Free The Down Home Zombie Blues by Linnea Sinclair

Mikkalah. They show up in your life, bite your head, suck your brains out, and leave nothing behind but a withered corpse. Then your friends gather around and stare down at you and wonder why your eyeballs are so nice and moist.
    Except his friends wouldn’t have his corpse to stare at. They’d look and look and never know what had happened to him. It had to be a horrible feeling, that not knowing. He’d seen it destroy families in missing-persons cases.
    Thank God his parents weren’t alive. This would kill them. And he wouldn’t even be dead with them so he could explain he was really on Paroo, eating brains with some zombies named—
    “Petrakos.”
    Light shafted over his eyelids. Noise reached his ears. He blinked, realized he was flat on his back on a soft bed. He didn’t recognize the matte-gray ceiling. He didn’t recognize the sounds in the room, an intermittent muted clicking, a hushed rush of air. Where…?
    “Petrakos.” A woman’s voice.
That
woman’s voice.
That
he recognized.
    Skata
. Shit. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, ran through more curses in Greek that would have impressed even crusty Uncle Stavros, then levered himself up on his elbows. He must have passed out. His gorgeous alien commander stood poised in the open doorway. He could see two of the three guards behind her.
    Her face was scrubbed clean, her hair brushed to a shine. The shorts and odd one-sleeved shirt had been replaced with a green-and-black jumpsuit. And only one gun now, hanging from a duty belt ringing her hips. She stepped in, but the door stayed open. He noted with some small satisfaction that she kept a hand on the gun. If she didn’t fear him, she was at least cautious.
Good,
he decided as twinges of anger surfaced again.
Be cautious.
    “You didn’t eat.” She motioned to his untouched tray.
    He let his gaze move around the room, touch on the overturned chairs at the small dining table, the sofa cushions in disarray, the storage doors hanging open. “I was busy.”
    “Foolish. You will stress yourself.”
    He snorted and sat up. “Being kidnapped isn’t stress?”
    She picked up a slice of the apple thing, bit into it. He heard the crunch. “Good. Try?”
    “No.” He glanced at his watch. Five-thirty. He’d been out cold for about two hours. He felt as if he could sleep two hundred more, but at least the headache was gone. Sleep deprivation had always been part of his job.
    So were certain routines. He knew that around three in the afternoon, someone from the cyber squad would check the BVPD evidence room and find no laptop. People would start looking for him, a cop last seen at the site of a homicide. Now missing. He knew exactly what emergency measures would be taken to find him, and it pained him. Because unless they launched the space shuttle, they wouldn’t work.
    Unless he took measures of his own.
    “I brought a thing for you to see.” She took two steps toward him.
    Adrenaline flashed through his body. Guards be damned, he could take her down. Right now. The hand on the gun had moved to a pouch on her belt. She was only a few feet in front of him, pushing the last of that apple thing into that beautiful mouth of hers.
    One swift move would do it. Knock her to the floor, restrain her hands, grab her gun while the weight of his body pinned her underneath him. She’d fight, squirm, press up against him, her hips grinding against his…
    “You want?” She tilted her head.
    Panagia mou!
Oh, Mother of God! Heat flooded him. His breath shuddered out. Yeah, he wanted, all right. But they were talking about two different things.
    She had a square disk—about the size of his Palm Pilot—in her hand. He watched her squeeze its corners, and suddenly the flat disk became a cube. Colors, images, swirled on all four surfaces.
    He should stand up, take it, but then she’d know what he wanted, and it wasn’t whatever the damned cube was.
    He braced one hand against his thigh, wiped his face with the