“No!” I waved the bag at him. “This way. C’mon. Don’t go over there. I’ll get you more brains, I promise.”
He stopped in the glow of a streetlamp, swaying as he looked back at me. His lips curled back in a snarl, but I got the sense it was more pain and confusion than menace.
“Here,” I said, making a quick decision. “Have the rest of these.” I held the bag out, hoping that there was enough brain power in them to counter his desire for fresh brains.
The zombie looked to the bus shelter, then back to me. His breath rasped as he turned and made a sluggish grope for the bag. I let it drop to the sidewalk, but to my shock he ignored the bag and made a lightning-fast grab of my wrist.
Shit! I sucked in a gasp. He was way stronger than I expected a zombie that shambly to be.
A menacing growl shuddered from him as his lips twisted back in a wicked tooth-baring snarl. “Aaannngggellll.” The word—my freaking name—came out in an ugly wet croak.
“What the hell?” The initial shock of getting grabbed melted into get-the-fuck-away-from-me. I made a strong twist of my arm in an attempt to free it and landed a solid kick in the bastard’s zombie balls.
To my dismay, he only grunted and snarled with the impact, then clamped harder on my wrist with bone-breaking strength. Excruciating pain shot up my arm, while his other hand swung slow and wide, arcing for my throat.
Okay. I’m in deep, deep shit. Yeah, I was a little slow getting a clue. But with that extra jolt of fear I turned into a punching, struggling, kicking, psycho redneck zombie bitch.
Bad Zombie clamped his free hand on my shoulder and lunged in for a bite. I threw myself backward enough to shake the shoulder hold and avoid anything to do with teeth. A sickening wave of zombie rot stench struck me, and his grip on my wrist slipped as skin sloughed from his fingers. This was Not Good on a whole bunch of levels. No way should he be rotting this fast. And now I had zombie ooze on my jacket on top of everything else.
“Let GO!” I snarled. I made a savage punch at the arm that held me, heart pounding from the desperate cocktail of anger and fear.
With the force of the blow, flesh slid from his fingers and my wrist slipped free. But I didn’t even get a fraction of a second to celebrate that victory as his other hand knotted into the sleeve of my jacket and yanked my arm up to his open mouth.
I let out a yelp of pain and dismay as he bit down hard on my forearm. “You fucker!” I shouted and punched his eye—well, I punched where his eye was under the dangling eyeball prosthetic.
To my total surprise, he let out a near airless moan and let go, latex dangling from his face and his real eyelid and upper cheek knocked away.
I wanted to allow myself a brief moment of self-congratulation at my badassery, but the abrupt release of my arm sent me staggering backward, and I barely managed to keep my footing. Plus, now another zombie dude loomed a couple of yards behind Bad Zombie.
Time to get the hell out of here. I turned and ran—
—and barreled straight into a wall. A wall that threw an arm around me and pinned me to it. Okay, not a wall, but another goddamn zombie pretending to be a zombie. Within about a half a second, Wall Zombie had my back to his chest and his arm locked hard around me. Shit.
Bad Zombie shambled toward us with the unsavory declaration of, “Miiiiinnnnne.”
Wall Zombie kept an unshakable hold on me and leveled a gun at the advancing zombie. “Tim, NO!” he commanded in a low, raspy voice.
It looked like Wall Zombie intended to shoot Bad Zombie, which meant maybe he was a Good Zombie, but I didn’t care. I went right back to struggling like a psycho. All I wanted was to get the hell away. “Let me go!”
“Hold still!” he ordered me through clenched teeth, then fired the gun. Except it wasn’t a normal gun, and it made a whuuuush instead of a normal bang.
His voice abruptly registered. I craned my head around in shock. “Oh my god,” I breathed. Though I couldn’t see his face under the makeup, I knew his eyes. Philip.
Bad Zombie staggered back with a sound between a growl and a sob. He pawed at a yellow tufted thing in his shoulder, and I realized Philip had shot him with a tranquilizer dart.
Looming Zombie moved in close behind Bad Zombie, got a hand on his arm as he swayed. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew it would be a lot better if I wasn’t right in the middle of it. I ramped my crazy-chick struggles up another notch, but Philip easily kept a solid hold on my scrawny ass. Even through my thrashing, I could feel his whole body tremoring against my back, as if he was shivering from cold or fear. But neither of those reasons made sense. Sure, we were all soaking wet from the rain, but it was the middle of summer. Something else was up.
“Roland, get him out of here. Now,” Philip ordered. He produced what looked like a candy bar with a white wrapper and tossed it to Looming Zombie, who ripped it open and scarfed it down. The whole thing reminded me of a dog getting a treat.
Bad Zombie collapsed on his back in the pool of light from the streetlamp, thrashed for a moment before subsiding into twitches. Wrecked latex and makeup left what remained of his face exposed, and it only took me a second to recognize him. Square jaw. A nose that had been repeatedly broken. Horror backed by anger slammed through me. I’d carefully memorized the features of the men who’d been my jailers when I was Dr. Charish’s unwilling test subject. This guy was one of the assholes who had callously watched me get strip searched.
Which means that he’s probably one of the two men who got turned into zombies by Philip right before I escaped Dr. Charish’s lab. My gaze snapped up to Looming Zombie—the one Philip called Roland—and met his eyes. Gorgeous blue. And that’s probably the other one. One of Charish’s guards had eyes like that. The makeup couldn’t hide those.
Oh, this was all kinds of bad. Philip and his freakin’ zombie-spawn. He’d been in bad shape when he made them—mean, near berserk, and rotting too soon—damaged by some experimental shit Charish had done to him. Who the hell knew how screwed up the two he’d turned were.
I landed a hard kick to Philip’s shin, but he seemed unfazed by my struggles. I got in a few more solid kicks and foot stomps, and then he tucked away the tranq gun and pulled a knife.
I made a strangled sound pushed out by panic. “No…no! Let me go,” I managed. “Oh god.” It was hard as hell to kill a zombie, but I had no doubt he knew how to do it.
“Shut up, Angel,” he said, voice deep and hoarse. He wrestled my bitten arm up and sliced the jacket sleeve. “Have to make sure the goods aren’t damaged.”
A stupid pang of grief went through me, and I stared in horror at the long rent in the lovely fabric. “You cut my jacket!” Yeah, I was captured by a couple of Evil Zombies, but a girl has her priorities. “You fucking dick!” I slammed my boot heel down into the top of his foot. “Get off me!”
Philip hissed and shifted. “God damn it, Angel.”
“Let her go,” a clear, strong voice commanded from off to my right.
Philip hauled me around with him as he turned to face the approaching man—who, unnervingly, had a very real gun drawn and pointed at us. Fortyish with close-cropped brown hair, the newcomer bore a serious-as-all-hell expression perfectly complemented by a dark suit. I had no clue who the hell he was, but I was pissed and scared and desperate. I thrashed and kicked back hard into Philip’s shin. “Yeah. Let me GO!”