CHAPTER 11: THE MUSICIAN
[Meat Cute Charcuterie — Mid-April 2015, 7:05 PM]
Lowell Tracey was taller than the show had made him look. Six-one, maybe six-two, with the lean build of someone who forgot to eat before the zombie virus made forgetting to eat dangerous. Dark hair that needed a wash, a leather jacket that had been expensive once and lived-in ever since, and eyes that held the specific exhaustion of a man who hadn't slept properly in weeks because the hunger kept waking him up.
He stood inside the front door and scanned the shop the way a cat scans a new room — everything registered, nothing trusted.
"Mr. DeBeers?"
"Blaine." I came around the counter. The hum was there again — the fifth instance, clear and unmistakable now, a subsonic vibration that started in my molars and spread through the base of my skull. Every time another zombie entered my proximity, the same frequency. Five times. Five zombies.
Pattern. The word surfaced from somewhere between the accountant's analytical framework and the security consultant's threat assessment protocols. Not stress. Not hunger. A pattern.
I filed it. Later. Right now, a hungry zombie musician needed feeding before his restraint eroded and he started eyeing the customers who weren't there.
"You look like you haven't eaten in a while."
"Four days." Lowell's jaw worked. The muscle along his temple flexed — the early stage of the hunger tic, the involuntary clenching that preceded the full zombie jaw-lock. "I had a source. She moved to Portland. Didn't exactly leave a forwarding address for the brain delivery service."
"Sit down." I gestured to the prep counter in the back — away from the front windows, away from the street. "I'll fix you something."
Don E appeared from the walk-in carrying a tray of pork chops for the display case. He clocked Lowell, clocked the situation, and set the tray on the counter without a word. A look passed between us — the shorthand we'd developed over two weeks of operating a dual-purpose butcher shop. Client. Feed first. Talk later.
I took one of David Kim's brain portions from the walk-in — the restaurant manager, age forty-seven. Good tissue quality, decent nutrient density. I brought it to the kitchen and did something the original Blaine would never have done: I cooked it properly.
The chef's brain guided the process. Cubed the tissue. Heated oil in a small saucepan — not too hot, medium, enough to develop flavor without destroying the neural compounds that made brain matter nutritionally viable for zombies. Added onion, garlic, cumin, turmeric, a splash of coconut milk from the fridge. The spices masked the distinctive organ-meat tang that made brain consumption psychologically difficult even for people who needed it to survive.
Brain curry. Served in a ceramic bowl with a spoon and a glass of water.
Lowell stared at it. "This is..."
"Eat first. Questions after."
He ate. The first bite was desperate — spoon to mouth in a continuous motion, barely chewing, the hunger overriding every social norm about pace and presentation. The second bite was slower. By the third, his shoulders had dropped two inches and the jaw tic had stopped.
"This is actually good." Wonder in his voice. Genuine, unguarded wonder, the kind that slipped past the British reserve when the body was too relieved to maintain social defenses. "Like, properly good. What's in this?"
"Trade secret."
"No, seriously. I've been eating brain — just... brain, raw, off a plate, for three months. Nobody told me you could cook it."
"Nobody thought to try."
He finished the bowl. Set the spoon down. Leaned back on the stool and looked at me with the specific expression of a man whose survival instinct was warring with his common sense: This person just saved me, but why?
"Right." Lowell crossed his arms. The leather jacket creaked. "What's the catch?"
"No catch."
"There's always a catch. I've been a zombie for four months. The first person who helped me wanted money. The second wanted me to scratch someone. The third turned out to be selling watered-down brain smoothies that barely kept the hunger at bay." He leaned forward. "So what do you want?"
"A regular customer who pays a fair price and doesn't make trouble."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Weekly delivery, quality product, prepared if you want it. Price scales to what you can afford — I'm not running a charity, but I'm not running a shakedown either."
Lowell studied me. The musician's eye — trained for performance, for reading audiences, for detecting when someone was selling something they didn't believe in. Whatever he saw, it didn't fully satisfy him.
"You're not what I expected," he said.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who runs a brain supply in a butcher shop? I expected more... menace. Less curry."
The laugh came easier this time. Not the involuntary bark from Don E's air-guitar moment — this was smoother, more relaxed. Two weeks in this body and the laugh was starting to feel like mine rather than a muscle I'd borrowed.
"The curry's a new addition. The business model is... evolving."
"Evolving how?"
"Toward something that doesn't require me to be a monster." The words came out before the filter caught them. Too honest. Too close to the edge of the secret. I caught Lowell's expression shifting — curiosity replacing caution — and redirected. "Sustainable sourcing. Ethical where possible. The old model was broken."
Lowell nodded slowly. "I'll take the weekly delivery. What do I owe you?"
We negotiated. He could afford three hundred a week — musician's income, gig-dependent, inconsistent. I set his rate at two-fifty, which was below cost but above charity, because Lowell Tracey was worth more alive than the margin he'd generate dead. The show had killed him in episode nine. I had roughly four weeks to change that trajectory, and step one was making sure he had no reason to go looking for alternative suppliers who might get him into trouble.
"Thursday deliveries," I said. "Same day as the fresh stock. You'll get the best of the week."
"You're serious about this."
"Dead serious." A pause. "Pun intended."
Lowell's mouth twitched. The first sign of humor since he'd walked in — a crack in the survival-mode shell that let something warmer peek through. "Terrible. Absolutely terrible."
"I'll work on the material."
He left through the front door. The bell chimed. The hum faded as he crossed the street toward a parked Vespa — vintage, forest green, the kind of vehicle a musician rode because it was charming and because parking in Seattle was a war he'd chosen not to fight.
Don E emerged from the back, where he'd been conspicuously not-listening from behind the walk-in door.
"So." He leaned on the counter. "Since when do we give the soft sell?"
"Good customers come back."
"Yeah, but—" Don E gestured at the empty bowl on the prep counter. "You cooked for him. Like, actually cooked. With spices and everything. The old way was: here's a bag, pay up, get out."
"The old way lost customers."
Don E considered this. His face went through a slow recalibration — the same expression he'd worn when I'd cancelled the harvest, when I'd thanked him for the cooler labels, when I'd told him his work was solid. The expression of a man updating his model of someone he thought he knew.
"So we're like Costco," he said. "For brains."
"That's..." I closed my eyes. "That's horrifying and accurate."
"Costco for brains." Don E grinned. "I'm putting that on a shirt."
"Please don't."
He went back to closing up. I cleaned the prep counter, washed the bowl, put away the spices. The Bluetooth speaker played low — Don E's playlist had shifted to evening mode, quieter tracks, and something acoustic drifted through the kitchen that made me reach for my phone.
I found Lowell's EP online. Three tracks of indie folk-rock recorded in what sounded like a bedroom with good acoustics. The first song was called "Deadweight," which was either prophetic or painfully on-the-nose, and the guitar work was clean and confident and genuinely good.
A musician who played beautiful songs and ate human brains to stay alive, and who'd walked into a butcher shop expecting menace and found curry instead. The show had given him six episodes. I'd give him more, if the timeline cooperated.
Outside, through the front window, a woman in a dark coat passed the shop without looking in. Not Liv — wrong build, wrong hair. Just a stranger on a sidewalk. But the proximity to Lowell's departure, the near-miss geometry of two people whose paths would eventually cross, made my chest tighten.
Lowell and Liv. The romance that ended with a bullet in the original timeline. Two zombies finding something beautiful in a world that was eating them alive, and the man responsible for Lowell's death was the man who'd just served him curry and offered him a lifeline.
The irony wasn't lost on me. Nothing about this life was.
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