Page 44 of The Undead

Adam touched a control by the “door,” activating a very dim soothing light, bringing back color and depth. It looked like a regular room, in every respect—except that in place of windows Adam had hung pictures of landscapes and seas to break the monotony of the white walls. One entire wall was covered with bookcases, jammed helter-skelter with leather-bound classics and dog-eared paperbacks. The shelves were deeper than normal, and he’d layered them three deep with rows of books. There were hundreds—thousands—and stacks teetering untidily in both corners that hadn’t found a place on the shelves yet.

Adam led me to the nearest bed and sat me down. It felt like a regular mattress. The pillow felt equally normal. I sighed and let the tension drain out of my limbs, then sat up to drag off my shoes. I managed it after a grim, clumsy battle, and discovered something curious. I wasn’t wearing any socks.

Adam sat on the other bed, watching, not making a move to help me. I forced my trembling, nearly numb fingers to the task of unbuttoning my shirt. Triumph. My pants.

I wasn’t wearing any underwear, either.

Adam tossed me a pair of pajama bottoms, no expression on his face.

“I dressed you in a hurry. The underwear seemed a little superfluous, sorry.” His smile was gentle and distracted. “You’ve been to a morgue before. They don’t slab you in your suit, Doctor.”

I clutched the cool cotton pajamas and felt my mind slipping away and around that inevitable image. I didn’t remember it, mercifully. I didn’t remember anything from death to Adam’s voice.

After a long, aching moment I concentrated on the monumental task of pushing my feet through the pajama legs. When I’d accomplished it, Adam got up again and collected my suit jacket, shirt, and pants. He opened a closet door and hung them up.

It had the eerie feeling of the times my college roommate had driven me home from a frat party, poured me into bed, and hung up my clothes for me. Steve. Where was Steve, anyway? Even if Steve had ended up a drunken bum, I’d have traded with him at this moment.

Adam shut the closet door and came back to look at me. Something strange moved in his eyes—regret? Yes. I was almost sure it was regret.

“Rest,” he told me. “I’ll be back before dawn.”

He started to say something else, then shook his head and turned a stainless steel knob on this side of the door to pop it open. I watched him go, then struggled up to my feet and walked over to the bookcases.

An extremely old edition ofGulliver’s Travels.A King James Bible, ancient and tattered, lay next to a scholarly text on cults and cultists. Andrew Greeley. Ian Fleming’s entire Bond series. Nero Wolfe. Sherlock Holmes. I wondered how Sherlock would react if he knew he was shelved next to Jackie Collins.

Only in the lowest right corner of the bookcase was any real organization apparent. In that shelf Adam had collected every work he could find on the subject of vampires, from Stoker to P. N. Elrod. I’d never realized there were so many. I pulled one at random and took it back to bed, but the words just sat on the page, mute and uncommunicative.

It was a big difference, living a fantasy.

Adam’s entry was so quiet that it took me by surprise; in this windowless room, unadorned by so much as a travel alarm, it was hard to gauge time. He was just there, suddenly, with the panel gliding shut behind him, and I could see, with my newly enhanced vision, the heat in his skin. It showed up as a faint glow, fading even as I noticed it.

“Sun’s coming up,” Adam told me tersely, and stripped off his clothes to toss them in the closet. There was a vivid white star-shaped scar on his back; as he finished pulling on pajama bottoms and walked toward his bed, I saw that there was a matching blaze on his chest, too. Something had gone all the way through—over his heart.

That was a death-wound. It looked old.

“Sunup means we die, Mikey—for a little while, if we stay out of the direct light, or permanently, if we’re caught out in it. You’ll start to feel the pull in a minute. Don’t fight it.” Adam settled himself in bed, turned his head, and looked directly at me. “It doesn’t hurt. Just try not to panic.”

His tone didn’t hold much hope. I wondered how often he’d panicked, before dying had become as much ritual as waking up. I wondered if he still panicked, in spite of what he said.

The first rays of the sun fell over the house. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew; it was a sensation like a cold knife sliding into my back, water spilling into my lungs … I gasped in air automatically, air I didn’t need except to make some unintelligible sound of terror. Adam’s eyes were still turned in my direction, dark, getting dark, going blind.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and his voice ground to a nightmarish halt in my ears, breaking into the shriek of breaking glass and ripping metal and the red drip of my escaping life.

The sun came up. I went down, into darkness, screaming.

Chapter Ten

The Enemy

Adam forgot to warn me about waking up.

I lay in a shaking huddle, tangled in dry cool sheets, and clutched my head as if I could dig the sensations out of it. After a while the futility of that occurred to me, and the disorientation passed into white silence. I felt—alien. I was terrified, but I wasn’t sweating; my heart was silent, not pounding as it ought to. I wasn’t gasping for breath. The only thing human left in my response was the shivering—and the terror. I finally unclenched my muscles and stretched out on my back, staring at the windowless tomb that was my new bedroom.

Adam’s bed was empty. There was water running in the house, distant but clear to my undistracted ears. Amazing how easy it was to hear without all those internal bodily noises, like heartbeat and the rush of breath. Adam in the shower? The idea came as a strange shock, but I supposed hygiene continued to be a consideration, dead or alive. Maybe, I thought sickly, more of a considerationafterdeath.

The memory came to me, unbidden, of Maggie’s skin against mine under the warm spray of the shower. I shoved it away and distracted myself by getting to my feet.

It was surprisingly easy. I didn’t waver much. My fingers, when I worked them experimentally, seemed nearly back to normal efficiency. I tried them out on the doorhandle. It didn’t turn. I exerted more force. Nothing. I yanked in a fury at it, rattled the metal, even bent the stainless steel knob into a knobby oval with the force of my rage. It didn’t open. I turned in a claustrophobic circle. Walls, walls, walls, ceiling, floor. Nothing. No way out.

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