All-Day Breakfast (15 page)

Dorfsman leapt up and stomped out of sight, shaking his head like a buffalo.

“I'm the intern,” said the girl, smiling up at me. “Gets a little crazy around here! What can we do for you?”

“Well, we were about to go back and see—”

The station doors crashed open behind us and two scruffy guys hustled in, looking vaguely like little-league coaches in their ball caps and sweatpants. One carried, miraculously, a stack of fifteen pizza boxes, and the other a deflated basketball.

“This the recycling?” It was hard to tell which one was yelling. “Hell, I told you it wasn't!”

“Oh my God!” Tina shouted at them. “Get out of—this is the
last
time! You think your bullshit is funny?”

They looked baffled by that but went on yelling about the pulp and paper industry. I refused to lose my Donny Brown momentum. I stretched my arms apart and shepherded both of them toward the doors.
Go,
I thought,
before I feed you your legs.

“Okay,” Clint encouraged them, “there you go.”

They tumbled out and down the steps, boxes and all, and I turned back to see Tina watching us with abject disgust.

“Can you
believe
that?” she asked. “My first
minute
here, and those losers come out of the woodwork! Sorry, who did you want to see?”

I stood up very straight, like a reliable citizen might, while I wondered how hard I'd have to hit the Plexiglas to bring the window down and put Tina through that wall behind her. I was strong enough. Grab Clint by the ankles and swing him like a bat.

“Donny Brown,” I said. “Please.”

Clint waited beside me—eyes down, hands clasped behind him.

“I'll buzz you in,” she said. “Okay. Go ahead now.”

She tilted her head meaningfully and I realized a doorknob to our right was buzzing. We stepped through into a particleboard hallway, then I closed the door behind us but not so the latch clicked shut.

“This,” Clint whispered, “is fully like
The Matrix
.”

We walked through to a little room furnished with what looked like a high school study carrel but with the middle board taken out so that two people could sit in the provided plastic patio chairs and stare at each other. Or, if they preferred, they could move the chairs and stare at each other from anywhere in the room. A steel door with a window in it led out into the squad room, jammed with a half-dozen desks and computer monitors and tattered motivational posters showing dolphins. A dark-haired cop sat facing me, pecking at his keyboard with the end of a pencil, while Sgt. Dorfsman sat with his back to us, reading his magazine and eating Irish stew out of a can—stuff must've been pulsing with nitrites because I suddenly had to swallow drool.

Tina hurried between the desks, leading a kid in a jean jacket by the arm.

“Here's your boy!” She held the interview-room door open with her hip and steered the kid inside. “Come tell me at the front when you're done, guys, and make sure to sign out. Ten minutes? Hurry up and sit down, Donny, before you fall on your butt.”

She hustled off behind the squad room filing cabinets, and I caught Donny Brown under the armpits before he did fall on his butt—didn't feel like he weighed more than Josie. The door banged shut and the sergeant only glanced over his shoulder at it—he'd probably raise hell once his break was over.

“Please get him a chair,” I said.

“Awesome,” said Clint.

Donny was a blond kid with freckles, and because the rest of his face had the pallor of drywall the freckles looked fiery as the ends of cigarettes. His eyes were inside black bags and he could barely look up at us, but the worst was how badly his lips were chapped. I didn't feel the least urge to throw him through a wall. He smelled like sawdust—maybe we all did. We got him balanced on the chair. He lifted his eyes as high as my belly.

“Did, did Mom send you in?” he whispered.

“No, man, no.” I knelt in front of him. “You worked at the factory, am I right? I'm the science teacher from Hoover, we got caught under that burst pipe and now things aren't right with us either, you understand?”

He nodded, though his head wavered.

“Other guys, they aren't going to live through the night with no bacon,” he muttered. “I remember you guys, the other day. Dancing around. We saw you.”

“How, uh, how do you guys get better?” Clint asked.

He'd stolen my question.

“Ha,” Donny exhaled. “You're a real stupid kid. I said bacon.”

“But, I,” said Clint. “Bacon just makes you want more bacon!”

Donny stuck his tongue out, then withdrew it.

“How many Dockside guys are back there now?” I asked.

“Ha. None!” Donny's jaw tilted over to his shoulder. “Set our bail this morning—twelve grand for each of us. I was talking to my mom, ten minutes ago, she said she could cash her retirement fund, get me out. Took me back in the cells? Other guys are gone, Ben, Lars, all of them. Collis told me somebody came and paid for all of them guys to get out, and I was sitting right here talking to my mom, and I, I got missed! They had a van or something waiting in the back. Boom. Collis thinks it was Dockside but Dockside would've known I was in here, right? Aw, shit, you guys got working legs, run get bacon!”

“In a minute,” I said.

He dropped his eyes, reached his right hand up and scratched hard at his temple, but the index finger folded sideways against his hand, dangling like a Christmas ornament. The rest of the fingers went on scratching.

“Dude!” Clint whispered. His lips worked themselves over his teeth, struggling to get the next syllable out.

“Donny,” I said, “listen, did, did that gunk get on you guys
before
it got on us?”

“No, no,” he murmured. Drops of purple blood, viscous as Vaseline, beaded on the exposed knuckle. “We mopped up that compound
after
it went on those kids. We had the respirators, the gloves, the whole shift of guys down there mopping, and you know what?”

“Take it easy,” I said. “We've got plenty of time.”

“The stuff was leaking onto the backs of our necks all the time, and we never even knew it. Never felt it. They hadn't shut the feeder all the way off. Some guys say they left it dripping on fucking
purpose
. You got anything salty?”

He scratched his chin, scratching hard, and that index finger dropped into his lap. Balanced there on his thigh.

“Who runs that Penzler outfit?” I whispered. “Who can tell us what's happening?”

“Corporate headquarters is like nine hundred miles away. Look it up on the fucking internet, man. And the other day he was saying he remembered these hippie doctors coming in like a year ago, asking about processing different crap.”

“Hippie doctors,” repeated Clint.

“He said this might've been their shit.”

“Who said?”

“Our main guy. What's-his-name.”

“Rob Aiken?”

“Yeah, funny name
now
, right? Shit!” He snatched up the finger and cradled it in his hands like a porcelain baby. “It's
me
now! Look at this, it ain't natural, man!”

Sergeant Dorfsman barged through the door.

“Time's up, Donny. Enough blowjobs for one night.”

“You ate
bacon
, I smell it!” Donny clambered to his feet. “Gimme some!”

The sergeant backed up a step, hand on his holster. “No, I didn't…”

“Look at the goddamn kid!” I said. “Get him a doctor!”

“Back the hell up, Donny!” Dorfsman stammered.

Donny's eyes looked half asleep, but he shuffled forward like he wanted to stick his tongue down the sergeant's throat. He wasn't a fraction as angry as I would've been.

“Fun's fun,” said Sgt. Dorfsman. “You sit the hell down.”

He rammed a shoulder into Donny that sent him sprawling back into the chair, then the kid's momentum flipped him off the chair and onto his back. Clint knelt beside him and we tried to lift him by the shoulders.

“I told you,” I snarled, “he needs a doctor!”

“He—he was—”

We sat Donny up and he looked, wide-eyed, from me to Clint to the sergeant, smacking his lips like he'd eaten too much peanut butter. His nose was missing. His dry sinuses winked at me in unison.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You—you're all right, son,” said the sergeant, drawing his gun from its holster.

“Doctor!” I shouted.

“It's your fault!” Clint jumped up, backing Dorfsman into the corner. “You want to hit everybody in the mouth, hey? Let's do this!”

A figure skater yelling at a bear. Sergeant Dorfsman waved his gun vaguely at all three of us, backing toward the door, then he tore through it and turned to lock us in. Clint punched the window, making a dartboard of cracks. I could see the dark-haired cop, Collis, staring at us while yelling into a phone. I helped Donny into the chair again.

“Get me pounds of it,” he murmured. “And liquid smoke! How come one leg's so much longer?”

His bare right leg protruded six inches out of its pant-leg. His knee or his hip had given way. The chair Clint threw at the door bounced off, so he started stomping the steel legs into a tangle—he was exactly like Watson to my Sherlock Holmes. I gave Donny a hard look, though his gaze kept roving around the room.

“We'll get you out of here, hey?” Though we'd need a wheelbarrow. “I'll get a—I've got a tarp in my car, I'll run and get that, and then we'll feed you, all right?

Donny pawed his face. He'd lost the middle finger too—it lay under the chair—and the sawdust smell in the room was pungent as turpentine.

“Hold tight.” I squeezed his shoulder, gingerly.

I got Clint by the elbow—it didn't come off in my hand!—and we ran down the particleboard hallway and let ourselves back into the foyer, where the pizza-box drunks quietly studied bouncy-castle advertisements. We banged out the front doors then down the steps and toward my car a hundred yards away. I already heard a siren.

“So we peel out after that van that took the other guys, am I right?” Clint retied his scarf as we ran. “Somebody took those guys to fix them up—I know, right? Easy.”

“How would we possibly follow that van?”

“We just, uh, traffic cameras! Because I don't want any of that shit with the hands and feet to happen to us, that was
retarded
. And the nose? The girls will barf when they hear that!”

“We won't tell the girls that part,” I said.

“That's cool. I get you. Know where it'd be cool if that van went? Miami.”

“We aren't following anybody right now. We're going back in for Donny.”

We'd come to Velouria to find an antidote or a magnetic wristband or a deep-breathing exercise that would put me on the path back to Ray and Josie, so what did one zombie in the back of a town lock-up have to do with it? That Penzler headquarters he'd mentioned obviously ought to have been my next stop, but if
you
belonged to a species of which only a couple of dozen individuals existed, and that entire species was about to crumble into slabs of chipped beef, wouldn't you attempt to keep every one of them alive? Even Donny's last breath might impart a lump of invaluable wisdom,
Snowflakes will melt holes in your skin
, maybe, or
French's mustard is all you'll ever need
or
Go back to your children, man, hold them tight, and this nightmare will dissipate like steam from a mirror
.

I opened my trunk. The folded blue tarp, my old dog-burying shovel, two empty cases of Lucky Bucket—no bikers with snakes tattooed to their faces.

“But,” Clint panted, “you were all, ‘My name is Chuck Norris, I run alone.' ”

I turned my head to peer out of the alley at Ye Olde Candy Shoppe across the main street. And it must've served karaoke as well as ice cream, because Franny and Amber swayed in the front window, backs to us, each with an arm around the other's waist, singing over “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks or possibly Van Halen, and they were both really nailing the guttural bottom of the
Oh yeeeeeeah
—maybe that was another blessing from Pipe #9. As their voices staggered over each other the track suddenly ended, and Colleen leapt up from somewhere beside them, clapping with her hands over her head. Might be I watched for a long while.

“Is it nap time?” Clint asked.

I pulled out the tarp and shovel and started back toward the police station.

An ambulance stood
at the curb in front of the station now, and I could see two people rolling a loaded gurney out across the sidewalk—could we possibly be more useful than paramedics? I knew more about Donny's physiology, but was there a time limit to how long a hunk of one of our bodies could sit unattached before it…spoiled? It'd been at least five minutes since his left leg had dropped off.

“Run up into the foyer,” I told Clint, “and get us a handful of thumbtacks.”

The people were all inside the ambulance by the time we crept up, and it rocked at the curb like the medics were leaping up and down inside, and they probably were. I tapped the back door with the shovel handle.
Kong, kong, kong
.

“What?” they yelled from inside. “Tina, we
still
can't—”

The door was thrown open by a young guy with a black moustache, and a stethoscope tangled around his neck. He looked sweaty and slightly blue—“shock” was my diagnosis. Behind him a middle-aged woman with short red hair was already labeling a big ziplock bag that contained one human foot. A lean, hairless arm lay in her lap. Donny was sprawled on his back with an oxygen mask over his face, but he pulled that off with his remaining hand to gaze down the gurney at me and grin. He'd lost both legs and his left arm, and though his face was just missing a nose and a strip of cheek, a plastic zip-cord had been fastened around his head, right across his pathetic sinuses. He was in his underwear and his stumps looked like charred driftwood.