All-Day Breakfast (13 page)

“ ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen,' ” she said, like she knew how close I'd come.

October 30 – 7pm

Burroughs County
BARN
D
ANCE
, Y'all Come Join the Fun

+ 2 yr old Snaffle Bits

The Agridome went by out at the end of Casement, and just before the merge lane onto Route 33, Harv's dad's magenta flyer flapped by one staple on its telephone pole.

“I'm not going to cry until I see Megan,” she said flatly, answering the question I hadn't asked yet. “I've been thinking about her.”

“Sure.”

“How the Megan I really miss is the kid who never made a fuss, our little M, and how she's turning into an adult, that's fine, she can have opinions, but,” she said quietly, “it's no different than if the sweet little kid had gone off and died.”

“You know, ever since Velouria,” I said, “most of the kids have been kind of stupidly overjoyed.”

“And I'm not? Well, different strokes.”

A jeep passed us, its bumper sticker:
I'm only speeding 'CAUSE I REALLY HAVE TO POOP
.

“And none of those kids have husbands,” she added. “What about that thing up there? It's yellow.”

“That's a Hummer.”

“Just checking.”

“Okay. Our houses burned down. Right?”

She ran a fingernail across her window.

“Then Doug came and told me that'd happened to cover up some kind of secret bullshit, then a minute after that Doug wasn't there anymore. To cover up some kind of secret bullshit. And maybe they didn't gun for me because I wasn't on the hit list yet, they'd lost track of who I might've been talking to. Or maybe bullets have been whizzing past our heads and I just hadn't noticed.”

“No.” She slowly twisted to peer into the back seat.

“How well do you know this Svendsen guy?”

“He's known Doug's brother for a long time. He did high-altitude parachute jumps for the Air Force, wearing oxygen masks. All his own research, he said.”

A black station wagon roared past us on the left—it had white-and-green Nebraska plates but tinted windows all around. A silver Western Dairy Transport truck was barreling down from the opposite direction, not tapping its brakes for anybody, so I had to stomp on mine to give the station wagon space to cut in front of us, four feet between our bumpers. I glanced over as the tanker roared past, rattling my mirrors, then glanced in front of me and saw the black wagon's brake lights. I swerved onto the shoulder, gravel spraying, half my arm holding down the horn, but then he lay on the gas again and beelined into the distance. I let go of the horn and puttered back into our lane. My breath came out hard, though I couldn't say my heart was beating faster.

“Shit,” I panted. “Thought that was going to be awesome, didn't you?”

Colleen shook her head, her hands flat against the dash.

“Thought that guy had come to kill us!” I bipped the horn two times. “Too bad.”

“Yeah,” she said flatly.

Then we had ten quiet minutes.

We listened to
a radio call-in show about Andre Agassi, the bald tennis player who used performance-enhancing drugs to win Wimbledon while wearing a giant feathery wig.

“Going around like regular folks,” a caller growled, “when at heart he's, he's a monster!”

Colleen reached across and shut it off. Then I could just hear the road under our tires. I wondered how many of the cars and trucks whizzing past from Velouria were headed to Hoover expressly to confirm whether or not we were dead.

I wasn't a zombie like Cam had said. They're known for traveling in packs of five or six, sure, and I
was
doing that—but I'd never seen a movie where a zombie drives a car, and I
was
driving a car. Zombies shamble across the countryside in search of human brains, whereas I was driving to Velouria for…answers. I'd had a hole put through me and a piece of my body had come clean off, true, and I seemed to have a decreased appreciation for human suffering, but those by themselves didn't make me a zombie. A real zombie has to start off dead before coming back to life, and I had
never
been dead though Deb might have argued that some or all of me had died with Lydia. A theologian could argue that one way or the other, but then
I
could interject that even if there
is
a movie where a zombie drives a car, at no time in any movie does a zombie drive a car and count on his reattached fingers the ways in which he is
not
a zombie.

“Doug and I decided to travel the country, looking for her,” Colleen finally said. “When the police came up with nothing, we were going to buy a motor home.”

Then she was quiet again. She seemed to have a great interest in the brown grass in the ditches.

“What was your job before this started?” I asked.

“I'm the office administrator at Farmers Mutual.”

I delved through my mental tool box for any joke I could crack about my insurance premiums, but nothing came—we had renter's insurance but I couldn't imagine ever seeing the sort of calm afternoon where I might sit down and fill out a claim.

“They going to miss you at Farmers Mutual, if you're gone for a while?”

I must've been trying to enforce some kind of normalcy, because she couldn't have cared. Ear-biters are notorious for trying to enforce normalcy.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I took this week off. I want to clean up the yard before the snow flies. Then we're going to…”

She pulled her feet onto the seat and curled into a lima bean. Still with dry eyes.

“Why don't you cry?” I asked. “Might feel better.”

“I said I'll cry when I see Megan.” She gulped in a breath. “The plate on the black car, was it Nebraska?”

I told her I hadn't noticed otherwise, then kept checking my mirrors every eight seconds. On the average stretch of highway there are no yellow cars.

“I understand why we're leaving Hoover,” she pronounced in a monotone, “but why Velouria?”

“Well, on a field trip, when one of the kids gets lost, the rule is always to go back to the last place we'd seen each other.”

Colleen screwed her lips up—must've done that a lot, from the wrinkles.

“But who did you lose?” she asked.

“Good one. Well, I guess Peter Giller,” I said. “That's what my mother-in-law thinks, anyway. Also my principal. And the police, we can presume.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were going to say you'd lost Harv Saunders. He's seemed a little lost from the start, so I can't entirely imagine how he's coping with this.”

“I saw him this week.”
Chainsaw scar across his head.
“He seemed just fine.”

“His mom was my best friend all through high school. Then we lost her. Doug would say I'm exaggerating, but honest to god, David Saunders ought to be in the electric chair. Stomped on her like she was a tomato worm. Marlene was just the sweetest girl in the whole world. Miss Burroughs County. Looked like Penelope Cruz.”

I watched the pairs of headlights flicker on in the mirror and wondered if they belonged to my poor goddamn students. Returning to the scene of the crime.

Then I heard a bang in my right ear and thought we'd blown a tire, which would have left us sitting ducks on the side of the highway, but then my optic nerves relayed the fact that Colleen had put her fist through the plastic crust of my old dashboard. After a second she pulled her hand to her chest and started picking plastic out of her knuckles.

“If you wanted to get these kids someplace safe,” she said, “you should have done that for Harv back in fourth grade. Of course Doug would tell you I'm exaggerating.”

A baby-blue sedan appeared in my mirror, hands waving madly from either side of its palm-tree air freshener. For some reason I flashed a peace sign, and in response Grace turned her wipers on.

It was pretty
well night by the time we got into rainy Velouria. Dockside was on the far side of town, out past the used-car lots and feed stores, half of them still open with their lights blazing out across the sidewalks. I guess that suited the farmers' hours. There wasn't a turn-off for the factory, just a road out of town that suddenly turned into employee parking lots. It'd quit raining by then. Not one parked car loomed in our headlights in any direction, even though Rob had exhaustively described the night shift's duties.

The girls stayed twenty feet behind us. At the eight-foot chain-link fence I pulled up to the entrance gate the workers were meant to file through, but it was chained and padlocked, displaying a handsome plywood sign:

closed for renovation until further notice.

making your community better!

dockside synthetics (a penzler company).

“Maybe,” Colleen murmured, “this is what the FBI was talking about.”

I got out and walked through the headlight beams just to tug the fifty-pound chain and make sure it was solid. It held, but the
clang-clang
it produced was so
loud
, the two idling cars were so
loud
, and with the dark factory looming above us and miles of parking lots behind, I could feel the eyes of things staggering around in the dark. Things even worse than we were, but a hundred more, a thousand more, and angry at
me
, pouring out of that hollow factory to swarm the fence. It was easy to imagine. I tried to ignore my car's rattle while I listened for them, but all I heard was a vehicle gearing down from the direction of town.

I was being stupid. I wanted to still feel in charge, so I walked over to Amber's car. Grace rolled the driver's window down—Creedence Clearwater playing “I Put a Spell on You” drifted out, with a smell like sawdust that'd been sitting wet under a tarp. Grace extended her bare arm. By the parking lot lights I could see a tooth resting in her palm, blood-smeared roots and all.

“Mine!” With the new gap in her grin, Grace looked like an eight-year-old. “We had a big argument!”

“People have misunderstandings, all right?” Amber called. “Seriously, does that say ‘Dickside'? ‘Dickside Synthetics'?”

Now I could hear that distant vehicle actually approaching, so I moved in front of the two cars as though I could shield
them
from harm, my fingers tingling with anticipation for the new car to knock me flying across the pavement, but then I'd make them poop in their pants when I got up and punched through their windshield. But the hatchback was slowing down as it came closer, and I squinted to make out the fire-breathing dragon on the hood, cruder than if Ray had fingerpainted it.

“Gillbrick!” Franny's head emerged from the passenger window. “We gotta hit the Curly Wurly bars!”

But all I could think was to get my hands on any of those unemployed Dickside Synthetics guys. Or on a ham sub.

The Pegasus gas
station on the way back into town stocked wet sandwiches at the bottom of a beer fridge. I piled them beside the register. I flexed my calf muscles over and over, hoping that might calm me enough to not veer back into 7-Eleven behavior. The elderly proprietor stood under a cardboard sign that read
ask me about nightcrawlers!
I'd made the rest of the crew wait outside, and the old guy kept peering out his little window at the three cars like he expected Colleen to dance in with a telescoping baton.

“I see you don't have it in the cooler,” I said, “but do you by any chance carry—”

“Bacon?” he asked.

I must've turned gray. I stood there with my wallet half-open.

“Oh, don't get spooked over it,” he said, licking his thumb to pull a plastic bag open. “You just have that look about you.”

“Uh, you don't stock luncheon meat of any kind? Because I don't see it.”

“No, son. You weren't laid off from Dockside too, were you? Never seen you around, have I? Unless you got a haircut or something.”

“I don't know any Dockside.” I angled my head so hopefully I'd look confused as hell, perhaps deserving of lengthy explanations. “No docks around here, are there?”

“We've just got the creek, but it's all underground in the culverts nowadays.” He started ringing in my sandwiches and each one bent limply as he ferried it into the bag. “Dockside's our factory over yonder, employed a mess of people until they shut up shop day before yesterday, and it was this time last week—it was my wife that pointed out how close the one thing followed the other—this fad went around a lot of the guys who'd worked there to start eating real quantities of bacon. They came in here after their company picnic cookout or whatever they'd had down at Plotkin Park. Funny, isn't that? Because nowadays they say bacon's not too healthy.”

“
Tastes
good,” I muttered.

“Supermarket down the road's been sold out since Monday, guys bought them out, so they started coming out to us, a dozen of these Dockside fellows we've known since they were kids, still in their coveralls from the factory! Asked if we still carried bacon, so I telephoned the supplier and yesterday the meat truck stopped
here
first instead of the supermarket, you understand, because they come in from Fontaine. And before that driver was out of his cab, oh, six, seven, eight cars and trucks came roaring up the road and pulled in all around him—penned him in! ‘Who's this, street gangs?' I said. Well, it was the Dockside fellows, come for bacon.”

I took a ham sub out of the bag and started to unwrap it. My hands shook like jackhammers. I should've eaten before we'd gone out to the factory, I'd timed it all wrong—my wrists felt like drinking straws.

“Bet the driver was surprised,” I managed to say.