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

“Neither,” he said. “There is no distinction—a new unified entity with no loss of who one was and is as a person. However, before experiencing it, one cannot even conceive the enhancements to the senses, perception, and overall awareness . Pheromones, taste, global species sensitivity. It’s exhilarating, even overwhelming at first, though totally natural.”

No, not natural at all! I silently protested. Yet in my little zombie heart it rang true, like an instinctual knowing and acceptance on top of eager curiosity. “That sounds more like a living steroid than a self-serving parasite.”

Dr. Nikas beamed. “A well considered analogy, Angel,” he said. “And that is the model I work with now, rather than symbiosis. To put it very simply, the organism is the ultimate mod. It gradually optimizes its target through bio-restructuring until it gets the job done—albeit with some heavy side effects.”

I peered at him. “You said you’re mature too, like Pierce?”

He nodded and extended his hand toward me, palm down, unbuttoned his sleeve and pushed it up to the elbow. “Point to any spot on my forearm,” he instructed.

Baffled, I reached to touch a spot a couple of inches above his wrist. I started to ask what he was doing, then could only stare, mouth hanging open. Like a slow-motion movie special effect, the skin of his forearm rippled and shifted as a scar formed, thick and white, angling across his forearm where I’d touched.

“Whoa.” I stared at the two-inch long defect in the skin. “Have you ever had a scar in that spot?” I asked. Maybe it was a weird parasite-memory thing?

“Never there,” he murmured. A few seconds later the scar rippled and became smooth skin again even as a long and barely healed gash appeared across the back of his hand.

“Whoa,” I said again,

“I am mature, yes,” he said. “Conscious control within genetic parameters.”

I processed that. “In other words, you can control stuff that could change on a normal human, but you can’t sprout wings?” I gave a nervous chuckle.

“That’s correct,” he replied. “And I can’t change my basic blueprint. No higher cheekbones or blue eyes instead of brown.”

It started to make a weird sort of sense. “Unless you—a mature zombie—ate someone’s brain, got a new blueprint, and decided to redecorate.” I watched with continued fascination as he smoothed his hand back to normal—whatever “normal” meant in this freaky context.

“Correct again,” he said.

I dragged my gaze from his hand to his face. “Conscious control. Is that how Pietro made himself look like he was in his sixties? Instead of staying younger-looking like regular zombies?”

“Yes, and it has proven quite useful.” He shifted and looked away “I’ve never had the need to transform or mimic aging. I stay away from people, for the most part.”

With the way Dr. Nikas lived as a recluse in his lab, there was no one on the outside who saw him enough to realize he never aged. The thought of so few people ever knowing him sent a weird and sad pang through me.

Dr. Nikas looked in the direction of Pierce’s room and exhaled softly. “I’ve been with him a long time. Mature zombies don’t tend to stay close together, but I . . .”

“You need him, and he needs you,” I finished for him.

A smile twitched his lips before fading. “He shelters me, and I keep him balanced,” he said. “I was broken long ago. For all of our physical and even mental healing capacity, most psychological or emotional wounds remain untouched, even in maturity.” He pulled his gaze back to mine. “Angel, you know I can’t tolerate a crowded room, much less a public life. With him, I can simply be who I am.”

“What happened to you?” I asked after a moment’s hesitation.

He pulled his sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff, focusing so carefully on the task it was clear he was either gathering up the nerve to tell me the story or attempting to come up with a nice way to tell me to fuck off and mind my own business. “I was revealed as a ghoul,” he finally said. “Zombie is a modern name. Ghoul, in various forms and languages, has been our label for centuries. Our kind were seeds for a great variety of legends of demonic association, sorcery, and macabre desecration of the dead.” He drew an unsteady breath, then reached for the mortar and scraped the goopy contents of the mortar into a smaller bowl. “A very long time ago I lived as a physician and surgeon in Thessaloniki.” His hands stilled, and his eyes went distant as though connecting with that past. “A mob ambushed me—the ghoul who’d been robbing the city’s graves and, more recently, its fallen soldiers.”

“Oh, no,” I murmured, dread rising.

He finished transferring the minced root into the bowl then busied himself with tasting the concoction before adding a final touch of what looked like black salt. I didn’t have to be a genius to understand that he needed a moment to compose himself. I doubted this was a subject he talked about much.

“I’ll spare you the horror of the details,” he said, and I suspected the short version was more to spare himself the horror of it. “The mob. People, friends and associates I’d known for years. So savage. So full of hate.”

A shudder ran through me. Though what he described happened a long time ago, he might as well have been painting a picture of my worst nightmares. Louisiana backwoods justice for the monster that ate Grampa Joe’s brain. “How’d they find out?”

“My wife.” His voice grew thick. “I never told her what I was. When she found a cask of brains in the winter cellar, she exposed me.”

Throat tight, I laid my hand on top of his. If he had told her, would she have been swayed to accept his way of living, or would she have turned on him then and there? It could’ve gone either way no matter how deep the relationship. What if Jane had turned on Pietro? There’d been no time to think about it in the moment, but damn, it could have been disastrous. Double kudos to Jane for being super cool.

Dr. Nikas’s hand trembled under mine as he spoke again. “They forced brains on me as they mutilated, broke, and burned my body by every means they could imagine. And they had vivid imaginations.”

Chilled to my bones, I squeezed his hand, silently grateful he’d decided to omit the graphic details. What words were adequate? None, and so I settled on the simple, “I’m so sorry.”

He turned his hand over and closed his fingers around mine, silent for at least a full minute. “They broke me, Angel,” he finally said in a voice choked with emotion, and I knew he meant far more than his physical body. “I don’t know how long it went on. Forever. Eventually they piled wood and brush around me for a final burning, but it never happened.”

I let out a breath I’d been holding, like reaching the turning point in a book when you know everything’s going to be okay. “What stopped them?” I asked, genuinely curious about what could put a halt to a situation so out of control.

“ He did,” Dr. Nikas said with a nod toward Pierce’s room. “He emerged from the darkness like an avenging angel, a mercenary captain and his company. In moments he and his men scattered the mob like dry leaves in the wind. He cut me down, told me it would never happen again. I’ve been with him ever since.”

“Pietro. Oh, wow.”

He wiped a stray tear away with the back of his free hand. “Yes. Strong, capable, fearless, and feared.”

“In other words a badass mofo.” A few days ago it would’ve been impossible for me to imagine Pietro Ivanov as a mercenary captain. But now that he had the form of Pierce Gentry I sure as hell could. And hell, what better place to get a supply of brains than a battlefield? “He hasn’t budged off that badassness one little bit, has he?”