Page 65 of The Undead

He wasn’t allowing himself to think of what William might have done, or might still do. He couldn’t do that and retain any vestige of humanity.

I wasn’t any less concerned about Sylvia, but the cab was a new and unpleasant sensory experience for me. Since I’d woken—changed—turned—whatever the verb of choice was for a recovering corpse—I’d often felt the wish to gag, and not the ability. No problem now. I had shut down breathing, but it didn’t much help. The odors crowded in on me and crowded down my nose to land gleefully on my taste buds: old urine, new vomit, rank sweat, pungent human body odor reeking of garlic and stale farts, undamped by any sort of polite deodorant masking. I rolled down the window and turned my face toward the breeze gratefully.

I wondered what I would have vomited, if I’d succumbed to the impulse. That made me fed even sicker.

“Hey!” our cab driver, a happy sort of guy and the unmistakable source of the body odor, hailed. We were somewhere about halfway there. He turned around, grinning. He had one silver tooth on the bottom, an incisor, that winked at us in the dashboard lights, mimicking the aluminum Jesus that bobbled on a neon-green cord from the rearview mirror. “Hey, you look like partying dudes. Want me to steer you to some really good places? No extra, man, I mean it. Really.”

Oh, man,I thought, too late, and turned toward Adam. Adam, not nailed down tightly to begin with, exploded. He lunged forward, caught the man’s collar in a throttling grip; his face was all the more menacing for being so completely expressionless. The passing taillights of a car caught and flared in his eyes behind the concealing glasses. I knew what that brief instant of stillness meant. Adam struggled against an overwhelming need to kill something. Anything.

“Drive,” he finally grated, and let the man go. The car wiggled in alarm, then straightened out with a hissing slide of rubber. The cab driver drove at rigid attention, hands in the two-ten position endorsed by driving instructors everywhere. When the cab’s two-way radio spewed a garbled message at him, he flinched as if it had sunk teeth in him, and ignored it. We did well over the speed limit.

The cabbie let us out at the curb and shot off, fishtailing into the street. His departure was heralded with barking dogs and lights coming on; Sylvia’s neighbors moved their curtains to stare. Adam didn’t even seem to notice, and I knew he didn’t care.

He stood still, silent, staring at the house. When I stepped over to him, his eyes slowly turned to fix on mine.

There was something—something in his face—I felt my mind go blank.

“Is she … is—” I couldn’t say it. He stared at me.

“Michael,” he began, and then stopped. Something terrible burned for a second in the darkly banked embers of his eyes, something that had no kinship to humanity. His voice, absurdly ordinary and calm, seemed to come from a whole different creature—the Adam of what seemed so long ago, the one who came to my house and laughed at Maggie’s jokes and won at Trivial Pursuit, to his own great amusement and buried joy. That voice shouldn’t have been here, facing this overwhelming pain. “Go away. Get out of here. It isn’t your problem.”

“Shut up,” I said, as gently as I could. His eyes sliced into me, dissected my soul; after a long moment he extended a hand to me. I took it, feeling the strength under his skin, the trembling rage. Adam’s eyes flashed briefly in the moonlight, blood-red; he nodded, let go, and turned toward the house.

He didn’t falter as we went up the sidewalk to the door; not even when he saw what was written in blood on the glass of the storm door, welcome home. It was neatly printed, ruler-straight except for the long thin ribbons of red that had broken out of the letters and glittered like dark tears on the way to the stoop. Adam opened the storm door and tried the knob. Locked. When he fumbled for his keys I finally saw a tremor in his hands, but it didn’t stop him from getting the key in the lock and turning it. The door opened with a slight hiss as the weatherstripping unsealed, and we walked into the blazing entryway.

Blazing because the lights were dialed up to dazzling brilliance. I stopped after two steps and couldn’t seem to go on, so weighted with dread that I couldn’t take those last few feet to discovery. Adam, moving like a ghost, went to the end of the hallway. His back was absolutely rigid, every muscle clenched and crying out in silent screams.

We stood there, locked in our fear, until I finally moved off into the kitchen. Nothing. The room was exactly the way we’d left it. I forced myself to do all the things I remembered from late-night horror shows: open the refrigerator (nearly empty); open all the cabinet doors (same); the washer and dryer in the attached laundry room. I wanted to weep with relief when I found nothing. When I went back into the entryway Adam was gone. My hands were trembling. I took the living room next, methodically opening every space that might have held—anything. When I opened up the washed-oak desk in the corner, a photograph slid down from a pile of unpaid bills. Sylvia, younger, her arm around a tall sweet-faced man who smiled uncomfortably at me out of the picture. I’d never seen him before.

Strange, how vividly I sensed her presence, smelled her perfume, heard the strong signature of her heartbeat. As if she stood behind me.

“Mike.”

I looked up, startled. Adam leaned over the upstairs railing, lacking any expression at all. We stared at each other for a few long seconds.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing,” he agreed. He moved along the rail to the stairs and came slowly down. He sat on the third step, elbows braced on his knees, palms massaging his temples as if the grief locked inside were shattering its way out. “He brought her here, then left again. What did he do?”

I didn’t answer him. I had no idea. Adam’s fingers rubbed at his temples, his forehead. Stopped.

“Adam?” I asked. He stared straight ahead. After a few seconds he stood up and walked through the living room to the kitchen. I followed, uncertain, and watched him open the cabinet under the sink. He took out Windex and paper towels and went through the entryway to the screen door.

He went outside, sprayed Windex on the blood, and began methodically wiping it off. Through the pinkish streaks and tiny white bubbles I saw his face, at last, show his suffering, as it had in the dub when he’d played the piano and wept for a girl named Julie. The ammoniac mist from the cleaner burned its way into my throat, and I swallowed convulsively. Adam dropped the blood-smeared paper towel and got another. He used five altogether, the last three showing nothing but the damp blotting of Windex.

“Adam?” I asked him. He looked at me through the dear glass, and then looked down at the bloody towel.

“It’s her blood,” he said in a conversational tone. “I wonder where the rest of it’s gone.”

Christ. I felt my stomach lurch as if he’d reached through the glass, through the skin and muscle, to wrap his strong white hand around it.

“You can’t know that it’s her blood,” I blurted, just to hear something reassuring. He picked up the trash and came back inside, pausing close enough that I could see the sparks flying in his eyes, the strange flat shine. His eyes looked dead. “It’s a mind game, man. William’s sense of humor.”

“Lock the door,” he said, and went back into the kitchen.

I found my fingers were still trembling when I reached out to obey him.

We had been searching in silence, without hope or conversation, for some time when I heard the car arrive outside. Adam heard it too, and lifted his head from examination of that same photograph I’d found on the desk. Something rippled over his face, but it wasn’t hope.

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