With the force of the blow, flesh slid from his fingers and my wrist slipped free. But I didn’t even get a fraction of a second to celebrate that victory as his other hand knotted into the sleeve of my jacket and yanked my arm up to his open mouth.
I let out a yelp of pain and dismay as he bit down hard on my forearm. “You fucker!” I shouted and punched his eye—well, I punched where his eye was under the dangling eyeball prosthetic.
To my total surprise, he let out a near airless moan and let go, latex dangling from his face and his real eyelid and upper cheek knocked away.
I wanted to allow myself a brief moment of self-congratulation at my badassery, but the abrupt release of my arm sent me staggering backward, and I barely managed to keep my footing. Plus, now another zombie dude loomed a couple of yards behind Bad Zombie.
Time to get the hell out of here. I turned and ran—
—and barreled straight into a wall. A wall that threw an arm around me and pinned me to it. Okay, not a wall, but another goddamn zombie pretending to be a zombie. Within about a half a second, Wall Zombie had my back to his chest and his arm locked hard around me. Shit.
Bad Zombie shambled toward us with the unsavory declaration of, “Miiiiinnnnne.”
Wall Zombie kept an unshakable hold on me and leveled a gun at the advancing zombie. “Tim, NO!” he commanded in a low, raspy voice.
It looked like Wall Zombie intended to shoot Bad Zombie, which meant maybe he was a Good Zombie, but I didn’t care. I went right back to struggling like a psycho. All I wanted was to get the hell away. “Let me go!”
“Hold still!” he ordered me through clenched teeth, then fired the gun. Except it wasn’t a normal gun, and it made a whuuuush instead of a normal bang.
His voice abruptly registered. I craned my head around in shock. “Oh my god,” I breathed. Though I couldn’t see his face under the makeup, I knew his eyes. Philip.
Bad Zombie staggered back with a sound between a growl and a sob. He pawed at a yellow tufted thing in his shoulder, and I realized Philip had shot him with a tranquilizer dart.
Looming Zombie moved in close behind Bad Zombie, got a hand on his arm as he swayed. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew it would be a lot better if I wasn’t right in the middle of it. I ramped my crazy-chick struggles up another notch, but Philip easily kept a solid hold on my scrawny ass. Even through my thrashing, I could feel his whole body tremoring against my back, as if he was shivering from cold or fear. But neither of those reasons made sense. Sure, we were all soaking wet from the rain, but it was the middle of summer. Something else was up.
“Roland, get him out of here. Now,” Philip ordered. He produced what looked like a candy bar with a white wrapper and tossed it to Looming Zombie, who ripped it open and scarfed it down. The whole thing reminded me of a dog getting a treat.
Bad Zombie collapsed on his back in the pool of light from the streetlamp, thrashed for a moment before subsiding into twitches. Wrecked latex and makeup left what remained of his face exposed, and it only took me a second to recognize him. Square jaw. A nose that had been repeatedly broken. Horror backed by anger slammed through me. I’d carefully memorized the features of the men who’d been my jailers when I was Dr. Charish’s unwilling test subject. This guy was one of the assholes who had callously watched me get strip searched.
Which means that he’s probably one of the two men who got turned into zombies by Philip right before I escaped Dr. Charish’s lab. My gaze snapped up to Looming Zombie—the one Philip called Roland—and met his eyes. Gorgeous blue. And that’s probably the other one. One of Charish’s guards had eyes like that. The makeup couldn’t hide those.
Oh, this was all kinds of bad. Philip and his freakin’ zombie-spawn. He’d been in bad shape when he made them—mean, near berserk, and rotting too soon—damaged by some experimental shit Charish had done to him. Who the hell knew how screwed up the two he’d turned were.
I landed a hard kick to Philip’s shin, but he seemed unfazed by my struggles. I got in a few more solid kicks and foot stomps, and then he tucked away the tranq gun and pulled a knife.
I made a strangled sound pushed out by panic. “No…no! Let me go,” I managed. “Oh god.” It was hard as hell to kill a zombie, but I had no doubt he knew how to do it.
“Shut up, Angel,” he said, voice deep and hoarse. He wrestled my bitten arm up and sliced the jacket sleeve. “Have to make sure the goods aren’t damaged.”
A stupid pang of grief went through me, and I stared in horror at the long rent in the lovely fabric. “You cut my jacket!” Yeah, I was captured by a couple of Evil Zombies, but a girl has her priorities. “You fucking dick!” I slammed my boot heel down into the top of his foot. “Get off me!”
Philip hissed and shifted. “God damn it, Angel.”
“Let her go,” a clear, strong voice commanded from off to my right.
Philip hauled me around with him as he turned to face the approaching man—who, unnervingly, had a very real gun drawn and pointed at us. Fortyish with close-cropped brown hair, the newcomer bore a serious-as-all-hell expression perfectly complemented by a dark suit. I had no clue who the hell he was, but I was pissed and scared and desperate. I thrashed and kicked back hard into Philip’s shin. “Yeah. Let me GO!”
Philip tightened his arm around me and looked to the left where Looming Zombie moved away with the tranquilized Bad Zombie slung over his shoulder, then dragged me backward with him into the shadows. “No problem,” he snarled, and shoved me roughly forward.Totally off balance, I went sprawling to the sidewalk. The palm of my right hand grated against the concrete, and white hot agony shot through me as my already broken wrist impacted and shattered.
“Asshole!” I shouted as I soon as I could get a full breath, though it came out as more of a pained wheeze. I shifted to sit heavily, cradling my arm to my chest, and caught a glimpse of Philip sprinting away before he was lost to the darkness.
The man holstered his gun and moved toward me. “Ms. Crawford. Are you all right, ma’am?”
The pain faded and my senses dulled as my parasite kicked in. “No, I’m not all right,” I growled as I struggled to my feet. “And, goddammit, that motherfucker cut my jacket!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a cool, professional tone. No accent to speak of. And no edible brain scent. Yet another zombie. “What are your injuries?”
“I dunno. My wrist is broken.” I examined my jacket sleeve with dismay. I felt my lower lip quiver. “Goddammit,” I muttered. “He could have at least cut the seam. What a dick.” I snapped my eyes to the man, abruptly wary. I’d discovered from Bad Zombie that knowing my name didn’t instantly translate to “friend.”
“And who the hell are you?” I asked. I took a step back, ready to bolt.
“Brian Archer, ma’am. I work for Mr. Ivanov. He called to say you’d lured a zombie out the west exit.”
The relief nearly dropped me to the ground again. “Oh. Good.” Of course Pietro had some security people around. I’d told Jane to call Pietro, and he must have sent this dude.
Brian reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a white plastic tube thing that looked like a yogurt packet for kids and held it out to me. “Here, you need this, Ms. Crawford.”
I frowned at the packet without reaching for it. “Why do I need that?” I glanced back over my shoulder toward the distant tent. “Crap. Marcus is gonna come looking for me.” And ohmygod would he ever freak the hell out about the fact that I went off on my own and then got in way over my head. I would never hear the end of it. Ever. Ever.
“You need it because your wrist is broken,” Brian stated, still holding the packet. “You need food.”
I took the packet from him. “Oh, wait. This is brains?”
“Yes, ma’am. And you may need a second one.”
Jeez, the “ma’am” thing was weird. I sure as hell wasn’t used to it. I tore the top of the packet open with one hand and my teeth. One sniff confirmed that it was indeed brains, and I sucked it down quickly as I cast another glance back toward the Gala.
Brian noticed. “I suspect he will be here very shortly, ma’am. Do you need another packet?”
I shuddered as the wrist pulled back together in a familiar but still eerie-as-hell shift of tissue and bone. “Uh, yeah. If you don’t mind. And an alibi,” I added with a snort.
He took the empty packet from me and tucked it away. “I don’t mind at all, ma’am,” he said and pressed a second one into my hand.
I gave him a grateful smile, then sucked down the contents of the second one. Nifty way to package brains for sure. “That should do it. Thanks,” I said, then let out a sigh. “Damn it. This sure went to hell.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he took the empty. “I could see that.” In a smooth move he pulled a business card from an inner pocket of his suit jacket, pressed it into my hand. “You might want to hold onto this.”
I glanced down at it. It simply said “Brian Archer” with a phone number below the name. Nothing else. “Um, thanks.” Cool that I had the number of Pietro’s security guy, though I wasn’t sure if he was giving this to me out of courtesy or because I had a tendency to get myself into trouble.
“Angel!” I heard Marcus call from the direction of the tents. Quickly shoving the card into the front pocket of my pants, I glanced back to see him hurrying our way.
He gave Brian the kind of nod you give to someone you know, then took me by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“I am now, but—”
“She’s fine, sir,” Brian interjected. “A little banged up for a moment. She slipped on some mud on the sidewalk after the extras left.”
I closed my mouth and stared at Brian. He was covering for me? Well, I did say that I needed an alibi. I hadn’t been serious, but it certainly made things easier.