Darcy Romero was twenty-three, freshly graduated, and driving to the first day of her new job when a tragic accident brought her promising young life to an abrupt end. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, which would ordinarily have been the end of the story. About forty minutes later, Darcy sat up and asked what time it was. This caused considerable excitement among the medical staff and considerably less in Darcy, who was mostly concerned that she was now extremely late for work.Unfortunately, being dead has had some cosmetic consequences. Darcy has no detectable pulse, runs roughly at room temperature, and her formerly healthy complexion has settled into an attractive shade of week-old haddock. More troublingly, her body continuously deteriorates, producing the assorted lesions, loose joints, and large holes that make shopping for skincare products largely an exercise in optimism. The good news is that consuming brain tissue temporarily reverses the process and allows her body to repair itself. The bad news is that it has to be brains. Kale does absolutely nothing.Despite what several decades of zombie movies would suggest, Darcy has no desire whatsoever to gnaw open somebody's skull and eat the contents. Dying didn't change her personality, and murder remains fairly high on her list of things she'd rather not do, most days. Instead, she buys animal brains from a local butcher who has learned that asking too many questions of his regular customers is bad for business. Darcy doesn't particularly enjoy the taste, either, so she has become remarkably creative at disguising them in otherwise respectable meals. When another hole appears in her elbow, that's usually her cue to stop procrastinating and defrost a portion.Otherwise, Darcy's life has changed surprisingly little. She eventually started the job she was driving to that morning, still sees her friends, runs errands, drinks coffee she doesn't technically need, and occasionally forgets to breathe until she needs to speak. People tend to find the whole situation considerably more disturbing than Darcy does. As far as she's concerned, she already experienced the worst possible outcome and it turned out to be mostly manageable. The paperwork was honestly worse.

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