In the living room, a young, teary-eyed brunette in jeans and a t-shirt stood with her arms hugged around herself. The roommate, no doubt. Ginger. That’s what Derrel said her name was. I heard the click of a camera shutter, and a peek down the hallway told me that the crime scene tech, Sean, was still working.

The young woman looked over at me where I stood by the stretcher. “This is horrible,” she said, voice quavering. “She was so happy.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, hating how empty the words sounded. But I never knew what to say to the bereaved. I usually didn’t have to say anything, since Derrel was the one to handle that stuff. He always knew what to say. For that reason alone I wasn’t sure I could ever be a death investigator. I’d fumble it and say something inappropriate, or worse, start crying along with the grieving friend or relative.

But apparently my empty phrase of condolence was all right. Ginger let out an unsteady sigh and shook her head. “She’d just gotten a break, and then this. It’s like a cruel joke.”

“What kinda break?” I asked.

Ginger dabbed at her eyes with the wadded up tissue in her hand. “She’d been unemployed for nearly a year—one of the first to be laid off by the factory. Then she got the call to be an extra in High School Zombie Apocalypse!!”

“Two exclamation points,” I said, then instantly regretted cracking a joke about the movie.

But a small smile touched Ginger’s mouth. “She used to laugh about that too. Pretty silly, I know. Still, the laid off workers were given first dibs. Sure, it’s temp work in a goofy movie, but it paid well, and an extra grand or so makes a big difference when you’re barely scraping by, y’know? Brenda said it was like winning the lottery for a bunch of folks.”

I nodded in understanding. Barely scraping by and I were old buddies.

She sighed and crumpled the tissue in her hands. “And even beyond the money, she was having the time of her life. They’d even talked to her about doing a small part in another production.”

“I bet being in a movie totally rocked,” I offered.

She smiled a bit again. “Whenever Brenda got home she’d tell me all the cool little details.” She reached for a stack of pictures on the coffee table, pulled three out and handed them to me. “Look, here she is with and without makeup.”

The first showed a petite redhead, grinning and waving in front of one of the movie set trailers. The second was a smiling zombie with a maggoty gash in the grey, rotting flesh of her cheek, and the third, that same zombie with slack face reaching toward the camera with convincing movie-zombieness.

“That’s really cool,” I said. “Looks like she was having fun.”

“She was one of the featured zombies,” Ginger said with a touch of pride in her voice.

I peered at the photo. “Was she at the Gourmet Gala last night? Some of the extras were there for a promo thing.”

Ginger nodded. “She sure was. I talked to her when she got home, I guess at about eleven or so. She said it was a blast.” Her face fell again. “God, and now she’s dead. This is so crazy.”

Was Brenda a real zombie like Tim and his friend last night? I wondered. But if so, surely she wouldn’t look like a normal dead person now. I itched to get close to the body to find out for sure, and to my relief Sean stepped out and gave me the nod that told me it was okay for me to do my thing.

Luckily, Derrel chose that moment to return inside, so I was saved from having to say something like, “It’s been great talking to you, but now it’s time for me to put your roomie into a body bag”—but, y’know, less insensitive.

Derrel gently guided Ginger to the couch to get more information about Brenda’s next of kin, and I made my escape to the easier company of the dead chick.

There she was, on her back on the bathroom floor, looking as if she was asleep except for the utter stillness and half-open eyes. She definitely wasn’t a zombie either. No whiff of rot, and I was barely hungry enough to smell a regular, unzombified brain within her skull.

I made quick work of getting her into the bag and, as she was slender and short, I didn’t need Derrel’s help to get her onto the stretcher. I draped the dark blue Coroner’s Office cover over the body bag, then wheeled the stretcher out while Derrel kept Ginger occupied. Even though it was obvious a body bag lay beneath the sedate cloth, it still offered a bit of shielding from the emotional impact. Derrel and I were pretty good about doing our best to make sure friends and family didn’t have to see the body being removed. That was one of those “final” things that tended to hit people pretty hard.

By the time I got outside the rain had slacked off to a sluggish drizzle—still annoying after so many days of rain but better than the earlier deluge. I tugged my raincoat back on, then pushed the stretcher and its burden to where I’d parked.

A flicker of movement down the street caught my eye as I shoved the stretcher into the back of the van. I closed the door and turned, mystified to see a blond woman with a camera aimed in my direction. That’s the same chick who was taking pictures of me on the movie set. What the hell?

Though I knew damn well she saw me looking at her, she didn’t lower the camera and no doubt got some great photos of my scowl. A few seconds later, she turned and strolled casually off in the opposite direction.

Shit. Every muscle in my body screamed at me to chase her down and demand to know why the hell she was taking pictures of me. But leaving a body in the van so that I could run down the street was a sure way to get fired.

As if the universe wanted to help me make up my mind, lightning split the sky, followed immediately by a crash of thunder that shook the van. I jumped and let out a squeal, then dashed for the driver side door and climbed in. Yeah, I could probably survive being struck by lightning, but it would hurt like a sonofabitch.

About two seconds later rain slammed down in a deafening roar on the roof of the van. Fine, I could take a hint. No chasing down mysterious photographers today.

But as soon as this rain let up? All bets were off.

* * *

Even with the wipers going at mach ten the visibility remained utter crap. To add to the driving fun, the ditches and drainage systems had obviously thrown up their collective hands and said, “Fuck it, I give up!” which meant that water of varying depths covered half the damn streets. And of course that meant that traffic was a frickin’ nightmare, because, apparently, heavy rain and flooding streets were signals for everyone with a car to leave the house and run every non-essential errand they’d been putting off until the weather and road conditions were maximum-shit.

Yeah, I was in a peachy mood.

The rain eased up to slightly less apocalyptic levels by the time I reached Tucker Point. As I drove past the high school I peered over to see if the movie people were trying to shoot in the rain, but while there were plenty of trucks and trailers parked by the main building, there was little sign of activity. Probably doing as many interior shots as possible, I decided. A few people clustered under the overhang at the front of the school. A red-haired man gestured at the downpour in obvious agitation as a slim black woman stood with folded arms and gave a disinterested nod as if she’d heard the rant before. Another man in a suit paced back and forth with a cell phone held to his ear, while a mousy woman in jeans and a t-shirt looked out at the rain with a faint smile on her face, as if enjoying the show nature had put on for her.

I made it to the morgue without further incident, got the body of Ms. Brenda Barnes inside and logged in. As soon as I finished that, two funeral home workers showed up, one right after the other, and I went through the usual rigmarole of releasing the bodies they’d come to pick up. Neither of the funeral home workers were zombies; I smelled quite-edible brains in both of their skulls. In fact I realized—after each departed with his respective cargo—that in the past six months the few zombies I’d met had all been associated with Pietro’s organization. I hadn’t met any “independent” zombies in that time.

I paused as I set out the scalpels and tools for Dr. Leblanc and pondered that. It was true that Ed had succeeded in killing off close to half a dozen zombies, including Kang, who I’d met not long after I’d been zombified. He was the first zombie to give me the slightest clue about how to survive as a brain-eater. His job at Scott Funeral Home supplied a sideline in dealing brains to a handful of undisclosed local zombies—at least until Dr. Charish put a bounty on his head, literally, and Ed decapitated him. After I escaped her, Pietro’s people supposedly recovered Kang’s head along with others from her lab, but I hadn’t heard a thing about it since. And maybe there was more to Kang than I knew. Hell, I’d only been a zombie a short time before he was killed.

So were the only zombies left in this area ones who worked for Pietro? Or were there still zombies who worked at the various local funeral homes though not in any capacity where I’d come into contact with them?

“Angel?”

I jerked, startled out of my reverie by the voice behind me. “Shit!” I dropped the scalpel in my hand and turned to see Dr. Leblanc. “Jesus, you scared the crap out of me,” I said with a shaking laugh.

But instead of giving an answering laugh, his eyes dropped to my left hand, and a look of alarm spread across his face. “Good lord, Angel!”

I looked down to see a deep slice along the lower part of my thumb. Crap, I thought as I stared stupidly at the gaping flesh of the inch-long gash and the thick drip of blood onto the floor. I just mopped that.

Luckily Dr. Leblanc had no desire to gaze at the pretty patterns my blood made on the tile. With a quick motion he seized one of the towels I’d set out and pressed it to my hand. “I’m sorry I startled you,” he said, concern in his eyes as he maintained pressure on the gash. “You were standing so still I thought something might be wrong.”

“Sorry,” I replied with a weak smile. “I was lost in thought.”

He lifted my hand, pulled the towel away enough to allow him to peer at the wound. Crap, I thought again. I wasn’t tanked enough for it to have healed on its own at all. Then again, that was probably good since it would’ve been really tough to explain why I’d been bleeding only seconds earlier.