All-Day Breakfast (35 page)

I squeezed his black polyester wrist as though toothpaste would squirt out his fingers. Crows above us shrieked, but Gary didn't make a sound, only hacked at my hand with some kind of blade! So I grabbed his free arm and dragged him onto the path. Under that gray sky his face looked white as paste but his crooked bottom teeth grinned like he'd won a trip to clown college. He wanted to see who was indestructible too. He slashed my forearms until I got a hand on his other wrist and squeezed the shit out of that one too. An X-Acto knife fell from his hand into the pine cones, then he drove his knee up into the side of my head but I didn't care because I'd twisted him flat against the ground so he didn't have any leverage to commit his sneaky spider-in-a-tree bullshit. I sat down hard across his legs, pressed my thumbs into his larynx.

He thought a nerve-pinch would take me out? Decapitation would've been too subtle.

“
Heh!
” Gary gasped.

He writhed, clawing at my arms. I kept my thumbs where they were, my arms sliced up like coleslaw, and drew serene deep breaths. Christmas Eve, two years before, Ray had asked for a fireside story about a ninja, of all things, and Josie had started telling him how good kids get a visit from Santa Claus but
bad
kids get the Christmas Ninja. “And on Christmas morning the good boys and girls wake up to oodles of presents,” Lydia had finished. “But bad kids
don't wake up at all
.”

I smiled about that while Gary dug his stone fingertips into the insides of my elbows, and my hands suddenly let go like he'd found their off switch. I was still sitting on him but just like that I'd lost all momentum. I stumbled to my feet so I could kick him, arms dangling, but I lurched down the path instead, back toward the Lamplighter six miles away. If I could keep him away from the kids for an hour, maybe they'd crawl away under their own power. Would I still be
valuable as a sample
if I was in fifteen pieces?

“Don't bother,” Gary wheezed behind me.

I ran, my legs lifting like a stiff antelope's, but after twenty steps I was in the backyard again, looking across at Colleen and the kids sprawled behind the blue cabin—I'd been turned around on the path.

I ran again anyway, sprinting for the garage, because if I drove away, maybe Gary would chase me and forget the others. I was the best sample! Branches snapped behind me, so in mid-stride I glanced back over my shoulder. I didn't even glimpse the path in that split second but it was long enough to catch my shin on the lip of the green plastic wading pool and tumble in, splashing into an inch of water.

I twisted onto my back, wet leaves stuck to the side of my face. Gary swayed at my feet, loading some kind of dart into a pistol, the black wall of pines behind him.

“
You're
the fucking sissy,” he croaked.

Monday, October 31.

Every year we
lived in Wahoo, a farm across the valley hosted its Olde-Fashioned Sleigh Ride. The sleighs used hay bales for seats. Our last year, we squeezed together with Josie on my lap, Ray on Lydia's, and piled on red blankets against the evening cold. Before the horses started to pull we sat staring at a Massey Ferguson tractor bedecked with twinkling lights, and every half-minute I wiped Ray's nose with a handkerchief recycled from a cowboy pillowcase.

“Coldest one yet,” said Lydia.

Her collar was zipped to her nose, and she sat in a sleeping bag beneath the blankets because the chemo drugs had destroyed her circulation. She called her hands her frozen fish.

The black-bearded driver called, “Giddy-ap,” reins slapped, bells jingled and the wedges of snow moved past beneath our toes.

Away from the electric halo of the barn the air seemed even colder. Women behind us cooed over the snowy pines. Lydia just sat up straight, smiling, one hand perpetually rubbing Ray's back.

“Might be hard to imagine,” she said quietly, “but in a while you two'll have to look after your dad.”

We were jangling up to the first carolers: three guys and a little girl singing “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” The week before, we'd been to Pawnee for Evadare's birthday, and with her latest diagnoses I'd half-expected Lydia to say over the cake that it might be the last Evadare's birthday she'd ever see, but in front of my mom she never gave bad news. Now here she was taking the bull by the horns. Josie and Ray glanced up at me like I might need looking after in the next few minutes.

I flexed my toes inside my boots—it was that cold—and pictured our sleigh as if I were a caroler, watching the passage of wet-nosed passengers. Only Lydia wasn't there.

We jingled past the three guys and the little girl, and the singing faded.

“You'll think of ways to cheer him up. All right, Jos?”

“Okay,” Josie said through tight lips. Her scarf covered her chin.

“And still have dance parties,” said her mom.

Josie nodded, one little jerk of the head.

“Even the songs no one likes but him,” said Lydia.

“Okay,” Ray said automatically.

“You too, Peter—you'll still be happy, right?”

She blinked at me over the pom-pom of Ray's toque; she'd spent many months not saying anything like this. Her eyes were yellow from the jaundice, and though her eyebrows had grown back they were mostly gray. She was thirty-two years old. The trees looked knotted together—the low branches brushed our toes.

“Sweetie?” she said.

Her next appointment with the oncologist was two weeks away, but her distended abdomen had already told us that tests were going to lead to more tests and a hospital bed she wouldn't climb out of.

“Sure,” I said, my voice like a paper airplane.

I grasped her hand, wrapped in its three mittens, and struggled, as I did daily, to say something meaningful that wouldn't also sound
final
. I said what I would've whether she was sick or not.

“I love you.”

She leaned over Ray and we kissed. Josie's teeth chattered against my collarbone. Lydia and I leaned our heads together. Her forehead felt like a furnace.

Then the sleigh stopped next to a table lit with tiki torches, where men in top hats and scarves handed out Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate. Josie slid off my lap and down into the snow, then she turned to help Ray down while the teenaged riders bounded off from all sides. In his snowsuit Ray looked eighteen months old again—he wouldn't be able to orchestrate hot chocolate by himself.

Lydia withdrew her hand. “Off you go.”

I jumped down and the three of us stood together in the line, Josie pressing her cold fists under her chin, Ray clicking his flashlight off and on.

“I guess she means ‘Indiana Wants Me,' ” Josie said. “It's too slow for a dance party.”

“It's too slow!” Ray's teeth chattered and his lashes were crested with frost, but he nibbled snow off his mitt anyway. “I can't do my crab walk.” And he swayed to the song in his head, which he'd said was always “The Kids Are Alright.”

“We'll be right there!” I called, stamping my feet.

Lydia smiled back, regal on her hay bale, alone with the driver and horses like she'd planned a daring escape.

Then I wasn't
in the snow. I'd been sitting in a chair for too long, my legs asleep from the knees down. My wrists felt tied down and I had such a crick in the base of my neck that maybe I'd been strapped into a car crash, feeling what Bill Giller had felt.

Then I remembered Gary, the blue cabin, and felt hollow as a toilet roll. His tranquilizers must've acted on the nervous system because if he'd relied on my circulation it would've taken a week before I'd even stumbled—hell, if my crew drew the diagrams big enough that idea could win them the Burroughs County Science Fair. If Gary had left any of them alive. Sixteen years old, just starting to have their own brains.

My eyes tried to open.

I was under fluorescent lights. A clean-cut guy in a tie and short-sleeved white shirt sat in a chair in front of me. He wasn't handcuffed to his, just a blue binder open in his lap. A gun in his shoulder holster. He had salt-and-pepper hair and lots of eyebrow.

“Ah! The ambulance thief.” He glanced up from what he'd been writing, working his lips like his spit was too sticky for him. “Brother, you have done some traveling, and you slept through the lot of it—thought I'd have to go find a book to read! All this time chasing after you and I never realized you were such a sleepyhead!”

He squinted hard at me, then ticked a couple of boxes on the page in front of him. There was a bare table behind him and a red door behind that. The floor was linoleum, and the walls looked like steel.

“You going to kill me?” My teeth were sticking to my lips. “That the plan?”

“No, Mr. Giller.”

I stretched my legs, trying to work the prickles out. Long pink welts ran across my hands and arms from that forest-floor tussle with Gary. Aw, shit—I remembered the flash of orange from the
tv
. A stupid tear welled up in my left eye. I shook it off while my inquisitor went on initialing the corners of pages.

“Where's my ear?” I asked.

“Right there on the side of your head,” he said. “Someone was kind enough to staple it back in place for you. I think it lined up perfectly.”

“So what do you want?”

“Well, that
is
the question. You're in the custody of the US military. Suffice to say—”

“Which branch?”

“Jesus, ‘Which branch.' You weren't a, a lawyer, were you?” He flipped back a bunch of pages. “You weren't.” He scratched the side of his head with the pen. “I can inform you that I'm here on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that there'll be a discussion on Thursday or, at the latest, Friday to determine whose jurisdiction you're under—to be honest, nobody's too keen. My name is Carver, by the way,
c-a-r-v-e-r
. We're going to be seeing a lot of each other.”

“And you're not from Penzler?”

“Definitely not.”

“And now Gary's not from Penzler either?”

“Gary?”

“I want to see my kids.”

“Yeah! Huh.
That
much is clear as crystal.”

He flipped to some yellow loose-leaf pages and started writing like crazy.

“Listen, Mr. Carver,” I said, “you ought to put me on a nitrite drip if you plan on keeping me alive any length of time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don't feel good, Mr. Carver, and if I
really
don't feel good you're going to need a wet-vac, not a stack of papers. If you know anything about this Penzler stuff, you—”

“We have calcium nitrate fertilizer as an experimental ration. You like some?”

“Does it work?”

“It has side effects.”

He gave me a hard look then went back to writing, and every seven seconds his free hand brushed the butt of his gun—he wanted to be sure that our balance of power wasn't going to shift within the next, say, eight seconds. He flipped forward to some typewritten pages.

“Mr. Carver?” I asked.

He held a fingertip to his spot on the page—maybe he'd been marveling at a transcript of how I once defended myself with nothing more than a propane fridge, though it wasn't likely anyone outside Penzler knew about that.

“What's on your mind?” he asked wearily.

“Where are we?”

“We're on an armed forces base in the state of Virginia, fifty miles from DC. According to this morning's roll there are 1,855 personnel beyond that wall.”

“You know Gary?”

“I know
a
Gary.”

“Is he like a double agent in all this? It doesn't make sense he'd blow up that
hq
in Preston too if he—”

“Possibly we don't know the same Gary.”

“I'm not the only one left, am I? Besides Natalia or maybe—”

He lifted his pencil from the page. “Natalia?”

“Never mind.”

“Never mind, exactly. Suffice to say our ladies in the lab up in Albany think your tissue will make for fascinating analysis. But before that I want to know if the psychological effects are anything like what we paid for. We didn't
develop
this formula, you understand, the manufacturer brought it forward and we entered into an agreement for full rights of distribution, et cetera.”

“Out of their lab in California,” I ventured. “The big bosses.”

“That's a given. But the manufacturer's stipulations didn't allow time for our usual due diligence which, after this experience, is not a protocol we'll be forgoing in the future, regardless of the beautiful application this product might have had overseas.”

“So why'd you have to blow it up?” I asked. “Whole shed full of kids.”

“With their whole lives ahead of them, blah, blah, blah? You tell me.”

“What?”

“You're supposed to be this smart guy.” His bottom lip hung in a pouch, disappointed like I'd missed curfew. In what possible sense had I been smart?

“Okay,” I said. “I'll guess that you have a phobia about people being alive.”

“I just about do. No—it came down to covering our tails. Enemies of democracy, the LRA, any of them back in Rwanda, they'd kiss their own behinds to hear about this kind of innovation, even if we
are
in the middle of discontinuing it.”

“Killing us all still seems excessive.”

“Really? For the US military? Maybe you've heard of Laos in the 1970s?” He jammed his fingers under the holster to scratch his armpit. “I mean, do you have any idea how many bums I had to wipe to clean up your Velouria bullshit? No, I'm tired of pussyfooting around.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Hadn't realized how badly you'd been inconvenienced by the piles of kids.”

“Really, yes!” He nodded like he'd finally found the one guy who understood him. “I mean, worldwide, civilians get offed by internal conflict every day in the week—only reason we went into Congo was that bleeding hearts wanted to save the chimpanzees! But if we evolved from monkeys, then they had a shelf life already, right? They're on the way out, natural selection.”

“The zombies'll say that about you, Carver, and we'll see how much you like it.”

“They eat chimpanzees over there, even in Kinshasa, call it ‘bushmeat.' But you'll never do that to us, right? Promise?” He clicked his pen happily—this tied-to-a-chair debate was his kind of party. “Anyway, to say this Penzler contract has been the biggest fuck-up in the history of this administration would—well, it actually
would
be an exaggeration, but it's definitely top ten. So…”

“You've left me alive to hit me with that binder.”

“In a manner of speaking!” He rubbed his nose ecstatically. “Hah! Sure, now having formed some impressions, I'd better order the questions for your work-up.”

He bent to his labors. If I'd had an elbow free I would've caved the top of his head in like a coconut husk. “I'll answer anything you want,” I said. “First, tell me where my kids are and exactly when I'm going to see them. Exactly when. If you're really from the Joint Chiefs of Staff you can fly them here in a helicopter.”

“All right, okay. I'll never conduct an interview under false pretenses.”

Though he'd set fire to a hundred people who'd never understand how or why. He lay his binder on the table, spun the chair and straddled the back of it like he was all relaxed now, my buddy. “Yesterday,” Carver said, “when you telephoned your kids, you in fact spoke with three voice actors that I'd had stationed at your mother-in-law's house since Saturday night—two of them used to work on
The Muppet Show
, believe it or not. Times are tough all over.”

I expected my gut to give an anxious kick but I was still so dumbfounded just to have woken up that I was willing to sit and listen.

“So tell me where my kids really are.”

“Where they
really
are?”

So here it was—with his fifties-sitcom crewcut and short-sleeved shirt, he was going to break the news to me. The news that had been inevitable all this time. A vein throbbed sullenly in my neck.

“We don't have the slightest idea,” said Carver. “By the time we got the full list of those affected and started sniffing around for you in MacArthur, your mother-in-law's house had been deserted. Kids' clothes in the drawers, though, and every sign that the three of them might be back any minute. Her neighbors said they'd left an hour before and had probably gone back to Hoover—but what
really
seemed to upset these neighbors was that the man across the street had evacuated too, and
he'd
only moved in a couple days before, telling anybody who'd listen he had a nine-to-five downtown. You look bored, are you bored?”