All-Day Breakfast (34 page)

“Straight back in the trees,” I whispered. “These guys are too fat to run.”

I didn't need to horrify them with the PBF news to get them running. There'd have to be a better time to tell them our fellow zombies were dead, though I couldn't imagine what that time would look like.

The woods were
invitingly thick, like they'd been planted expressly for us decades before. I ducked under the first branch, disturbed a couple of crows sharing a hamburger bun, then kept low as I heard the five start through behind me, dry pine needles crunching. I felt steady enough on my feet by then to run a hundred steps, then I went two hundred more.

“They'd need helicopters to catch us now,” Franny whispered behind me.

“Mrs. Avery's not used to running, she's tired,” said Harv.

“No, I'm not.” Colleen's breath dissipated between the pine branches. “Doesn't the air feel like snow again?”

Once we stepped onto an actual path, cut by hundreds of bike wheels, we really started to cover ground. I didn't wonder what was ahead of us, instead I thought about our savior Gary and how maybe he
had
burned down Penzler's evil
hq
—he'd sure acted like it, once Jones clued to the possibility—but he'd also burned down the house where Josie and Ray and I'd been living, and even if Deb did own some of the same pictures of Lydia there were hundreds more I'd never again hold between my fingers. So for that I'd grind a rope of his intestines between my teeth. And I discounted that he'd leveled PBF and everyone in it because Gary wouldn't have had enough time to drive from four
am
Nebraska to room twenty-six at the Lamplighter, but then I remembered: he has resources, and there are airplanes. So this one guy had maybe killed all of those people we loved, but were we running
after him
, to snap his neck? No, we were running away.

The trees thinned out, brightening the path, then we stepped out into a backyard with woods on three sides. An ornamental pond and a trampoline led to the back steps of a two-story log cabin, painted blue. No smoke from the chimney. Was it too much to hope that nobody was home? Jones said it'd been three days since Thursday, so that confirmed it was Sunday. A chewed-up
Little Mermaid
Frisbee lay at my feet, but no dogs barked. Man, if it
was
Sunday, I was missing the Steelers trouncing Miami!

“Maybe they're at church.” Franny scratched a branch-scraped bare arm that read
franny's left arm
™. “One that has the afternoon tea after.”

We tiptoed around the cabin and past a shingled double garage—containing exactly one locked blue station wagon and an oil stain from an absent vehicle—to the more-respectable front door, where I opened the screen and knocked. Stray links on my broken handcuff rattled against the panel of stained glass. Still no barking.
Pardon the intrusion, does this road out front lead to Highway 33?

“Maybe there's buses to somewhere,” said Megan.

There was no sound at all from inside.

“How likely that they're right behind us?” asked Colleen.

“Superstars like that could be out with infrared scanners.” Clint tottered a plaster goat-boy figurine beneath his pointy shoe. “Maybe we got microchipped.”

Harv loped around the corner from the far side of the house. I hadn't noticed he'd been gone, which wasn't the first or last time my leadership would be shitty.

“I hunted around behind the lattice,” he beamed. “They've got five bikes. One of them only comes up to my knee, though, and it's got a pink basket.”

“Clint,” I said.

“Har, har,” said Clint. “Here's something pink that goes down to my knee.”

“Seriously?” asked Megan. “Like
bright
pink?”

“Gillbrick.” Franny stalked up, twisting the hair around above her ear. “That back door isn't even locked.”

Their kitchen smelled
of bacon and overripe bananas, and a dozen gap-toothed faces smiled down from the fridge. So, grandparents. A pixelated snapshot they'd printed off their computer showed a grinning, squinting young man in green camouflage, an M-16 over his shoulder as the wind tossed the palm trees behind him. A bag of Purina Pro-Plan Small Breed Formula sat on the counter, so they'd clearly chosen to save their yappy dog's life by carrying it away.

More importantly, Clint started two frying pans and a stewpan's worth of bacon cooking on the range, tenderly lifting each strip to peek at its underside before committing to turn it over. He wiped the spat grease from his face with a paper towel. Franny hovered over the pans with a teaspoon, scooping up the grease as it became available.

“Whoever needs Band-Aids,” I told the room, “now's your chance to look for Band-Aids.”

I still didn't tell them that Amber and Grace were dead. I reassured myself that I'd imagined it. I felt like the back of my head was missing.

We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way.

“Peter,” Colleen said from the hallway. “In here.”

“G,” said Franny, “you want to try the juice? It'll grow you a new pecker.”

“Someone ought to slap your face,” said Colleen. “I mean it.”

Franny shrugged. “Whoever tries it'll get fucked up.”

I put my head back like a baby bird, and she tipped in the bacon grease. It seared the back of my throat but its sheer deliciousness curled my toes inside my shoes.

“Now your turn, Mrs. Avery,” said Clint.

“No, thanks.”

Colleen led me into a narrow bedroom, toward the big bed with its orange counterpane, then past it into the closet.

“You look like one of those plane-crash soccer players who ate all the other guys,” she said.

“Well, it's all how you carry yourself.”

The old homeowner had a lot of red plaid shirts with snaps, Lee blue jeans, long gray socks. Wool used to itch me but those socks didn't, probably because I was a different species from what I'd been. I spent a good minute at the mirror, inspecting my right shoulder where it had reattached—white tendrils of tissue had grown across the gap.

“Feels like fiberglass insulation,” I said.

She ran her fingertips across too, stopping on each fiber like she was playing a harp. My penis filled with sluggish blood. The skin was puckered and purple around the nails in my shoulder.

“Wow,” Franny said from the doorway, “you look so retarded.”

I snapped up the shirt and we followed her into the kitchen. Clint was transferring the perfect bacon onto a platter painted with ducks. Maybe I could've fed and clothed myself without my bevy of helpers, but they sure ran things smoothly, and what had I offered them? Twenty-two hours in an ambulance and one more day alive.

“Eat outside,” I said, “so we can go into the woods in a hurry. Where's Harv?”

“By the garage.” Megan dropped pans in the sink. “He wants to start that car.”

“What're
you
doing?” Colleen asked as they all filed out.

“Gotta pee.”

Though since Pipe #9 burst I hadn't actually needed to—but my intestines felt distressed as I reached for the beige kitchen telephone. To phone Deb I had to call collect. Still hadn't forgotten the number!

“Will you accept the charges?”

“Yes,
yes
,” she said. “Peter, where
are
you?”

“Still in Ohio. I'm heading way out west for a day or two, but then straight back to you guys. Promise. The kids there? Everything still all right?”

“You just say where you are, we'll come get you. Just come be with us then go do what you have to do. Say where you are, we'll be there.”

“That would be nice. That would be nice. The kids there?”

“Sure.”

Bacon grease rose in my throat. I trotted to the sink and spat, getting a string of the salty stuff down my chin.

“Dad?”

“Hi, Ray. How's the school?”

“School? Good. Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah, Ray.”

“Can we come get you? I'll sleep in the car, Grandma doesn't mind!”

“I've got to ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“How was your birthday?”

“Birthday? Pretty great. Yeah.”

“What did Grandma get you?”

“Here's Josie.”

“Hi, Dad!” said Josie.

“Was he pretty pissed off at me?” I asked.

“You mean Ray? What for?”

“I told him we'd bowl on his birthday. I'll take you another time, all right? Listen, help me out, what was the name of your teacher back in Hoover? I have trouble remembering.”

“My teacher?”

“Mrs. Somebody, with the black hair. Drives a Subaru.”

I heard the phone change hands.

“Peter,” said Deb. “I don't care how far away the place is, they have to see you.”

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “I would love that. I would love it. But I can't say, I'm sorry.”

“Well, I suppose we've talked long enough. You have your things to do. I have to get them down for their naps now, Peter. Say good night, kids!”

“Good niiiiight!” they hollered.

“See you soon,” said Deb.

She hung up, with a click across the phone line like a screen door closing. I kept the phone to my ear in case it wasn't
really
hung up and the kids were going to jump back on with something desperate to convey. Instead I listened to it hum for ten seconds until there was
another
click, like another door closing, then the dial tone came on. Did all collect calls do that?

And the day before, Ray had said his birthday was after Easter. Also, it was only noon in Nebraska, and neither child had napped since they were three and they would've knocked the bastard down who said otherwise. Something fucked-up had happened to my kids, when all along I'd believed they alone were in the clear. On the old people's toaster, my reflected face looked like melted cheese. I clacked my jaw shut and shook the numbness out of my fingers. I found plastic cups above the sink and filled a pitcher with water. I couldn't hear Franny's guffaws on the porch, so they'd probably gone to sit in the wading pool.

“Okay,” I called, swinging out the back door. “Harv got that beater started?”

The four of them lay all over the porch like they'd been dropped from a helicopter. No apes around, no cops—were they just fooling? Franny slumped sideways in her Adirondack chair, and Clint had fallen out of his. Colleen stretched on a plastic lounge two feet in front of me, looking up at the roof though her brown eyes didn't blink. She was breathing. An inch-long pink dart quivered in the side of her neck. Nowhere to be seen: her telescoping titanium baton.

I dropped to one knee, set the water down silently on the blue boards and looked over my shoulder at the roof. No one. I scanned the pines in all directions and listened hard for ten seconds.

From the woods a bird whistled a loopy tune.

The attacker had come and gone? Where was Harv? Megan had toppled down three steps onto the back lawn, the platter overturned six feet away from her, our bacon strewn in the grass like eggs on Easter Sunday. Her feet were still on the porch and her neck looked twisted as Play-Doh from the way she'd landed, so I slid down beside her, rolled her onto her side, brushed the grass from her face and after a few seconds found the slow, slow thud in the side of her neck.

I plucked the tiny pink dart from behind her ear and threw it under the steps. Looked like the darts had all come from one direction.

I huddled against the steps and peered up at the roof again. The gray sky seemed too bright to look at, but I made out a dark shape crouched beside the old people's chimney, and when it dropped flat to its belly I knew it was Gary.

Part of my brain thought
Good, now all of us will be dead. Very neat and tidy.

I rolled away from Megan, and ran sixty steps across the backyard toward our path, then got ten steps into the woods, fifteen, hoping that I was behind decent cover by then. A starling flashed past, brushing my eye. I ducked under a branch, blinked and blinked—my eye could still see. Something had landed on my shoulder—had the bird taken a dump? No, too solid to be bird crap. I squinted at the thing.

It was my ear.
Sharp as a shuriken
, he'd said.

I slipped the ear into my shirt pocket and slid backwards under some kind of wide-leafed bush, then folded my feet under me. An earwig dropped onto my arm, skittered under my sleeve. I dabbed my sleeve against the sticky stuff dripping down the side of my head. I could still see a strip of green lawn. Was he coming from the cabin or was he in the woods already?

“You're a riot,” Gary said from somewhere above me.

He didn't say anything else. The roof of my mouth felt hard as a hatchet. I peered up at the trees but every shadowed branch swayed the same gentle fraction of an inch. I committed my heart to waiting him out, years, staying silent as snowfall.

“Come out of there,” he said, “let's throw down. See, there's other dudes I work for. These dudes want to retain a sample, exclusive of Jones.” He seemed to talk from one side of the path then the other—some trick he'd picked up at ventriloquist camp. “I see your name on the target list, five minutes later you walk in the room, I was, like, ‘I need to buy a scratch card.' So come on out, okay? Let's throw down.”

A happy prickle went up my spine because we were going to fight, ninja versus zombie, and prove that I was indestructible. I wriggled right back against a tree trunk and branches pinched the side of my neck. I reached back to push them away and grabbed a hand. He'd reached from between the trees to knock me out with some kind of nerve pinch—who'd told him I even
had
nerves?

“You're such a fucking sissy!” I rasped.