Chapter 3 : Supply and Demand
[Blaine's Apartment — March 2015, 3:12 AM]
The burner phone lit up on the nightstand. Unfamiliar number. I'd been staring at the ceiling for two hours, running supply calculations that kept coming up short, so at least the interruption had purpose.
"Yeah."
Breathing. Fast, ragged, wet — the kind of breathing that came from someone whose body was failing in a specific way I recognized from four days of living inside this one. Brain hunger.
"Who is this?"
"You did this to me." A woman's voice. Young — twenties, maybe. The words came out bitten and raw, each one pushed through clenched teeth. "You scratched me. In the parking garage on Capitol Hill. Three weeks ago. You don't even remember, do you?"
I didn't remember because I hadn't been here three weeks ago. The real Blaine had done this. One more mess in a landfill of messes.
"Tell me your name."
"Jackie. My name is Jackie, and I'm a nurse — I was a nurse — and now I'm sitting in my car outside a homeless shelter on Third Avenue trying to convince myself not to walk in there and—" Her voice cracked. "I need help. I'm losing it. I haven't eaten in six days and I can smell them through the walls."
The burner phone's screen cast blue light across the ceiling. Six days without brains. That was past dangerous. That was pre-Romero.
"Jackie. Listen to me. Don't go inside that shelter."
"Then feed me."
"I will. Where are you right now?"
"I just told you. Third and—"
"Exact cross street. I need the exact intersection."
"Third and Pike. The — there's a diner across the street. Beth's. Open twenty-four hours." Her breathing was slowing. Marginally. The fact that someone was giving her a task to focus on was doing work. "Blaine, if you don't help me, I swear to God I will walk into that shelter and I will—"
"You won't. Because you're a nurse. You spent years keeping people alive and that's not the kind of thing that goes away in three weeks. Go to the diner. Order coffee. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Silence. Then: "Fifteen."
The line cut.
I was already pulling on Blaine's jacket.
[Beth's Diner — 3:38 AM]
Jackie sat in the last booth with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug like it was the only warm thing left in the world. She was small — five-three, maybe — with dark hair pulled into a ponytail that had given up halfway through the day. Scrubs under her coat. Her hospital ID badge still clipped to the pocket, the photo showing a woman who smiled.
The woman in the booth wasn't smiling. Her skin had the pallor — that telltale zombie white she hadn't figured out how to cover yet — and her eyes darted to every person who walked past the booth with a focus that wasn't curiosity. It was assessment. Prey evaluation.
I slid into the seat across from her. The vinyl squeaked.
"You're late," she said.
"I'm here."
She looked at me the way a drowning person looks at a life preserver — desperate and furious in equal measure. "Three weeks. You scratched me in a parking garage, told me to 'enjoy the new diet,' and walked away. I didn't know what was happening to me for four days. Four days. I thought I had a disease. I went to the ER where I work and nobody could tell me why my hair was falling out and growing back white."
That sounded exactly like something the real Blaine would do. Scratch someone for fun, or out of carelessness, and forget about them by the next morning. A new zombie, cast into the world with no instructions and no supply line.
"How'd you get my number?"
"You left a card. In my pocket. It just had a number on it and the words 'Call when you get hungry.'" She pulled a crumpled business card from her jacket. Blaine's handwriting. Blaine's burner number. Like leaving a trap with a timer. "Who does that?"
A sociopath. "Someone who should have handled this differently."
"Handled this—" She laughed. The sound was thin and sharp. "You turned me into this. You don't get to talk about handling."
The waitress approached. I ordered two black coffees and a slice of pie. Jackie watched the woman walk away with an intensity that made my chest tight.
"Jackie. I'm going to fix this."
"How?"
"Forty-eight hours. I'll have a supply for you. Brains — ethically sourced. Already dead. Nobody gets hurt."
"Ethically sourced brains." She said the words like she was testing whether the English language could actually contain them. "That's your pitch?"
"That's my pitch."
"And if you don't?"
"I will."
"If. You. Don't."
The diner hummed around us. A cook singing off-key in the back. The coffee machine gurgling through its cycle. Two truckers in a booth by the window arguing about the Seahawks' off-season moves.
"Then you call me again. And I answer. That's the deal, Jackie. You don't go hunting. You call me."
She stared at me for a long time. The hunger was doing things to her face — tightening the muscles around her eyes, pulling her lips back from her teeth in a way she probably didn't notice. The body wanted what the body wanted. Willpower was a finite resource and hers was almost spent.
"Forty-eight hours," she said.
"Forty-eight hours."
She stood up. Dropped two dollars on the table for the coffee she'd ordered before I arrived. Professional. Even falling apart, she paid her tab.
"If this is another lie," she said, pulling her coat tight, "I'll find you. And I won't be polite about it."
She walked out. The bell above the door chimed. Through the window I watched her cross the street, get into a Honda Civic with a dented fender, and sit there. Engine off. Hands on the wheel. Staring straight ahead.
Another name. Another zombie Blaine made and discarded. Jackie — the nurse who didn't exist in any episode, any plotline, any wiki page I'd ever read.
The real Blaine had been busier than the show let on. The question was how many more Jackies were out there, starving, unraveling, calling a dead man's phone number at 3 AM.
[Watkins Funeral Home, Rainier Beach — 10:15 AM]
The first two funeral homes that morning were dead ends. Pacific Rest charged institutional rates and required a state license for any tissue procurement. Emerald City Mortuary had a receptionist who threatened to call the police when I used the word brains in a sentence.
Watkins Funeral Home sat at the end of a strip mall between a laundromat and a tax preparation office. The sign was faded. The parking lot had three cars. The building itself had the look of a place that processed grief on a budget — functional, clean, and completely absent of pretension.
Mr. Watkins was in his sixties. Thin. Glasses that sat crooked on a nose that had been broken at least once. He met me in the arrangement room — a space designed for families choosing caskets that now held two folding chairs and a desk covered in county paperwork.
"You said on the phone this was about the indigent cremation program."
"It is." I sat down. Placed an envelope on the desk between us. "How many unclaimed bodies do you process per month?"
"That's — why would you want to know that?"
"I run a specialty food company. Organic. High-end clientele with very specific dietary requirements." Every word tasted like ash, but the lie needed to be clean and boring enough that he'd stop asking questions. "We have a need for certain biological materials — already designated for cremation, already processed through the county system. Materials that would otherwise be destroyed."
Watkins looked at the envelope. He didn't touch it.
"What kind of materials?"
"Neural tissue."
The room got quiet. Watkins adjusted his glasses. The fluorescent light above us buzzed at a frequency that drilled into the back of my skull.
"You're asking me to sell you brains."
"I'm asking you to redirect tissue that's already slated for destruction. Bodies the county has released. Families that didn't claim them. People who died with nobody to mourn them and nothing left but paperwork."
"That's — that's not legal."
"It's not illegal, either. Washington state code is specific about released remains. Once the county signs off on cremation and no next of kin has been located within the statutory period, the disposing entity has discretion over the process." I'd spent three hours last night reading state mortuary law on Blaine's laptop. My eyes still burned. "I'm offering five thousand per unit. Cash. No paper trail on your end."
Watkins took off his glasses. Cleaned them with the hem of his shirt. Put them back on. The action bought him fifteen seconds of thinking time, which was exactly what it was designed to do.
"Five thousand."
"Five thousand."
He opened the envelope. Counted. His fingers moved with the ease of a man who'd handled cash before — not often, maybe, but enough to know the weight of a stack.
"How many per month?"
"As many as you process. I'll take every one."
He closed the envelope. Set it on his side of the desk. "I need to think about—"
"Take the night. I'll call tomorrow morning." I stood and extended my hand. He shook it. His palm was dry and cool and his grip was the grip of a man who'd just crossed a line he was going to pretend didn't exist.
"Mr. DeBeers?"
"Yeah?"
"These people — the ones you're taking. They're already dead."
It wasn't a question. It was a permission slip he was writing for himself.
"Already dead," I said. "Already gone. Already forgotten by everyone except the county clerk who filed their paperwork."
He nodded. Once. Didn't speak again.
I drove back to Meat Cute with the windows down. The March air was cold and wet and tasted like pine and exhaust, and for the first time in four days, the knot behind my sternum loosened by a fraction.
[Meat Cute, Walk-In Freezer — Evening]
The last brain sat on the prep counter in its plastic wrapping. One brain. Julian or me.
Julian's daughter had a recital on Saturday. She practiced "Für Elise" every afternoon in the apartment upstairs, the notes filtering through the floor like a heartbeat. Her father needed to be her father on Saturday. Coherent, present, human enough to sit in a folding chair in a school gymnasium and clap when his twelve-year-old hit the right notes.
I unwrapped the brain. Packaged it in a clean container. Wrote Julian's name on the lid.
My stomach howled. The hunger came back like a tide — first the jaw ache, then the blur at the edges of my vision, then the deep, structural need that made my hands shake and my teeth grind. I'd eaten once since arriving. Four days ago. I was running on fumes.
I put the container in the refrigerator behind the office door. Texted Julian: Ready for pickup. Come before nine.
Then I sat on the prep counter and pressed my palms against my eyes and waited for the hunger to stop screaming.
It didn't stop. It just got quieter. Not because the need diminished, but because something else pushed through it — a vision, sharp and sudden, cutting through the hunger like light through a crack.
A kitchen. Small, warm, cluttered with spice jars and a drying rack full of wooden spoons. Late afternoon light through a window over the sink. A woman — mid-thirties, dark hair, flour on her apron — laughing at something I couldn't hear. She turned toward me and her face was bright with the specific happiness of a person who hasn't thought about sadness in hours.
She was cooking. The hands in the vision were her hands — deft, practiced, reaching for a pinch of cumin without looking — and the kitchen smelled like garlic and saffron and bread baking and home.
The vision ended. I was back in the walk-in. Metal walls. Fluorescent light. The hum of the compressor.
That was the first brain. The one I'd eaten on night one. A chef, probably. A woman who loved cooking in a kitchen full of light, whose happiest memories lived in the smell of bread, whose skills were still in my hands four days later — steady and sure and permanent when they should have faded after forty-eight hours.
The cooking skill was still mine. The knife work. The instinct for heat and timing. Four days later and it hadn't degraded. Hadn't faded. Hadn't even dimmed.
In the show, brain effects wore off. Always. It was one of the core rules.
This body was breaking the rules. My version of the zombie virus was keeping what it took.
I flexed my hands. The chef's precision lived in my fingers like it had always been there. Not borrowed. Not temporary. Mine.
That changed things.
That changed everything.
I locked the walk-in. Walked upstairs. Sat at Blaine's desk with the ledger and the Montblanc pen and started a new page.
Known: Skills from consumed brains persist beyond the expected window. Duration unknown. Mechanism unknown. Do NOT discuss with anyone.
Needed: More data. More brains. More time.
Priority: Watkins delivery. Feed the clients. Feed Jackie. Feed myself.
The pen hovered over the page. Downstairs, the front door opened. Don E's voice: "Delivery truck's here, boss. Four crates of actual pork. You want me to—"
"Handle it." My voice carried down the stairwell without me raising it. "I'll be down in ten."
First Watkins delivery would arrive tomorrow. Four brains, maybe five, from people who'd died with nobody to claim them. Enough to stabilize Julian and Jackie. Not enough for everyone. The math still didn't balance.
But the math was closer than it had been yesterday, and the chef's hands were still mine, and somewhere in Rainier Beach a funeral director was counting cash and telling himself it was a victimless arrangement.
I capped the pen. Closed the ledger. Went downstairs to help Don E stack pork in a freezer that had held very different meat three days ago.
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