How the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back Read online

  Rave reviews for Diana Rowland’s

  White Trash Zombie novels:

  “The third outing in Rowland’s marvelous series takes new zombie Angel Crawford deeper into a deadly conspiracy where zombie research and testing has taken some horrific turns. Rising star Rowland has created such a compelling and charming heroine, building reader investment throughout this truly outstanding series!”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “So far, this has been an incredibly fun series, and a breath of fresh air in an increasingly crowded field. While there’s no denying that the basic premise is fascinating and entertaining, the real draw here is Angel’s personal journey of growth and self-discovery. . . . Angel’s a heroine worth cheering for.”

  —Tor.com

  “If you haven’t discovered this series, you’re in for a treat. Angel is one of my favorite heroines in urban fantasy right now, and I can’t wait to see what she’s up to next!”

  —My Bookish Ways

  “An intriguing mystery and a hilarious mix of the horrific and mundane aspects of zombie life open a promising new series from Rowland. . . . Humor and gore are balanced by surprisingly touching moments as Angel tries to turn her (un)life around.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rowland’s delightful novel jumps genre lines with a little something for everyone—mystery, horror, humor, and even a smattering of romance. Not to be missed—all that’s required is a high tolerance for gray matter. For true zombiephiles, of course, that’s a no brainer.”

  —Library Journal

  “Every bit as fun and trashy as the brilliant cover. The story is gory and gorgeous with plenty of humor and a great new protagonist to root for. There is also a tightly written murder mystery too that shocked me by the end. No word yet on the next book in the White Trash Zombie series, but I’m already feeling the Hunger.”

  —All Things Urban Fantasy

  Also by Diana Rowland:

  SECRETS OF THE DEMON

  SINS OF THE DEMON

  TOUCH OF THE DEMON

  FURY OF THE DEMON

  VENGEANCE OF THE DEMON*

  MY LIFE AS A WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE

  EVEN WHITE TRASH ZOMBIES GET THE BLUES

  WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

  HOW THE WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE GOT HER GROOVE BACK

  *Coming in 2015 from DAW

  Copyright © 2014 by Diana Rowland.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos.

  Cover design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1657.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-60859-3

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Diana Rowland

  Books by Diana Rowland

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  For my sister, because she always has my back.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In no particular order, enormous thanks are due (and overdue!) to Anna Hoffstadt, Kat Johnson, Steve Wages, Andy Rogers, Mary Robinette Kowal, Google Street View, Matt Bialer, Mrs. Mary Biernacki, ibuprofen and cyclobenzaprine, Cathy Rathbun, Lindsay Ribar, Roman White, the entire Hoffstadt clan, John and Tara Palmer, Wikipedia, Jordan Ellinger, Nils Onsager, Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe, chocolate, Jaye Wells, Eddie and Cindy Schmidt, Matt Saver, Bill and Ann Jacobson, Scott Knight, those exercise band thingies that you hook over a door, Daniel and Kat Abraham, Dan Dos Santos, Jodi Levine, bacon, Marylou Capes-Platt, Jill Smith, John and Kristine Scalzi, Myke Cole, Betsy Wollheim, Kevin Hearne, Paul and Julie Wood, Joshua Starr, Peter Stampfel, Jack Hoffstadt, George R.R. Martin, Sherry Rowland, the entire DAW staff, and everyone else who helped keep me in one piece this past year.

  Chapter 1

  Sweat dribbled into my eyes and my ribs ached, but I stood my ground against the burly man in front of me. He flexed his hands as we slowly circled each other, his teeth bared in a sneer framed by a truly majestic beard.

  His hand shot out to seize my sleeve. I twisted to break his grip, but he merely shifted to grab my shoulder with his other hand. Within about two seconds he spun, slammed his butt into my hips, hoisted me up and sent me flying.

  I landed hard on the mat, breath whooshing out of my lungs before I remembered to slap my hand down.

  “No, no, Angel, the slap is part of the fall.” That was my sensei, his voice laced with three months of frustration from trying to teach me the most basic aspects of jiu jitsu.

  “Right,” I wheezed. “Got it.”

  My brawny opponent reached down and grabbed the front of my gi, then hoisted me up to set me on my feet as easily as picking up a kitten.

  “C’mon,” he rumbled. “Try it on me. It’s all about balance.”

  All about balance, my ass. I weighed barely a hundred pounds, and Freddie easily topped three hundred. Lips drawn back in a snarl, I seized his sleeve, grabbed his shoulder with my other hand, then spun and tried to slam my scrawny ass into his groin in an attempt to copy the move he’d performed on me.

  “You’re not going to get him onto your back using brute strength,” my sensei lectured as Freddie remained immobile. “Try a different move. Try osoto gari.”

  I gave him a blank look, and he sighed. “‘Trip the Drunk Guy,’” he said, supplying my own nickname for the move.

  “Gotcha!” Why did they have to use so many weird names for things? And yes, I knew it was Japanese, a beautiful and elegant language that wasn’t weird in the slightest, but I still had trouble with parts of the English language. Expecti
ng me to remember a bunch of foreign words was asking way too much of my brain. Of course, for all I knew osoto gari actually meant Trip the Drunk Guy.

  I adjusted my grip, yanked on Freddie’s arm to try and get his weight onto one leg, then shot my own leg forward and slammed it back into his to sweep it.

  Like kicking a tree trunk.

  “Pull on the arm,” sensei suggested, oh-so-helpfully.

  “I am,” I growled, then added a belated, “sir.”

  I continued to yank and pull and grip and kick and sweep until finally Freddie tumbled to the ground—with a perfect slap and fall—though I was pretty sure he’d simply taken pity on me. Sensei probably suspected the same thing, but he looked more relieved than anything. Poor guy. It wasn’t his fault that I wasn’t exactly the best learner in the world.

  After my brilliant demonstration, it was my turn to stand back and observe humongous Freddie and normal size Chance go at it. My ego recovered slightly as I watched Chance get taken down over and over, though when he fell he slapped the mat and did shit right instead of flopping like a sack of flour the way I did. About a month ago I’d snapped something in my ankle because of my horrible form, but a quick snack of brains healed the damage right up. That was one awesome thing about being a zombie. As long as I had my “protein shake” in my bag—with its super special ingredient—no one, especially my sensei, ever needed to know I was hurt.

  Sensei gave the two men some critiques on form, then turned to me. “Rollouts, Angel,” he instructed, gesturing to the length of the mat. “Both sides, back and forth twice, then you’re done.”

  “Yes, sir!” I said with a cheerful grin, then proceeded to throw myself at the mat in the most spaztastic rolls any jiu jitsu dojo had ever seen.

  I wasn’t sure, but I think sensei might have wept a little.

  “Cherry red face.”

  The skin parted beneath my scalpel as I let out a soft snort of derision. “Oh, please. Give me a hard one. Carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  Dr. Leblanc smiled from where he leaned against the counter. Fifty-something, with thinning grey-blond hair, glasses perched halfway down his nose, and more flab than muscle around his middle, he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, but I didn’t care about that one little bit. The pathologist for the St. Edwards Parish Coroner’s Office was one of my all-time favorite people in the world, mostly because he seemed to have absolute faith that I was capable of all sorts of great things. I didn’t always believe him, but I sure tried my best to live up to his expectations. Barely an hour earlier I’d been spazzing my way through jiu jitsu, and one of the reasons I hadn’t given up weeks ago was because, shortly after I started training, Dr. Leblanc had remarked that he would be honored if I would invite him to attend my belt ceremony once I earned my yellow belt. Honored. Before I was turned into a zombie, I’d been a drug addicted high school dropout with a felony conviction who couldn’t hold a job. And Dr. Leblanc couldn’t have cared less about any of that.

  “All right,” Dr. Leblanc said, “let’s stick with the carbon monoxide subject.” He tipped his head back as he contemplated my next challenge. “Your decedent has second and third degree burns over ninety percent of his body. No evidence of other trauma. Tox scan comes back clean. Carboxyhemoglobin level is five percent. How does that level corroborate your decedent’s death by fire?”

  I drew the scalpel down the woman’s abdomen to finish the Y-incision as I thought. “It doesn’t,” I said after a moment. “Poor dude probably got himself killed, and the murderer tried to use the fire to cover it up.”

  “Are you sure?” He leveled a stern look at me.

  “Yes,” I said, with mock-seriousness. “Well, not about the murder part,” I amended, “but about the dead-before-the-fire-started part. With only five percent on the . . .” I faltered. I knew what the damn test measured, but I had a hell of a time spouting off the word. “With a carboxyhemidoodamajigger level of only five percent, there’s no way he was alive when the fire started, otherwise it’d be way higher from breathing carbon monoxide.” The hamster raced on its wheel in my head. “Could be he died of a heart attack and dropped a cigarette onto a pile of newspapers. Five percent would be pretty normal in a smoker.” I shrugged. “Murder or accident, dude didn’t die from the fire or its smoke.”

  His smile returned. “I should probably say I’m impressed, but the truth is, I’m not.”

  “Huh?”

  “To be impressed I’d have to be surprised by how well you’ve absorbed the material,” he said. “And I’m not surprised at all.”

  Flushing with pleasure, I returned my attention to the body and finished separating skin and flesh from ribs. “I still have a long way to go.” I set the scalpel aside and picked up the big pruning shears—the same kind I used to snip branches at my house. Not that I actually did much in the way of yard maintenance besides shoving a lawnmower around every few weeks.

  “But every piece of knowledge is one more step down that long path,” he replied. He watched me snip through ribs to remove the triangle-shaped section, then pushed off the counter to step forward and peer into the chest cavity. “And one day you will look at that long path and find only a few steps left.”

  “Keep being so wise, and I’m going to start calling you Most Honorable Master Leblanc,” I teased as I wiped down the shears. “You’d look awesome with a long white beard and moustache to twirl.”

  He laughed. “I suppose I do sound a bit pompous.”

  “Nah, it’s cool,” I said with a grin. “Just don’t ask me to punch through boards or anything.”

  “I can promise you that’s not likely to happen,” he replied, then picked up a scalpel and began his examination of the throat, chest, and abdomen.

  Funny thing was that I had punched through boards before—not all that long ago, in fact. A flash flood had washed my house away this past summer, and with my dad and me trapped in the attic, I’d punched and kicked my way through the plywood and tar paper and shingles to give us a way out.

  Nobody knew about that, though, except my dad. It wasn’t the sort of thing any normal person could do, and especially not one like me—barely a hundred pounds of skinny bitch who sure as hell didn’t look tough enough to break a toothpick, much less rip through a roof.

  Then again, I wasn’t normal. Not one bit.

  I moved to the end of the table and began work on the young woman’s head. Mid-twenties, pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way. Sarah Lynn Harper. The name didn’t ring a bell, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling I’d seen her before, when she was alive.

  Scalpel in hand, I made a slice from ear to ear on top of her head, then peeled the scalp back to expose her skull. Trading scalpel for bone saw, I cut a neat circle all the way around, like a bowl cut gone wrong, then took a chisel-like tool called a skullcracker, shoved it into the groove and twisted. The bone gave a satisfying crack, followed by a wet sllrrkk sound as I pulled the top of the skull off to expose the pink and grey convolutions of the brain.

  The weird and gross music of the morgue, I thought with amusement, then took a deep breath and inhaled. The lovely scent of that brain filled me, but I resisted the urge to grab a handful and stuff it into my mouth. I wasn’t all that hungry, but yummm, fresh brains. I’d chow down later when there weren’t witnesses to how very not normal I was.

  My desire to munch on brain matter wasn’t because I was crazy. No doubt there were people who’d argue that I had a mental twitch or three, but that was beside the point. About a year ago I woke up in the ER with memories of horrible injuries yet not a scratch on me. I soon discovered that an anonymous benefactor had arranged for me to get a job with the Coroner’s Office, and I’d been harvesting brains out of body bags ever since. I wanted the brains—hell, needed the brains—because I was host to a truly bizarre parasite. As long as I ate a brain every week and a half or so, I was fine. The parasite
stayed happy, and would even fix me up if I got hurt or sick, though that required more brain-fuel. However, if I didn’t give my parasite enough brains, I’d start to fall apart—literally. Not only would I rot, but I’d lose my ability to think clearly and, worst of all, I’d get hungry. Really hungry. Hungry enough to kill for the brains I needed.

  Fortunately, my job as a morgue tech kept me well stocked on brains. No need for any murderous rampages today.

  The creak of the door jerked me out of my thoughts, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Allen Prejean, the Coroner’s Office Chief Investigator, step into the cutting room, a clipboard in his gloved hands.

  Yanking my gaze away, I returned my attention to my work as he and Dr. Leblanc exchanged pleasantries. Allen didn’t like me. He’d made that very clear from day one by giving me everything from crap schedules to undisguised sneers and offhand comments about work ethics and unsavory lifestyles. There were plenty of people who didn’t like me or who saw only what they expected to see—high school dropout, former felon, and recovering drug addict. In other words, a loser. Most of the time I had no problem blowing it off when I got the stink-eye. In the past year I’d worked my ass off to leave my loser self behind, and if there were some people who couldn’t see it, well, screw ’em.

  Allen’s barely hidden contempt hadn’t really bothered me until last summer when I’d accidentally sliced my hand open right here in the morgue. If Dr. Leblanc hadn’t been in the room it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I couldn’t exactly say, “Don’t worry, Doc. I’ll slurp down a baggie of brains and my zombie parasite will have me fixed up in no time!” I was forced to play it out like a normal person. To save me the hassle and paperwork of the emergency room, Allen stitched it up—and not only was he vaguely decent to me while he did so, but he let slip that he tended to use his vacation time to go on Doctors Without Borders missions. Admirable shit. And in a flash I went from not giving a rat’s ass that he hated me to being bugged by it.

  That’s his problem, I told myself for the billionth time. So what if he and I weren’t BFFs? He couldn’t fire me without cause, and I did my damnedest not to give him any.