked back at me, then nodded wordlessly to the east. It was gray, turning slowly blue. I swore under my breath and followed him through the rest of the dead maze, coming to a halt on the gravel path in front of the largest of the tombs.

Adam reached out and snapped the lock—carefully, this time, twisting it just enough to remove it. He hung it back on the hasp and played with the placement until he felt it would fool a casual observer. Then, with a last look at the east, he waved me inside.

“I can’t,” I croaked as the smell hit me—mildew, death, rot, decomposition, a thousand less palatable things. Adam shoved me inside with the heel of his hand in my back. I hit the far wall, a replica in expensive polished Italian stone of morgue drawers, and turned back to look at him. He looked drained in the dawn’s coming, wasted and weary. His eyes were pale and painfully swollen.

“You can do whatever you have to do,” he grated, and swung the creaking marble door shut on the morning light. “Whatever you have to do.”

It sealed with a heavy scrape. I felt my knees give way; I slid down the uneven recesses until I was sitting on the cold dusty floor. Dust, I had somewhere read, was mostly made up of dried human skin.

Like me.

Adam sank down next to me. I couldn’t see him, the darkness was too complete for that, but I felt his nearness. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder.

After a long, long moment his fingers touched mine.

“She’ll be all right,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything at all. Like children in the dark, our fingers laced together for comfort. In the next half hour, we were dead again.

Chapter Thirteen

This Is Your Death

I opened my eyes to darkness, and I felt it on my skin like a thick sucking blanket. It wasn’t just the dark—I could see red outlines, even in the dark—it was the stench of death, the claustrophobic gagging feeling of being locked in a space no larger than a medium-sized elevator with ancient rotting corpses.

Gasping for air I didn’t need, I struggled up to my feet and lunged for the door. Adam’s hand caught mine before I could touch it, and his other slid coldly over my lips.

“Quiet,” he whispered, almost as silent as the other occupants of our hidey-hole. I could feel them grinning their idiot grins as if bared teeth pressed into my skin. “Careful. Let me go first.”

I shook all over, but I stayed still when he let me go. Adam eased open the marble door—a faint creaking, a gentle sign of air—and looked carefully out. The inrush of night glowed like a neon welcome sign, and I gagged again, this time with relief. We weren’t sealed in. We weren’t quite dead enough. Adam, oblivious to or ignoring my distress, opened the door wider, then gestured to me.

“Hurry,” he said. We did. We ran like Olympic ghosts through the darkened cemetery, taking grave markers like hurdles. Adam, powerful as a hunting cat, went over the fence with hardly a pause, then took a second to contemplate the place where his convertible had been parked. It was an empty fog-washed expanse of pavement, rainbowed with oil.

“Towed?” I guessed as I dropped down to the pavement beside him. He nodded. “Shit. What now?”

“Cab,” he said tersely, and ran in the direction of the main cross street. I followed him as quickly as I could, but he was fast; he was already pumping change into a pay phone when I came to a stumbling halt, dialing the number of a cab company that had slapped a stick-on advertisement on the shell of the phone. He gave them the cross street and hung up. We waited tensely, watching the cars cruise past the parking lot; I read the graffiti engraved on the plastic windows around the half-booth (Donna Sux Dix! J.B. and Filly 4-EVR!) and Adam clenched and unclenched his fists in rhythmic fury as he thought about Sylvia. About William. I remembered her hand sliding out of mine, and I felt hot and sick. She’d been so goddamn scared, so quiet. It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t.

The cab took twenty minutes to arrive. Adam poured cash on the driver to get him to something approaching haste. If my friend was frightened, he didn’t show it. He didn’t show much of anything, not even anger. His whole attention was focused on believing, somehow, that we were in time and things would Be All Right. I could see that white determination in his eyes. The gentle, weary grief underneath was what hurt.

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