Read Online Eat, Brains, Love by Jeff Hart - Free Book Online

crouching with her back to me, thumbing through the mortician’s record collection. She must have heard me sit up because she turned to look at me.
    â€œHoly shit!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t help myself.
    â€œWhat?” She instinctively reached up to touch her face, a note of panic in her voice.
    â€œYou look amazing.”
    Amazing. Way to play it cool, dude. She did look amazing, though. For starters, her eye had grown back inside her skull. The rest of her face was back to normal too. Maybe her hair was a little mussed from not showering after all the people-eating we’d done but, overall, she had that glowing, just-woke-up look about her.
    â€œI mean,” I tried to clarify, “you look better.”
    Amanda smirked and looked away. I think she was blushing, but maybe I was overestimating the power of my charm.
    â€œYou look better too,” she said.
    I glanced down at my abdomen. My T-shirt was all torn to shreds, but beneath that was nothing but perfect pink skin, all of my guts modestly hidden.
    â€œMOTHERFUCKING WOLVERINE!” I shouted.
    Amanda glanced at me again. She was trying to look annoyed but I could see there was a spark of something in her eyes—not amusement, I wasn’t that funny—but, like, shared excitement. We could heal!
    â€œHe’s an X-Man,” I explained lamely. “He can—”
    â€œYeah, I know who he is. Hugh Jackman.”
    I rubbed my belly, just happy to have it back.
    â€œWe made it.”
    â€œUh-huh. We made it to the basement of a funeral parlor in Newark.”
    Well, it didn’t sound so good when she said it like that. Still, I felt a deep sense of relief. We’d escaped those psychos in the black SUV and were whole again. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we had some serious problems to figure out, but when you see a girl grow back her face, everything else seems way more workable.
    â€œSo, Jake,” she said, awkwardly fingering a clump of dried blood in her hair. “You sort of saved me back there.”
    â€œYou saved me too.”
    â€œYeah.” Amanda shrugged. “Thanks, though. You didn’t have to do that.”
    I didn’t know what to say. The way she thanked me, it seemed like Amanda Blake wasn’t used to dudes sticking their necks out for her. I thought of Chazz Slade and what he might’ve done if he had been the one turned into a zombie with his girlfriend. Probably would’ve copped a quick feel while he was carrying Amanda down that alley, that’s for sure.
    I should’ve thought of that.
    â€œMy dad loves this old stuff,” Amanda said, still looking through the mortician’s records.
    â€œIs there anything with, like, sixty guitars? Because I feel like rocking out.”
    â€œUh, no,” she said. “This is a good one.”
    She took the record out of its dust jacket carefully, as if the dead mortician would give a shit, and gently placed it on the record player.
    It was a Frank Sinatra recording: “The Way You Look Tonight.” Not really my thing, but something told me that after that night in the basement it’d be a song I committed to memory.
    We listened to the beginning in silence—Sinatra doing that old-man crooning stuff over some horns. Amanda drummed her fingers on her thighs.
    Before the second verse, she grabbed some weird metallic plunger from the mortician’s toolbox. That thing had probably scooped so much goop out of so many corpses, but that didn’t stop Amanda from lip-synching into it. She mouthed the words in perfect time with Sinatra, working an imaginary crowd of lounge-goers, even doffing an imaginary hat, all while barely containing her laughter.
    I watched in amazement. Holy shit. Amanda Blake was kind of dorky.
    We’d just turned into flesh-eating brain-sucking monsters and eaten a bunch of our friends. And some other people. We’d also narrowly escaped some gun-toting government