Page 24 of The Undead

His command ripped through my mind like a non, crushing everything in its path. I wanted to scream, to protest this incredible violation, but nothing came out of my open mouth but a sigh. Even as he spoke, I could feel myself reeling, feel my mind clouding and becoming confused. I pitched forward to my hands and knees. I was trembling all over.

“In fact,” Adam’s voice whispered, from a very cold distance, “you’re about to pass out, Michael. And you’ve forgotten everything I’ve told you to forget.”

I pitched forward face-first to the tiled floor. It was cold.

Darkness.

I opened my eyes and saw the muted sunset-colored bedroom swim back into focus. Hallucinations. Jesus. I needed to get to the hospital and get a CAT scan, fast, before I started to really come unglued.

That was the logical explanation. The one I believed was this: that Adam Radburn, whatever the fuck he was, had altered my memory of the events in the morgue and then sent me out to be killed on my way home. It wasn’t just that I thought it might be possible. I believed it with every fiber of my being, every terrified illogical cell. And nobody was going to tell me different.

The bastard had sent his friends to kill me in the park. No wonder I’d been running as if my life depended on it when I left the hospital; it had. A faked mugging, only I’d been a little more desperate and a little luckier than either Adam or his friends had expected.

I’d known someone was following me—I’dknown.

Maggie was calling my name, in an exasperated, half-worried tone that meant she’d been calling it for some time. I blinked the world back in focus again and stood up, bracing myself against the bedpost as reality rocked around me. Some part of that was the bump on the head, I knew.

But not all.

I lay beside Maggie, listening to her even slow breathing, and slid carefully out of bed. It was about nineP.M., early for either of us, but her painkilling drugs had kicked in and she wasn’t likely to wake for hours. I bent over and kissed her very lightly. She didn’t move, didn’t stir even when I bumped into the open closet door again and cursed softly. I dressed in the closet, pulling on a pair of jeans and a plain black T-shirt.

Good skulking clothes.

I drove the Volvo to the hospital and parked it in the far end of the lot. It was hidden outside the glow of the sodium arc lights, but close enough that I could see the car I wanted to keep an eye on. It was a faded blue Mustang convertible, deceptively disreputable; I’d noticed that Adam kept it up where it counted, under the hood and on the wheels. If I was right, he was on short shift tonight, so he’d be out before midnight.

I waited quietly and passed the time watching the passage of cars in the parking lot. I was amused to see the emergency-room nurse Leland leave arm-in-arm with Sam Fikowski. A match made in heaven, surely. I couldn’t picture them in the throes of passion, but the effort killed a lot of time.

I almost missed Adam when he came out. Under the glow of the yellow sodium lights he looked oddly frail, washed in the light of an ugly man-made imitation of the sun. He got in the Mustang and pulled it smoothly out of the parking lot; I hung back and gave him plenty of room. I didn’t know just how good his senses were, but I suspected they were sharper than mine, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard.

Adam never glanced back that I could see. He turned the Mustang downtown and negotiated the busy night traffic with elegant ease. It was harder than I’d expected, following him without being spotted. I compromised for following fairly close in another lane and trusting the traffic to cover me.

Adam turned onto Cedar Springs. We were heading for—where? The airport? His apartment? I’d never visited his home, though he’d been to mine several times. We cruised down to a short stretch of bars, and Adam’s brake lights came on as he turned. I went past and found a street parking place. As I finished the parallel parking, he appeared around the corner on foot and disappeared into the second bar on the block. I darted across the street and followed him inside.

The loud pulse of music assaulted me as the doors slid open—they were large solid smoked-glass doors on electronic eyes—and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I realized that I was facing a blank dark wall. Tb my left a bored-looking bouncer sat checking ID; I dug mine out and was waved inside.

I turned the corner into a jammed room that trembled from the force of the speakers on the walls and vibrated in the reflected colors of big-screen videos. I turned to the bar and ordered a beer. As I turned back to the room in search of Adam, I realized that I was in a gay bar.

Not just a gay bar. A gaystripbar. I took a swallow of my beer as a new dancer mounted the stage and began gyrating in a tiny leaf-shaped G string, to the cheers and claps of a row of young preppily dressed men, half of them still in their suits. One of them with his Ferry Ellis tie knocked askew got up and waved a dollar bill at the dancer, who favored him with a professionally appreciative smile and knelt so that his crotch was at eye level. I took another drink of my beer, a long one, and wondered how in the hell the dancer could manage to keep smiling while the suit felt around considerably more than was necessary to get the dollar under the elastic strap of the G-string.

“You like it?” someone shouted in my ear. I turned to see a pleasant-faced young man standing next to me, taking a swig of his drink. He indicated the dancers. I shrugged. “Yeah, takes some getting used to. Trust me, though. You’ve got to stay for the contest.”

“Contest?” I repeated vaguely while I kept looking for Adam. The place was a madhouse, and the flickering colors made everybody anonymous. My new friend smiled.

“Strip-off. They take volunteers.” His smile widened and became positively admiring. “You’d do pretty well. You ought to try it.”

“Sorry, I don’t think so. I’m looking for a friend.”

“I’ma friend,” he objected forlornly as I slipped away through the crowd. The booze and hormones had obviously been flowing pretty strong most of the night, because I got groped as I struggled through the press of bodies. I suppose that was a compliment. I didn’t feel particularly complimented.

I wanted to find Adam badly. Adam, even with all his newfound inhuman menace, would be a rock to cling to here. I took another drink of my beer and realized that I’d guzzled the entire bottle. Somebody offered to buy me a new one, and I took the offer more out of desperation than flirtation. It took another ten minutes to convince him that I wasn’t willing to take a walk with him, and even then I only escaped in the hopes of gaining some privacy in the bathroom.

No such luck. There weren’t any doors on the stalls. I used the urinal and ducked back out again. I collided with a woman in the dark crowded hallway.

“Excuse you!” she laughed, and pushed me back. If the throaty purr hadn’t given her away, the next flash of light would have; they might be wearing the clothes, but she hadn’t been born with the plumbing. For a transvestite, though, she was surprisingly shapely in the tight-fitting tube dress and fishnet stockings. “Sorry, honey, I’m taken. Hmm, then again—you look new. Are you new? You want to join the contest?”

I managed to get away without volunteering. She mounted the stage, teased the dancers, and began emceeing the amateur contest. I used the diversion to scan the room again, and this time I spotted the one I was looking for.

He shone in the blue neon flicker of the TV like a glass sculpture. He was stooping slightly to listen to a lean young man in a leather jacket; as I watched, Adam nodded and made a lazy gesture toward the back. I ducked out of the way as the leather-clad kid and Adam slid by, then followed in their wake. They went out a side door that opened into a little courtyard. A few people stood around in the cooling air, mostly men but a few women scattered around. Adam and his friend walked through them and out a wooden gate to the parking lot beyond. I hesitated, then plunged back inside and through the bar again. I came out the front and edged carefully around the side of the building.

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