Chapter 1

Rain. Lots of it. Not yet, but soon. I hadn’t heard a forecast, and I sure as hell wasn’t psychic, but I’d lived in southeastern Louisiana all my life and felt the coming downpour in my bones. Of course, the really dark, ominous clouds helped a bit too.

But that was nothing. Not with zombies roaming the streets of Tucker Point.

Several shuffled along the sidewalk, and a dozen or so huddled together, gruesome and shabby, in front of the Sundown Café, one taking a drag from a cigarette through cracked and bloody lips. Apart from the nearby movie crew, the cigarette was a sure sign these were zombie wannabes and not the real thing.

No self-respecting zombie would be caught dead smoking.

Caught dead. I snorted. But the truth was that zombies were some of the cleanest-living people I knew. Had to be since anything bad for you, like cigarette smoke, drugs, or alcohol, used up precious brains to detoxify the body. And if you didn’t get more brains quickly, you’d start to rot. Not fun. I’d been a pill-popping alcoholic smoker before I was turned. Now the most toxic substance I consumed was coffee.

Well, mostly. Every now and then I still took a quick drag for old times sake.

I drove slowly, watching with roll-my-eyes amusement as the crew filmed a couple of fake zombies shambling after a shotgun-wielding woman. No stereotypes here. No sirree.

The majority of the movie-related activity seemed to be taking place at the back of Tucker Point High School, where school had let out for the summer a week earlier. A couple of eighteen-wheelers were pulled up in the lot on the side, and I saw movie people and equipment all over the blocked-off street ahead as well as on the school grounds to the left.

The cop at the end of the street pulled the barricade aside without my having to flash my badge. My Coroner’s Office van was plain black with no markings, but he’d probably been on enough death scenes to know the routine well enough to expect me. His face registered recognition, and he gave me a friendly wave as I passed through. I gave a polite hand lift in response but had no clue if I’d ever seen him before. It was probably a lot easier for cops to remember the scrawny little blond chick who worked as a bodysnatcher for the Coroner’s Office than for me to remember one cop’s face in a sea of identical uniforms.

I proceeded slowly, trying to get a good look at the movie hoopla without obviously gawking or running into anything. Parked against the curb about a half block down was a white SUV with St. Edwards Parish Sheriff’s Office Crime Scene emblazoned across the side, and right behind it the black Dodge Durango that belonged to Derrel Cusimano, the death investigator I was partnered with.

As I parked behind the Durango, a tall woman with brunette hair bound up in a severe bun and wearing a sheriff’s office t-shirt walked up to the SUV. Maria, a crime scene tech. As I climbed out of the van, she gave me a smile and a thumbs up to let me know she was finished with her work. I returned the smile and gave an acknowledging wave. With rare exceptions, a crime scene tech had to take photos and process any death scene in case there was a need later on to review the specifics. The actual removal of the body came last, after the techs did their stuff and the detectives had a good look at everything. I’d been collecting bodies from all sorts of death scenes for a while now, so I was pretty used to the routine. The techs appreciated that I stayed out of their way while they worked, and in return they let me know the instant I could get on with my own business.

I moved to the back of the van, pulled the stretcher out, and lumped a body bag and a couple of sheets on top, then looked around for my hard-to-miss partner, a big, bald, black guy with muscle to spare. He’d been an LSU linebacker ten or so years back and still looked every bit the part.

I spied him striding across the street toward me with a notepad in his hand. He’d probably been here a while already, gathering information, taking notes, and speaking to detectives and witnesses.

“Perfect timing,” he said after he reached me. “Maria finished processing the scene only a couple of minutes ago.”

“Yep, she gave me the go-ahead,” I replied, then swept my gaze around the area with its bustling activity. Crew members carted fancy equipment here and there, men and women scrambled over set pieces, painting, nailing, clamping, and cutting. A man with deep lines of stress around his eyes consulted the stack of papers on his clipboard and gave instructions—accompanied by a lot of arm waving—to the crew. Apart from the one scene with the shotgun, there wasn’t any actual filming going on in the blocked-off street, but the behind-the-scenes stuff made up for it. And there were fake zombies everywhere. Only about ten or so wore full makeup, but the rest sported the equivalent of spray-on tan, except instead of Sun Kissed Bronze it was Decay Grey.

“This is too cool,” I said.

Derrel’s mouth twitched. He knew perfectly well I wasn’t talking about the body I’d come to pick up.

“So whatcha got?” I asked.

A grimace flashed over his face. “Freak accident. Support pole on some scaffolding fell as our Mr. Brent Stewart was walking by, and he got beaned right in the skull.” He gestured with his head toward a cluster of trailers and headed that way. I followed, towing the stretcher in my wake as we passed through the trailer area, then toward a sidewalk that ran in front of a stucco building at the back of the school grounds.

Near the corner of the building, the body of a white, middle-aged man lay sprawled face down on the ground beside a structure of pipes and plywood about twenty feet long and at least that tall. Part of a set, I realized, upon seeing the painted façade—a cleverly rendered perspective of one side of the school but looking far nicer than the school appeared in reality. A two-inch diameter pipe lay beside the man, along the length of his body and with a few feet to spare. Blood and hair clung to it in a pattern that perfectly and morbidly matched the large dent in the back of his skull.

“Well, hell.” I wrinkled my nose at the mess the pole had made of his head, then peered back up at the set piece. Now I saw the twisted clamp near the top.

“Yeah,” Derrel said with a shake of his head. “Looks like he was in the totally wrong place. The clamp broke, the pole fell, and smack. Probably never felt a thing. Not even time for an oh shit.”

I made an appropriately sympathetic wince. A part of me thought that was probably a good way to go—never feeling a thing and never knowing. Yet at the same time, he never had a chance to say goodbye to his family and friends, even in his head. Death was really goddamn unfair sometimes.

I crouched by the body, taking it all in, then looked around. We were behind a half dozen trailers, probably for makeup and such, and away from the general activity I’d encountered near the street. A few crew members carrying fake body parts passed us as though nothing had happened and headed toward the high school, and several extras in fresh-from-the-grave clothing but no makeup clustered at the back of the furthest trailer, casting anxious glances our way.

“A zombie movie,” I muttered. “That’s too weird.”

Derrel nodded. “Shambling, braaains, the whole thing,” he replied, holding back a chuckle. Laughing and joking weren’t considered cool on a death scene. “Saw a segment on the news about it last night. High School Zombie Apocalypse!!” he said, showing as much smile as he dared. “With two exclamations points!”

“Too weird,” I repeated with a roll of my eyes as I pulled on gloves. This certainly wasn’t the first time a movie had been filmed in the area, but as far as I knew it was the first one with zombies, and my first time anywhere near the action. In the past few years Louisiana had been dubbed “Hollywood South” because of the growing film industry in the state. Movies and TV shows filmed here benefited from generous tax credits and were great for the local economy. And it was always a kick to see local sights show up on the big screen. It somehow made the people here feel as if they were really part of something bigger.

I retrieved a sheet from the stretcher and wrapped up the poor guy’s sadly smushed head. Though I’d eaten brains only a few hours earlier, I still had to use a good dose of willpower to keep from giving in to the delicious scent and digging a glob of brain out of the cracks in the skull to stuff into my mouth. That would probably go over even worse than laughing.

Close to ten months as a morgue tech/van driver for the St. Edwards Parish Coroner’s Office, and I actually felt like I knew what I was doing. That was also the same length of time that I’d been a zombie, but I had a feeling it would take me a lot longer to really get a handle on that lifestyle.

I’d been an unemployed, pill head loser—with “felon” and “high school dropout” to pad out my resume—when I woke up in the ER after a night of drinking and drugs. Even though I had a fairly clear memory of being horribly injured in a car accident, I didn’t have a mark on me—or a stitch of clothing, for that matter. Waiting for me had been a six-pack of weird brown, sludgy drinks, and an anonymous note about a job waiting for me at the Coroner’s Office, along with the threat of jail time if I didn’t take the job. Took me a few weeks to figure out the truth: that not only would I rot and fall apart if I didn’t eat brains, but also that if I hadn’t been turned into a zombie the night of the accident, I would’ve died on the spot from the combination of drug overdose and injuries.

Though I’d only taken the job with the Coroner’s Office because it was better than going to jail, I quickly grew to enjoy it, and not simply because it gave me easy access to the brains I needed. It was interesting, challenging without being a pain in the ass, and paid better than any job I’d ever had. Ever. Plus, I had some pretty awesome coworkers.

With Derrel’s help I got the dead guy wrestled into the body bag and onto the stretcher. Once I had him in the van and the doors closed, I decided to take a few minutes to gawk some more at the movie stuff. What the hell. It wasn’t every day I had the chance to see something like this.

I locked the van, then crossed the street to get a better view as a stunt zombie practiced a fall from a third story window to the airbag cushion below. Further down the street several zombie extras mauled an actor in a cop uniform, then backed up and started over, repeatedly. Gotta get those shambling horde subtleties down for the camera. I smiled and shook my head. Though I’d watched several zombie movies and TV episodes after I was turned, I couldn’t manage much love for most of them since the majority were about escaping from or killing mindless zombies. Needless to say, I had a hard time getting into that sort of thing.