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He looked like he wanted to sigh, but he didn’t. “I will. Promise. I’m heading to Lafayette tonight to visit my folks, but I’ll get up with her before I go.”
“All right then,” I said. “I’ll stop poking at the lab stuff.”
He smiled, and for an instant I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he simply released me and turned and headed back to his car. I watched as he drove off, then climbed into my own.
Good thing I was a lying, untrustworthy bitch. ’Cause there was no fucking way I was letting this shit go. Not as long as I was the one being slammed in the news. Both the zombie mafia and the rebel zombie alliance could suck my white trash undead ass.
Chapter 18
I slept late enough to feel almost rested, and went on in to work my noon shift. However, when I swiped my card at the back morgue entrance, the card reader stubbornly refused to let me in and instead kept blinking a “fuck you” red light at me. Scowling, I got back in my car—’cause I was lazy like that—and drove around to the front.
The receptionist, Rebecca, gave me a bright smile as I walked in. “Hi, sweetheart. Don’t normally see you coming through this way.”
“Yeah, there’s something wrong with my card,” I said. “Can you buzz me through?”
The smile slipped from her face. “Of course.” She bit her lip as she looked at something on her desk. “There’s a message here for you to see Allen when you come in.” Her eyes were shadowed with worry, and I didn’t need a high school diploma to put the pieces together. Card not working and a note to see my supervisor?
“Have I been fired?” I managed to ask.
Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better not have been!” she announced, but there was a shimmer of doubt in her eyes as she pressed the button to let me in.
The door buzzed, and I went on through, anger and dismay fighting it out in a hard knot within my chest. I began to head down the hallway to Allen’s office, but Rebecca reached out and stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“No matter what happens, you’ll always have friends here, darlin’.”
I forced out a smile for her. She gave me a little pat, then turned back to her desk. I continued on to Allen’s office, deeply grateful when I didn’t run into anyone else on the way.
His door was open. I didn’t bother knocking on the doorframe or anything polite like that. I simply came in and plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. “Hi, Allen. My card isn’t working. And I have a message to see you. Have I been fired?” And hey, I managed to say it without sounding like I was about to burst into tears.
He frowned at the still open door, but I wasn’t about to get up and close it so that he could say the bullshit he had to say in private.
“You’re not fired,” he said, returning his gaze to me.
“But?” Because it was obvious there was a gigantic “but” coming.
His mouth tightened into a thin line. “But…the coroner feels that it would be best to let all of this…messiness blow over.”
“You mean until after the election’s over?” I said. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my jacket. I wanted to hide that they were clenched to keep them from shaking. The election was over three months away. If I was super careful I might be able to make my stash of brains last that long. But then what if he loses? His opponents were nobodies, and he was heavily favored to win, but stranger things had happened. And why would his replacement possibly want to take a chance on hiring me?
Allen leaned back. “You’re taking a leave of absence for personal reasons. Once Dr. Duplessis secures the re-election, you’ll have the option to return from your leave to your former position.” He cleared his throat. “Of course it would be unpaid leave. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t been with us long enough to have that much vacation time.”
I stared at him while everything he said tumbled over in my head. “Wow,” I finally said. “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Haven’t you been reading the papers?” he asked with a snide curl of his lip. “It’s been on the front page since the incident.”
“Yes, I’ve been reading the papers,” I shot back. “Despite what you think of me, I’m not illiterate. I totally expected that at some point I was going to get fucked. What I didn’t expect was to be asked to fuck myself.” I stood up, aware that I was beginning to shout, but I had no desire to control myself. “Well, you know what? It’s not going to happen. I’m not going to meekly take myself off so that the coroner can avoid a nonexistent scandal. I was held up at fucking gunpoint! Why the fuck doesn’t he grow a pair of fucking balls and come out and say that? And, y’know what? He can grow a pair of fucking balls and fire me to my goddamn face if he wants me gone!” I was beyond shouting at this point. I was shrieking like an insane bitch. Hey, at least now there was legitimate reason to fire me.
I didn’t give him a chance. I spun and stormed out, holding my fury and hurt close to me, and didn’t look around even though I knew there were plenty of shocked observers leaning out of office doors. I thought I heard Reb whisper, “Good luck, babe,” as I stormed past her and through the security door, but I couldn’t be sure. I liked to think she did.
I drove out to my storage locker and numbly counted up my stash even though I had a pretty solid idea of how much I had saved. If I was careful and wasn’t too active and didn’t get hurt, I could probably last a couple of months. And what then?
And then I’m fucked. Unless Sofia manages to get her fake brain formula right by then.
Why the hell had I gone off on Allen like that? Yeah, sure, the whole “leave without pay” thing was bullshit, but at least it would’ve most likely been temporary. Life was full of bullshit, and sometimes it was smarter to suck it up and wait for a better opportunity.
With a sense of complete despair paired with a fair amount of self-loathing, I shut and locked the freezer and the storage unit. I stopped at the first store that sold cheap clothing, bought a t-shirt, and changed out of my coroner’s office shirt. I briefly considered chucking it into the trash, but then changed my mind and shoved it into the trunk of my car. I really had loved the job, and just because Allen and the coroner were jerks didn’t mean I needed to scrub it from my entire life.
Now if I could only find something that would help take my mind off the complete clusterfuck my life had become.
