All-Day Breakfast (30 page)

“Any time now, team,” I muttered.

Light came in through thin gray curtains—the house probably ran off a propane generator, out there in the sticks, and the Penzlers must've been thrifty types who didn't fire it up until dark—but even so, it was bright enough to watch Alice saunter across the room and stare down at me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Any time now,” I said again.

Then she was busy around my middle. I lifted my head and saw that she'd pulled my shirt up and stuck the tip of her third finger into my belly button. I hadn't even felt it go in. She gave a tired sigh out her nose. Her finger looked to be wiggling. Cattle started lowing outside, not far away.

“I need help,” she finally said.

I looked back up at the plaster roses. Whenever I wasn't in a fistfight I was thinking about my kids, so it occurred to me then that I was farther from them geographically than I'd ever been.

“Your dad here?” I asked.

“Oh,” she sighed. “He's not well, he's in a wheelchair. I've looked after him and my sister, so throw-up doesn't bother me, all right? Barf all over yourself if you want.”

I stretched my arms out as far as I could, to keep the ropes from cutting so deep, because I knew those tendons wouldn't hold together the way they used to. It looked like my dog bites had nearly healed, using up resources, so I'd need bacon to rectify myself.

“What sort of help you need exactly?” I asked. “Hired hand?”

“Bigger help than that.”

“Why'd you tie me up?”

“So you won't take advantage of me.”

Had she been saving up dialogue for the first XY chromosomes to happen by? She lay both hands over my belly button, and that finally got me thinking about her like I'd thought about Holmes with her freckles, or Colleen the odd time. No, Colleen was more nuanced. Jesus, could I ever focus on where I was?

“I want you to go look for my sister Natalia,” Alice said. “She looks like me but with red hair. Think you can remember what I look like?”

I nodded. Her cheekbone formed a perfect line back to her ear.

“I know exactly what you are. Nailing your leg back together, are you kidding me? And you smell like chopped kindling, you know what that means?”

“I'm hungry,” I told her. “You have meat or anything in your fridge?”

“We got a telegram from California that said not to expect her back, and she was only supposed to be out there for the
cure
!”

“Cure from what?” I asked quietly.
Holy shit!
I thought.

“Before you leave I'll show you the telegram.” She framed my navel between her hands. “I apologize if this is too much. I just love belly buttons, they're what I miss the most. Brad's was good, he had a
good
belly button. Not too deep.”

“Your father must have one.”

“Don't be disgusting,” she said. “I
know
what kind of thing
you
are, anyway.”

She bent and kissed my navel. I saw her tongue dart into it, but I didn't feel any sensation except my armpits stretched tighter than harp strings. From another room I heard a clatter like a spoon dropping, though I couldn't twist my head enough to see beyond the piano. So I looked back down at her. She'd lifted my shirt and kissed her way up to my sternum while her hands busied themselves unbuckling my belt. She stopped kissing long enough to unzip my fly, and from the top of my knee I could see those nail heads wink at me.
Good luck!
they said.

I lifted my behind so she could tug my pants down.

“Technically,” she said, without looking up, “you aren't even human.”

She pulled down the underpants I'd worn for three days, and I could
see
that I had an erection though I couldn't feel it. In her hand my cock didn't look as long and magnificent as I thought it should have, but it did look fat. She got her mouth over it and moved her head up and down, bit by bit it went further into her mouth. Her blond pigtail dragged across my bare stomach. And suddenly her mouth over me felt hot as an oven, and a 100-volt current jolted straight up my spine to flare behind my ears. For once my kids flitted out of my mind—without kids, Jesus, a zombie could have a lot of fun. I gasped and she kept me in her mouth and started yanking on my balls like she was ringing for the night nurse, and if she knew so much about my condition she should've been more cautious. Her bottom teeth moved against me and I shut my eyes and came.

Then my cock shrank to the size of a peach pit.

Her puffy-eyed face appeared over me. She took hold of the back of my head and kissed me hard, her tongue against the back of my incisors. Her hands smelled like oats and molasses. She looked me in the eye, a lovely moment, then kissed the tip of my nose. I imagined Lydia doing that, then I imagined Colleen. I couldn't decide which to think of.

“You taste like creosote down there,” Alice said.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five. If I look younger it's because Dad's a biochemist.”

“Experiments on you.”

“Breakfast supplements.”

I needed nitrites but there was no sense starting a fight while I was tied up.

“You got bacon in your fridge?” I asked.

“Alice!” a man's crackly voice called from another room.

Sounded like he was coming over a radio, or maybe just upstairs—and who did he sound like? Just like my own hard-bellied dad.

“That guy ready for transit? The boys phoned me they're down the road!”

I tried to sit up but that just wrenched the tendons in my armpits. Did he mean cops? In any case, my cock was hard again.
You never know
, it must have been thinking.

“That's your dad?” I asked through my teeth.

“Listen,” Alice said. “My sister, Natalia, got sent to California, and I want her back. You heard of Pismo Beach, with the albatrosses? San Luis Obispo?”

I was twisting like a snake, trying to get leverage. It was time for Colleen and the kids to drive in through the wall, tank-at-the-Lamplighter-style.

“Don't bother,” she said. “José tied you up, and I can't get the knots undone.”

“You're the one who hit me with the fucking pan!”

“That's protocol around here. Have to know the rules to break 'em!” she smiled.

“Cut the things!” I said. “Before they get in here!”

She shrugged and her breasts shuddered, which was obliging. Had Lydia's breasts ever moved quite like that, in a bikini or anything? I remembered them as still pictures, not moving ones. Not a great time to get melancholy, but the preceding five minutes had set my mind down certain paths.

“He giving you trouble?” The man sounded so tinny—an intercom?

“No, Dad!” she yelled.

Alice ran past my right arm and out of view. Even if I did get loose, I wasn't going to make it fifty steps unless her fridge was packed with the good food.

“They say they're at the door!” her dad called. “Be hospitable now, Alice! I can't quit what we're doing here, so go be hospitable this one time!”

Now she was waving a bread knife above me. She leaned over and sawed away beside my left wrist, giving me an enviable perspective for watching her T-shirt in motion. Bacon, fistfights, sex—since Dockside it'd been feast or famine in all things.

The last strand finally gave and my left hand was my own again. I curled the poor thing onto my chest and let it rest a minute. She started on the right arm, but her pigtails were unbraiding and she stopped to push the hair out of her eyes.

“Keep going!” I said.

“Something's up with this rope,” she said. “I'll do your legs.”

She gave my cock a friendly squeeze as she hurried down the table. I could hear footsteps pounding up a flight of stairs.

“Quick,” I whispered.

“Oh, hell,
this
one I can untie. And don't stress anyway, they're just going to drive you twenty miles and dump you. California doesn't need any more subjects, now they have Natalia. She smelled just the same as you, and I bet
she
could snap these.”

“What?”

The boys yelled at each other from a landing somewhere, and I realized I had one hand free and could at least greet them with my pants on. By the time my zipper was up she had my legs free, but they were too stiff to even lift.

“If you're going anyway, I want to watch that butt run out of here.” She knelt beside the table, picking strands off the knife. “Curious to see if that knee'll hold, too. Three
nails
—this could be interesting from a technical perspective.”

“Get this other arm loose,” I said.

She put a warm hand on my right wrist but it was already too late. Four guys in black Kevlar and gas masks marched in from behind the piano. Penzler boys.

“Step back, young lady!” the first one ordered through his respirator. They weren't wearing the visors, so maybe they were new at the job. “That's the living dead.”

She hid the knife behind her back. “More like the living end.”

She'd been saving that dialogue too. My right arm was still tied but I rolled off and slid underneath the table. Alice scuttled away into a corner. I gave the rope an almighty tug but that piano really did weigh half a ton. Beyond the table legs I could only see the Penzler apes' feet across the room but I heard their truncheons crackle to life and my stomach flip-flopped and the burns on my back felt hot again. My new knee felt no pain but I was soggy through every joint—maybe that was how Donny Brown had felt before the end. And had she said Natalia had gone to California to get
cured
?

“Remember, no live rounds!” Alice's father called. He didn't sound like my dad anymore, he'd have never said that. “That's our home in there!”

“Get around behind that table,” a respirator ordered.

I yanked on a carved leg to break it off for a club, but it didn't budge a hair. The apes' black legs surrounded the four sides of the table and a burning-plastic smell wafted from their truncheons. I was like a lassoed calf under there.

“Go to it,” the respirator said.

Away in the corner I heard Alice giggle.

I dove out quick. A truncheon seared the back of my neck but I rolled to my feet and ran, straight past that piano I was tied to and into the next room—the kitchen, with a green fridge and flowery curtains. At the far end a sack of potatoes and two mason jars sat beside a closed door—had to be the basement. I knew I'd only be able to run eight feet beyond the piano, but I galloped like a streak of lightning and hit the end of the rope as hard as I could, hoping either the rope or some part of me would give, though I nearly lost my footing on the throw rug by the sink. The rope went taut so my wrist burnt like a branding iron but then it was my
shoulder
that came away—I'd torn all the ligaments at UC Denver, of course, then trashed it on that rebar. The joint ripped in two like a towel torn into rags, then the whole arm flopped onto the yellow linoleum like ten pounds of potatoes. Specks of blood splattered the cupboards, viscous as paint half-dried on the roller. I felt suddenly lopsided. I heard apes' boots. A coupon stuck to the fridge read
awesome hot dogs
.

“Can I get some progress, please?” Alice's father shouted.

“Shut up, Dad!” she yelled.

All in less time than it took to tell. A meat cleaver hung on a hook over the cutting board, and country people keep their knives sharp. I'd wear the apes down before they could corner me in that basement.

I grabbed the cleaver, lopped off four feet of rope, then shoved the cleaver in the waiting hand at the end of my right arm and closed the fingers around the handle, tight, and all in a goddamn
hurry
. I picked up the rope and started twirling the whole works over my head, arm and cleaver, like a cowboy at a freak show—they couldn't chase me off the property until I had some idea of the cure being given to this Natalia.

The first ape stepped into the doorway and I let the rope play out through my fingers. His eyes went wide for a split-second, then the warm knob of my shoulder-bone crashed into the bridge of his nose—my detached arm had ten feet of reach, thanks to the rope, and a hell of a lot of torque. He dropped like a slaughtered steer and his sizzling truncheon bounced in front of me, burning a barbed-wire pattern into the linoleum. The next ape barreled in.

“Keenan!” he yelled.

I picked my arm up and flung it at him. The cleaver lopped his gas mask in half so he dropped his truncheon, brought his hands up and staggered against the doorframe like he thought his whole head had been chopped in two. He would never have made it as a zombie—he'd have coughed up his nitrites first time he lost a finger.

The next ape pushed past the first two, leading with his truncheon out like a fencing master. No time to collect my arm from the floor. I dropped the rope, stepped beside the fridge and unlatched the freezer. As the fencing ape lunged I sidestepped his truncheon and swung the freezer door toward his head. He ducked, the door banged against the cupboards and he straightened up, eyes crinkling at the way he'd outsmarted me. My joints might have been jelly but I was still fast—I sprang past him for the edge of the door and closed it as hard as I could, smashing his face into the frozen casseroles, then I jammed my knee into the small of his back so I could slam the door on him three more times. I felt like Harv would've enjoyed all that. It was a heavy goddamn door, too—fridge must have been cast iron.

“Hey, zombie. Over here.”

It was the last ape, their sheriff who'd been giving orders at the start, leveling an automatic pistol at my chest. He stepped in front of the first pair as they climbed to their feet. The gun, I didn't mind. It was the numerical disadvantage I didn't care for, because I didn't even have a warm jar of vomit to throw.