How the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œSounds 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.
    â€œNow 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWe had a case like this a few months ago,” I said around the sudden chill that gripped my throat.
    â€œHypertrophic 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.
    â€œNothing 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.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œIt 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