My Life as a White Trash Zombie (10 page)

BOOK: My Life as a White Trash Zombie
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Well, that was cool of him. “Um, yeah, he saved me from doing a face-plant on the sidewalk,” I said with a laugh that I was sure sounded forced and self-conscious.
Derrel grinned. “Marcus takes the whole ‘serve and protect’ thing pretty damn seriously. That or he simply wanted an excuse to put his hands on a cute chick.”
I could feel myself flushing, and the only thing that saved me from total embarrassment was the fact that the deputy looked slightly flustered as well. Derrel simply laughed and shoved a menu my way.
“Here. Order food,” he told me. “We’ve already ordered, but you’re the one who’s all skin and bones.”
My stomach gave another soft little rumble, but I couldn’t be sure what the hell it was rumbling for. “I, uh, kinda just ate,” I mumbled.
Ivanov’s mouth curved in a smile. “You’ll need to keep your strength up if you’ll be working with this beast here,” he said with a nod toward Derrel. Then he looked back at me, smile still on his face. God-fucking-damn but he was seriously good-looking. “Have you ever had the stuffed pancakes here? They’re evil. I highly recommend them.”
“Heh. The cop is recommending evil,” I said. “Too funny.”
To my surprise, Ivanov chuckled. “You’ve discovered my dark side.”
Derrel made a rude noise. “And you’ve also seen all there is to his ‘dark side.’ This is the squeaky cleanest fucker I’ve ever met. How he manages to not be a complete dick is beyond me.”
Ivanov’s smile stretched into an actual grin. “You’ve obviously never talked to any of the, uh, guys I work with.”
He didn’t even flick a glance my way, but I knew with an odd certainty that he’d been about to say “the people I’ve arrested” and then changed it because I was sitting there. Part of me wanted to be totally self-conscious but there was a bigger part of me that couldn’t help but be really grateful that this cop wasn’t saying anything about that time he arrested me, or even hinting at it. Or even saying anything that could make me feel uncomfortable. That was cool. And unexpected. Maybe he was just messing with me. Waiting to let loose with that info when it’d be really humiliating.
But even as I thought it, I had a hard time believing it was true.
A surly waitress came by and poured coffee for me, and I went ahead and ordered the stuffed pancakes. Marcus gave me a smile when I did so. I smiled back out of reflex then quickly busied myself with the cream and sugar, getting my coffee the way I liked it. Sheesh, I was starting to act like a high school kid with a crush. This was a cop. I was a convicted felon. He was simply being nice. That was all.
The waitress returned less than a minute later, slid plates of food in front of Marcus and Derrel, muttered something about refilling their coffee when she could get a damn free second and left. I told the two men to go ahead and eat, and they didn’t need any more urging. I sipped my coffee while they ate and absently listened to the short order cook yell for a waitress to come pick up her damn order. Her retort was equally harsh but no one in the diner paid any attention to it. It was all part of the “ambience” of this place.
“So,” Derrel said after a moment, eyeing the deputy, “have y’all come up with any leads in the headless hunter case?”
I’d just taken a sip of coffee and barely managed to keep from spraying it across the table in a scene that could have been right out of a sitcom. Of course, then I had to keep from breathing the coffee right back in, which would have resulted in the sort of coughing fit that would have looked even more suspicious. I grabbed my napkin and managed to pretend to sneeze which had the added effect of covering up most of my face which was surely completely beet red with embarrassment at this point. Yeah, I was classy and suave like that.
Jesus Christ, Angel, get a grip!
Ivanov cast an uncertain look my way then, thankfully, returned his attention to Derrel. “Nothing so far. The victim’s been identified, as you know, but that’s about it.”
Derrel dipped his head in a nod. “Adam Campbell.”
“Right,” Ivanov said. “The guy lived in a fishing camp not too far from where his body was found. Kept to himself, worked as a technical writer or some such thing.” He shrugged. “The detectives questioned people in the area but haven’t come up with squat.”
Derrel huffed out a sigh. “Monica was working that night. I know she wasn’t thrilled to be working two scenes back to back, but it sounds like that one was pretty interesting.” He glanced my way, slight frown creasing his forehead. “Have you even met Monica yet?”
I nodded. “Met everyone in the staff meeting last week.” Although “met” was a strong word for what was more like: “Hey, everyone, this is Angel, our new body-snatcher. Angel, this is everyone!” There were three death investigators: Derrel, Monica Gaudreau, and Allen Prejean—the
Chief
Investigator. There were also three van driver/morgue techs: me, Nick, and a pasty-looking older guy named Jerry Powell. Supposedly the coroner, Dr. Duplessis, wanted to hire one more of each to make scheduling easier, but that was on hold for some sort of budget reasons. The only reason my position had been open was because the previous van driver had been caught stealing lab supplies. I almost never saw Monica or Jerry because of the way the shifts fell. If it wasn’t for the fact that the office had a staff meeting every other week I probably wouldn’t know anyone except Derrel. And Nick, but only because he’d trained me.
“I don’t know about interesting, but it’s definitely something different,” Ivanov said to Derrel. “So far about all they can be sure of is that it was someone reasonably strong—and they only have that much because of Dr. Leblanc’s findings in the autopsy.”
“How can he know that?” I asked before I even realized I’d opened my mouth.
Derrel answered. “I haven’t read the report, but often that sort of thing can be determined by the extent of the damage. Chopping off a head isn’t an easy thing to do, so someone with spindly little arms like you would have a hard time of it.” He chuckled and I joined in, more out of incredible relief than from the teasing.
Okay, so another vote against the “Angel is a psycho killer” option. Whew.
My food finally arrived along with a refill of my coffee. The stuffed pancakes were as good and evil as the deputy claimed, and I managed to survive the rest of the meal without looking like a total idiot or doing anything that would make the others realize that I had no business being in that line of work.
But, while I ate, one niggling thought occurred to me and refused to leave me alone.
If I really did break my trunk open, then I
would
be strong enough to chop off someone’s head.
Chapter 10
All next week I was the goddamn model of a good worker. I arrived at the morgue early to get everything set up and cleaned up. I stayed late to get stuff cataloged or put away.
And whenever I was alone, I scooped the brains out of the bags and squirreled that shit away. I bought a bunch of ice packs, started saving plastic water bottles, and I washed out a bunch of the old pickle jars from underneath the cabinets at home. I also decorated the jars to make it a little less obvious what was in them. Back when I was a little girl my mom and I had done this craft thing where we’d take empty wine or liquor bottles—which we always had tons of—and cover every bit of glass with inch-long pieces of masking tape. Once the bottles were covered in tape we’d smear brown shoe polish all over and then wipe the excess off with a rag, and when we were done we had a bunch of bottles that looked cool and antique—kinda leathery, in a way. At least, they looked cool to seven-year-old me. Maybe I’d loved them because it was one of the few pleasant memories I had of my mother. Funny how it’s so much easier to remember the bad shit.
Then again, there’d been a lot of the bad shit.
I couldn’t decide if it looked dumb or not when I did the masking tape/shoe polish thing to the pickle jars, but it served its purpose. Someone would have to actually open the jars to see what I had inside them. I also went to the dollar store and bought a cheap little hand held, battery-powered blender. Once blended, the brains weren’t really recognizable as brains at all, but to be on the super-safe side, I borrowed a trick from Anonymous Letter Dude and started blending brains up with soup or fruit juice or chocolate milk—stuff that looked normal so that no one would freak out if they happened to open the cooler. I could fit half a brain and about a cup of soup or chocolate milk into each jar or water bottle, and so far it seemed that a jar or bottle every other day kept me from getting smelly. I really wanted to see if brains could freeze and, after thawing, still retain whatever it was that I craved. But I didn’t want to risk putting them in the freezer at home. Either my dad would eat them by mistake, or—worse—he’d throw them out.
Things were going as well as I could possibly expect, considering my circumstances. I had a seriously fucked up diet, but I still ate real food and was starting to get to where I could tell the difference between hunger and Hunger. Plus, the one month mark was coming up fast, and while I’d figured out that I probably wasn’t in any sort of position to tell my boss to fuck off, still, finally getting the straight scoop from whoever’d set all of this up for me was the thought that kept me going. It also helped that I was actually starting to enjoy the job.
Drive a van. How hard could it be, right?
Three A.M. on a Tuesday night and the body in the back of the van was being nice and quiet. Not that I expected it to sit up and start talking or anything stupid like that. But sometimes bodies made weird noises—farts and belches and shit like that—and I was still new enough to this gig that it gave me a bit of a freakout whenever I heard it.
Yep, the freak who ate brains could still get freaked. I had the iron stomach thing going for me, but there was still plenty of other shit that had the ability to creep me right out.
I had the radio in the van on, but the left speaker was blown and Shania Twain sounded more like Axl Rose, so I had the volume pretty low. Still, it was better than silence, especially since it was dark as all hell, and I was in the middle of Swamp Bum-fuck-nowhere on Highway 1790. I hadn’t passed another car in over ten minutes, and I had at least another twenty to go before I hit what passed for civilization in St. Edwards Parish.
So that was my excuse for screaming like a little bitch when I saw someone standing in the road in front of me.
I slammed on the brakes even as I realized that it was only a fallen tree with a branch sticking up that was kind of person-shaped.
Person woulda been better to hit,
flashed through my head as I yanked the wheel to the left in stupid panic.
Really
stupid panic, because I was already too close to the tree, and all I did was make sure the van went into a really spectacular flip and roll.
My head smacked hard against the doorframe as the van slammed down on the driver’s side, and for several seconds all I could see were bright bursts of light. The van scraped along the highway with a horrible shriek of metal on pavement, then everything stopped, and all I could hear was the sound of my panicked breathing.
I was lying against the driver’s side door, partially suspended by the seatbelt. I’d only been wearing it because I knew I couldn’t risk getting written up for not wearing one in a Coroner’s Office vehicle.
Score one for the rulebook
, I thought with a wheezing laugh. Half the windshield had pulled free like a banana peel, and I could see the crescent moon and about a million stars. Muggy air flowed in and a mosquito buzzed near my ear, probably drawn by the blood I could feel trickling across my forehead. Part of the doorframe had buckled and twisted inward, and it wasn’t until I unpeeled my fingers from the wheel that I realized my left arm was badly broken, complete with a jagged end of white bone shoved through the skin of my forearm.
I stared at the end of the bone for several seconds, still trying to process what had happened. I wasn’t exactly the go-to gal in an emergency. I was usually the one who freaked out enough to need a good hard slap. But there was no one here to slap me.
My phone. Yeah, I could do that. I could find my phone and call for help. And then I needed to find my lunchbox.
The end of the bone seemed to take on a surreal glow in the moonlight. “Damn,” I murmured. It wasn’t all that long ago that the sight of blood—anyone’s blood, not just mine—would have had me puking and close to fainting, yet here I was staring at the end of my arm bone. “That is
seriously
disgusting.”
Sudden worry clutched at me. How much trouble was I going to be in for wrecking the van? If I lost this job, I was dead meat.
I fumbled for the seat belt release. It sprang free, and I let out a strangled scream as I crumpled against the door and banged the broken arm hard. Curling my arm to my chest, I lay there and took several deep, gulping breaths. It hurt like a bitch, but I knew too damn well that it could have been a lot worse. I could already feel that bizarre fading of sensation creeping through me, and right now I was more than happy to have the edge taken off.
BOOK: My Life as a White Trash Zombie
8.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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