White Trash Zombie Apocalypse (11 page)

Allen opened his bottom desk drawer, pulled gloves out of a box and tugged them on, then stood and moved to me. I let him examine the gash, and even I had to admit it was an ugly wound for a non-zombie to have. The cut extended from the outer edge of my thumb and into the meat of my palm. It gaped open about a quarter of an inch, and I could see the white sheen of a tendon within. Didn’t hurt though. That was nice.

“Needs stitches,” Allen muttered. “Probably about five, I’d say.”

Dr. Leblanc nodded. “I agree. But any chance we can take care of that here and avoid her wasting hours in the ER?”

Allen looked up at Dr. Leblanc. “I could do it since it missed the tendon. I mean, I have a suture kit, but I don’t have any lidocaine.”

“I don’t need it numbed up for just a few stitches,” I said quickly. Allen gave me a doubtful look, but I hurried on. “Seriously, if you can stitch it up, that’ll be fine.”

“I’ll get started on the incident report while you take care of Angel,” Dr. Leblanc said as if the matter had been decided. After another couple of seconds of hesitation Allen shrugged.

“Okay, but no screaming or crying,” he grumbled. “Come on.”

I followed him down the hall and into a small, rarely used room that had become more of a catch-all storage space than the consulting room it once was.

“Have a seat there by the desk,” he told me as he looked through the cabinet.

I did so, mentally bracing myself against him being a jerk to me, or rougher than necessary, or any crap like that. Hunger poked at me, reminding me how unnecessary all this was, and I bit back a sigh.

Allen turned back to me with suture kit, wound wash, and towels in his hands, set them all on the desk and flicked on the swing-arm lamp. He folded one of the towels into a pad and set it on the desk by me. “Okay, Angel, rest your forearm there and get comfortable.”

“Thanks for doing this,” I remembered to say as I set my arm on the folded towel. “I really didn’t want to have to go to the emergency room.”

He unrolled another towel and draped it over my forearm. “Emergency room sucks,” he said. “This way you’ll be done in fifteen minutes instead of three hours.”

“You’ve done a lot of stitching?” Not that it really
mattered since I wasn’t exactly worried about him botching it up. Even if he did, a slug of brains would take care of it.

Allen didn’t shift his careful focus from the wound. “I’ve gone with Dr. Duplessis four times on Doctors Without Borders rotations,” he said. “Did quite a few sutures.”

I blinked at him in surprise. “Really? Like other countries?” The instant the words left my mouth I realized how stupid they sounded.

But Allen didn’t deliver the condescending sneer I expected. “Yes,” he replied as he opened the suture kit and began removing items. “Africa, Guatemala, and Haiti twice.”

“I never knew that,” I said, frowning slightly. “Why don’t you ever talk about it?”

“It hasn’t come up,” he replied with a small shrug. He picked my hand up carefully and sprayed wound wash on it. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to sting, but I figured I’d give a slight wince anyway.

“Wow. Did you like it?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have gone four times if I didn’t,” Allen replied. He finished cleaning the slice, then replaced the towel beneath my arm with a fresh and dry one. “I’m going again in October, but without Dr. Duplessis this time.” He pulled off the latex gloves he had on, then put on fresh sterile gloves from the suture kit.

“That’s really cool,” I said, meaning it. “Where are you going?”

“Guatemala again to work in a children’s services clinic in the highlands,” he said. He picked up the needle, then adjusted my hand on the folded towel. “Okay, Angel,” he said, speaking calmly and, to my continued surprise, gently. “Take a deep breath and let it out.”

I did so, fascinated and a teensy bit weirded out by this completely alien-to-me side of him, then watched as
he did the first stitch with smooth efficiency and tied it off. He’d obviously done this a few thousand times.

Allen glanced up at me, a small frown touching the corners of his mouth. “Damn, Angel, you didn’t even wince.”

Shit. “Oh, um, I was watching you do it, and, uh, kinda forgot it was supposed to hurt.” I let out a weak laugh that sounded false even to me.

He pursed his lips, then returned his attention to my hand and began the second stitch. “Watching usually makes it worse.”

“I guess working in the morgue has gotten me really used to gore.” I shrugged. “Seems less scary to watch and see what’s going on.”

He knotted the thread. “Actually I’m the same way. I’d rather see it coming than be surprised.” He turned my hand slightly. “I think you can get away with only four stitches on this,” he stated. “It’s really shallow here at this end.”

“Okay, cool. Thanks.” I said. “I guess it’s good the scalpel was really sharp. I mean, I barely even felt it.” I winced as he did the next stitch, but when his frown deepened slightly I suspected I’d done so a fraction of a second too late.

“Do you generally have numbness in your hands?” he asked as he tied off the last stitch. “Or lack of sensitivity to touch?”

Double shit. “Nope. Not at all!” I replied brightly. I lifted my right hand and wiggled my fingers. “Totally fine!”

Allen cut the suture thread and set the needle aside. “Even a sharp scalpel hurts like hell. I know.”

How the hell was I supposed to explain it in a believable way? “Um, that arm was broken when I was twelve,” I said. “Maybe there was nerve damage or something.”

He shrugged, cleaned the wound area again, then
taped gauze over the stitched cut. “Could be. You definitely don’t have normal pain sensitivity.”

“Or just used to it,” I said before I could stop myself.

“Used to getting sliced?” he asked, frowning more.

“No, um…used to getting hurt.” I hesitated, then gave him a tight and humorless smile. “Mom used to smack me around. That’s how my arm got broke,” I explained, even as I wondered why the hell I was telling him this. “She went to jail for it.”
And died there
, I thought.
Killed herself on my sixteenth birthday
. Luckily I had enough self-control to keep from sharing that lovely tidbit of family history.

But he didn’t comment on my little revelation. He wrapped up the suture kit, dropped the needle into a sharps-disposal container, stripped the gloves and placed them in a biohazard trash can. “You’re all done,” he told me curtly, sounding almost harsh after the gentler tone of before. “I’ll check it in a couple of days, but I don’t anticipate any issues with it. Keep it clean.”

“Sure thing,” I said. The old Allen was back. “Thanks for saving me a trip to the ER.”

“Don’t make a habit of it,” he replied, then left the room without a glance back.

I sat silently for another couple of minutes. Why the hell had I told him about my mom and her abuse? Because for a short time he’d been almost nice to me? Great. He treated me like a normal person, so of course I had to make sure he knew I wasn’t normal.

Taking a deep breath, I stood and returned to the morgue. After pulling gloves on over the gauze, I finished getting everything ready for the autopsy.

Dr. Leblanc returned as I was getting the body of Brenda Barnes onto the table. I hid a smile as I noted he was deliberately noisy as he walked.

“Everything go all right?” he asked.

“Went great,” I said brightly. “All put back together.”

He glanced down at my hand. “Does it bother you? We can postpone until the morning, or I can get someone else to assist if it hurts too much.”

“Oh, no, I’m cool,” I assured him. “Allen did it in four stitches. Hardly aches at all.”

Dr. Leblanc gave an approving nod. “He’s good. I know you have your differences, but anything is better than the emergency room for such a minor wound.”

I got the body stripped of clothing and shoved the block under her shoulder blades so that her back was arched, making it easier for Dr. Leblanc to do the Y-incision and examine her organs. With her head dropped back I could see remnants of the zombie makeup—green, grey, and beige grease paint along her jawline, and square patches of lingering adhesive on her neck.

I stepped back and looked over at the pathologist.

“Why doesn’t he like me?” It bothered me now. It had never bothered me before, at least not like this. But now Allen was someone I could actually respect, and suddenly his opinion of me mattered. And
that
bothered me as well.

A grimace flickered across his face as he shook his head. “I don’t know, Angel. It’s been like that since day one.”

Taking a deep breath, I did my best to throw off the stupid desire to give a shit about Allen’s opinion of me. “Oh, well,” I said. “Brenda’s been waiting long enough. Let’s get to cutting.”

The autopsy of Brenda Barnes went quickly, though Dr. Leblanc remained puzzled about the cause of death despite knowing
what
had killed her: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which was a condition where the heart muscle got too thick to pump blood properly, he’d explained. What he couldn’t figure out was how the heck she could’ve had that condition, since her medical records showed absolutely no sign of any thickening whatsoever in a full physical she had right before being laid off only a year earlier.

Muttering about misread test results and sloppy record keeping, he returned to the main building in the late afternoon, leaving me free to finally scarf down some brains to appease the insistent waves of hunger. I peeled up the gauze and tugged the sutures out of my healed flesh since they itched like crazy now, then taped the gauze back down. Later I’d figure out how to keep Allen from wanting to check it in a few days. Oh yeah, and figure out some way to explain why it healed without a scar. Maybe I could buy some miracle scar cream
and claim it did the trick. I groaned and resisted the urge to beat my head against the cooler wall.

After making absolutely sure I was alone in the morgue, I retrieved an empty container from my cooler and “harvested” the brain of Ms. Barnes. During an autopsy the organs—including the brain—were removed, examined, and samples taken to be stored in formalin. Yet afterward, the organs weren’t returned to their former body cavity but instead ended up in a big plastic bag that was set between the body’s legs for its trip to the funeral home. Therefore, once the autopsy was complete, I snagged the brains out of the bags for my own consumption.

In fact, that’s how I’d met Kang. He’d confronted me after he noticed that the brains were missing from the body bags when they arrived at his funeral home.

I got the container safely tucked away in my cooler and back in my car without incident. The rest of my shift was blissfully dull with only one other body pickup—an apparently natural death of a man with a history of heart disease who showed all the signs of a heart attack. Once he was in the cooler and logged into the system, Derrel and I grabbed a bite to eat at Paco’s Tacos, then I returned to the morgue and managed to squeeze in several hours of studying. When midnight finally rolled around, I clocked out, left the van keys in the box by the door, and got the heck out of there.

Lightning followed by a tooth-rattling crash of thunder heralded the start of another goddamn downpour. I dashed to my scrappy little Honda, yanked the door open and clambered in. It sure as hell wasn’t worth much on the open market, but it ran—most of the time—and right now it scored points for being dry.

I jammed my keys into the ignition and cranked the car. Hunger—the normal human kind—reminded me that, though I’d gorged on tacos at seven, it was now after
midnight. What the hell. A late night snack never hurt anyone. There wasn’t a whole lot open at this hour, but the flickering neon of Double D’s Diner promised destressifying pie and hot chocolate, plus the parking lot had only three other cars in it. Score.

The rain still pelted down in torrential sheets. I clutched my dorky raincoat around me, pulled down my hood, and made a dash for the slim awning over the door, then scowled blackly as the rain abruptly eased to a mere drizzle.

“Really?” I snarled up at the sky. “You couldn’t ease up thirty seconds earlier?”

I shook the worst of the water off and entered the diner, hung my raincoat on a peg beside two normal-yellow ones and a bedraggled umbrella, then headed to the counter. The waitress slid a mug of hot chocolate and a plate full of apple pie to me as soon as I sat down.

“You know me too damn well, Lurline,” I said with a laugh.

The rangy, well-worn woman grinned. “I know how you are when you get off work in the middle of the night.” She leaned her elbows on the counter. “Anything good today?” she asked with a gleam in her eye.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Only one today and there was no mess or yuck of any sort. Very ordinary natural death.”

She heaved a disappointed sigh and pushed off the counter. “How’m I supposed to live vay-car-ee-us-lee through you if you don’t got any good stories?”

I laughed. “I’ll make up something good and gory for the next time I come in here.”

“You better!” she announced, then sauntered away to check on another customer.

Grinning, I dug into my pie and allowed the loving embrace of sugar and fat to shield me from my worries. I glanced around idly as I ate. The old, bald guy at the far end of the counter was another regular, and a young couple
nestled in a booth, laughing and whispering as they shared a heaping plate of blueberry pancakes.

Through the broad windows of the diner I saw a Jeep pull into the lot and park, angled with the passenger side toward me. But the headlights remained on, and no one made a move to get out for almost a full minute. Finally the driver exited and moved to the back. Though she wore a light jacket with the hood up, I could tell it was a woman by the general build and grace of movement. She opened the hatch, huddling beneath it to stay out of the light drizzle as she rummaged through the contents as if looking for something.

But my heart did a weird little flip when she straightened and pushed the hood back from her face. It was her. The stalker blonde.