Diana Rowland - My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Derrel huffed out a sigh. “Monica was working that night. I know she wasn’t thrilled to be working two scenes back to back, but it sounds like that one was pretty interesting.” He glanced my way, slight frown creasing his forehead. “Have you even met Monica yet?”

I nodded. “Met everyone in the staff meeting last week.” Although “met” was a strong word for what was more like: “Hey, everyone, this is Angel, our new body-snatcher. Angel, this is everyone!” There were three death investigators: Derrel, Monica Gaudreau, and Allen Prejean—the Chief Investigator. There were also three van driver/morgue techs: me, Nick, and a pasty-looking older guy named Jerry Powell. Supposedly the coroner, Dr. Duplessis, wanted to hire one more of each to make scheduling easier, but that was on hold for some sort of budget reasons. The only reason my position had been open was because the previous van driver had been caught stealing lab supplies. I almost never saw Monica or Jerry because of the way the shifts fell. If it wasn’t for the fact that the office had a staff meeting every other week I probably wouldn’t know anyone except Derrel. And Nick, but only because he’d trained me.

“I don’t know about interesting, but it’s definitely something different,” Ivanov said to Derrel. “So far about all they can be sure of is that it was someone reasonably strong—and they only have that much because of Dr. Leblanc’s findings in the autopsy.”

“How can he know that?” I asked before I even realized I’d opened my mouth.

Derrel answered. “I haven’t read the report, but often that sort of thing can be determined by the extent of the damage. Chopping off a head isn’t an easy thing to do, so someone with spindly little arms like you would have a hard time of it.” He chuckled and I joined in, more out of incredible relief than from the teasing.

Okay, so another vote against the “Angel is a psycho killer” option. Whew.

My food finally arrived along with a refill of my coffee. The stuffed pancakes were as good and evil as the deputy claimed, and I managed to survive the rest of the meal without looking like a total idiot or doing anything that would make the others realize that I had no business being in that line of work.

But, while I ate, one niggling thought occurred to me and refused to leave me alone.

If I really did break my trunk open, then I would be strong enough to chop off someone’s head.

All next week I was the goddamn model of a good worker. I arrived at the morgue early to get everything set up and cleaned up. I stayed late to get stuff cataloged or put away.

And whenever I was alone, I scooped the brains out of the bags and squirreled that shit away. I bought a bunch of ice packs, started saving plastic water bottles, and I washed out a bunch of the old pickle jars from underneath the cabinets at home. I also decorated the jars to make it a little less obvious what was in them. Back when I was a little girl my mom and I had done this craft thing where we’d take empty wine or liquor bottles—which we always had tons of—and cover every bit of glass with inch-long pieces of masking tape. Once the bottles were covered in tape we’d smear brown shoe polish all over and then wipe the excess off with a rag, and when we were done we had a bunch of bottles that looked cool and antique—kinda leathery, in a way. At least, they looked cool to seven-year-old me. Maybe I’d loved them because it was one of the few pleasant memories I had of my mother. Funny how it’s so much easier to remember the bad shit.

Then again, there’d been a lot of the bad shit.

I couldn’t decide if it looked dumb or not when I did the masking tape/shoe polish thing to the pickle jars, but it served its purpose. Someone would have to actually open the jars to see what I had inside them. I also went to the dollar store and bought a cheap little hand held, battery-powered blender. Once blended, the brains weren’t really recognizable as brains at all, but to be on the super-safe side, I borrowed a trick from Anonymous Letter Dude and started blending brains up with soup or fruit juice or chocolate milk—stuff that looked normal so that no one would freak out if they happened to open the cooler. I could fit half a brain and about a cup of soup or chocolate milk into each jar or water bottle, and so far it seemed that a jar or bottle every other day kept me from getting smelly. I really wanted to see if brains could freeze and, after thawing, still retain whatever it was that I craved. But I didn’t want to risk putting them in the freezer at home. Either my dad would eat them by mistake, or—worse—he’d throw them out.

Things were going as well as I could possibly expect, considering my circumstances. I had a seriously fucked up diet, but I still ate real food and was starting to get to where I could tell the difference between hunger and Hunger. Plus, the one month mark was coming up fast, and while I’d figured out that I probably wasn’t in any sort of position to tell my boss to fuck off, still, finally getting the straight scoop from whoever’d set all of this up for me was the thought that kept me going. It also helped that I was actually starting to enjoy the job.

Drive a van. How hard could it be, right?

Three A.M. on a Tuesday night and the body in the back of the van was being nice and quiet. Not that I expected it to sit up and start talking or anything stupid like that. But sometimes bodies made weird noises—farts and belches and shit like that—and I was still new enough to this gig that it gave me a bit of a freakout whenever I heard it.

Yep, the freak who ate brains could still get freaked. I had the iron stomach thing going for me, but there was still plenty of other shit that had the ability to creep me right out.

I had the radio in the van on, but the left speaker was blown and Shania Twain sounded more like Axl Rose, so I had the volume pretty low. Still, it was better than silence, especially since it was dark as all hell, and I was in the middle of Swamp Bum-fuck-nowhere on Highway 1790. I hadn’t passed another car in over ten minutes, and I had at least another twenty to go before I hit what passed for civilization in St. Edwards Parish.

So that was my excuse for screaming like a little bitch when I saw someone standing in the road in front of me.

I slammed on the brakes even as I realized that it was only a fallen tree with a branch sticking up that was kind of person-shaped. Person woulda been better to hit, flashed through my head as I yanked the wheel to the left in stupid panic. Really stupid panic, because I was already too close to the tree, and all I did was make sure the van went into a really spectacular flip and roll.

My head smacked hard against the doorframe as the van slammed down on the driver’s side, and for several seconds all I could see were bright bursts of light. The van scraped along the highway with a horrible shriek of metal on pavement, then everything stopped, and all I could hear was the sound of my panicked breathing.

I was lying against the driver’s side door, partially suspended by the seatbelt. I’d only been wearing it because I knew I couldn’t risk getting written up for not wearing one in a Coroner’s Office vehicle. Score one for the rulebook , I thought with a wheezing laugh. Half the windshield had pulled free like a banana peel, and I could see the crescent moon and about a million stars. Muggy air flowed in and a mosquito buzzed near my ear, probably drawn by the blood I could feel trickling across my forehead. Part of the doorframe had buckled and twisted inward, and it wasn’t until I unpeeled my fingers from the wheel that I realized my left arm was badly broken, complete with a jagged end of white bone shoved through the skin of my forearm.