After the Dark by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

hope—who was it that said, “It's not the despair, I can handle the despair . . . it's the hope!”
    Nonetheless, something
was
different this time. Logan should have been sweating profusely by now, in the merciless grip of chills, with seizures not far 'round the corner. Yet he felt warm against her—not feverish. He smelled good, that fresh cocktail of aftershave and powder she knew so well—as if he'd spruced up for her, anticipating that this evening might be the night of love they'd both longed for, a honeymoon about to happen, not a damn death watch. She loved the aroma and took it deep into her lungs, feeling greedy for it, knowing this sensation was one that would likely have to last her the rest of her life.
    She heard a faint knock. Logan didn't react, but she sat up, just as the knock repeated, this time more forcefully, and Logan jumped a little next to her.
    “Gotta love a doctor who makes house calls,” he said as he started to sit up.
    Max pushed him back down into the pillow and climbed off the bed herself. “You stay right here, mister—you're the patient, I'm the nurse, and I'll fetch the doctor. Chain of command, clear?”
    “Yes, ma'am.”
    But she was already out of the bedroom and into the large room with its dividers that cordoned-off sections. The kitchen, with all its postmodern stainless steel appliances, and the dining area, with an oak table large enough for six, were off to her right. The apartment was similar to the one Ames White and his NSA minions had trashed last year, with a comforting familiarity about it—like the living room with its monstrous leather sofa, three chairs, coffee table, and lawn-sized area rug, directly in front of her, and Logan's office space to her left in the rear of the spacious quarters. A door at the far end of the room led to the tunnel that connected them to Terminal City, and the door to the right, the one that Dr. Sam Carr was presumably pounding on now, opened to the street.
    After a quick check of the small monitor to one side of the entry—a video peephole of sorts—Max flung the door open to reveal Dr. Carr in a heavy blue parka, the hood pulled up to protect the man's balding head from the wind. A gust whipped into the apartment, helping Carr inside. He and Max didn't even bother to speak until the door was firmly bolted against the nasty weather.
    “Where is he?” Carr asked, handing Max his Gladstone bag, then slipping off his coat and hanging it over the back of a dinner-table chair.
    Perhaps five-ten, with a forehead that stopped at the apex of his skull, Carr had short dark hair that covered the back and sides of his oval-shaped head like a yarmulke with flaps. His dark eyes had the resigned sadness tinged with kindness of a man who'd spent a career listening to people's problems; his nose was long and straight, his mouth sensitive, his chin cleft.
    “Bedroom,” Max said.
    “How'd it happen? You've been careful.”
    She told him.
    “Be surprised how many people die stupidly around Christmas.” Shaking his head, Carr took the Gladstone bag from her. “Frankly, I don't know what I can do for him. We can try a transfusion from another transgenic, but—”
    “Don't you usually examine a patient first, then make your diagnosis and treatment?”
    Carr's eyes tensed. “What's going on here, Max?”
    “That's what I'd like to know—go look him over.”
    She was trying to keep the hope out of her voice, and Carr seemed to be reading that as despair, keeping his eyes on her even as he crossed to the bedroom, where he slipped inside.
    Max flopped onto the couch, trying to force all feeling and emotion from herself. Let the doctor do his work—let him examine his patient, and science would determine whether Logan Cale had a future . . .
    She didn't dare embrace these hopeful feelings. It was going on half an hour since her hair blew into Logan's face, and he seemed fine. But how could that be so? Renfro herself—Manticore's final