“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.>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.