My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Chapter 7

More than ready to get the hell out of there, I had the dead guy bagged, on the stretcher, and shoved into the back of the van in record time. Derrel gave me a funny look, but thankfully didn’t say anything about the fact that I was probably looking as guilty as I wasn’t. At least the cop and the paramedics were gone by the time I was ready to load up the body. If Ivanov had still been there, I’d have probably done something stupid like drop the body, finally proving to everyone that I couldn’t be trusted with anything.

As soon as I was on the road and headed to the morgue my tension eased slightly—only to be replaced by a knifing stab of hunger. My hands tightened on the steering wheel, and it didn’t help that I kept thinking I could smell the body in the back of the van. My stomach gave an encouraging growl, and I clenched my teeth as my mouth started to water. Within that skull was such a lovely brain. Maybe I could pull over and use the tire iron to break the skull open, kinda like a coconut. I could scoop out handfuls of that sweet, luscious—

I sucked my breath in, absolutely horrified at the direction of my thoughts. I’d get fired for sure if I showed up at the morgue with a body with a caved-in head. And if I got fired, I’d go to jail for sure, and then—

“Oh, god,” I groaned. I wasn’t horrified at the thought of eating brains. I was worried about how to explain a hole in the corpse’s head.

If you crave it, eat it.

“This is so fucked up,” I muttered. Maybe I was suffering from some weird post-accident trauma. Some lingering hallucination from my overdose? That made as much sense as anything else.

The morgue was empty when I arrived. No surprise, since it was a Sunday. I yanked the stretcher out of the van, wheeled it into the cooler. No, I was not going to bash in this guy’s head. I wasn’t that crazy.

But my stomach screamed at me the second I entered the cooler. I didn’t even have to look at the other body bag already in there. That guy had been autopsied on Friday and was waiting to be picked up by the funeral home. His organs were in a bag between his legs, and there was brain in there. I could smell it—through the plastic bag, through the body bag, through all the other stenches and odors of the morgue. The scent of that brain cut through them all.

I looked down at the organs swimming in the clear plastic bag. I didn’t even fully remember walking to the other stretcher and unzipping the body bag. A weird calm descended on me. I was really going to do this. I was probably completely crazy and hallucinating, but I couldn’t fight it anymore. I wasn’t that tough. Hell, that was the reason I was in this situation—I had no damn willpower. Get clean? Yeah, right. Too much work and too much of a bummer. Your life sucks and the only thing you’re good at is fucking up? So much easier not to think about it—wipe the worry away with a Percocet or a Xanax. Go numb.

I carefully untied the plastic bag and pulled it open. I didn’t look at any of the other organs. I wasn’t grossed out by them; they simply held no interest for me. It was the segments of brain that held my attention. Most of the brain had been sliced into neat half-inch slices during the autopsy. It looked like pieces of bread pudding that had been soaked in raspberry syrup.

Not that I needed the comparison. I didn’t have to psych myself up to eat a piece. The hunger took over and the next thing I knew I was on the second slice—and I felt good. I closed my eyes in bliss. It was almost like the kinda good that some drugs could give you—and I knew drugs—except that it was somehow . . . cleaner.

So what if I was nuts? This was fantastic. The hunger was gone. More than gone. I felt sharp and clear and alive and completely sated. I felt awesome.

My eyes snapped open. I could feel the puzzle pieces fall into place as the last bite of brain slid down my throat. I knew this feeling. The coffee-drinks . . . those gooey chunks with the same consistency, given to me by the same mystery person who told me to give in to my cravings.

Holy shit. I’d been eating brains for two weeks. And loving it.

I couldn’t make my mind figure out what that meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. It had to be some sort of disease, right? I mean, anything else would be crazy.

“Oh, man,” I whispered. “I am way beyond crazy.”

There was still nearly half a brain in the bag. I grabbed a towel, quickly wiped my face and hands, ducked out of the cooler and snagged a clean and empty plastic container from the room where the tissue samples were kept. My pulse hammered as I returned to the cooler and stuffed what was left of the brain into the container. Whether I was crazy or diseased, I obviously needed to keep eating brains unless I wanted to feel like I was dying of hunger. If my heart was beating, that meant I was alive, right? Couldn’t possibly be anything else.

So what if I’d seen enough horror movies to know what kind of creature eats brains. That wasn’t possible. There was no way I was . . . that.

I shoved the container into a paper bag, then did my very best to clean everything up so that no one could possibly know what insanity I’d been up to.

Am I insane? Or am I a monster?

I had no idea which was the better option.