Diana Rowland - How the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back

“Actually, I’m going to register for a couple of classes at Tucker Point Community College next term,” I shot back before my brain could engage itself. Crap. I’d toyed with the idea and even made it as far as checking out the college website, but I’d been too . . . well, okay, I’d been too chicken to do anything more. I’d passed the GED by the skin of my teeth—by one damn point, to be exact—and only managed that because I was allowed extra time because of my dyslexia. How the hell could I make it through college?

Yet I’d gone and said it, which meant that now I was stuck. No way would I give Allen the satisfaction of being right about me, and no way would I disappoint Dr. Leblanc, not with that proud smile on his face.

“Sounds good, Angel,” Allen commented without so much as a glance my way. He made another note on his clipboard, gave Dr. Leblanc a slight nod, and then departed without another word.

The pathologist removed the woman’s heart, weighed it, and set it on his cutting board. “I suppose I don’t need to suggest that you get in there and show everyone what you’re made of?”

I snorted, forced the fierce smile Dr. Leblanc expected from me. “Nah. Got that covered.”

Shit. Looked like I was going to college.

“Now isn’t that interesting,” Dr. Leblanc murmured, frowning down at the sectioned heart.

I peered over at the abnormally thickened wall of her left ventricle. “Ventricular hypertrophy?” We saw it all the time in cases of heart disease and high blood pressure, but hardly ever in someone this young. And certainly not where there was barely any space in the ventricle at all.

“I think we can be more specific,” he said. “Cardiomegaly, young, signs of pulmonary edema, asymmetric septal and ventricular hypertrophy.” He ran the probe over the septum in the cross section. “See?”

Not only did I see, but I actually understood everything he’d said. Hot damn! Of course it helped that I was almost positive we’d seen this once before in an autopsy—

Oh, shit. We had seen this before, and now I knew why the woman looked familiar. She’d been one of the extras—a zombie cheerleader—for a movie that had been filmed in the area this past summer: High School Zombie Apocalypse!! Another female extra, Brenda Barnes, had died from the very same condition.

“We had a case like this a few months ago,” I said around the sudden chill that gripped my throat.

“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” he said, expression turning grave. “Two cases in a short span of time, and this one just as perplexing as the first.”

An echocardiogram from a few months prior to Brenda Barnes’s death had shown no sign of the heart condition, yet she’d died of it all the same. After quite a bit of frustrated puzzling, Dr. Leblanc had finally decided that either there’d been a mixup in medical records or a mistake was made in the echo.

Unfortunately, I had another theory. Several months ago Saberton Corporation was busy performing pseudo-zombie experimentation. They needed a large group of test subjects, and the movie extras fit the bill perfectly. Makeup hid side effects of rot, and behavioral issues were chalked up to acting like, well, zombies. And, of course, none of the extras knew they were part of an unethical, horrible, and utterly evil experiment to test fake brains and who knew what else.

But maybe Sarah Lynn was different and already had the heart condition? The thought that more people would die months down the road because of Saberton’s bullshit made my stomach turn. “Anything in her records about it?” I asked, clinging to the slim hope.

“Nothing about any sort of heart condition in any of her records,” he said, dashing my hopes to the ground and stepping on them. “And she has a lot of medical records. Lymphoma . . . and two months ago she went into remission.” He let out a sigh.

“She traded cancer for a fatal heart problem?” I didn’t like the direction of my thoughts, but I couldn’t share them with Dr. Leblanc.

“It does appear to be a supremely tragic twist of fate,” he said. “It’s possible some aspect of her treatment contributed to the heart condition. But I’ll check everything out thoroughly, especially with the similarity to the previous case.”

And what if he discovers that both were extras in the movie? The thought unsettled me deeply. Would he report the link to authorities? Would they in turn dig up Saberton and its zombie research? As much as I hated the idea of the Saberton assholes getting away with murder, the last thing the zombie community needed was prying from outsiders.

He picked up a scalpel and carefully sectioned the heart while I busied myself with sewing up the incision. As much as I liked Dr. Leblanc, all I wanted right now was to get away so I could process this crap.

After we finished, I returned Sarah Lynn to her body bag and placed the clear plastic bag of organs between her legs. Under normal conditions I’d wait until I was alone in the morgue, then go into the cooler and collect that brain for my own dining pleasure. But not this one. It would stay right there in the bag with the liver and kidneys and other organs. I wasn’t about to risk screwing up my zombie parasite by eating a Saberton-contaminated brain. It might as well have been a lump of sawdust for all the appeal it had now.

I tucked the body away in the cooler, cleaned up the morgue and readied everything for the next day’s autopsies. With that done, I grabbed my phone from my purse then headed outside and to the other side of the back parking lot. Dr. Ariston Nikas ran the zombie research lab where I worked part-time, twice a week. If anyone had answers about autopsies and zombie research, it would be him, but I wasn’t about to risk that someone might overhear.

Dr. Nikas answered on the second ring. “Hello, Angel,” he said, a smile in his pleasantly accented voice. “I was about to call you.”

“Oh? What do you need?”

“No, you go ahead first,” he said. “It must be important if you are calling.”

I checked around me, then lowered my voice. “You remember the movie extra who died from the Saberton experiments a few months back? We just had another case. Sarah Lynn Harper. She was an extra too. Twenty something with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that wasn’t there two months ago.”

“Oh, dear.”

With those two words my hopes for a non-Saberton explanation sank. “You think the experiments caused it?”

“That would be my first theory,” he replied solemnly “It’s unprecedented for that condition to develop in such a short time frame. The common denominator for both victims is Saberton.”

“There were a couple of hundred extras,” I said, stomach knotting with anger and dread. Most of the extras had been unemployed, laid off from a factory Saberton bought and closed. The company had promised to rehire everyone once Saberton got some big juicy defense contract, but that had yet to happen. “ All of those people could die or get screwed up? We have to do something!”

“Philip smuggled enough of the Saberton research data to me that I may be able to develop a counter agent,” he said, referring to Philip Reinhardt, a Saberton employee I’d been forced to turn into a zombie when I was a prisoner in Dr. Kristi Charish’s secret lab. Philip turned out to be an undercover operative working for Pietro Ivanov—the head of the local “Tribe” of zombies—and it was because of heroic efforts on Philip’s part that Dr. Nikas was able to stay a step ahead of most of Saberton’s bullshit.

Dr. Nikas released a sigh heavily tinged with regret. “I’d truly hoped the death of Brenda Barnes had been an isolated incident.”