All-Day Breakfast (28 page)

I sprinted back around to my unit—and realized how
fast
I could run if I really wanted to—and there were the two idiots rubbernecking at the curtains. But I ran past them and knocked on 18.

Franny opened up. She wore a blue bra and yellow panties—a little chunky around the hips, but not bad. She had a Sharpie in her hand and black writing up her arms and legs. Clint jumped off the couch in what looked like multicolored
Justice League
underwear. I shut the door quickly but quietly.

“What the hell?”

“It's not a kinky thing,” said Franny.

“That's what they keep saying,” Megan announced. Hunched over the mini-fridge, she tore open a foil packet of coffee—she'd only stripped down as far as a pale pink
north platte ceramics guild
T-shirt.

“Preventative measures!” The back of Clint's scrawny right triceps read
this is clint's right arm thank you
. His armpit smelled of sawdust. “It's going down like Velouria all over again!”

“Did those dumb kids come tell you first?” I asked.

“What dumb kids?”

“Harbinger Harv's wandering around out there.” Franny sidled up to the window. “Harbinger Harv says there's guys in black.”

“If he comes back, tell him to stay in here.” I had both hands gripping that left earlobe now, and I really did feel calm despite whatever shit was unfolding. “Assholes don't know we're all together, so even if you hear me shitting myself, you stay
in here
. Where's Colleen?”

“Shower.” Clint studied his labeled limbs in the mirror. “She's of the wear-clean-underwear-to-the-hospital school of thought.”

“She has clean underwear?”

“In her purse,” said Franny. “Oh, actually, if and when you do pin us back together, if my knees are like in a million pieces?” She bit her lip while she bent to write on Clint's back. “Harv has pretty nice legs. Just sayin'. Oh, and there's another text!”

I opened up her pinging phone. The keypad was sticky.

craigs only in the cooler one more night jock promised!

As I crawled back into 17 the two boys ducked under the table.

“I turned your thermostat up to seventy-seven,” said Chad. “Right here above the table, see?”

Pat held the empty ice bucket accusingly—I'd robbed those boys of such a terrific good time. I hunched over in the corner beside the pole-lamp and unbuttoned my shirt—I could at least wear it inside-out to hide the Nebraska associations.

“Was it possible this guy in the Penzler hat was just affiliated with ambulance dispatch?” I asked.

“Maybe,” said Chad. “Mostly the one guy paced around and talked on his cell and said, ‘I'll teach
him
a lesson.' ”

“It wasn't exactly a hat, either,” said Pat.

“What do you mean by that?”

But they didn't answer. They were too busy staring at me.

“What?”

“There's a big hole in your shoulder,” murmured Pat.

“Hey, the light's goes right through it!” said Chad. “That's awesome!”

“It's no big deal, fellas.” Really, as far as I could tell it seemed to be healing nicely. “I was just in a, uh, a war a while ago, that's all.”

“Which one?” asked Pat.

“War of 1812,” I said.

“Awesome.”

I put on the inside-out shirt but found it difficult fastening the buttons that way.

“What did you mean that he wasn't
exactly
wearing a hat?” I asked.

Chad was on his knees by then, peering under the couch.

“It was a gas mask!” said Pat.

I buttoned faster.

“Yeah, but pushed up on his head—like he was on his lunch break or something.”

“This was at lunchtime?”

“Naw!” said Pat. “Ten minutes ago.”

“And the little, the little canisters for breathing said
penzler
on them,” Chad explained, his face still on the carpet. “Hunter's dad wears one to work. You know what? Hunter said his dad was going to sign up to be one of the plastic soldiers, and they'd have enough money to go to Hawaii!”

“Lucky!” said Pat.

“So this guy in the lobby ranted and raved and then ran out to his car?”

Pat stared into the empty bucket as though ice might materialize.

“Not exactly a car.”

“No way!” Chad sat up, holding an orange ping-pong ball aloft, his braces gleaming triumphantly. “Guy got into a
tank
!”

“Boys,” I said. “You need to—”

Someone knocked on our door, a solid
knock-knock-knock
.

Good
, I thought, grinding my back teeth,
let
'
em come in
.

“Shit!” Chad hissed. “My mom!”

He shoved the ping-pong ball down the front of his pants like it was a baggie of weed. Pat leapt for the pole-lamp and clicked it from very bright to dark, and then I could only make out the door by its dim outline. I took a deep breath.

“Yes?” I called, innocently enough. “I'm just getting out of the shower!”

“I'm from around in twenty-six,” a man called back softly. “I wanted to ask if you could please move your car. Your
ambulance
, I guess.”

“Be right there!”

I crept to the window and put my eye against the curtain. Through the blue weave I could see easily enough that the speaker was not a meek little guy from twenty-six. It was one of the
swat
team guys from the Penzler site, gas mask and inscrutable visor and everything, standing under the 40-watt bulb with his shoulders back, and what looked like a black cricket bat gripped in his leather gauntlet. It looked less like a cattle prod now but probably worked on the same principle. I flexed my jaw and thought,
These poor bastards
. Didn't their job descriptions involve preventing their headquarters from being flattened? I couldn't see whether another guy was standing outside 18, but I couldn't hear any knocking. Tiny green and yellow lights blinked along the length of the bat, and I swallowed hard. The lights were sickening.

I shuffled back toward the bed. I could barely see the boys, crouched at either end of the sofa.

“Just getting my shoes on!” I called out. “I'll come take care of it, not to worry!”

The lamp's pull chain still clacked against the pole.

“How do we get out of here?” I whispered to the boys.

“Climb on the bed and push the air-conditioner out the window,” murmured Chad. “But don't smash it, they're super-expensive.”

“We have to sneak out of rooms all the time,” whispered Pat.

“Sir?” Gas mask called softly through the door—now I could hear that through-a-gas mask quality in his voice. “I felt real bad about having to bother you, so I've got a six-pack here for you if you could open the door.”

Pretty ballsy to stand on the doorstep in that get-up for all the world to see, but that probably meant he was coming in whether I liked it or not. Up on the bed, I pulled the curtain across and there sat the lonely air-conditioner, cardboard taped around it for the off-season. I put my shoulder to the corner but on such a springy mattress I couldn't apply much pressure.

“Oh, wait,” Chad said from the dark. “Is this seventeen? You've got a new one, with the bolts. Do you have an electric drill?”

I
did
, out in the ambulance.

“What's that noise?” hissed Pat. He was teetering beside me all of a sudden.

I heard a brief mechanical clatter, maybe a diesel tractor, then the door flew off its hinges and thudded against the foot of the bed. A three-foot black square on a horizontal boom followed it in—in the gloom I could only see outlines—as the tractor came rolling across my parking spot. But not a tractor, it was a tank with some kind of battering ram.

I flattened Pat against the mattress as four
swat
guys' silhouettes tip-toed in at the edges of the doorway, their reflective visors down. Oh, it was
good
that they'd come. I flexed my walnut-cracker fists.

“Pretend you're not here,” I said into Pat's ear.

I vaulted over the broken door onto the shoulders of the nearest guy, ripped the gas mask off his head and threw it out the door. He didn't like that—he spun his body and swung his elbows at me but I kept my legs wrapped around his belly and my hands underneath his jaw, trying to force my fingertips into his glands. Every time I shaved I imagined how vulnerable we must be under the jawbone there, and after a second his skin broke and my right middle finger slid in up to the base of his tongue. Blood spattered across the back of my hand. The
swat
guy was really screaming then, and even if this
was
Hunter's dad, some poor working stiff, I justified it in that I'd never much liked the name Hunter. Anyhow, if I'd kept myself from crossing a particular line at the 7-Eleven, now I'd overthrown it by fifty yards.

“Light 'em up!” the other guys shrieked. “Get him off!”

As the first
swat
stumbled forward I heard electricity crackle and figured the cricket bats had come out. I rolled off him across the floor, then balanced on one hand and swung my legs sideways into the next guy's knees. Maybe something I'd seen on
tv
. He thudded to the carpet beside me just as the other two started to hit me across the head and neck. I felt a whack and a
sizzle
every time—the things were burning me, my neck, the back of my arm, my ribs and thighs. I could hear them huffing behind their masks from so much hard work, even as the first guy slumped and gurgled beside the door. The places they'd cooked me smelled exactly like overdone bacon, but it felt a lot worse than when I'd been shot through the leg in Velouria, and I figured they knew it.

“Shitty!” I squealed, and rolled into a ball.

I took one more good thwack across the small of the back, then managed to get one foot under me and launch myself over the sofa. Chad sat back behind it with his knees to his chest, his eyes big as headlights.

“Staunch the bleeding!” an unseen
swat
guy ordered.

“Know what Hunter's dad said?” Chad whispered to me. “He said in the plastic army a severed limb can survive for five minutes!”

“Think I don't know that?” I whispered back.

“Release!” the
swat
guys called.

I never heard the canisters fall but a second later my eyes were burning like I'd rubbed them with a cat, and I wanted to puke though I knew my body couldn't afford to lose a single nutritious carcinogen. Three big guys couldn't just pull a couch away, they needed tear gas?

I tried to breathe through the front of my shirt and remembered that you can supposedly make a half-decent gas mask by peeing on a cloth—when I'm losing them in Science 9, I always mention that—and though my own bladder felt like the Mojave Desert, I figured Chad must've been ready to pee about then.

“Kid?” I managed to say.

I prised my eyes open to peer at him and realized he was trying to get to his feet.

“No, kid!” I croaked.

“There!” barked the
swat
guys.

Then a flash of light as a truncheon arced above my head. Chad thudded down beside me, limp as a noodle, his head propped against the moulding. A piece of skin had been lifted off his forehead and blood steamed down his face, but worse yet was the snot pouring out of his nose. A thousand times I'd held a Kleenex to Ray's nose and told him to blow.

“See that?” they said from beyond the sofa. “That wasn't even him!”

I kept blinking and realized the tear gas had stopped bothering me. Maybe the goo was helping me adapt physically as well as to increase my mastery of bizarre improvisation. I lay down on my back, Chad's lap the only place to put my head, and lifted my hips to slide my belt off. It was all I had for a weapon. My burns still throbbed.

“Man,” Pat groaned from far off. “Get me out of here!”

“There's a kid on the fucking bed! What kind of sicko fag—”

“Just get him outside!”

They sounded distracted just then, so I threw myself over the back of the couch and kicked the first guy I saw in the chest. He collapsed on his back, waving his bat from down there before I stepped on his throat. His gas mask went
crack
and his hands dropped to the carpet. Misty crap still gusted from the canister at my feet, and Pat, bent over and retching, was being guided out the door. The next Penzler guy flailed out with his truncheon and it crackled like a bug zapper as it breezed past my chin, then I wrapped the belt around the thing and wrenched it from his hand. It clattered against the
tv
.

“Grandma,” I whispered, “doesn't like this kind of behavior.”

What the hell was I doing? I kicked the dude in the side of the knee, then my big elbow to the side of his head, like I was filming the kind of movie Lydia had hated. A final knee to crush his testicles against his pubic bone and the third
swat
guy went over like a stack of dimes. Ought to have worn a cup.

And the room was empty of conscious people. The fourth muscle-head had got Pat clear, the guy with the hole in his throat too, that was good, but I figured Ange might never find him back there if I didn't pull the couch out, so I dragged it eight feet. I had a hard time doing anything with delicacy.

I turned Chad on his side so he wouldn't choke on his tongue, and when I stood up, the tank's treads were flush up against the doorframe and the eight-foot barrel was pointed right at me. Could they shoot through that battering-ram thing? If it pegged me I'd never even feel it, I'd just be in pieces—but that meant Josie and Ray believing, even when they'd retired to the Caymans, that maybe their father had never intended to come back—so I did a somersault and ended up across by the
tv
, and the end of the barrel followed me, whirring like a blender, so I shuffled back onto the door by the bed, and then whoever was aiming the thing must've got tired of that particular square dance and the whole tank pushed right in through the wall, sending plaster and two-by-fours flying at me like I was a dartboard. In the top corner of the gaping hole it'd made I glimpsed a square of greenish evening sky, and I figured I could fling myself through that square if I hustled. But in the second I spent thinking that, the barrel shifted.