Two prisoners? Shit. Of course Heather would be a prisoner as well. I grimaced as the rain began in earnest again. Well, at least it’ll wash the blood away. “No, I think that covers it.”
Dan gave a crisp nod, close-cropped sandy hair giving him that security-dude look. He was only a few inches taller than me, though, which translated to pretty damn short for a guy. But he was wiry and moved with confident ease. “We’ll finish the cleanup here then,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”
It wasn’t a dismissal, but it was obvious there wasn’t much more I could do here. Besides, I was soaked to the skin, and my shirt and pants were full of bullet holes. Looks like I’ll be breaking out the mending kit, I thought with a sigh. No way was I going to throw them out simply because I got shot. Since I seemed to have turned into a bullet magnet, that would get expensive, fast.
“Y’all will let me know about Heather?” I asked Dan.
“I’ll make sure someone does,” he said with such conviction that I couldn’t help but believe him.
“Okay, then, um…well, it was nice meeting you,” I said.
He smiled. “Be careful getting home.” Then he turned away to take care of the mess we’d made.
Chapter 9
It was only a little after one a.m., which seemed weird. So much had happened since I left the morgue at midnight, it felt like it should be at least four in the morning. But apparently a psychotic firefight and zombie fest only took about half an hour from start to finish.
The entire way home I struggled to come up with a story that would explain the pesky bullet holes in my clothing in case my dad was home and still awake. My pants and Coroner’s Office shirt were both dark, which meant that the blood didn’t show, but after getting shot and beat up and then shot some more—in the pouring rain—I was looking pretty damn bedraggled.
But then my dad wasn’t even home. That made hiding the fact that I’d been shot a whole lot easier, but annoyed me anyway because, damn it, why the hell wasn’t he home? All too easy answer: he was out drinking.
I shoved my wet clothes into the washing machine, dumped a bunch of other laundry in on top of them, and got the load started.
With that taken care of, I took a quick shower to get the mud, blood and other grime off, then tugged on a t-shirt and fresh undies and climbed into bed. But once there, I lay awake, listening to the washing machine churn as though it mimicked the agitation of my own thoughts. Six months ago I’d been kidnapped for zombie research and learned that some people didn’t have a whole lot of respect for zombies. Based on that experience, I thought I knew how high the stakes were for my kind.
But apparently they were a shitload higher, enough so that Saberton was willing to hunt Heather down to either kill or capture her, simply because she wanted to leave them. At least I sure hoped that was the real story. As much as I already liked her, I knew there was always a chance that this whole thing was a ploy to infiltrate Pietro’s organization.
The washing machine finished its cycle with a clunk. Silence ticked through the house, but about a minute later I heard the front door open and shut quietly. Paranoia gripped me. What if it wasn’t my dad? What if the Saberton people knew where I lived and were coming after me?
My heart thudded while I ran through escape scenarios in my head. Out the window would be easiest, then run like hell. No, grab a bottle of brains first…except that my fridge is locked, and—
A muffled curse that was clearly my dad’s voice effectively banished my paranoia. Relieved on a number of levels, I listened to his low muttering as he rummaged through the kitchen cabinets, then a few minutes later I heard him go down the hall and open the washing machine. More muttering, then the sound of him transferring my laundry to the dryer, followed by the thumps and creaks of my dad putting a load into the washer and starting both machines.
Mystified about why he felt the need to run a load in the middle of the night, I remained silent, listening hard, but he did nothing more than go to his own room and shut the door.
I finally fell asleep, lulled by the comfortably familiar vibration of the ancient washer and dryer despite the worries that crowded in my head.
“You have a maggot on your sleeve,” Derrel murmured.
Sighing, I flicked it off, watched it sail through the air to land on the wood-paneled wall and slide down to the dull-grey carpet.
My day had begun with a pickup from the hospital, then a hospice death which we only worked because the family was arguing about which funeral home to use. The scene we were on now would normally have been a somewhat ordinary suicide of a terminally ill man—advanced pancreatic cancer. He’d written a careful email to his family explaining his decision and expressing his love for them and detailing his wishes for disposition of his body and funeral arrangements. But in a cruel twist of fate, he’d mistyped the email address, and the family never received it. He wasn’t discovered until two weeks after he overdosed on pain meds, by which time he was a yucky, maggot-covered mess.
Which made it impossible to fulfill his desire to have his body donated to science. Poor dude. Couldn’t even have this fucked up illness be good for something.
I brought him back to the morgue and got him logged in and stored in the cooler. Dr. Leblanc informed me that he had court and wasn’t going to perform any autopsies until the next day, which meant I had nothing to do except wait for another call.
The last thing I wanted was time to reflect and think or anything like that. I didn’t want to muse on the incidents of the previous night, or contemplate how right or wrong it was for me to kill and eat that Saberton man. I needed to stay busy and, annoyingly, not enough people were dying to keep me so.
Restless, I went up to the front office and scored points with Rebecca, the secretary, by helping her with filing. That only killed about two hours, and so I went back to the morgue and organized the supply cabinet, made notes of what needed to be ordered and did, essentially, every minor and/or crap job that tended to be put off or avoided.
The grime on the baseboards of the cutting room had been bugging me for a while, and I was down on my knees scrubbing them when I heard the cooler door open.
Frowning, I straightened. “Nick?” I called. “Is that you?” I didn’t think he was scheduled to work today, but who else would be going into the cooler?
After a few seconds of no answer, I stood and moved through the cutting room to the hallway. The cooler door stood open, and when I stepped into the doorway, I saw Allen, hands gloved, standing over a body bag on one of the stretchers. The bag was unzipped, and he appeared to be searching through it.
A stab of apprehension went through me. This was the body I’d picked up from the hospital, and it hadn’t been autopsied yet. But what if someone at one of the funeral homes had mentioned that brains were missing from the bags of organs? I’d never thought it likely that any non-zombie would notice whether brains were missing or not. After all, no normal human in their right mind would look through the bag of innards to verify that everything was there.
“Allen?”
He glanced over at me, eyes flicking to the rag and scrubber in my gloved hands. “Dr. Leblanc has you doing something useful?”
I bristled, but did my best to hold onto my outward cool. Allen didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him, and that was that. “No, I decided to do it on my own,” I said. “The baseboards have been bugging me.”
He gave a snort of what might have been either contempt or disbelief. “Good that you’re doing it. No one else would,” he said with the clear implication that no one else would lower themselves to crawl around the cutting room floor. He continued to dig through the bag and around the body. “Saves us from having to call in a cleaning crew,” he added.