Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues

Chapter 20

It wasn’t a big house. Not much bigger than my own, though certainly newer and in better condition. My senses were pretty dulled, but the occasional flash of lightning through the gaps in the heavy curtains showed me that the house was almost completely empty of furniture except for a ragged sofa and a folding chair in what appeared to be the living room.

The thunderstorm had finally made it here, and rain was coming down in driving gusts, but my stomach didn’t give a crap. Hunger gnawed at me, yowling at me to go, hunt, find someone with a brain for me to eat. I felt a tickle on my cheek and rubbed my hand across it only to come away with a three-inch long patch of flesh. Numb horror burrowed through me as I flung it away. My face. That was part of my face! I sat in the middle of the floor and wrapped my arms around my legs, suddenly glad that I was wearing long sleeves because it kept me from having to see skin sliding off my bones. How long would it take for Ed to get back? Would I be so far gone into the hunger that I’d attack him?

I jerked in surprise as the back door cracked open. I caught a quick glimpse of Ed as he tossed a plastic bag inside and quickly slammed the door closed again.

A guttural snarl came from my throat at the smell of him, but before I could lunge for the door, I caught sight—and scent—of the packages in the bag. Shuddering in relief, I tore open the box and into the brain-covered pizza, scraping the toppings off to shove into my mouth. I didn’t need the crust right now. That would only get in the way.

Sensation began to return, and the hunger settled into something manageable. I reached for the curry chicken next since I knew there wasn’t any chicken in it. A tingle in my cheek told me that my face was putting itself back together. I knew that Ed knew I was a zombie, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to see me rotting and falling apart.

I waited until the hole in my face was completely closed up before I called out, “It’s okay now. It’s safe.”

He eased the door open, eyeing me cautiously. I peered at him in the gloom. “I take it there’s no electricity?” I asked.

“Nope. This is a foreclosure,” he told me. “Been empty for close to a year. And best not to have any lights until we can seal around the windows.” He held up a large plastic bag. “I have a lantern and duct tape. We should tape the curtains down around the windows before we turn on any light. This place is pretty secluded, but no sense taking any chances.”

Well, now I knew where he’d been staying the past couple of weeks. I gave a nod toward the gun in his other hand. “You planning on shooting me again?”

“Only if you come after me,” he replied.

I nodded and kept eating. “Understandable. Did you happen to grab any of the plastic containers? Those have more brains in them.”

Disgust flickered across his face, but he didn’t voice it. He continued in and shut the door behind him. “I picked up a cooler. I brought as many containers as I could fit into it. What’s the stuff that looks like spare ribs?”

“Spare ribs,” I said. “I didn’t have room in my freezer at home.”

“That’s disgusting,” he breathed.

“Really?” I said through a mouthful of brain and cheese. “I’m pretty fond of spare ribs, myself.”

He winced. “No, I mean that you have it in the same freezer as all the…” He gestured toward my little picnic. “Remind me to never eat at your house.”

I grinned. “It’s all wrapped or sealed up. I doubt that any brain bits could possibly get on anything else.”

“It’s still freaky,” he muttered.

I wiped my mouth, did a careful physical assessment. My various wounds seemed to be healed up, and my senses were back to normal. Perhaps a little higher than normal. I was well and truly tanked up right now, which I figured was a smart move considering whose company I was in.

“No,” I said calmly, “what’s freaky is that you’re having this polite and friendly conversation with me, and just a few weeks ago you called me a monster and shot me. Twice.” I gave him a hard look. He had his gun, but I knew how fast I could move right now if I wanted to.

Apparently, so did Ed. He set the gun and bag on the folding chair before he sat heavily on the floor. “Yeah,” he said in a low voice as he leaned back against the couch. “I did.”

I stood, brushed myself off. He watched me warily as I moved to the folding chair, visibly relaxed when I pulled the duct tape out of the bag instead of going for the gun.

“Okay, help me try to figure something out here,” I said as I moved to a window and started taping. “What happened to your parents?”

Grief and horror skimmed across his face. “The official report said it was a boating accident. But that’s not what it was. I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I prompted.

His eyes lifted to mine. “I saw a zombie eating my dad’s brain.”

I kept my face immobile though I wanted to wince. I knew zombies sometimes killed people for brains, especially when they were hungry enough. I’d been that hungry once—okay, twice, including tonight—and had barely held on to my humanity until I could find brains. “Your mom too? It killed them both?”

“My mom was shot,” he said in a flat voice. “In the chest. Twice. I could see the…the wounds. The gun was lying on the deck. Then I saw my dad…his head was bashed in. The boat anchor was all bloody and…” He took a shaking breath. “I figure it shot her, then my dad tried to save her, and it turned on him…” He trailed off and squeezed his eyes closed.

I continued to tape down the edges of the curtain as I turned over what he’d said. “Wait. I’m confused. Were you all on a boat? Where did the zombie come from? How did you make it out alive?”

“No, no,” he said. “They were out on the dock behind our house. We lived on the Tchefuncte River, and my folks had a pontoon boat that they liked to take out in the evenings. I heard a gunshot, then some yelling and ran out and saw…saw the zombie.” He swallowed. “I didn’t know it was a zombie. I just thought it was some psycho.”

“Uh huh. And how did the story become a ‘boating accident’?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I ran back to the house and called the cops. Shit, I was seventeen, and I knew no one would believe me if I said a monster was eating my dad. I just told them my parents were dead, that something awful had happened.” A shudder ran through him. “I was hysterical, but still, I knew I couldn’t tell them the truth.” He stood suddenly, though to my relief he left the gun on the chair. “I ran back out with a baseball bat, and…” His hands clenched into fists. “I came out just in time to see the boat going full speed toward a pier on the other side of the river. Saw it crash and burst into flame…”

“And your parents’ bodies were recovered on the boat?”

He nodded.

I scratched my head. “Look, it’s real possible that the zombie did kill your parents, but just on first sniff, I’m seeing some weird stuff about all this.”

“Of course it’s weird,” he began, but I waved him silent.

“No, wait, hear me out. First off, why would it shoot your mom but not your dad?”

His forehead creased. “Maybe it was out of ammo.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But the next thing is bigger: I don’t see how it could have put them on the boat and sent it crashing into the bridge.”

Ed leveled a frown at me. “What do you mean? That wouldn’t have been hard at all. Drag them on board, set a fire, jam the throttle, jump off.”

“No, I get that part. But here’s something you don’t understand about zombies.” I smiled thinly. “I guess I’m sort of an expert witness about this shit now.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on.”

“Any zombie that was hungry enough to kill someone wouldn’t have had enough…mind to be able to figure out all of that—the getting rid of the evidence stuff.” I moved to the other window and began taping those curtains down as well. “So either someone else did the stuff with the boat, or a rogue zombie was killing people before he was crazy hungry—which I admit is possible, but it seems like he would have done a better job picking his victims. Or, there wasn’t a zombie at all.” I watched him as I said this last one. “Ed, how on earth did you know about zombies back then? What made you seriously consider that as a possibility?”

“I didn’t. Not really,” he admitted. “After the accident and the investigation, I managed to convince myself I’d imagined it. Shock, hysteria. That sort of thing. After a while I simply accepted that it had been a horrible accident.”

“What changed?” I asked, frowning.

Ed grimaced, rubbed at his eyes. “About six months ago I got a package in the mail. It was a notebook—a personal journal of my dad’s.”

I pressed the tape down on the bottom of the curtain, then got the lantern out of the bag and flicked it on. It wasn’t a lot of light, but it was better than pitch darkness, and enough for me to see what Ed was wearing—black and grey striped pants tucked into studded boots, black shirt with dark red skulls. It also looked like he’d picked up a few more piercings somehow. He definitely didn’t look anything like the Ed I’d known before. “Okay,” I said, “and something in that journal convinced you that zombies exist?”

“It was only a few dozen pages. Most of the rest had been ripped out. But my dad wrote about how the zombies were real and that the person they used to be was dead and gone and all that was left was a monster.” Even in the dim light I could see the guilty flush crawl across his face. “And, he, uh, wrote about how it was spreading like a plague, and he had theories about how to kill them.” He gave an uncomfortable shrug, not looking at me. “The basic gist was: slow them down then cut their heads off.”

“And…that’s when you decided to become a zombie hunter?” I asked, my voice thick with disbelief.

He narrowed his eyes, scowled. “No. No, of course not. I mean, I didn’t know what was going on, and I’d made myself forget what happened on the boat, so I figured this was just some sort of novel or story that my dad had decided to write. I mean, really, who the hell could believe that?” He paused, looked down at his hands. “Then, about a week later, I got another package. This time it was some of my mother’s correspondence.”

“Wait,” I said with a slight frown. “What kind of doctor was your mother?”

“Neurologist. She had a practice, but she enjoyed the research end of things more,” he explained. “Anyway, this was printouts of several emails. The recipient was blacked out, so I have no idea who it was intended for, but it was a series of conversations with her going through a number of theories she had on how zombies actually functioned and why they needed brains—”

“Prions,” I interrupted, perhaps a bit smugly. “The parasite needs prions as building blocks.”

A grimace flickered across his face. “Um, right. And after reading all that I…I started to realize that I really had seen what I thought I’d seen.”

I opened my mouth to speak but he held up his hand. “And, no, I still didn’t immediately go out and start slaying zombies.”

“Then why?” I asked in exasperation.

He sighed heavily. “It was almost a month afterwards that I got another letter directing me to a secure website. All sorts of passwords and ID verification stuff, and there was a message for me there that told me my parents had been zombie hunters—part of a secret society that had been trying to wipe out the, um,” his eyes flicked briefly to me, “zombie menace before it turned into an unstoppable plague.” He groaned and dropped his head back, covering his eyes with his forearm. “Fuck, Angel, by that time I was so tied up in knots, and so much of it made sense along with the stuff from my parents…I bought it, hook, line and sinker, and told them I was in.”

I thought about this for a moment. Could it be true? Were his parents also zombie hunters? Pietro had certainly made it sound as if there was an organized cabal-type thing. “And you used Marianne’s dog to let you know who the zombies were,” I said.

“Right.” He sighed. “Kudzu is a cadaver dog. If someone smelled like a dead person, that gave me a reason to look into them. Then I’d watch them for a bit, see if they ever started smelling or rotting. I’d sometimes check them out on Lexis Nexis to see if there were any hiccups in their info that would be there if they were older than they looked. That sort of thing.” He stood and moved to one of the windows, peeled a small section of tape back and peered cautiously out through a thin gap.

“Zeke Lyons was one of your victims, right?” I asked. He nodded without looking back at me. “Did you know that somehow he regrew his body?”

Ed whipped his head around to stare at me. “Regrew? What do you mean? Like a lizard regrows a tail?”

“Yeah, except that it was the whole body, with the right fingerprints and everything.” I had a sudden bizarre image of a full-sized head on a teeny-tiny body as it grew back, like a bobble-head doll. “Same head, though. Had a scar on his chin, same as on his driver’s license. And his body was still in its coffin at Riverwood.” I paused. “So, what did you do with the heads?”

He pressed the tape back down. “I don’t know how he regrew a body, but I had to deliver the heads to a drop point.” He flushed. “I, uh, got points for verified kills.” He groaned and raked a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why I didn’t even think to question it. I actually burned the head of the first one I killed, but they insisted that wasn’t good enough, and I had to deliver the heads in order to ensure proper destruction.”

I could feel my eyebrows climbing to my hairline. “And who the hell is ‘they’?”

Ed shook his head. “No clue. My only contact was through that website. God damn it, I thought I was doing this great and awesome thing, ridding the world of a terrible threat.” He looked over at me, eyes full of guilt and agony. “But then you didn’t kill me when you had the chance. And then you even saved Marcus. That’s not something a monster would do.” He stooped, dimmed the lantern slightly. “I’d gone so far off the deep end, it took me awhile to figure out that whoever these other zombie hunters were, they didn’t have the whole story. And then I started, finally, to wonder about the heads.” He scowled at himself. “And that’s when things really went to shit.”

“How so?”

“I used that secret website. Told them I’d been busted but also told them I thought we were wrong about zombies being monsters. And I also asked about the heads.” He gave a dry laugh that turned into a sob. “I snuck into Marianne’s house while she was gone. Used her computer.”

“Oh, no,” I breathed.

He nodded, a stiff jerky motion. “She came home just a few minutes later. I stayed, had to talk to her. God, I missed her so much.” He paused. “I was going to marry her. We’d already talked about it, knew it was what we both wanted. But I knew I had to leave, for her sake.” He let out a shuddering breath. “I told her what I’d done, told her I loved her. Told her I was sorry. I was on my way out the back, when I heard her answer the door.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Then I heard the shot. I ran back…but it was too late. He didn’t see me, but I saw him.” His expression turned grim. “Same guy who shot you tonight.”

I stood. “His name is Walter McKinney. He’s the head of security at NuQuesCor. But…why did he kill Marianne?” I asked, baffled.

Ed’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Maybe they thought I’d talked to her and told her what was going on. Or maybe they wanted to be sure the heat stayed on me to keep me out of their way.” He shook his head. “Or maybe they simply wanted to fuck with me as much as possible.”

“Those fuckers.” I fell silent, thinking. Pieces of the puzzle were finally starting to settle into place. “Dude. You were used. You gave them the heads, right?”

He stared at me for several seconds, then a grim look settled over his face. “They didn’t destroy them, did they?”

“They’re doing zombie research at that lab, and they needed zombie brains!” I paced in the small living room. Did that mean Sofia was behind all of this? But surely Pietro wouldn’t have approved of the murder of zombies, even ones that weren’t part of his group. “You chopped off Zeke’s head, gave it to them, and they somehow regrew him a body.” And how would that work? Just give the parasite enough brains to fix things up? I guess if it could repair a bullet hole in Marcus’s head…Wow, those were some industrious little fuckers. “But something went wrong,” I continued. “The body we picked up at NuQuesCor was Zeke Lyons, and he was old—at least twenty years older than he should’ve been. And when he fell off those stairs, he died.” I sat, jiggling my legs in excitement. “Oh my god, fake brains! Sofia’s fake brains! She used them to grow a new body for this dude.” Then I grimaced. “But she said the research wasn’t finished. Why would she use fake brains that she knew wouldn’t work right? That part doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sofia Baldwin?” Ed asked.

I nodded. “You know her?”

“Yeah, we all went to high school together,” he said. “She’s fucking brilliant. How the hell does she know about zombies?”

“I guess Marcus told her,” I said, shrugging. “She’s known since right after he was turned, apparently.”

“Oh.” He nodded slowly. “So…he told her, and not me.”

I grimaced in sympathy. And how different would everything be now if he had confided in Ed? I thought. Would McKinney and Sofia or whoever have found someone else to collect zombie heads for them?

Ed took a deep breath and straightened. “You just said the guy was old and died,” Ed pointed out. “Maybe that’s how she knew the research wasn’t finished. Maybe Zeke was the test subject.”

“I guess that fits,” I said slowly. I had the feeling I was missing something, and it was driving me nuts. I didn’t like Pietro, but this didn’t seem like something he would tolerate one little bit. Maybe some other zombie faction was involved? And had Zeke been trying to escape, or was he trying to break in to get more of Sofia’s fake brains?

“But why did they have me kill the zombies and deliver only the heads?” he asked. “Why not just have me locate them, and then capture them—the way they were trying to do to you?”

“Probably because kidnapping a live zombie is a lot more complicated than simply killing one.”

“Or maybe the whole point was to see if they could regrow zombies?” he suggested.

I made a face. “Seems like it would be just as effective to cut off some other body part to test these alternate brains. But whatever the reason, it does seem like they want a real live zombie now.” I paused, narrowed my eyes. “Which also means that call from Sofia was bullshit.” I quickly explained to him about the panicked phone call from her and was pleased to see his expression darken. “That bitch set me up,” I continued. “How else would McKinney have known to set up his ambush for me on that highway?” I growled under my breath.

“GPS tracker,” Ed stated.

“Hunh?”

His shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I mean, yeah, he clearly knew you were going out to her house and it does sound like she’s behind this, but he wouldn’t have known when and where exactly to set the spikes out unless he knew exactly where you were.” He paused while I attempted to digest this. “It’s how I found you,” he added, doubling my shock. “I put one on your car when I was by your house.”

I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yup. I’ve been following you for the last couple of days,” he said with no trace of apology in his voice. “Kind of funny to think that you probably had two tracking devices on your car.”

“Yeah,” I scowled. “Real funny. Okay, so Sofia lured me out there and…” I straightened as fear spasmed through me. “Marcus. I need to warn Marcus.” I’d told Sofia he was out of town, but if she got hold of him and told him she was in trouble, I had no doubt he’d come running into whatever trap she and McKinney had ready for him.

I automatically looked around for my purse, then realized that everything was still in my car out on the highway. “Shit! I don’t have my phone. Do you have one?”

“I stopped carrying one. Too easy to trace back.” He swallowed harshly. “I’ve grown a little paranoid, y’know.”

“Well we need to go find a phone,” I said, throwing the brain-food I hadn’t eaten back into the plastic bag.

“There’s a pay phone at the XpressMart on Highway eighty-eight,” Ed said.

I stood, hefting the bag. “And once we’ve done that we need to pay Sofia a visit.”

A whisper of a smile twitched at his mouth. “Perhaps you should clean up first?”

I blinked, looked down at myself. “Oh. Yeah. Blood everywhere. Good point.”

“There’s bottled water and a change of clothing out in the car.”

I raked a gaze over his own apparel. “Please tell me it’s not goth chick stuff to match yours.”

He gave a dry chuckle. “I would never do that to you. It’s cargo pants and a midriff sweatshirt that says ‘Redneck Princess.’”

“Thank god,” I breathed. “I have a signature look, you know.”

“You’re a style icon, to be sure.”