Free White Trash Zombie Apocalypse by Diana Rowland Page B

me, and his grip on my wrist slipped as skin sloughed from his fingers. This was Not Good on a whole bunch of levels. No way should he be rotting this fast. And now I had zombie ooze on my jacket on top of everything else.
    “Let GO!” I snarled. I made a savage punch at the arm that held me, heart pounding from the desperate cocktail of anger and fear.
    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
.
    His voice abruptly registered. I craned my head around in shock. “Oh my god,” I breathed. Though I couldn’t see his face under the makeup, I knew his eyes.
Philip
.
    Bad Zombie staggered back with a sound between agrowl and a sob. He pawed at a yellow tufted thing in his shoulder, and I realized Philip had shot him with a tranquilizer dart.
    Looming Zombie moved in close behind Bad Zombie, got a hand on his arm as he swayed. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew it would be a lot better if I wasn’t right in the middle of it. I ramped my crazy-chick struggles up another notch, but Philip easily kept a solid hold on my scrawny ass. Even through my thrashing, I could feel his whole body tremoring against my back, as if he was shivering from cold or fear. But neither of those reasons made sense. Sure, we were all soaking wet from the rain, but it was the middle of summer. Something else was up.
    “Roland, get him out of here.
Now
,” Philip ordered. He produced what looked like a candy bar with a white wrapper and tossed it to Looming Zombie, who ripped it open and scarfed it down. The whole thing reminded me of a dog getting a treat.
    Bad Zombie collapsed on his back in the pool of light from the streetlamp, thrashed for a moment before subsiding into twitches. Wrecked latex and makeup left what remained of his face exposed, and it only took me a second to recognize him. Square jaw. A nose that had been repeatedly broken. Horror backed by anger slammed through me. I’d carefully memorized the features of the men who’d been my jailers when I was Dr. Charish’s unwilling test subject. This guy was one of the assholes who had callously watched me get strip searched.
    Which means that he’s probably one of the two men who got turned into zombies by Philip right before I escaped Dr. Charish’s lab
.