White Trash Zombie Gone Wild (24 page)

Hunger roared in impatience.
Screw it
, I thought and gulped the chunk of brain. I didn't really have a choice anyway. I shoved the rest of the brain into my jacket pocket and zipped it shut, then gave Judd's body a quick search in the hopes of finding the flash drives. His wallet contained four hundred dollars in cash that I pocketed with zero guilt, but his clothing held only keys and a folding knife. No drives. Crap.

Marla let out a flurry of growl-filled barks, quieting only after a
hush
from Rosario. I didn't need to be fluent in Doggy to know that she'd announced precisely how she planned to tear me apart for hurting her human, despite the fact that Rosario was far from death's door, judging by the muffled curses that drifted my way.

Well, this was a nice little standoff. I had no way to reach my car without risking getting tranqed or mauled. I had Judd's rifle, which was surely the only reason Rosario hadn't sent Marla to flush me out. But if he called for backup I was fucked.

Fine. Time to change the game. I tucked Judd's knife into my pocket then snatched up the rifle and took off running at an angle that kept the trees between me and Rosario. I fully expected to get a German Shepherd between the shoulder blades at any second, but I made it to the water untackled, and a glance behind showed no pursuit.

Yet.

With a vague goal of
get the hell away from here
, I splashed into the water and tried not to think about snakes and alligators and snapping turtles and sea monsters. The setting sun painted the marsh in reflections of gold and orange, and cypress trees cast long shadows over the water. I pressed onward, slogging through waist-deep then chest-deep water, holding the rifle over my head like soldiers in a movie I once saw about the Vietnam war.

Marla's strident bark in the distance was more than enough to spur me deeper into the marsh. It was nearly full dark by the time I stopped hearing her barks and was far enough into the swamp to feel safe from discovery. Exhausted, I crawled onto a small island of relatively dry ground. I heard a slide and splash that was probably a gator, but I was too tired to give a crap. The island was about half the size of my bedroom and crammed full of chest-high marsh grass that I knew damn well was home to all sorts of slithery critters. I wasn't really afraid of snakes, but getting bit by a water moccasin at this point might make my poor parasite throw its hands up in defeat and go sob in the corner. With a stick in hand, I jabbed and poked and whacked the grass as I pushed toward the middle of my little island. Though I didn't see any snakes, I heard plenty of whispers of noise as unseen creatures evacuated the area.

Invasion complete, I stomped a circle of grass flat then plopped my butt down. An almost full moon was starting its climb above a horizon of cypress trees and Spanish moss. I reclined in my nest and watched the curtain of stars shift and shimmer as fluffy clouds drifted across the sky. The various swamp musicians who'd been silenced by my arrival gradually resumed their evening symphony. I was wet and dirty, but the night was mild enough that I wasn't miserable, and I took care of the twinge of hunger with the rest of Judd's brain. Peace stole through me despite the danger that lurked beyond the swamp. Tomorrow, I'd deal with Rosario. And Bear.

For the moment, I was safe. And that was enough.

I snapped fully awake, primal instincts shrieking so loudly I expected to find a serial killer standing over me with an axe. But no serial killer. No threat of any sort within my trampled circle of grass. It was still full night with at least another hour until dawn, judging by the moon's new position. Heart jittering, I grabbed the rifle, parted the grass, and gave the dark swamp a careful scan. Though I couldn't see anything remotely dangerous, my nerves continued to buzz a low warning. Unsettled, I listened, straining my ears through the silence.

Silence?

No symphony or chorus. Every living creature had gone utterly still, waiting for whatever was out there to pass them by.

A low splash cracked through the air like a cannon. I bit back a yelp, hands spasming on the rifle. An animal going into the water. That's all it was. A goddamn bullfrog.

The moon slipped behind a cloud, plunging everything into a deep gloom. Another splash, and every hair on my body lifted as a weird choking-gurgle followed it.
That was no frog
.

Okay, I was officially freaked out. I peered in the direction of the splashes, breath catching as the water rippled twenty feet away from where I crouched.
Nutria
, I prayed.
Please let it be a nutria.

As if in slow motion, a dark figure broke the surface, water dripping as it straightened into an unmistakably human shape.

Anger and dismay battled it out in my gut.
Rosario.
Or, more likely, one of his Saberton buddies since gunshot wounds and swamp water didn't play well together. I couldn't catch a fucking break.

Or maybe I
had
caught a break. I didn't know how this guy had found me, but any plans to catch me off guard were toast. I was awake, ready, and armed.

I shifted to one knee and lifted the rifle to my shoulder, but a tremble went through me as I took aim. I was about to kill this guy, and he had no idea it was coming. It didn't matter that I
knew
with horrifying certainty what sort of hell awaited me in Saberton's tender care. I'd killed before, but always face-to-face, in the heat of battle. This was cold-blooded murder.

Damn it. I blinked tears away and took careful aim at the center of my intruder's torso. And now I really am a monster
.

Fire leaped from the muzzle as the shot shattered the air. The dark shape fell back with a heavy splash, barely audible beneath the chaos of cries and shrieks as thousands of creatures dashed into hiding. Ears ringing, I lowered the rifle, watched as the water closed over him and went smooth again. “Shit. Shit.” I scrubbed at my face with a grimy hand as a stupid ache squeezed my chest.
I had no choice, but hunting me—a zombie—was his choice.
I knew that, and I also knew it didn't change a thing.

I startled at a loud splash and watery gasp, yanked the rifle up again as the man surged upright. I hadn't killed him, but I wasn't sure whether to be pissed or relieved about it. He staggered a step closer, less than ten feet from the edge of my island. Pissed, I decided. That was the better choice.

“Get the fuck back!” I yelled. “I don't care if you're wounded. You're not going to—”

“Annnnnnggeellll.”

I knew that voice. My blood turned to ice as the impossible figure lurched forward. The moon broke through the clouds to shine down like a spotlight from hell, illuminating the lopsided and ragged half bowl of remaining skull. His mouth gaped open as glistening drops of water fell in lazy slow motion from a stained gauze bandage on his right forearm.

No. This couldn't be Judd. I was having a nightmare. That was the only explanation. A really horrible, terrifying, vivid nightmare. There was no way in hell my bite had made this open-skulled
thing
. Making a zombie was
hard.
It couldn't happen from one bite.

Or could it? Horror crawled through my veins as I remembered Philip turning two Saberton guards with only a bite. But that was only possible because he had a
damaged
parasite. And those two had been messed up, unstable. Not
real
zombies.

So what the hell was this thing?

The Undead Judd sloshed closer, snapping me out of my shock. With every movement, water spilled from the jagged edges of his skull, like a kid carrying a bowl of soup.

He found me
, I realized in stunned amazement. Apparently the bullshit I'd fed him hadn't been all bullshit. Whatever kind of zombie he was, he'd glommed onto the weird zombie mama-baby connection and found me, deep in the swamp. It would be amazing and sweet except for the part where he was a godawful walking nightmare who'd been a murdering piece of shit before he died.

I fired twice in quick succession, hissing in frustration as he stayed on his feet.

“Annnnnggelll.” His arms extended toward me, hands crooked like claws as he continued to close the distance. Mouth dry, I fired three more times, cursing when the gun clicked on the fourth try. I was out of ammo, and I'd only managed to blow a fist-sized hole in his chest. Damn it, the dude was missing most of his fucking
brain.
How was this possible?

The answer appeared as moonlight shone down on the pink and grey lumps in his shattered skull. Those lumps included a completely intact cerebellum—a seriously vital region of the brain that handled all sorts of important shit like motor control and coordination. That explained how he could move—sort of. But talk? I'd eaten his cerebrum! Whatever godawful zombie parasite or infection he had inside him was helping him out in ways I couldn't imagine.

Now I had to figure out how to shut him down.

I scrambled to my feet and backed away as he lurched onto the island. “Judd!” I shouted, hoping he still had a few neurons that would listen to reason. “You need to stop!” Oh, who the hell was I kidding. He'd never had any listen-to-reason neurons, even before I ate most of his brain.

Judd's lips pulled back from his teeth as he swung at me in a clumsy blow. I ducked it with ease, then smacked him across the jaw with the butt of the rifle. His head jerked to the side then swiveled back to face me. His eyes skittered in every direction in a creepy, unfocused dance, yet I couldn't shake the feeling he had no trouble seeing everything around him. He made another swing at me, a bit faster this time. Things were getting rewired deep in that brain chunk, and I didn't like it one bit. Especially since I'd obviously left the part that wanted me dead.

I pivoted away then whacked him again with the rifle with the same lack of effect as before. His next swing brushed my shoulder, but when I moved in to whack him again he snapped his arm back with a gut punch that sent me sprawling.

He flopped on top of me, pinning me down as I gasped for breath. I struggled to buck him off, fear climbing as he closed a hand over my throat. He growled like a purr, and a trickle of brain-tinged swamp water poured over the edge of his open skull to spatter onto my face as he shifted to tighten his grip.

Brains in a bowl.

A predator's snarl pulled at my mouth. Time to scrub the dishes.

I ignored the squeeze of his fingers on my throat and reached up with both hands to grab that goddamn cerebellum. I was at a lousy angle and couldn't pull it out, but when I dug my fingers in, it sure as shit got his attention. He spasmed hard and released my throat, which gave me enough wiggle room to jam my knee into his side and shift him off me. He let out a weird howl as I dug my fingers into his brain stem, as if he knew what was coming. In the next instant the howl cut off, and Judd's body collapsed, finally lifeless.

I staggered to my feet with the remainder of Judd's brain clutched in my hand while several inches of spinal cord dangled like a tail. Curious, I took a cautious sniff. It definitely didn't smell like a human brain anymore. No desire to eat it whatsoever. I filed that bit of info away to pass along to Dr. Nikas, then stuffed the brain and its dangly bits into my jacket pocket. Dr. Nikas would definitely want to examine it. And me, for that matter.

After a few minutes to catch my breath, I dragged Judd's body to the center of the island and once again searched him, but this time with the meticulous and thorough care that I used to search bodies in the morgue. It made no sense that he wouldn't have the flash drives on him or in his car, especially considering how he'd believed the whole zombie thing was his ticket to freedom via Bear. Anger flared at the thought of Nick's dad, but I tamped it down. I'd deal with his ass soon enough.

In the year and a half I'd been working in the morgue, I'd stripped and searched hundreds of bodies and found an incredible variety of objects in every possible nook, cranny, fold, crease, hole, or flap that the human body had to offer. My gut told me that drive was on or in Judd's corpse, and by god I was going to find it.

Dawn was happily flinging orange and purple streaks across the eastern sky when I found the penis-shaped flash drive within Judd's tighty-whities and tucked behind his nutsack. I took a moment to revel in weary triumph before shoving it deep into a pocket along with Judd's car keys. One down, one to go.

The original had to be somewhere. I searched again. No drive. He'd either stashed it or given it to someone.

Not someone.
Bear Galatas
.

“Judd, you turd bucket,” I muttered then took out his knife and set to work separating his head from his body.

•   •   •

The sun was up, and my mood was shit by the time I finally finished sawing through muscles, tendons, windpipe, and spine. I clambered to my feet and gave the two pieces of Judd the finger. “Shamble now, asshole,” I muttered.

Though I wasn't happy about leaving Judd's body behind, there was no way I was dragging that thing with me. Instead, I rolled it into the water and trusted that the swamp's flesh-eating critters would dispose of it, while I silently prayed that St. Edward's parish wouldn't end up with zombie gators.

The head was a different matter. I had
no
desire to carry that nasty thing back through the swamp. But, even more so, I absolutely did
not
want to leave it out here and give some microscopic fragment of brain the time and space it needed to regrow another zombie Judd body. Yeah, it was improbable, but so was the original zombie Judd.

Since the rifle was out of ammo, it didn't matter anymore if it got wet. I slung the strap across my chest, hooked my fingers in the only secure grip on Judd's head—his mouth—and accepted that the feel of his tongue on my hand would haunt my nightmares for a very long time. After half a mile, I broke through a fringe of trees and could finally see radio towers on the horizon as well as a few other distinctive landmarks—a dead oak whose branches formed a twisted thumbs-up, and a bald eagle nest near the very top of a towering pine. I had a fairly good sense of direction, but even so it took me several minutes of confused puzzling before I realized why nothing lined up the way I was used to.

Nice job, Angel,
I thought with a roll of my eyes as the answer came to me. In my not-quite-panicked flight of the previous evening, I'd managed to travel two-thirds of a giant circle. If I'd kept going, I'd have ended up right in Rosario's lap. Obviously, I needed to implant a friggin' compass in my hand.

I laughed at the thought. For a zombie, that wasn't a
completely
ridiculous idea. Of course, if I decided to go with that level of body modification, I'd also get the satellite phone option, 'cause that shit would've been damn handy last night.

With daylight to help me make out landmarks, I estimated I had less than a mile to go. Still, it wasn't a walk in the park, and my fading spirits and energy levels perked up at the sight of a flagpole thrusting up from tall grass. But my relief shifted to bewilderment as I neared it. Where was the parking area? I should've been able to at least see the outer edge of it by now. And hadn't the flagpole been surrounded by bushes before?

I stopped in the knee-deep water, Judd's head dangling from my grip as I stared in at the flagpole. It stood almost straight, and not far from its base was the remains of a concrete barbecue.

There are two flagpoles
. How the fuck did I not know there were two flagpoles?

I checked the position of the radio towers and other landmarks, then struggled to visualize the whole thing from above. After a few seconds I gave up, splashed to a muddy bank and drew it out with a stick.
Now
it made sense. Not only was this pole near the outer perimeter of where the Tribe did most of its training, but I'd never actually been in this particular section before. Not all that surprising considering I'd only been out to Camp SwampyButt a handful of times to train with the security team. And, since Dr. Nikas had almost certainly never been out here, he hadn't known the need to specify.

I broke into a run and hoped to hell there weren't a dozen more flagpoles with barbecues to find and search. But no, a dull green, hard-plastic case rested far beneath the barbecue, hidden behind a battered sheet of corrugated metal. Hands shaking, I lugged the case out and dialed in the combination. At the click, I swung the lid up then literally cried at the sight of what had to be close to eighty brain packets.

Worry slipped away as I tore two open and sucked the contents down, and when I finished, I counted out ten more. That would be plenty to carry me through the next few days.

Probably. The V12 was using up brains like crazy, and I had a billion things on my to do list. Just to be sure, I went ahead and counted out another dozen.

My gaze fell to where I'd dropped Judd's head in the grass. After a moment of thought, I stuffed both head and brain into the case, locked it, and shoved it back under the barbecue. Leaving them here wasn't the best option, but it was better than my original plan of “stick them in the trunk of my car and hope for the best,” especially since I wasn't sure when I'd be able to get to the lab. Plus, I didn't want to risk being the subject of a headline like
Murder Suspect's Head Found During Routine Traffic Stop of Insane Woman
.