My mood did backflips while I pulled the mop and bucket out of the closet. I knew I should be more freaked out, but weirdly it all made sense considering everything else I’d experienced. I’d bled totally normally when the van wrecked, but I was well-fed on brains at the time.
Was I really alive at all? Or was I more alive when I was full on brains, and less when I wasn’t?
Scowling, I swiped the mop across the floor. What difference did it make anyway? I was still moving, and that was what ultimately mattered.
Right?
Right. Being kinda dead is nothing to worry about at all, I thought.
I turned my attention to the sinkful of nasty dishes and did my best to put questions about how alive I was or wasn’t out of my head. By the time the lasagna was done the floor was clean, the dishes were washed and put away, and I’d managed to replace my worry over my degree of alive-ness with a healthy distaste for how dirty the kitchen had been.
This is the cleanest this place has been in years, I thought with a grimace as I pulled the food out of the oven. Had my dad and I simply given up? Yeah, that’s exactly what we did. It didn’t happen immediately, but after Mom was gone somehow we came to a point where we accepted that there was no point in trying to keep things clean or make things right. I know I had.
But now my situation wasn’t complete shit. Or rather, it was shit in different ways. I ate brains, but at least now I knew I wasn’t crazy. Not after seeing the other zombie. I knew what I was—well, I was about 98% sure—even if I had no fucking idea how I’d ended up that way.
However, right now I wasn’t craving brains as much as a damn clue. How the fuck did this happen to me? Shit, maybe I did overdose, and then . . . what? Maybe Zeke the Zombie could fill me in. I’d told him to come to the morgue, but what if he came by while I was out on this leave? Would he come back? I wasn’t all that eager to share brains with him, but I was also getting desperate for some information, some sort of framework I could put this whole crazy scenario into.
Surely he’d come back. He needed brains.
And so do I. Yeah, I’m a brain eater. A zombie. That’s still shit. That’s not normal. I was never going to be normal again. Why the hell was I trying so hard?
Chapter 13
I practically sang for joy when I got the call at six A.M. to pick up a body.
I’d never been so eager to get back to work in my entire life. And, strangely, it wasn’t only because I was completely out of brains. Yeah that was a huge part of it, especially since I was feeling more and more dead—the sky looked grey, even though it was cloudless, and I’d turned the radio off because it sounded like a bunch of tuneless jangling. Plus, I was obscenely hungry. But for the first time I actually felt as if I was “one of the gang” where I worked. Maybe it had something to do with the type of job it was. Maybe we felt closer to each other because no one else could possibly understand what it was like to be around death all the time.
I snorted. Look at me, trying to be all philosophical and shit. Maybe I simply liked my job because the money was good, the people were cool, and it wasn’t in a convenience store. Either way, I was damn glad to be back at it.
As I neared the address, I let out a low whistle. This was no ordinary body pickup. The street was lined with sheriff’s cars and a bunch of unmarked cars, as well as two crime scene vans. An ambulance was departing in the opposite direction as I neared the address, but it didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
This is a crime scene, I realized with an absurd little thrill. A real one, not simply some guy who dropped dead in his living room. It must be a murder!
Okay, it wasn’t as if I wanted someone to get knocked off. I wasn’t that much of a sicko. But I totally loved all those forensic cop shows, and this would be my first chance to really see the whole crime scene investigation thing up close, not merely watching a bored tech snapping some pics and taking a few measurements.
The ambulance had left a convenient opening in the row of cars, and I quickly pulled the van in before anyone else could claim it. Climbing out of the van, I saw that Derrel hadn’t been so fortunate and was walking up to the house from practically the other end of the block.
“Lucky bitch,” he said with a good-natured grumble, nodding to my primo parking spot.
“That’s me,” I replied. “And I’d have double-parked the damn thing if there’d been no spot. I ain’t pushing a body down to the end of the street!”
Laughing, he gave me a wink and a thumbs up before he headed into the backyard. I grinned, spirits absurdly buoyed by the silly little show of camaraderie. Yeah, I was pretty easy to please. I tugged the stretcher and body bag out of the back of the van, kicked the doors closed and headed to the backyard, whistling as I pushed the stretcher before me. Crime tape was strung across the entrance to the backyard, and I enjoyed a dorky little thrill as I signed my name on the crime scene log before ducking under the tape.
We were in the backyard of a two-story brick house in the sort of subdivision that desperately wanted to be considered upscale but couldn’t manage to break out of slightly above average. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the yard was expensively landscaped—decorative trees and artistically placed clumps of flowers, a koi pond in the corner complete with a cute wooden bridge over it that led to an equally cute gazebo, and expensive-looking paving stones forming twisty paths throughout the yard. I’d long ago accepted that I would never live in a house like this. My backyard was landscaped with a couple of decrepit cars on blocks and an old washtub that held mosquito larvae instead of fish.
My whistling stopped when I saw the body. “Son of a fucking bitch,” I muttered.
Detective Ben Roth glanced at me and grinned. “Bit of a shocker, isn’t it? You gonna be okay?”
I nodded and plastered on a grim smile. “Of course!” I said with a nonchalant shrug. “Less for me to have to pick up.”
Detective Roth let out a bark of laughter. “That’s one way of looking at it!”
As soon as he turned away, I let the grim smile shift to a sour scowl. I wasn’t upset at the sight of the body. Or rather, I was, but certainly not because my delicate sensibilities were shocked. No, it was obvious that, once again, the universe was back to fucking with me.
This body had no head.
The second in a month. I let out an uneven breath. Okay, this was a good thing, right? I mean, not that someone else got whacked, but at least I knew there was no way I could have killed this guy. I didn’t have any gaps in my memory this time. And if the two murders are connected, then that totally clears me of the first one. I winced at the thought. Great. I was hoping for a serial killer.
It looked like he’d been lying down when his head had been hacked off. Deep gouges in the grass by the stump of his neck helped support that theory. I wasn’t a detective but even I could figure that much out. White male, dressed in jeans and a faded Pizza Plaza T-shirt. It was tough to tell his approximate age with the head missing, but the skin on the hands and forearms made me think he was somewhere between teenager and old fart.
The cops and Derrel would surely find it all interesting and informative, but I really didn’t give a crap about any of that. Now that I was fairly sure that I wasn’t an axe-wielding murderer, what I gave a crap about was the fact that if the head was missing, so was the brain.
And I was hunnnnnngry, damn it!
They weren’t ready for me yet, so I found a spot by the fence out of everyone’s way. There were about half a dozen crime scene techs in the back yard, but none of them seemed to be doing anything more interesting than taking pictures and measurements. Three detectives were clustered by the fence on the other side of the yard, peering intently at smudges of dirt on the white paint. Beyond the fence a petite, dark-haired woman dressed in brown fatigue pants and a grey T-shirt had a German shepherd on a long lead. She didn’t look like a cop, but no one was chasing them off, so I figured they were a search dog team of some sort. They must be looking for the head, I decided. That was probably a cadaver dog—trained to find dead bodies. I’d heard of them but never seen one except on TV. I watched them for a few minutes, but they weren’t doing anything very interesting, and I finally gave up and returned my attention to what was going on in the yard.