Page 91 of The Undead

Adam, still moving so slowly he might have been underwater, bent forward until his head touched his knee.

“I’m yours,” he simply said. Lifeless, that voice. Not Adam’s voice at all. “You don’t need him now. He’s nothing to you.”

“True,” William agreed, and looked back at me. His eyes were suddenly impersonal and insectile. He reached out and grabbed hold of the wooden stake in my chest; I felt it press forward, ever so slightly, and my body convulsed in response.

William pulled it out in one smooth motion. I flopped like a fish, out of control with the burning agony; without pause he pulled the wood from my left hand, then my right. I collapsed to the carpet almost on top of Rebecca Foster and watched the blood pour from the two circular holes in my hands.

Foster ignored me and began a single-minded crawl toward Adam. Her mouth opened and closed with dry bony clashes of her teeth.

“Get up,” William told me softly. “Get out. This is the only chance you have.”

“That’s no chance. It’s dawn,” Adam said, not protesting, just stating a fact. William looked up from his contemplation of me and my pain.

“More of a chance than staying here.” William smiled. I found the strength somehow, somewhere, to clutch my hands clumsily to my chest and sway to my knees—to my feet. “Go, Michael. I like you. I might want to play again someday.”

Adam was staring at me. In his face I thought I saw a flash of what he really felt—something burning white and pure like the dead center of a nuclear explosion—and then it was gone, locked behind smooth shiny concentration. I had to pass him. The distance between us seemed to stretch into miles, and each step took an intricate amount of effort. My body had lost too much blood, and I could feel my veins lying loose and flaccid under the skin, desiccated and exhausted. It was only will holding me together now—and pain.

Nice to make pain work for me, for a change.

Adam stayed where he was, unmoving, until my legs failed me. I pitched forward, helpless to gravity, and he caught me and held me for a long second against his chest.

“Trust me,” he whispered. He released me; I managed to stand up without falling again while he reached in his pocket and took out a small green bottle with a rag stuffed in the mouth.

“What are you doing?” William asked, not angry, just curious. Adam took out a book of matches.

“Well,” Adam said softly as he set the bottle down, “Father, as it happens, there is one thing I do better than you. Do you know what it is?”

I froze. Adam struck a match, then lit the cover of the matchbook. It started to blaze merrily.

“No!” William roared. It wasn’t a human voice, it didn’t come from a human throat; it vibrated around the room and flaked plaster from the wall that was streaked with my blood. Foster, only halfway to her goal, drew herself into a fetal ball. William’s pupils expanded to fill his eyes, lid to lid, a thick black film of pure fury. “No!”

Oh, he understood. I think we all did, in the instant of the match striking. The stink of sulfur rolled through the air and raised the hackles on my neck, but Adam only smiled a simple, peaceful smile and touched the burning matchbook to the rag in the bottle’s mouth. It ignited.

Adam picked up the bottle. William took a big step back, suddenly smaller in the growing day as Adam tossed the matchbook at him, a flaming missile that fell short by inches. William backed away again, fangs down, snarling.

“Afraid?” Adam asked. His voice wasn’t soft anymore, it was hard and metallic and angry. “Why? You wanted a chance at me. Come and get me, you fucker. You could have done anything at all to me, you know, God knows you have before. But you broke all the rules when you took Sylvia. These aremyrules,Dad.Trial by fire.”

The rag was burning close to the mouth of the bottle. Adam turned to me, and our eyes met again. He smiled slightly, an amused, sardonic, half-bitter smile that touched me deeper than he knew. It sliced through the pain and opened a new, bloodier wound.

“Maggie’s outside,” he said. “Go. Take care of her.”

He must have seen that I couldn’t make it on my own. He reached out, took hold of my shirt front, and literally threw me through the open door. I crashed through the plate-glass door beyond and rolled to a stop at the top of the cracked concrete steps. I could still see Adam from there as I twisted around.

Foster was looking in my direction. I saw her lips move.

Help me, she said.

Oh God, I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

Adam threw the bottle in a perfect arc to shatter against the wall marked with my blood, and the gas exploded into a fireball that took instant hungry hold of the ancient carpet and molding wall. And Rebecca Foster, who wreathed herself in a crown of fire and a robe of flame like a martyr in an icon.

I will never forget her face.

“Adam!” I screamed, and tried to get to my hands and knees. “Goddammit, come on! Come on!”

I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined that he was far away from me, some place private, terrible, and painful. Adam took another bottle out of his other pocket and walked toward the inferno where Foster lay burning and dying.

“No!” I screamed. Or tried; I couldn’t seem to get my lungs to work properly. He looked over his shoulder at me, then dropped the bottle in the lake of fire growing from Foster’s writhing body.

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