All-Day Breakfast (31 page)

“I'm no zombie,” I hissed. “Look at
yourselves
, man.”

I took my knee down and the ape in the freezer clattered to the floor. His truncheon still hummed between my feet and beside his shattered gas mask a copper valve protruded from the base of the fridge.

“Let's get a goddamn report!” Old Man Penzler hollered. “We have to get back to what we're doing!”

The sheriff took another half-step toward me. Didn't fire. I looked to be unarmed, of course, and his fantasy must've been to cold-caulk me with the butt of his pistol. Guys in the country love the action movies. No sign of Alice through the doorway—she must've hunkered down in a corner. I nodded toward the apes.

“Get out of here, Alice,” I said, “you don't need to see this.”

Each of them glanced over his shoulder as if Alice were behind them, and the sheriff didn't exactly turn but for a heartbeat his eyes flickered off me. I scooped up the truncheon then brought it straight down again, snapping the propane valve clean off. How much gas would escape from the little black mouth of broken pipe in a couple of seconds? Hopefully not enough to blow up the whole house. I gripped the end of the rope between my heels, started to jump backwards and hoped like hell the basement door was as flimsy as it looked.

“Goddamn it, zombie,” said the sheriff, “I said to—”

Whether or not he meant to, he tightened his index finger. Maybe the propane smell panicked him, but in any case people should only point guns if they're prepared for the thousand different things that might happen when they pull the trigger.

I didn't much care if the bullet hit me in the chest or the belly or the groin as I jumped, the important thing, once the igniting gas helped throw me backwards, was that I hit the
top
half of the basement door so that I'd be lying across it as we plummeted downstairs and not the other way around. Oh, and to keep my heels pressed tight enough together for my arm-on-a-rope to get dragged down with us. That was the horrendous plan that I wouldn't have needed if Harv and Colleen had come to my rescue as scheduled.

The primer sparked at the back of the sheriff's bullet, the bottom of the fridge detonated, and as the purple explosion hurled me backward I saw the freezer-ape skid across the floor like a rag doll with cotton spilling out of it. The back of my ribs crashed into something then I plunged backward into the dark.

I woke up
with my own severed arm across my chest, its rope tangled around my neck, staring up at a yellow rectangle of kitchen doorway, and while the breath was already knocked out of me it wasn't easy to unwrap the noose from my windpipe one-handed. It's possible zombies don't even need oxygen but I didn't want to be that test-monkey, and by the time I'd thought that through I had the rope clear.

Like a one-armed crab I scuttled out of the light from upstairs to sit behind a cobwebbed column, so to lay eyes on me the apes would have to creep right down the stairs. If any of the Penzler boys were left. I could hear wood crackle, and smoke wafted down the stairs, but for the house to still be standing there had to have been a shut-off somewhere in their propane system.

Oval shapes hung above me. I squinted and saw they were dozens of
hams
hanging from the rafters. Two hundred parts sodium nitrite per million. Manna from heaven like in Exodus
16—my brain had gone back to Knudsen First Lutheran. In the meantime I still had a
severed arm
and the meager hope that five minutes hadn't gone by.

A couple of big bent nails were stuck in the post—useful, but how the hell would I pull them out? With all of that stuff out in the shed they wouldn't have a tool bench in the basement too. A tall white shape stood in the corner: hot-water heater. I propped my secessionist arm against the post, then crept to my feet, stiff as a rusted faucet. Without that right arm, I listed to the left like a ship taking on water.

A man coughed somewhere upstairs—big, wet hacks like he had a milkshake in his lungs. “Fuh!” he muttered, then coughed again. Must've been right at the top of the stairs. Footsteps thumped across the boards over my head.

Beside the hot-water heater my foot kicked something metal that skittered away across the bare concrete. I got down on hand and knees to find it—a pipe wrench with a long narrow handle. I hurried back to my lonely arm, the dangling hams taking turns to whack me across the forehead. I slipped the pipe's handle behind the bend in the first nail and yanked back hard, but it didn't fly out, just shifted a little.

“Keenan?” a man upstairs called hoarsely.

“Present,” someone muttered.

I pulled again and again until the nail was rattling as loose as a bad filling, then I plucked it out with my fingers. Then I got to work on the next nail. You needed at least two if you wanted your appendage to heal straight, any carpenter would've told you that. Upstairs the men were quiet and I took that as a bad sign.

When the second one clattered to the concrete I knelt and started tapping the nails through the side of my shoulder with the side of the pipe wrench. Just like building a rabbit hutch. The nails were straighter now thanks to the prying-out. I got stupidly queasy each time I broke the skin. “Buck up,” that's what I'd always said to Ray whenever I was taking a sliver out of his foot and he started squirming. Buck up!

“Not much left of Danny,” they said upstairs.

“Boots and saddles,” the sheriff said. “Any exit from down there, Alice?”

She muttered a response.

“Rip the fucker to shreds,” a guy announced.

Holding my shoulder against its empty socket was a slippery operation, the nails sticking out sideways like antennae. I backed up to the hot-water heater then ran at the post as fast as I could, hoping like hell the shoulder would still be correctly positioned when I connected. I concentrated on the nail heads striking at a perfect right-angle, then I slammed into the post like De Niro breaking a door down. The thud shook clear into the middle of my chest. I stepped back and saw the nails had been driven in better than halfway, then I rammed the post again. Then they were three-quarters of the way. I let the arm dangle there by itself, and it held! I thought hard about clenching my fist,
clench, clench, clench
, at which point my index finger moved a full millimeter.

As I turned to caress the nearest ham, I saw their black legs on the steps, steps that were so goddamn solid they hadn't creaked so much as a whisper. It didn't look like they'd brought flashlights so I had a couple of seconds before the apes' eyes adjusted. The first stepped down onto the concrete, his pistol thrust out in front of him. They'd given up on truncheons and helmets. Too angry for precautions, which sounded familiar.

I lifted the pipe wrench with the toe of my shoe then caught it in my left hand—the right hand would need another minute. The rafters were too low to swing the wrench overhand so just as the first ape turned to squint at me, pistol wavering, I brained him sidearm across the temple. He dropped. I put the wrench in the back of my pants, scooped up his pistol and slid into the dark under the stairs. I looked up at the second ape through the slats. Why where we bothering with each other? If it hadn't been for that goo from Pipe #9 we might've been sitting together to open a bag of chips.

The second one had stopped but he didn't even holler, like he'd expected the first one to drop.

“Light-switch down here?” he called up the stairs.

If I didn't want Josie and Ray's battered mug-shots in the
Hunter-Gatherer
for passing bad checks I knew I'd have to lead by example, so even though the second Penzler boy was directly above me and I could have put a bullet up his ass and out the top of his head, I waited for him to take another step down, his foot directly in front of my face, then I shot him through the back of the calf. The muscle burst like a water balloon, and as he tumbled to the bottom of the stairs I jumped over him and the first ape, and I started up toward the bright rectangle of kitchen, my feet nearly slipping in the mess halfway up.

The ape I'd shot must've been shrieking but I didn't hear him because my sinuses filled with a smell of gunpowder and blood, and goddamn if it wasn't just like cured meat! I charged up the last step into the kitchen—it was mostly charcoal, the curtains and strips of wallpaper black and swaying, and the real reason for the smell was the freezer guy, cooked to the bone against the cupboard door. Through a hole in the wall I could see a half-dozen low buildings out behind the house. If Colleen and the kids weren't charging through the hole it meant something had happened to them, which was my fault for bringing them down McCauley Road. I put the gun in my belt and hunted under the sink for big garbage bags. No sound from downstairs, so the second ape had either bled to death or fainted. The bags at the top of the stack were melted together but the rest were all right—a flashlight under there too. How soon before more came to get me? If my blood hadn't turned to Vaseline it would've pounded in my ears.

“Nah, I'll be at
hq
another half-hour,” Penzler was saying. “Place fucking stinks! We didn't deserve anything like this, Christ.” The voice came from down a hallway, maybe an intercom panel up at the front door. “Get Jones on the phone.”

“Plenty of reinforcements on the way,” the sheriff's voice said.

So it was time to load up on hams and hightail it to the ambulance, but then where, if I didn't know exactly where to find Natalia? My highly intelligent penis twitched at the idea of adding Alice to the crew as navigator but while my brain was still running the show I hurried down the stairs to my basement seclusion. If I still wanted Penzler himself he was back at his flattened headquarters, I'd been there a day too early, but in the meantime there was Alice and her sister and the cure, the cure, the cure!

My flashlight beam showed the two Penzler guys sprawled in a pool of blood eight feet across—and it was trickling out of the back of the second guy's leg, not
spurting
, which might've meant his heart was slowing down. I set the flashlight on the bottom step, turned the guy over and unbuckled his belt. His holster kept it from sliding out all at once but after I unsnapped that the belt came free so I could loop it around his thigh. I stepped on the leg to pin it down, then tied as tight a knot as I could manage above his knee—only time would tell if it was tight enough to stop the flow, though I wouldn't be around to see that. But I was confident that my single act of mercy would inspire plenty of clemency when I stood trial for all of the guys I'd killed and/or maimed since Thursday morning.

“Oh,” she said behind me. “You
are
still here.”

My jellied heart thudded. Alice rolled the flashlight back and forth with her bare foot. Her hair hung loose. I stepped into her and wrapped my arms around the small of her back, which in the long view was nearly as inexplicable as when I stopped chewing the guy's ear off. We kissed each other on the mouth and I was hard within seconds, which should've been impossible since my blood pressure was five over zero. She squeezed the back of my neck and pulled away.

“Yuck,” she said, running her tongue behind her lips, “I guess you haven't brushed your teeth.”

“They know you're down here?”

“I told the boys I had to settle the animals in the barn, so we might have five minutes. I said these guys were already out there.”

I put my hands on either side of her neck and kissed her again. She used her tongue and the very ends of her lips in equal measure, like she was dancing around my mouth, sometimes hardly touching it. She was up one step so her breasts pressed into my chest.

“Hey,” she whispered. “Your arm works.”

What kind of people make out like weasels beside two critically injured rent-a-cops? Lonely ones? She bit my earlobe, and the ear stayed on. Of course I thought of Donny Brown's ear then, which ought to have cooled me down to a more human level, but I put my fingers inside the waistband of her pants anyway. She had a warm bum, though my right hand couldn't tell. She reached down and pulled my wrists up.

“Five minutes,” she whispered, “is how long you've got to get out. What's the bag for?”

“Hams.”

She stepped down into the blood and took a good look at the guys.

“Roll them on their sides,” she said, “or they'll swallow their tongues.”

I'd done that for Chad, sure, because he was a kid. After that she pulled out a pocket knife and helped me chop down a half-dozen hams, then she used the bottom step like a cutting board and sliced one up—and the peristalsis in a zombie's esophagus must be a determined process, because I hardly chewed even once. I make it sound like an all-afternoon picnic but really we shuffled around and bumped into each other and got our feet sticky with blood and the whole thing took about ninety seconds.

“Nothing I haven't seen out in the barns,” she said.

That line-of-dominoes sensation of nitrite-rich vitality flooded back into my limbs. And that feeling didn't make Alice any less beguiling.

“If you're going to find Nat you've got to get going!”

“Hell,” I said, “you just like me because I won't be around for long.”

“Natalia can tell you how long you have.” She kissed me, a flicker of tongue against my teeth. “And it'll be longer than half an hour, because she's months ahead of you. Maybe a year. If she's not better by now she just has to come home. Here's that telegram, and I wrote her mailing address on the back.”

“So why doesn't your dad bring her back?”

“We disagree about it.”

I glanced at the paper as I folded it in my pocket. A
po
box in San Luis Obispo.

“But that won't be where she lives?”

“Inside a
po
box? You'll have to be a detective for five minutes to find that out, all right? Then get her
home
!”