Until You Are Dead by John Lutz Page A

suddenness, she had visited him. She had looked so much older that Millow hardly recognized her. So much older! Her blonde hair had turned a lusterless gray, her full lips had become thin and sunken, her once graceful figure was now thick and stocky. It could be that she finally came to see him because in a strange way she was indebted to him. He had loved her enough to kill for her. And yet there might have been something else, something he could never fathom.
    Every Sunday then, for the next three years, Marian came and sat and talked to him through the clear Plexiglas shield. And then one Sunday she didn't come, and he heard that she'd died. That was all he heard, but he managed to clip her obituary from the newspaper, and he still had it, curled and yellowed, among his personal effects.
    How was it he still missed Marian, not the young Marian who was only a dream, but the Marian who had come to visit him faithfully every Sunday afternoon for those three years? A man who was dead in everything but body should miss no one.
    The accelerated healing pain in Millow's chest was growing. Strangely, as if the pain had been anticipated, a young intern entered and injected him with a sedative.
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    D ays passed in dizzying cycles of wakefulness and sleep. Then one morning when Millow awoke, Dr. Steinmetz was there, his eyes smiling behind the dark glass frames.
    "You're progressing nicely, Marvin."
    Millow said nothing. The pain was still in his chest, though not as bad, and he felt slightly nauseous most of the time.
    "You should be well enough to have visitors soon," Steinmetz said, studying some X-rays he had in a yellow folder.
    "Tell the warden he can see me anytime," Millow said, and immediately he was sorry he'd said it, for he saw that it gave Steinmetz some small satisfaction to see that the patient was recovering his sense of humor.
    Millow drew a deep breath and focused his gaze on the doctor. "I almost died this time, didn't I?"
    Dr. Steinmetz nodded. "It was rather close — until we got you to the operating room."
    "I wish you had let me die," Millow said. "Just living is no reason to want to live. A man has to have something, some hope or interest in the future."
    "You may be right," Steinmetz agreed, surprising Millow with his frank reply.
    Millow let his head sink back into the soft white pillows. He only knew he didn't want to spend even one more endless night back in his cell, pacing on stiff, unwilling ninety six-year-old legs, while the thing inside him paced.
    "I'll check with you the beginning of next week," Dr. Steinmetz said, pinching the yellow folder closed and smiling.
    "I'll be here," Millow said as the doctor left and the door locked automatically behind him.
    The room was as small and bland as Millow's cell, and like his cell there was no escape from it except death. But they were careful to eliminate even that avenue to freedom. Every item and furnishing in the rooms and cells of the prison were dull, soft and harmless as possible. If only one of the nurses or an intern would forget and leave a sharp instrument behind! A scissors, a glass bottle he could break! Anything! Millow sighed. He probably wouldn't even have time to bleed to death. They'd check him on the closed cir cuit viewscanner and pump more of the cursed artificial blood in him to prolong his artificial life.
    As he'd promised, Dr. Steinmetz came to see Millow at the beginning of the week. The doctor looked unusually cheerful, even for him.
    "How's the unwilling patient today?"
    "Feeling better, damn you!"
    Steinmetz laughed. "Yes, you must be improving, though naturally there's still some pain. You were on the operating table a long time."
    "It still hurts," Millow said, "but not as much."
    "You'll be on your feet shortly," Steinmetz said, "and as brooding and unhappy as ever."
    "That's comforting."
    A buzzer sounded, one long, one short. Dr. Steinmetz, his features set in an absent smile, looked up. "That's for me," he said to