Chapter 1 : Dead On Arrival
[Meat Cute Charcuterie, Back Office — March 2015, Evening]
"—so that's four in the cooler, boss. The fifth one's still breathing, but Julien says he can finish up by Thursday if you want the full set for—"
The words hit like shrapnel. Fragments of a conversation I hadn't started, in a voice I hadn't heard before, coming from a man I'd never met.
He stood across from me — stocky, mid-thirties, neck tattoo peeking above a stained collar — holding a blue Coleman cooler the way a delivery driver holds a package. Casual. Routine. His mouth kept moving but the sounds blurred into static because my hands were wrong.
Not wrong. Different. Longer fingers. Thinner wrists. A silver ring on the left pinky that didn't belong to me.
Ten seconds ago I'd been crossing Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn. January. Night. Headlights coming too fast on my left. Then nothing — not blackness, not light, not a tunnel — just a hard cut, the kind of splice you get between two episodes of different shows, and now I was standing behind a desk in a room that smelled like cured meat and Pine-Sol.
"Boss?" The henchman tilted his head. "You good?"
My mouth opened. Sound came out. "Yeah. Just — zoned out for a second. Long day."
He bought it. Set the cooler on the desk with a thump that rattled a pen holder. "Julien says we're running low on the good stuff. The clients on the east side are getting—"
"I'll handle it." The words came from somewhere instinctive. A reflex that wasn't mine.
"Cool. You need anything else tonight?"
"No. Go home."
He left. The door clicked shut.
I locked it. Deadbolt first, then the chain. My hands shook — these thin, unfamiliar hands — and I pressed them flat on the desk until the trembling stopped.
Okay.
Okay okay okay.
The room came into focus in pieces. An office. Small, cluttered. A desk piled with invoices and a spiral-bound notebook. A wall calendar showing March 2015. A mini-fridge humming in the corner. Through a doorway, the dim outline of a commercial kitchen — stainless steel counters, a walk-in freezer, butcher's hooks gleaming under fluorescent light.
The cooler sat on the desk. I unzipped it.
Four brains. Human brains, nestled in ice packs, wrapped individually in plastic like deli cuts.
My stomach clenched. Not with nausea.
With hunger.
The kind of hunger that bypasses your throat and hits your jaw — a deep, animal ache that made my teeth hurt and my vision blur at the edges. I'd never wanted anything this badly in my life. Not food, not water, not sleep, not sex. This was a craving that lived in the base of my skull and it was screaming.
I stepped back. Hit the wall. Slid down until my ass hit the floor.
I knew where I was.
The calendar said March 2015. The room was a back office in a butcher shop called Meat Cute. The brains in the cooler came from murdered people. And the body I was wearing — pale skin, white-blond hair, hands that had strangled and stabbed and scratched — belonged to Blaine DeBeers.
The primary antagonist of a CW television show I'd binged three times in my old apartment, in my old life, in a borough that might as well have been another galaxy.
iZombie. Season one. The villain's opening act.
I was inside the show. I was the show's monster.
The hunger won in eleven minutes.
That's how long I held out. Eleven minutes of sitting on the floor, back against the wall, trying to convince myself that the gnawing in my gut wasn't real, that the craving would pass, that I was stronger than the biology of whatever this body was.
Eleven minutes. Then I opened the cooler, unwrapped the nearest brain, and ate a piece with my bare hands.
It tasted like — I don't have the words for it. Imagine the best meal you've ever had. Not the best-tasting, the most satisfying. The meal that hit exactly what your body needed after days of deprivation. That deep, structural relief.
It tasted like that. Savory and rich and the texture was softer than I expected, and my jaw stopped aching and my vision cleared and the hunger receded like a tide pulling back from shore.
I sat there with brain matter on my fingers and hated every second of how good it was.
Here's what I knew about being a zombie in this world, from three complete rewatches and too many wiki deep-dives: brains are the only thing that keeps you functional. Without them, you degrade. Personality dissolves. Cognition erodes. You become what the show called "full Romero" — a shambling, feral thing that can't be recovered. Eat brains, stay you. Skip meals, lose yourself. That's the deal. No negotiation.
And when you eat a brain — this is the part that mattered — you absorb pieces of the dead person. Their skills. Their memories. Their personality traits, temporarily, like a radio picking up a station. In the show, Liv Moore would eat a victim's brain and become a painter or a sociopath or a frat boy for a week, catching fragmented visions of their death along the way.
That was the standard zombie package. What I didn't know yet was whether my version came with the same terms and conditions, or something different entirely.
The piece of brain settled in my stomach. Warm. Grounding.
No vision. No personality shift. Just a faint sense of competence in my hands that hadn't been there before — a steadiness, a precision, like I'd spent years chopping vegetables with a chef's knife. The dead person's muscle memory, seeping into mine.
I washed my hands in the office sink. Dried them. Sat at the desk.
The spiral notebook was the ledger.
Names. Dates. Amounts. Written in handwriting I now recognized as mine — or Blaine's, which was the same thing whether I liked it or not.
The operation was simple and monstrous. Blaine — the real Blaine, the one whose life I'd inherited — had been scratching wealthy people to turn them into zombies, then selling them brains harvested from teenagers. Runaways, mostly. Homeless kids. The ones nobody reported missing because nobody was looking.
Fourteen names on the current list. Seven had lines through them. Seven were still alive.
The show had depicted Blaine's operation as a three-man crew with a handful of clients. The ledger told a different story. Six paying clients, each consuming roughly one brain per week. Three separate procurement channels. Two delivery drivers. A network of spotters who identified targets — kids sleeping under bridges, in shelters, in the doorways of closed businesses along Aurora Avenue.
I turned pages. Supply forecasts. Client preferences. Premium pricing for brains from college students versus addicts. A handwritten note in the margin of one page: Friday — pick up at Gasworks, 2 AM. Bring the van.
Friday. Three days from now. Seven kids on the list.
The pen in Blaine's desk was a black Montblanc — expensive, heavy, the kind of pen a man who murdered teenagers for profit would own. I picked it up and drew a line through Friday's entry. Then another line. Then another, until the ink bled through the paper and the words underneath were gone.
That was the first decision. Everything else would follow.
[Blaine's Apartment Above Meat Cute — Later]
The apartment was nicer than it should've been. Exposed brick, hardwood floors, a kitchen that had been renovated recently with marble countertops and a gas range. The kind of place a Capitol Hill hipster would kill for, which was accidentally appropriate given the owner.
Blaine's phone sat on the nightstand — an iPhone 6, because it was 2015 and the world was young. I picked it up. The passcode was his birthday: 1-2-2-5. December twenty-fifth. Of course a man like Blaine thought sharing a birthday with Jesus was a personality trait.
Contacts. Hundreds of them. Clients marked with a brain emoji — subtle — and suppliers marked with a snowflake, which was either a drug reference or the man's idea of dark humor. Cash reserves: a stack of banded hundreds in the bedroom safe, combination written on a Post-it stuck to the inside of a dresser drawer. Sloppy. The real Blaine had operated like a man who assumed he'd never get caught because the universe owed him immunity.
I counted the cash. Forty-two thousand dollars. Enough for a few months if I was careful. Not enough to rebuild an empire.
The burner phone was in the jacket pocket of a coat hanging by the door. Three unread texts from someone called "Chief": logistics questions about Friday. I didn't answer.
In the living room, a turntable sat on a console table next to a stack of vinyl. I flipped through the records — Tom Waits, Bowie, Leonard Cohen, The Clash. Curated taste. Blaine had been a bastard, but he'd been a bastard with excellent music.
I put on Rain Dogs. Tom Waits' voice filled the apartment — gravel and bourbon and broken sidewalks.
A dead man's music in a dead man's body. I leaned against the wall and listened to the whole first side without moving.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, in 2025, my old body was probably on a slab. Hit by a car on Seventh Avenue. Did it hurt? I couldn't remember. The splice had been clean — one second there, next second here. No tunnel. No choice. No explanation.
Just this. A butcher shop in Seattle. A cooler full of human brains. A face in the mirror that belonged to a television character. And a ledger with fourteen names, seven of which still had heartbeats.
The record crackled between tracks. Tom Waits started singing about a guy who couldn't go home.
Yeah. That tracked.
I pulled the ledger onto the coffee table and opened to a blank page. The Montblanc was still in my pocket. I started writing.
Step one: Cancel the harvest. Nobody dies on Friday.
Step two: Find brains that don't come from murder.
Step three: Keep six zombie clients fed before they lose their minds — literally.
Step four: Figure out what the hell happened to me and why.
Step five: Don't die. Again.
The ledger listed fourteen names — seven crossed out, seven still breathing. Friday was three days away.
A key scraped in the lock downstairs. Heavy footsteps on the staircase. Don E's voice, muffled through the floor: "Yo, boss? You up? We gotta talk about Friday."
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