CHAPTER 29: HUNGRY
[Meat Cute Charcuterie, Front Counter — Mid-May 2015, 2:30 PM]
Julian stood in the center of the shop floor with his arms crossed and his eyes cycling — brown to red to brown, the transitions irregular, the iris flickering between human and zombie like a fluorescent tube with a failing ballast. His jaw was set. The muscles along his neck were rigid. The posture of a man fighting his own biology and losing by increments.
Behind him: Eleanor Chen, sixty-one, retired thoracic surgeon, who'd been a zombie for approximately four months and who stood with the particular stillness of someone whose body was screaming for fuel while her medical training kept the scream inaudible. She wore a cashmere cardigan over a silk blouse, and her hands — the hands that had cracked sternums and sutured aortas for thirty years — were clasped in front of her with the deliberate control of someone preventing them from doing something she'd regret.
Behind Eleanor: Marcus Webb — not the dead combat medic whose brain I'd consumed, but a different Marcus, mid-forties, former insurance adjuster, who'd been a zombie client for three weeks and who was handling the starvation with the specific agitation of a man whose tolerance for discomfort had never been tested. He paced. His mouth moved — not speaking, just chewing air, the jaw working reflexively against the hunger that lived behind the teeth.
Three starving zombies in my shop. The lockdown — no deliveries, Watkins paused, the supply chain contracted to protect against the investigation — had produced the crisis I'd been dreading since Jackie texted on it and the scanner went to priority monitoring.
"The shop is closed," Don E said from behind the counter. His voice was steady — the Don E of Week 6 operated in crisis with the same calm he brought to sandwich assembly. But his hand was below the counter, near the baseball bat he'd installed after the warehouse job. Not because he thought he could take three zombies with a Louisville Slugger, but because having the option was better than not having it.
"It's been closed for a week." Julian's voice was thick. The hunger changed speech — slowed it, roughened it, as the virus redirected resources from nonessential functions like vocal finesse toward the systems that kept the host alive. "I've been buying from you for a month. Four hundred a delivery. You took my money and promised supply, and now the supply's gone and I'm—"
His eyes flashed red. Full red — not the flicker, the saturation. Two seconds. Then brown again. The transition left his hands shaking.
"—I'm losing control," he finished. Quieter.
The teacher's brain engaged. Helen Park had spent thirty-one years managing rooms full of volatile, unpredictable, emotionally dysregulated humans between the ages of five and twelve. The parallel wasn't perfect — her students hadn't been capable of entering a neurological rage state that turned them into superhuman predators — but the principles transferred. Calm authority. Eye contact. Physical positioning that communicated control without confrontation.
I stepped past Don E. Into the open floor. Between the counter and the three clients. The security brain screamed — you're between the threat and the exit, you're between the threat and your only backup — but the teacher's brain overrode it. Proximity communicated something that distance couldn't: I'm not afraid of you. I'm here to help.
"Julian. Look at me."
He looked. The eyes were brown. For now.
"I know you're hungry. I know the lockdown has been hard. I'm going to fix it today — right now — but I need you to hold it together for twenty more minutes. Can you do twenty minutes?"
"I don't—"
"Twenty minutes." The teacher's projection — the voice that carried to the back of a classroom without shouting, the voice that communicated absolute certainty to people who needed certainty the way they needed oxygen. "Sit down. All three of you. I'll bring something from the back."
Julian's jaw worked. The eyes flickered — brown, amber, brown. Then he sat. Not on a chair — on the floor, cross-legged, the way he'd probably sat in elementary school when a teacher told him to, the regression triggered by an authority pattern he didn't consciously recognize.
Eleanor sat in the nearest chair. Her hands stayed clasped. Marcus stopped pacing and leaned against the wall, arms folded, the agitation still present but contained by the group's compliance.
Something happened in the space between Julian's flicker and his decision to sit. Something I hadn't intended. The virus in my body had pushed — a subsonic pulse, directional, aimed at Julian's zombie signature, carrying an intent that wasn't verbal but was undeniable: sit down. The hum between us had shifted frequencies, my signal briefly dominant over his, the same proximity detection system that identified other zombies repurposed — instinctively, involuntarily — as an influence mechanism.
Julian had blinked first because the virus had told him to.
I filed the observation. No time to process it — three hungry zombies on the floor and no product in the building.
"Don E. Keys."
He tossed them. I caught them with the locksmith's reflexes and was in the car before the front door finished closing.
[Watkins Funeral Home — 3:00 PM]
Watkins answered the service entrance on the second knock. His face communicated everything his words would take three minutes to deliver: the audit was Friday, the records were shaky, the last thing he needed was an unscheduled visit from the man whose brain purchases had created the problem.
"I need three," I said. "Emergency. Cash."
"Mr. DeBeers, the auditor—"
"Ten thousand. Three brains. Right now." The number was a lie — I didn't have ten thousand. I had the cash reserves from the register, the week's revenue minus expenses, and whatever was left in the safe after Angus's five-thousand-dollar extraction. The accountant's brain ran the calculation in real time: $7,200 total available. Not enough.
"The auditor flagged three entries," Watkins said. "If she finds three more discrepancies on Friday—"
"The sandbags arrive tomorrow. Industrial sand, three-pound bags, sealed. Your cremation weights will match. The follow-up audit will find nothing." I held his gaze. The teacher's confidence, the lawyer's certainty, the security consultant's unwavering composure — three skill sets projecting a conviction I didn't fully feel. "Three brains. Today. I'll pay seven thousand now and the remainder next week."
Watkins looked at the money. At me. At the money again.
"Seven now, three on Tuesday," he said.
"Done."
The brains were packaged in fifteen minutes. Standard procedure — Watkins had the process refined to a science, the funeral director's efficiency applied to the specific task of extracting and preserving neural tissue from bodies whose families had signed cremation waivers. I carried the cooler to the car. The seven thousand dollars left my hands and entered Watkins's safe and the cash reserve at Meat Cute dropped to two hundred and eighteen dollars.
Two hundred and eighteen dollars. The price of not letting three zombies go Romero in a butcher shop on Jackson Street.
[Meat Cute — 3:40 PM]
Julian ate first. The brain — prepared quickly, hot sauce and onion, the chef's minimum-viable-meal for a zombie in crisis — disappeared in four minutes. His eyes went brown and stayed brown. The tremor in his hands subsided. The man who'd been cycling toward full Romero on the shop floor thirty minutes ago sat in a chair and breathed with the specific relief of someone who'd been drowning and found air.
Eleanor ate second. Her approach was different — deliberate, methodical, the surgeon's precision applied to consumption. She cut the brain into uniform pieces with a plastic knife, arranged them on the plate, and ate each piece in sequence. The efficiency was clinical. When she finished, she folded her napkin, placed it beside the empty plate, and stood.
At the door, she paused. Turned back. Her hands — steady now, the tremor gone, the surgeon's instruments restored — hung at her sides.
"I used to save lives with these," she said. Not to me specifically. Not to anyone. A statement delivered to the air of a butcher shop that had just saved hers.
She left. Marcus ate third, quickly, without ceremony. He nodded on his way out — the insurance adjuster's version of gratitude, delivered with professional brevity.
The shop was empty. Don E and I stood in the silence that followed crisis — the particular quiet of a room that had contained an emergency and now contained its absence.
"That was close," Don E said.
"Too close." I leaned against the counter. The hunger was back — the teacher's brain was less than a week old and the virus was already chewing through its reserves. The two-day cycle was arriving ahead of schedule.
"Boss. We can't keep doing this."
"I know."
"The lockdown's killing us. The clients are starving, the cash is gone, Watkins is one auditor away from bolting, and we're running a butcher shop on two hundred bucks."
The assessment was accurate. Don E's growth as an operational thinker had been incremental but real — the man who'd done a fist pump at the first $8 sale now understood supply chains, cash flow, and the structural vulnerability of an ethical enterprise that operated at a deficit.
"I know," I said again. Because the alternative to acknowledgment was false reassurance, and false reassurance was a currency I'd already spent.
A knock on the office door. Not Don E's urgency pattern. Slower, deliberate. Jackie's knock — the one she used when she had something to show rather than something to report.
She carried a whiteboard under her arm. A marker in her scrub pocket. The expression on her face was the one she wore when the ER delivered a patient with a problem nobody else could solve and her training had an answer the room hadn't considered.
"Stop thinking like a businessman," she said. She set the whiteboard on the desk, uncapped the marker, and drew a circle. "Think like a nurse. The system loses track of tissue all the time."
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