Undead and Unwary Read Online Free PDF Page B

face of the earth has mice, this solved two problems at once.
    “The kitchen? Again? We eat in here! Well, the others eat, and the vampires drink, and Sinclair and I occasionally have sex in here! Aw, dammit, that was out loud.”
    “Ha! Knew it. Jess owes me fifty bucks. Besides, you banned me from the basement.” Marc was blinking at me over a tidy row of teeny corpses. “You said it was like living with Igor . . .”
    “It was! Is. No offense,” I added, because there was nothing sadder than a touchy zombie whose feelings were hurt. God, the moping. The angst. Zombie angst . . . would that be zangst? Will that be a thing now?
    “. . . knowing I was skulking around down there doing sinister experiments, creating then destroying abominations, tracking dirt . . . which is stupid, by the way. I don’t skulk.”
    Of course, knowing that the zombie you lived with was experimenting on dead rodents created a whole new problem. It almost made me yearn for the days when he was skulking
    (because he does he does so skulk his denials are big-time bullshit he skulks therefore he is )
    in the attic, all hidden and ashamed and furtive, full of zangst. Like Quasimodo if the attic was the Notre-Dame Cathedral, our puppies were the gargoyles, and Quasimodo was a cute dead gay doctor.
    “I can obsess over their brains,” my cute dead gay doctor said, indicating the row of teeny fuzzy dead bodies, “or yours.”
    “Yeah, we’ve been over this. Theirs, obviously, but couldn’t you be a little less creepy about it?” I let the door swing shut behind me and edged toward the table. Everything was meticulously laid out; I had to give him that. Instruments neatly lined up, shiny-sharp. The sterile field all set up (guess he didn’t want the dead frozen mice to catch an infection). Marc all scrubbed clean and shiny right down to the latex gloves. It was the neatest, sterilest (is that a word?) operating field I’d ever seen. In my kitchen. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
    “What?” he asked, defensively. He was wearing a pair of scrubs that had been washed so many times, they were like fuzzy barf-green velvet. He’d cut his black hair super short again (“The Caesar,” he called it, “or the George Clooney, circa . . . anytime, I guess. He really got bogged down with one style, didn’t he?”), which pulled attention to his dark green eyes and pale (even before he died) skin. He was about my height—six feet, give or take—and lanky, and his face was made for smiling; grins took years off him. Not that he would age or anything. No. He’d . . . rot. But only if I wasn’t paying attention, apparently? I was still vague on the details. The horrible, horrible details. I made him a zombie, except it wasn’t me. God, I hated time travel. “Betsy? What?”
    “Hmm?”
    Marc, used to me staring vacantly at him while I pondered, got to his feet, neatly dropped the pile o’ fuzzy corpses into the biohazard bag, snapped off his gloves and dumped them, too, tied the bag off, then went to one of the sinks, rooted around beneath, emerged with Clorox wipes, and proceeded to wipe down the table. (I know, probably shouldn’t have fussed so much about the mouse massacre on the table, but come on! Mouse massacre! On the table!) Finished, he disposed of the wipes and crossed the room to go for the freezer. I definitely wanted out of there before I saw what was up for Revolting Kitchen Experiments, Round Two. “This isn’t anything new, you know,” he reminded me.
    “You killed yourself less than two months ago,” I retorted. “It’s incredibly new.”
    He laughed and I smiled. Marc had a high, cheerful laugh and I loved hearing it. “Point.”
    “What . . .” I stared, then tried not to look so terrified. I wasn’t afraid Marc would go all zombie feral in the night and try to suck my brains out of my head with a curly straw (“Don’t be a dumbass, Betsy, a curly straw would take too much