White Trash Zombie Apocalypse (White Trash Zombie 3)

“As much as I’d love to let the parasite take full responsibility, I’m not sure I can,” he said to my surprise. He gave me an uneasy smile. “It couldn’t have influenced my one-sided decision to turn you, since I wasn’t your zombie-daddy yet. And the heavy-handed shit of blackmailing you into taking the job at the morgue? Yeah, the instinct might have had a role, but it was probably more just me being a superior dick and giving you a great Teaching Moment.” Then he took a deep breath, met my eyes. “And even if all the stuff later was because of some kind of instinct…God, Angel, you’ve come so far in the past year. I know it’s stupid and wrong to treat you like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You deserve better than that, and I promise I’ll try my damndest to throttle it back, whether it’s instinct or simple dickishness on my part.”

I believed him. “And I promise I’ll give you many chances to do so.” I smiled, gave his hand a squeeze. “I need to meet with your uncle to ask him about cosigning a loan for me,” I said, then extended a big horking olive branch by adding, “Would you call him for me?”

Marcus kissed me, a lovely, lingering kiss. “No. You should call him,” he said, handing the entire olive tree back to me.

And so I did. Pietro seemed unsurprised by my desire for a meeting, and I suspected that Brian had already given him a heads up. After a polite inquiry about how I was doing post zombie-mayhem, he told me he’d send a car for me at ten the next morning.

With that taken care of, I snuggled up against Marcus. “I really like you a lot.”

He slipped an arm around me. “Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

“Nope. No buts,” I said. “I’m too exhausted to deal with buts.” I frowned. “That sounds weird.”

“Yes, it does,” he said, laughing. “All you need to do right now is rest.”

My eyes closed. Now that I’d stopped moving and knew my dad was all right, the fatigue swept in with crushing force. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Rest would be cool.”

I heard Marcus ask me something, but I was already well on my way to sleep, and apparently he didn’t need the answer badly enough to wake me up.

* * *

Sometime later, I woke in a bed that wasn’t my own and wasn’t Marcus’s either. A clock nearby told me it was 1:14 in the morning, and a few more seconds of semi-coherent thinking informed me that I was on a futon in Marcus’s office.

I smiled into the darkness. He wasn’t pressuring me. I got up, headed down the hallway to Marcus’s room and crawled under the covers to snuggle with him.

He woke, blinked at me. “Angel?” he asked in a voice thick with sleep. “You okay?”

“More than okay,” I told him. “Now shut up and hold me.”

And he did.

Chapter 26

I half expected some awkwardness in the morning, but Marcus was already cooking eggs when I woke up and shambled into the kitchen. He had on shorts, his cast, and nothing else, and he looked seriously hot.

He gave me a smile. “I’m making zombelets. Want one?”

“Uh, zombelets?” Then my brain kicked into gear. “Oh, zombie-omelet? Eggs and brains?”

“That’s right!” he replied, chuckling. At my approving nod he pulled another plate out of the cabinet, then slid a portion of the contents of the pan onto it, and pushed the plate and a fork my way.>“It must suck having to wear a cast,” I said.

Marcus nodded. “Yeah. Everything went fine until the car shifted and caught my leg,” he said as we settled onto the couch. “Fortunately Uncle Pietro has a doctor lined up for us to take care of hospital red tape. Can’t get out of having an injury, but it keeps too many questions from being asked.”

Now that was pretty damn useful. There was a lot I still didn’t know about the workings of the zombie subculture, but Pietro sure seemed to have his fingers in a lot of it. Then again, if he’d been around for centuries or so, it made sense that he’d have made plans for stuff like that.

“Well, I’m glad you’re in one piece and saved that family,” I told him with a kiss.

He returned it enthusiastically as we settled on the couch, but before we could get too distracted I paused the general naughtiness and proceeded to give him a rundown of the events of the past few days. The firefighter on Highway 1790, Philip undercover, Saberton and their shenanigans, the movie extras as test subjects, Philip freaking out and the resulting mayhem on the movie set, Dr. Charish and her fuckups. I didn’t hold anything back, though I was well aware how outlandish some of it seemed. I figured that if Pietro didn’t want Marcus to know all of it, that was his own damn problem, and he should have warned me.

“Shiiiiiiit,” Marcus breathed when I finished. “Uncle Pietro had all of that going on?” To my relief he seemed to accept the whole thing without question, even the parts that sounded batshit crazy.

“Yeah, it was a mess.” I rubbed at my eyes. The fatigue was starting to catch up with me. “I need to check on my dad.”

Marcus nodded. “He’s in the guest bedroom at the end of the hall.”

I left Marcus on the couch and headed that way. The door was open, and my dad sat in a comfy-looking recliner watching TV.

“Hey, Dad, you doing okay?” I asked. I searched for any hint of anger or his usual orneriness, but apparently having a plush recliner and a flat screen went a long way toward pacifying him.