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

unsettled me deeply. Would he report the link to authorities? Would they in turn dig up Saberton and its zombie research? As much as I hated the idea of the Saberton assholes getting away with murder, the last thing the zombie community needed was prying from outsiders.
    He picked up a scalpel and carefully sectioned the heart while I busied myself with sewing up the incision. As much as I liked Dr. Leblanc, all I wanted right now was to get away so I could process this crap.

Chapter 2
    After we finished, I returned Sarah Lynn to her body bag and placed the clear plastic bag of organs between her legs. Under normal conditions I’d wait until I was alone in the morgue, then go into the cooler and collect that brain for my own dining pleasure. But not this one. It would stay right there in the bag with the liver and kidneys and other organs. I wasn’t about to risk screwing up my zombie parasite by eating a Saberton-contaminated brain. It might as well have been a lump of sawdust for all the appeal it had now.
    I tucked the body away in the cooler, cleaned up the morgue and readied everything for the next day’s autopsies. With that done, I grabbed my phone from my purse then headed outside and to the other side of the back parking lot. Dr. Ariston Nikas ran the zombie research lab where I worked part-time, twice a week. If anyone had answers about autopsies and zombie research, it would be him, but I wasn’t about to risk that someone might overhear.
    Dr. Nikas answered on the second ring. “Hello, Angel,” he said, a smile in his pleasantly accented voice. “I was about to call you.”
    â€œOh? What do you need?”
    â€œNo, you go ahead first,” he said. “It must be important if you are calling.”
    I checked around me, then lowered my voice. “You remember the movie extra who died from the Saberton experiments a few months back? We just had another case. Sarah Lynn Harper. She was an extra too. Twenty something with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that wasn’t there two months ago.”
    â€œOh, dear.”
    With those two words my hopes for a non-Saberton explanation sank. “You think the experiments caused it?”
    â€œThat would be my first theory,” he replied solemnly “It’s unprecedented for that condition to develop in such a short time frame. The common denominator for both victims is Saberton.”
    â€œThere were a couple of hundred extras,” I said, stomach knotting with anger and dread. Most of the extras had been unemployed, laid off from a factory Saberton bought and closed. The company had promised to rehire everyone once Saberton got some big juicy defense contract, but that had yet to happen. “
All
of those people could die or get screwed up? We have to do something!”
    â€œPhilip smuggled enough of the Saberton research data to me that I may be able to develop a counter agent,” he said, referring to Philip Reinhardt, a Saberton employee I’d been forced to turn into a zombie when I was a prisoner in Dr. Kristi Charish’s secret lab. Philip turned out to be an undercover operative working for Pietro Ivanov—the head of the local “Tribe” of zombies—and it was because of heroic efforts on Philip’s part that Dr. Nikas was able to stay a step ahead of most of Saberton’s bullshit.
    Dr. Nikas released a sigh heavily tinged with regret. “I’d truly hoped the death of Brenda Barnes had been an isolated incident.”
    â€œI’m with you there.” I began to pace in the parking lot to vent some of my anger and frustration. “But there’s something else. Sarah had lymphoma that went into remission after the filming, and when we autopsied her, it was like she never had it. The same shit that killed her, cured her.”
    Dr. Nikas fell silent for a moment before answering. “That would be my conjecture. It apparently mimicked the zombie parasite’s