How the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back (35 page)

“A foolish move,” I repeated, almost as disgusted by his need to be superior as by his choice of words. Behind him I saw the lid of the bin lift and an arm snake out, a red line around the wrist that had yet to fully heal. The fingers moved in jerks, still not fully functional, but they worked well enough to grip Andrew's hair.

I kept my face impassive as Andrew let out a strangled cry of horror and tried to scramble to his feet.

“Fooooolish,” Kyle rasped, using his hold on Andrew as leverage to haul himself up and partially out of the bin. Andrew twisted, squealing like a kid in a carnival haunted house, but with his hands secured behind him he couldn't pull free. I stood and shifted back a couple of feet to avoid getting kicked by Andrew's scrabbling feet, and bit my tongue to keep from laughing.

“Foooolish,” Kyle breathed, wet and burbly, and pulled his face close to Andrew's. His stench rolled over me as blood and ichor dripped from his mouth and onto Andrew's neck. “I . . . am feeling . . . foolish.” He shifted closer, and Andrew screamed. I almost felt sorry for Andrew, since this had to seem like a scene from a horror movie. Almost sorry. Okay, not really.

Then again, in the next instant, I saw he had a real reason to scream. Kyle had his teeth clamped on Andrew's ear and probably the only reason he hadn't bitten it off yet was the weakness of his jaw.

“Kyle, he's Naomi's brother,” I said mildly. “Take it easy, for her sake.”

Kyle loosened the bite, and I noted that the top half of Andrew's ear already hung oddly and dribbled blood. “No promises,” he growled, but he released Andrew with a shove before flopping back into the bin.

Pierce hung up behind me. If he'd noticed the altercation, he'd seen no reason to intervene. “I'll get the mod syringes off Brian.” As he spoke he pulled a second phone from his pocket. “Mine,” he said as he handed it to me, and I realized he meant Gentry's. “Try calling Saber. Stall her or make a deal for
him
.” He gestured toward Andrew without looking at him. “Do what you can.”

“Got it.” I turned on the phone then started scrolling through Gentry's contacts, somewhat surprised that there were only a dozen or so and none for Nicole Saber. I opened my mouth to ask Andrew for his mother's number, then closed it as I saw a contact with the name CEOILF.

CEO I'd Like to Fuck? No way.

I quickly checked the text messages between Gentry and CEOILF. “Ohhhhhh myyyyyyy goddddddddddd!”

Pierce turned sharply, in the process of lifting the still unconscious Brian. “What? What's wrong?”

“Dude! You were banging Nicole!”

Andrew jerked in shock. “
What?
”

Pierce almost dropped Brian back into the bin, denial in his eyes before he remembered he had to play Gentry in front of Andrew. He nodded once, tense. “Right. More info that way,” he said, improvising quickly. “And she was hot for it.”

Grinning, I skimmed through the texts, then checked Gentry's pics on a whim. “Oh, dude! Pics and all! In the front lobby?” I looked back up at Pierce. “You animal!”

“Just doing my job.” He gave me an exasperated glare that Andrew couldn't see and continued to search Brian for the syringes. Andrew simply looked horrified.

I was more than happy to twist this particular knife, especially since the taunting was a healthier way to channel my anger and fear than, say, punching him in the nose. “Oh, snap! A crotch shot!” I crowed to Andrew. “You came out of there!” His mouth worked soundlessly, flush deepening to crimson.

“Angel,” Pierce growled softly.

“Oh, right. The call. Sorry.” I'd give Pierce shit later about how his persona's penis had been in Nicole Saber.

I returned to the contact list and dialed her number. Time to channel some more stress and worry into a bit of trash-talking. Luckily, I was damn good at that sort of thing.

She picked up on the second ring. “Pierce. You fucking asshole. What the
hell
is going on?”

Sounded like she'd heard the news Gentry had switched sides, and was appropriately freaked that her loverboy had duped her. Good. As much as I wanted to fuck with Andrew for not opposing the shit Kyle and Marcus went through, I wanted Nicole to fucking
suffer
for being responsible for it in the first place. “Nikki, darling!” I trilled. “It's been so long, sweetie. We have
got
to get together for coffee someday soon!” I began to gloat about the naughty pics, then stopped. I'd save those for a special occasion.

“Crawford.” She snarled my name, managing to pack disdain and disgust into the one word. “What do you want?”

“Ooh! A pony? I've always wanted a pony!” I gushed, getting into the spirit of it. “Or, if I can't have that, then maybe you can clear a passage for us, and in return I won't eat your darlin' son's brain.” I covered the mouthpiece and spoke in a stage whisper to Andrew, “Don't worry, I won't eat your brain.” I paused and grinned. “I'll let
Kyle
eat it!”

He glared but cast a fear-filled glance toward the bin. His bitten ear still trickled blood down the side of his neck.

Nicole remained quiet for a moment. “Agreed,” she finally said with icy calm. “Bring him up, and we'll escort you out.”

“What about my pony?” I asked brightly. Since she had zero reason to believe otherwise, Nicole surely assumed that Gentry-the-traitor was human. She thought she was dealing “only” with zombie-me and human-Gentry. Not to mention, she figured we'd be dragging butt as we wrangled a bunch of out-of-commission zombies.

“You'll have to wait on that one,” she replied, voice still cool though a bit stiff.

“Darn it! Santa says the same thing.” I heaved a tragic sigh. “Thing is, Nikki, honey, I don't have a lot of faith that you're really going to let us out of here.”

Pierce straightened with what looked like a slim waist pack in his hand, then got all three zombies arranged in the bin as comfortably as possible before he closed the lid.

“I can't afford to lose Andrew,” Nicole replied, loading her voice with resignation and a touch of anger. “I'll play your game.”

She was a good manipulator, but I had her pegged. I covered the mouthpiece again. “Hey, Andy, she says she can't afford to lose you. Am I correct in assuming she's full of shit?”

He lifted his eyes to mine, and I saw behind his wall of arrogance, to the pain and despair that came with being a pawn in a brutal game.
Welcome to the fucking club,
I thought.

“She can't afford to lose me,” he said. “But right now she can't afford to lose you people even more.” He let out a shaky breath, eyes bleak. “She'd rather win with me dead than lose with me alive.”

In that moment I actually felt a glimmer of sympathy toward him. To survive, he had no choice but to accept enemies as allies.

“Sorry, dude,” I said quietly, meaning it. I uncovered the phone. “Hey, Nikki, honey, about this whole playing-my-game thing. See, I think you're chock full of shit. And Botox too.”

“You little piece of worthless trash,” she hissed. “Bring Andrew up, and you go free. Otherwise, you'll force me to take radical action.”

“Hey, can my pony be white with brown spots?” I asked, but she'd already hung up on me. I
tsked.
“Jeez, rude much?”

“Angel, I have the mods,” Pierce said.

I closed the phone and stuffed it into a pocket. “Cool. You need me to help you inject them?”

He shook his head. “I can't use them. They're not designed for my . . .mature physiology.” He lifted the waist pack he'd pulled from Brian. “But you can.”

I blinked stupidly at him. “I don't have a port.”

“There weren't any ports when we first began using mods,” he told me. “It'll be a raw surge, and it won't last as long, but it will work.”

“But . . .” I gulped. “I'm not a trained soldier operative martial artist ninja. I'm a scrawny lightweight. What the hell will this SuperMod do for me? Make me snarkier?”

A thud from the top of the elevator pulled our attention. Scowling, I jumped atop the bin, reached up and banged my fist on the emergency hatch. “BACK OFF, ASSHOLE,” I yelled. “I'M HUNGRY, AND YOU'RE ABOUT TO BE MY HAPPY MEAL!”

Silence reigned. Satisfied, I jumped back off the bin and returned to where Pierce regarded me with a bemused look on his face. “Okay, fine, so I get turbocharged. How does this work without a port? Do I eat it?”

“Stomach acid would destroy it,” Pierce said. “For maximum effectiveness, it needs to be injected directly into the abdominal cavity.” He pulled a folding knife and flicked it open. “It's similar to what you did to yourself when you stored brain reserves in your abdomen.”

“Great,” I said with a grimace. When my dad had been taken hostage I'd traded myself for him, but my ace in the hole had been brains packed in sausage casings and stuffed into my gut. “That shit was
loads
of fun.”

“It will be a much smaller cut,” he promised.

“You're giving me this mod so I can take out any guards we run into, right?”
Take out
. Nicer and easier way to say
kill
. A shiver crawled through me.

His eyes met mine. “Yes,” he said with an evenness that told me he understood my angst and didn't find it odd or misplaced. “War isn't pretty. Ever. Nicole Saber has declared war on our kind and will move heaven and earth to keep us from making good our escape. Her Special Security Team will be well armed and, with only two of us functional, we'll need as much speed and strength as possible.”

“Wouldn't using guns be better than jumping their asses?”

“Guns have their place,” he said, “but in some situations, especially close quarters, we waste our zombie edge if we stand off and shoot. We can take damage humans can't, which gives us a psychological advantage when we're in their face, kicking ass despite their weapons.”

“Got it,” I said, grateful that he'd bothered to talk this out with me. Then again, this probably wasn't the first time he'd given a soldier a pep talk right before a pitched battle.

A scrape of metal made us both look toward the stairwell again. “Shit,” I said. “They're trying to flush us. Let's fucking oblige and get this done.”

“Lift your shirt,” he instructed, then went on one knee before me as I obeyed “I'll make the cut and insert the syringe but won't inject. Once you press the plunger, it'll take a few seconds to kick in, then you'll have two to three minutes at the most before you lose the effect.” He glanced up at me. “It'll probably be best to hit the mod right before the elevator stops.”

I licked dry lips. “Sure thing. Sounds like a great plan.”

“Put the other mods in your pocket,” he said as opened the waist pack. Within it were three enormous stainless steel syringes, much like the kind used to marinate meat and hefty enough to deliver a load of the thick SuperMod goop. I took two and dropped them into the side pocket of my pants, heart already beginning to race in anticipation and dread. “Once I've made the cut I'll give you the knife so that you can administer the other doses if needed.”

“Got it. I'm totally ready,” I lied.

Either he believed me or it didn't matter to him. He set the point of the knife halfway between my belly button and my sternum then, without a lick of warning, drove the two-inch blade in to the hilt. I gasped and stiffened at the sharp burn of pain, then clenched my teeth as he pulled the knife to make the gash wider.

“Almost there,” he murmured. He removed the knife and slipped the first syringe into the gash until only half its length and the plunger protruded. “Hold that there.”

As soon as I had it, Pierce moved to Andrew and hauled him to his feet.

“I'm cutting the zipties,” he growled, “but if you
fuck
with me again or try to run, our agreement is null, and your ass is mine. Understood?”

Andrew gave a tight nod. “Understood.”

Pierce pulled a much larger knife from a sheath on his belt—the same knife he'd used to kill the two guards in the holding area. “Good deal. I suggest you take cover behind the bin when the shooting starts.”

Andrew paled, but he nodded again.

Pierce lifted his chin. “Let's roll.”

We pushed the bin fully into the elevator and readied ourselves to fight our way out. The metal syringe buried in my gut felt like ice in my fingers, and I forced myself to breathe deeply and keep my hand steady.

“We're going up one floor and then out,” Pierce said in a low voice, holding the door until Andrew could hunker behind the bin, and I could crouch on top. “No other choice since this elevator only goes between these two basement floors.” His mouth twisted in annoyance. “She'll have her team waiting for us, but the one possible bright spot is that there are probably only a dozen or so left.”

“Only a dozen.” I laughed weakly. “Awesome.”

He nodded toward the syringe in my hand as the elevator began to rise. “Show time.”

“Right.” The word came out as a squeak. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Right,” I said, then took a deep breath and pressed the plunger.

I felt nothing for a second. And another. And—

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” I gasped. Warmth raced through me as if every neuron in my body was waking up for the first time. My vision snapped into razor sharp focus, colors intensified, and every noise grew distinct. The thud of Andrew's pulse. The hiss of Pierce's breath. A shift of flesh in the bin beneath me. The scrape of fabric against metal above me, and a bolt sliding back. I jerked my eyes up to the outline of the service hatch, and my lips pulled back from my teeth. “Zombie Super Powers,
Activate
,” I breathed.

I surged up from the crouch and slammed the palm of my hand into the hatch. It flew open and smacked the unlucky security guard in the chin on the way, giving me a split second of advantage, which I seized along with his collar. He scrabbled for purchase, but gravity remained on my side as I used my weight to pull him down through the hatch and to the floor. Also on my side was the sudden stop when I smacked his head into the corner of the bin, and it took only two more Angel-assisted skull-meets-industrial-plastic blows to split it. I dug my fingers in and ripped his head open like a kid tearing into a Christmas present, yanked the brain out of its nice warm home, then lifted the lid of the bin and dropped the brain in.

“Breakfast in bed, y'all!”

Pierce's eyes rested on me as I resumed my perch on top of the bin, but he seemed to approve of my actions. He turned toward the door as the elevator stopped, grip tightening on the knife in his right hand. Muted growls and wet sounds of slavering came from within the dumpster, and I smiled. Hungry zombies were hungry.

“He had this,” Andrew said.

I looked down to see him still cowering behind the bin, his face flecked with blood from the guy who turned into breakfast. In one hand Andrew held a canister about five inches long, with a pin still in place. Smoke bomb or tear gas, I figured. Maybe a flash bang. Whatever it was, I'd stopped the bad guy before he had the chance to use it. One point for Angel.

“Thanks.” I plucked the thing from Andrew's grasp and handed it off to Pierce, then focused on the elevator door. My blood hummed through my veins, and the scent of the men outside coiled through the widening opening.

“Six,” Pierce murmured, but I was already in motion. I leaped from the bin, pushed off the right side of the elevator door to launch myself at the first guard on the left. He tried to shift the aim of his tranq gun, but I grabbed his head and snapped his neck before his finger could tighten on the trigger. Beside me, Pierce moved quickly to bury his knife in the chest of a guard. He wrenched the blade up and threw the man aside as my guy dropped. A blond man with a scraggly soul patch fired a real gun at me but the bullet simply grazed my hip. I leaped forward and snapped a kick hard into his knee, spun and smashed my elbow into his face, wrenched the gun from his hand, then spun back again to ram the butt of it into the throat of a third man.

I held back a manic laugh. No way would I be able to pull off these moves without the mod. Everyone seemed to move so
slowly
. Taking them out was like dancing through people trapped in mud.

Pierce broke the wrist of another guard even as a round took him in the thigh. Unfazed, he slashed his knife across the shooter's throat. The last standing guard brought a tranq gun to bear on Pierce, but I dove at him, grabbed him by the face and smashed the back of his head into the wall. He slumped to the floor, leaving a trail of blood on the cinderblock.

I swung around to deal with the next opponent, only to see that there wasn't one. Six guards littered the floor, at least three quite dead, with the others definitely not posing a threat anymore.

Pierce cleaned his knife on the shirt of one of the guards, straightened and slid it back into its sheath.

“Good work, Angel.” He gave a nod of fierce satisfaction as he surveyed the carnage, then pulled Gentry's radio from his belt and flipped through frequencies.

My skin prickled, and I clenched and unclenched my hands. I'd come down off enough highs to know I didn't have much longer as a superzombiebadass. I pivoted to the guy whose head I'd smashed into the wall, gripped him by the face again, cracked his skull open and scooped out his brain. I repeated this with the other two dead guards, then split one brain in half, handed one chunk to Pierce, then took the other two full brains back to the elevator. Andrew had pushed the bin forward to block the elevator door, and now sat slumped against the back of the car, eyes slightly glazed. I gave him a grin, then lifted the lid and chucked in the two full brains. Kyle lay curled on his side atop the body bag. He growled and awkwardly pulled one of the brains to him with his forearms. Brian stirred sluggishly, still heavily under the effect of the tranq. Marcus groaned and shifted but didn't look up.

My elation shifted to worry. “Marcus?”

“Still out,” Kyle mumbled through a mouthful of brains. He swallowed awkwardly with his screwed up jaw and tongue, then bit off a piece of brain, spat it into his hand and stuffed it into Marcus's mouth. “You take care . . . business out there,” he slurred. “I'll take . . . care of business . . . here.”

I released a shaky breath. “Thanks.” Frustration clawed at me despite his encouragement. Marcus and Kyle still had Saberton's experimental drugs in their systems, and I didn't have a clue how to counter it or help them get back to full strength.
More brains can't hurt
, I told myself.
And I'm doing everything I can to get us out of here.
That's how I'd help them. Take care of business, just like Kyle said, and get them to Dr. Nikas.

I closed the lid then crouched against the wall beyond the elevator to wolf down the remaining brain half. My hands trembled, and a slight queasiness wanted to push back against the brains I swallowed down. Yep, definitely coming down off that incredible high. Damn it.

“You doing all right?” Pierce asked. He bit off a chunk of brain, watching me carefully.

Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I nodded. “Yeah. Hard crash though. Need a minute.”

He finished his brain and didn't bother wiping his mouth. “There'll likely be another team waiting past the next door. We need to move quickly before they realize we've taken these guys completely out.”

I scarfed down the rest of the brain and got to my feet. Now I was the one who felt stuck in mud, though my little snack helped a bit.

A dart whizzed past my ear. “Angel, get back!” Pierce shouted in the same instant. I flattened myself against the wall behind the corner as Pierce dove into the elevator and took cover by the number panel. “Three,” he told me, pointing down the hall. Guess they decided not to wait for us.

Well, I sure as hell wasn't going to wait for them to come to us, not in my current non-badass condition. The sound of approaching footsteps spurred me faster as I yanked the knife and another syringe from my pocket. Pierce hissed “too soon” at me, but I ignored him. If I didn't do it now it would be too late.

I jabbed the knife into my gut, eerily amazed that I'd reached a point where I could do so with relative ease. Shouts and more footsteps grew louder as I shoved the syringe in and pressed the plunger.

3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

Delicious fire raced through my veins, and when the first man came close I stepped around the corner, grabbed his shotgun and slammed it up and into his face. As he staggered back I wrenched the gun from his hands, then swung the butt to clock the guy beside him in the temple and drop him like a stone. Something punched me in the side, and I swung around to see a third guard, a woman, still a good twenty feet away down the corridor. Fire leaped from the muzzle of the gun in her hand. I staggered back a step as the round smacked me in my thigh, but before I could shift my weight to charge her, her head snapped back in time with the sound of another gunshot, and she went down with a neat hole in the center of her forehead.

I spared a quick glance back to confirm that yes, it was Pierce's shot that had taken her down, then turned on the one guard still standing—the one whose face I'd slammed with his own shotgun. “Jarvis,” or so his name patch read. Blood from his nose mingled with a portwine birthmark that covered the left half of his neck and disappeared under his shirt collar. Eyes wide in shock, he dropped his hands from his nose and jerked them out to his sides in a position of surrender.

“Please. Please don't kill me.” His voice shook, high and thin, and his eyes darted around at the dead bodies. He didn't look much older than me, for fuck's sake. How the hell did he get tangled up in this shit?

“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your back!” I barked at him. Or tried to bark. It came out more like a wheeze as my tanked up parasite dealt with two bullet holes, but he flung himself to the floor and stuck his wrists behind his back.

“Please don't kill me,” he repeated, breath coming unevenly.

“Don't give me a reason to,” I said as I ziptied his wrists together. “Stay still and be cool, and you'll be fine.” Yeah, he was a cold-blooded asshole if he was on the special team, but that didn't mean
I
had to be.

He gulped once and then went as still as a statue.

Pierce approached and made a quick examination of my two healing bullet wounds as the flesh closed. “Hang on,” he said, then moved over to the guard he shot, used the shotgun to smash her skull open, pulled the brain out and brought it to me. “Tank up again while you move. We still have to get to the van.”

I ripped the brain in half and handed him one piece with a nod toward the bin. Understanding, he slipped the brain under the lid.

Maybe there's something to the whole concept of a zombie soldier after all?
I wondered as I ate. Feeding off one's enemies seemed to be working so far.

I was more prepared for the crash when it came this time. As the prickling began I put my hand against the wall and took several deep breaths. An urge to weep filled me as, once again, the world grew dull and normal, and I bit the inside of my cheek to hold it back. The urgency of our situation clawed at me, but it was still several more seconds before I could pull my hand from the wall, leaving a bloody print behind.

I forced my legs to take me over to the elevator, and by the time I'd crossed the ten or so feet, I felt almost not-crappy. I grabbed the bin handle, then saw that Andrew still sat slumped against the back of the elevator.

“You hanging in there, dude?” I pulled the bin out a few feet to give him some room to get up, but to my surprise he shook his head.

“Shot,” he said in a shaky voice then pulled his hand away from his side to reveal a red spot the size of a quarter on the left side of his shirt below his ribcage.

“Oh, shit,” I breathed and came around the bin to crouch by him and peer at the wound. “How the hell'd you get shot? You stayed down the whole time, didn't you?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed then nodded toward the wall and a small divot in the metal. “Ricochet.” A one in a million shot had bounced perfectly to hit him.

“Can you walk? Or, um, do you need to ride?” I gestured to the bin with an apologetic wince.

“I can walk,” he insisted. He struggled upright, then swayed, paling.

“No, you can't.” I seized his right arm and laid it across my shoulders, then grabbed him around the waist. “Pierce, Andrew's hurt. We need to move.”

Pierce turned toward us, knife in one hand and gun in the other, bloody and badass and looking as far from Pietro as I could possibly imagine without a sex change. His lips pressed together at the sight of Andrew.

“You need your hands free,” he told me. “And he's safest inside the bin.”

Andrew blanched and started to protest, which I completely understood since I totally got how being crammed into a rolling dumpster with hungry zombies—who probably didn't like him very much—could be the stuff of nightmares. Unfortunately, his physical state and us getting the hell out of the building took priority over his mental state.

“Sorry, Andy,” I said, “but he's right.” I flipped the lid up. It was going to be a pretty cozy fit with a fifth person in there, even if one was in a body bag. “Y'all be nice to your guest,” I told the three zombies as they blinked up at me. To my relief Marcus was finally focusing on me, and Brian looked as if he had a little movement back. “I'll explain it all later,” I added.

Andy continued to babble protests, but I wrestled him in and got the lid closed, then set both hands on the bin, dug my feet in and shoved it forward. Pierce stalked ahead, every inch the predator. I breathed deeply, but there were too many scents of blood and brains and rot for me to tell if there were any humans nearby who still posed a threat. Pierce seemed to be having the same problem to judge by the way he paused every ten feet or so to scent.

We came to a corner and stopped. Pierce listened and sniffed the air before quickly peeking around, then motioned me forward. Twenty feet down the corridor was a set of battered grey metal double doors that I recognized from my first escape from this place. “Déjà fucking vu,” I muttered.