Page 70 of The Undead

“I know,” she murmured, and slid away. I rested my head against the upholstery and watched her walk up to the house.

“You’re a fool,” Adam said, very softly. I didn’t move.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “Who’s Caroline?”

I’d fired blind, and I’d hit. I felt him flinch, then go very still.

“What?” he asked. I smiled slightly.

“That first night, when you were trying to get me to drink up, you told me you’d watched Caroline die twice. So who’s Caroline?”

Adam’s voice, when it came, was from a long, painful distance.

“Nobody,” he murmured. “I wish I could tell you, could make you believe—the happiness is brief, Michael, but the pain keeps coming. It never stops. And every time you touch her you know what she is, what you are. It’s not the same, and you can’t ever be human with her, not now. Not fully human.”

“That how you feel with Sylvia?” I asked. He didn’t quite tense up.

“Yes.” It was a hard, unyielding answer meant to end the conversation, but I wasn’t done yet.

“What happened to her? To Caroline?”

Adam leaned back in the limited confines of the Volvo, too tall to be comfortable and probably as tetchy as I was about small enclosed places.

“After a year of—knowing me, she died of fever. I brought her back—for a few hours. But she wouldn’t drink, she just stared at me with those fevered eyes, just waiting to go back to the dark. And I had to let her go.”

He shifted a little. I sensed that, even though he made no sound.

“Someday you’ll have to lethergo,” he said.

I wasn’t sure, afterward, if he meant me and Maggie, or he and Sylvia.

I don’t know which of us sensed it first, but Adam was the one who first spoke and gave my fear reality. He leaned forward, eyes distant and intent.

“She isn’t alone,” he said. And I smelled—sensed?—the presence of somebody in the house, darting around Maggie’s bright life. Something tightened up in my guts—that dagger again, doing its duty. “Come on.”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. There was a feeling bubbling up in me that burned as clean as add. I honestly didn’t know what it was. As angry as I’d been in the past few days, this was something that put itself well beyond mere human anger. I stepped out of the car and felt the night settle around me like a second skin in seductive welcome.

Adam knew where the back door was as well as I did, and he got there before me—barely. In my present mood I would have taken the thing off the hinges, but he applied a little discreet pressure and eased it silently open. The hallway was dark and quiet, so thickly crowded with familiar smells and memories that I faltered under their crush. Adam’s cool hand gripped my shoulder and steadied me. My fingers brushed a framed photo of my father, squinting seriously out at me from a distance of years and cancerous pain. Maggie’s college graduation picture hung opposite. As I came to the end of the hall, I saw the lights were on in the den.

Adam’s hand fell on my shoulder again, holding me still. A smell cut through the fog of Maggie’s perfume and memories—new, out of place, gaggingly strong. Nick’s aftershave, freshly applied. There were heartbeats in the den; I went for them in mindless rage. Adam pulled me back. He had to fight me to do it.

“Quiet!” he whispered when I tried to open my mouth. The smell of Nick was so hatefully overwhelming that I could feel it coating my mouth even though I’d taken care not to breathe. It tasted foul and slimy. “Outside.”

“No!” I spat raggedly. Maggie’s heartbeat, on the other side of the hallway wall, was uneven and hammered with adrenaline. I wouldn’t leave her, not again.

“Just shut up and do as I tell you. Get out!” Adam didn’t wait for my obedience, just grabbed me and propelled me in the direction of the door.

Not this time, my friend. I’d had enough of being the nice boy, and I’d had enough of Nick Gianoulos to make me puke. I twisted and slammed my hand into Adam’s chest, drove him up against the wall and Maggie’s college picture. Something fell and shattered. I darted around him into the darkness.

“What the fuck was that?” I heard somebody ask. It wasn’t Nick; he’d brought a friend, which was fine with me. I must have just loomed up out of the darkness; he screamed when he came face to face with me, and with an instinct I didn’t know I possessed, I knew that he was no friend of mine, or Maggie’s, or even Nick’s.

He had an uncorked gas can in one hand. As he stumbled backward he dropped it, adding the stench of processed dead dinosaurs to Nick’s Old Spice. He was carrying something in his other hand—the portable TV from the den.

He’d picked a really bad evening to rob my house.

I hit him so hard that I felt bones break under my hand, and more gave way when I dragged him up by the neck. I was too angry to be careful. The thin fragile cartilage of his throat crumpled like tissue paper, and blood spurted out over my hands in a warm welcome flood. The smell almost overpowered the gas. I froze, disoriented, and raised my hands to my face.

The den door slammed open, and I was introduced to another of the scavengers. He looked more like a car salesman than a thug, but the gun he held convinced me that he hadn’t made a house call to sell Maggie a new Bronco. I reached out and grabbed him by the throat, using a little more care than I had with the first one.

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