Undead and Undermined Read Online Free PDF Page A

was oozing with strawberry-banana smoothies. It was a lava flow of delicious strawberry-icy goodness!
    He poured himself a generous cup, stared at the fridge where Tina kept her vodka, debated leaping off the wagon, decided to cling to said wagon for another hour, turned away from the fridge, and plopped onto one of the kitchen chairs around our big, wide wooden table. You could slaughter and dress a moose on the thing. We mostly just drank smoothies there, though.
    A quick word about Tina’s vodka collection. Like all vampires, she was constantly thirsty. Unlike many ( many being my code for less than a dozen ) she tried to keep it at bay with frozen drinks made from potatoes. She also adored variety. Not that you could tell from her schoolgirl-bait wardrobe. Wait. Did schoolgirl-bait mean she was dressing to bait schoolgirls or was bait to people who liked—argh, focus!
    Anyway, in our freezer lurked cinnamon-flavored vodka and bacon-flavored vodka. Ditto chili pepper and bison grass and bubble gum. Go ahead and barf . . . I nearly did.
    “Now that you two’ve finished your unholy banging,” Marc began, taking a monster slurp, “tell me all about the past. Is it smelly? Is the food great? Do they really say ‘prithee’? And how come Laura’s not here?”
    “Laura didn’t come back with me.” Even as I said it I realized it was weird. “I mean, she made a doorway to here for me, but she stayed in hell. Or made herself a doorway and went to her apartment from hell. Or both. Or neither.”
    “Ah, beloved, one of the things I most cherish about you is your attention to detail.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ll cherish you for shutting up now. I’m not my sister’s keeper.” Though if anyone needed one, the Antichrist qualified.
    Marc was gulping his smoothie, and Jessica and Nick were watching him with some fascination. He had told me once that he’d gotten in the habit of bolting liquid meals when he was an intern. He could gulp down the equivalent of two pints of strawberries in three monster swallows. When he was off the wagon, he drank all his meals.
    It was an indicator of how little I wanted to talk about the future and the past by how interested I was letting myself get in something I was normally leery about discussing. “Uh, so, how are the AA meetings going?”
    He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Don’t take my inventory, Betsy.”
    “I don’t know what that means,” I admitted over Nick’s snort.
    “It means addicts in recovery know what they’re supposed to do to stay clean and whether or not they’re doing it. They dislike being reminded of it.”
    “Is that what you are?” Sinclair asked with interest. “In recovery?”
    “Nah.” Slurp. “People in recovery go to meetings. I’m a drunk.”
    I clapped a hand over my mouth, but not in time. Marc grinned at my insensitive titter.
    I’d never understand why he couldn’t find someone and settle down. He was smart, he was gorgeous, he had true green eyes (d’you know how rare that is? True green, not hazel?). He had black hair, currently cut brutally short into, I’m sorry to report, the Woody Harrelson. He was in his usual outfit of scrubs and his iPod. He was famous at the hospital for listening to heartbeats with one ear and They Might Be Giants in the other.
    I know. They Might Be Giants? More like they might be one-hit wonders.
    “But you know the old saying,” Marc was saying, “tomorrow being another day and such. And I can’t take credit for that . . . I think Stephen King said it first.”
    “Margaret Mitchell did.”
    “Not the another-day line. The addicts-go-to-AA line.”
    “Like you even read Gone With the Wind ,” I said. I mentioned how delighted I was in talking about stupid crap instead of the future, right? “Ha!”
    Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think there was much funny about addiction, outside of Sandra Bullock in 28 Days . And I won’t deny being mystified by 28 Days Later . . . she was nowhere to be found in