All-Day Breakfast (32 page)

“Are these hippie doctors with beards?”

“The ones I've met had beards. Let's get to the back here.”

The head-wound guy groaned through the roof of his mouth, and the follicles across my head crackled.

“Hold on—you said there's a
cure
.” My fist tightened around the bag of ham. “But it hasn't ever worked?”

“They don't
tell
me! Go out and get her, you'll be the first to know.”

“Why don't you get her yourself?”

“I get as far as Preston and his staff swoops in, it's happened eight times! Must have a microchip in the back of my neck. He's scared I'll get pregnant or drug-addled, plus he doesn't want his only non-zombie offspring out of his sight. So instead I look at the internet all day and make sure nobody's infringed his patents.”

These people proved what I'd said at Dad's funeral: families are pointless.

“No such thing as zombies,” I muttered.

She really did roll her eyes that time. Then she covered the flashlight with the palm of her hand and we quit breathing as enough footsteps thundered across the ceiling to be a herd of cattle. I'd given up on imagining it was Harv and Colleen.

She took my wrist—I nearly had feeling back in that right arm—and led me behind the hot-water heater, the flashlight trained on our feet, then through a wooden door that she barred behind us by quietly lowering a waiting two-by-four into iron brackets. Who'd have a room like that in their basement? The air smelled like rank washcloths. She kept me moving between two brick walls, and so many boots thudded over us I thought the ceiling might come down. The cobwebs wavered like kites.

“Kirk's away in town!” the sheriff hollered above us. “The kid's in the stable!”

I stopped walking.

She shut off the flashlight. “What?”

“You're a Penzler, and you folks have fucked up everything in my life.” Everything since Lydia.

“But you're still going to get my sister?” Alice's voice asked.

I listened to the dark. Boots were thundering down those basement stairs.

“I'll give you five million dollars,” she said. “How does that sound?”

The last Walgreens flyer I'd seen had advertised bacon at $3.29 a pound for the really good cheap stuff that congeals a half-inch deep across the pan. I could feed Amber and the rest for a decade.

“And I'm qualified because—what?” I whispered. “I broke into your shed?”

“Am I supposed to phone up a soldier of fortune, give him a credit card number?”

I remembered from Lydia that when a woman adopts a certain tone she isn't expecting a response. Alice flicked the flashlight back on. She found the knob to another door and we passed through into fresher air, with steps against the far wall that climbed to a set of root-cellar doors shaped like shutters. Sunlight filtered through gaps in the wood. She stepped up and put her eye to a crack.

“Stupid armored vehicles circling around,” she whispered. “He leased them all yesterday after the explosion. I told him they'd suck, listen to those carburetors!”

“You sound like you're pretty tight with your dad.”

“Until he decided my sister was
really
sick.” She kept an eye outside but I saw a shoulder droop. “Took matters, as usual, into his own hands.”

“You're serious about that money.”

She jumped down and straightened out some musty blankets that had been balled up on a shelf. She lay down with her head against the water-stained foundation.

“Come stretch out,” she said. “The trucks'll head cross-country in a minute.”

“Why wouldn't they think I was still down here?”

“I threw a strip of your pants out the hole in the wall.”

I set my gun and wrench on the step then lay down beside her warm arm. She laced her fingers through mine. I could see in the gloom that she'd shut her eyes, so I shut mine too. I felt tired like I was still tied to that piano—must've been the strain of putting my limbs back on.

“How'd your sister get to be a zombie exactly?”

“Long story,” she murmured.

“Why do you live out here if you're the multinational Penzlers?”

“Oh,” she said softly. “Our mom grew up here.”

I touched the tip of my thumb to the tip of my pinkie. Worked like clockwork.

“Have you ever been on a horse?” she asked.

I had to think hard about that.

“At my grandparents',” I said.

“Can you do it again?”

“I'll carry it on my back if I have to.”

“I'll put you on Shamanski, they'll think you're a neighbor. Who ever saw a zombie on horseback, right?”

“Ever heard of one that throws up?”

“Careful your nails don't catch on anything. Wait here a minute.”

She got up, climbed two steps, unlatched the bolt and pushed the doors up in a burst of shredded cobwebs and white light. Her sweatpants started up into the yard.
Christ, no!
my baffled penis called after her.

She turned to drop the doors back into place. I peered through a crack as she jogged away across brown grass then through a low door into one of those peeling-paint blue sheds. A goat bleated somewhere. This was the start, we were on our way indisputably to California. Clint had been right.

But why way out west? Even if Penzler kept a lab out there, couldn't they have sent a vial back to Ohio in a courier envelope instead of flying a dissolving girl all that way? No, it had to be bullshit—
Out to California for a cure
was probably a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Which reminded me: there was that telegram. Who the hell sent telegrams anymore?

mr k penzler

n's progress less dramatic than first hoped stop other work wildly successful will incorporate n if you advise stop will telephone immediately when cell tower repaired stop

dr q duffy

A science outfit, and it couldn't even send e-mail? Fishy as Charlie Tuna. And why was I leaving
Preston before I could throttle her old man? Because if he'd
had
the cure he would
not
have sent Natalia to California. Though if we were really reanimated corpses like they'd said on the radio, would it just cure us of being alive?

The cellar doors flew open again, blinding me. Alice, back already?

“Seriously,” whispered Colleen, taking the front of my shirt in her hands, “leaving the girl to wait is bullshit! You raised on Enid Blyton?”

“Holy shit,” I said, “you can't be down here, there's—”

“We saw her run out and figured this was it! Harv's bringing the ambulance!”

Blinking like hell, I dragged my plastic bag and climbed up after her, tucking my tools in the back of my belt. Did the gun even have bullets? From the front of the house I heard gears grinding, an engine.

“It's California from here,” I told Colleen. “I've got tons of hams.”

But on the grass a big pink pig looked at us and wagged its tail—a black furry tail with a brown tip like a German shepherd's, attached with the spike that Christopher Robin used on Eeyore. My fingers, unbidden, went to the nail heads in my shoulder.

“Oh,” said Colleen. “Good dog.”

Then gunshots clapping on our ears—a broken roof shingle hit the ground in front of us. Apes, but where? The pig turned, chasing its tail, and fell down. I pulled Colleen low behind a woodpile, then we ran like hell along the side of the house. Our ambulance roared up the lawn from the front, tearing up turf, sun glancing off the windshield, turning in a tight circle so it'd be ready to make an exit, then twenty feet from us it lurched to a stop and the back doors flew open. And Franny and Megan reached out?

“Zombie!” a man's voice barked out. “Line up for attendance!”

I knocked against Colleen's shoulder and peered into the ambulance: our gurney had disappeared and the four kids lay on their faces on the rubber floor. None of the kids so much as wiggled. A hefty guy, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, grinned at us as he crouched over them in his tan suit.

“I'm James Jones, Mr. Giller. Put down the hams.”

The kids were ants and Jones was the jerk with the magnifying glass—I ought to have come to Penzler alone. I'd always cleaned up messes by myself, right? But my legs were cemented like fence posts, and I couldn't make my fingers let go of the hams. I'd been ready to hop to California on one foot, but this bullshit dropped a blanket over me.

“Two-by-four,” Colleen murmured. “He's a dead man.”

Jones lifted Megan's hands behind her back—her wrists had been cuffed together with plastic zip ties—then he dropped them like overcooked asparagus.

“High school kids, they love their Rohypnol. Here, maybe this'll calm
you
down.” He pressed a black handgun to the back of Megan's neck. “I said drop what you're carrying.”

“I am calm,” I said, dry-mouthed. “You don't need to do that.”

But Colleen only made fists, and I thought of the Preston gas station and how many different ways she was going to get shot. Behind me, an ape on hands and knees reached up to extricate the plastic bag. The wrench and gun were lifted out. There was more movement and I felt a pinch in my neck, but I didn't twitch because point-blank to the back of the neck might've been more than even Megan could take.

“That's the first of them!” said a gas mask at my shoulder.

My legs went woozy. The apes turned to Colleen.

“That's real good,” smiled Jones. “And let's maintain that perimeter.”

“Megan?” Colleen called, though Megan was unconscious. “Stay there, baby!”

She did a dive roll beside the woodpile and came up with a two-by-four in her hands. She bounded toward the ambulance and I figured Jones had eight seconds to live—he threw an arm up in front of his face like he'd forgotten the gun. As Colleen whooped like a baboon, two guys materialized on either side of her, one grabbing the board, the other jamming something into her shoulder. She shuffled forward a step then pitched forward onto her face.

“The excitable type,” said Jones.

Her back arched then she lay still. Jones wiped his palms with a hankie.

“Giller, you stroll around front, we'll strap you in up there. We doctored this cocktail for you zombies especially, so you've got thirty seconds before you zonk out.”

I set one foot in front of the other. Couldn't risk the kids getting hurt.

“Something moving back there,” a ventilator announced.

“All right, all right!” Jones was taking Colleen's limp elbows as they loaded her in the back. “Keep that perimeter solid! They might've brought fifty of these people!”

I must've had a different angle than the apes, because I looked toward McCauley Road and there was Alice astride a big black-and-gray horse, the famous Shamanski, trotting up from beside the ditch. Tendons flexing in her arms, Alice looked so beautiful with that blue sky behind her. Here she came to swoop me away.

The air cracked. Shamanski reared up, baring teeth.

“Shit!” yelled the ventilators. “Hold your fire!”

Alice had fallen below the skittering hooves, her whole belly suddenly a wondrous tomato-red. Black elbows flapped as apes raced toward her.

“All right, zombie shit,” Jones said pleasantly. He gripped my arm to guide me onto the passenger seat—my wrists had been cuffed. “Let's get you someplace private.”

I watched an ape take Shamanski's reins and another sit beside Alice and lift her head into his lap. She stared right at me through their grove of legs.
The deal stands
, she was saying, because why else would she have kept staring?

“Hey, there, man!” Some kid behind the wheel with a
penzler
ball cap and a scar cut across both lips. He grinned like a fellow son of Nebraska. “Welcome aboard!”

We drove between
muddy little farms and small-engine repair shops with yards full of rusting crap. Jones was hauling us away from Penzler's so he could kill us anonymously out in the boonies. I could picture it so well that my chest got tight, right out to my armpits, but all I could do was simmer like a pan of onions.

It was 905 miles from Preston, Ohio, to the pale-blue bedrooms where Josie and Ray slept in MacArthur, Nebraska, but I would never drive that distance. It was over.

But it wasn't going to end in the boonies—we turned onto 91a and slowed down at the Lamplighter Motel, rolled past the black tarp and yellow police tape that covered the front of seventeen, then drove all the way around the back to twenty-five. The day was steel-gray overcast now, and the air flecked with snow.

“What're you doing to the kids in back?” I asked. “You going to hurt them?”

The driver shrugged; he'd be happy with anything he got for Christmas. I was breathing through my front teeth like an incensed mother badger.

Three Penzler apes opened the passenger door, grabbed my shoulders and hauled me down to the pavement. The line of parking spots was crowded with pristine pickups and
suv
s but without any sign of people—not even Chad and Pat creeping along with knives clenched between their teeth. The door to twenty-six opened and they shuffled me in. Instead of a double bed, a desk sat in the corner, and the spinning titles for WNBS-10 News flickered on the silent television.

Jones hustled in past me, lighting a cigarette.

“Come sit down, Giller.”

They uncuffed me and I staggered a step—the sedatives made me feel like I'd been hit with the flu. I wouldn't be bursting through the roof.

“We'll hash it out right after this,” said Jones, settling his backside on the desk.

He was addressing a lean Asian guy in a black tracksuit who was lounging on the couch, a Penzler guy scowling on either side of him. Maybe he was in trouble too. My apes sat me down in a steel-frame chair, then threaded my arms through the back somehow and cuffed my hands again.