All-Day Breakfast (37 page)

Then I was light-headed from loss of viscous blood or cough syrup or whatever. I swayed to my feet and took down another coat hanger and yanked it into a sort of diamond. I tucked that under my chin too, dragged the top up over my forehead, and the thing fit perfectly after all of ten seconds' work.

And it was a good thing I'd doubled the pressure on the jaw because then I knelt and vomited into that useless wire wastebasket, though my mouth couldn't open more than a quarter-inch. My jaw stayed in place.

So I stepped back to that big yellow door and put my hand on the cold latch.

Cold air bathed
my poor face and shook those structural coat hangers. I looked down at a set of three wooden steps, then a tall chain-link fence, white windblown prairie and gray sky beyond it. Just looked like Nebraska as far as I could tell, but I'd never been to Virginia to be able to say if it looked any different. No sign of friend or foe. Left alone to mop up as usual.

I shut the yellow door, tiptoed down the foyer and clicked open that other red door. By the light of a spastically flickering fluorescent I saw twenty feet of bare hallway, with a blue door at the far end this time, and chunks of cement spilled across the floor from a hole in the wall. With the red door open an inch I could smell sawdust, so this seemed right—still no clatter of grenade belts. I shut the door silently, and behind it found a green-and-white fifty-pound bag of fertilizer, showing grapes and watermelons, just like farmers buy in Velouria.

“He-oh?” I called to the knee-level hole in the wall. “Ih Heeda.” It's Peter, who's in here? “Who ih he-a?”

Five seconds of silence. A noise from the hole like a cat coughing up hairballs. None of my crew had ever made that sound. Gingerly I dropped to one knee and peered in. Just blackness, and a bare patch of cement floor lit by that sporadic fluorescent tube.

I went back to the bag—it was open but mostly full, with a Pyrex measuring cup on top of the white pellets. I dragged the bag over to the hole.

“Aw? Jock?''
Rob, Jock
—funny the words you can still say even when your tongue's on hiatus. “You guys ungry? Ih Heeda.”

I threw a handful in ahead of me as I crawled through the hole. It was dark and smelled like
smouldering
sawdust. Crawling across the pellets didn't feel too pleasant on my kneecaps, so with my good right hand I dragged the bag in after me.

“Who in heah?” I asked.

Straight in front of me I heard the coughing-cat noise again, and to my right what sounded like a guy muttering in his sleep. Where the hell was I?

Suddenly enough light came through a window in a door on the left to throw a weak square onto the floor, and from that I could make out two guys sprawled to my right and one in front of me. Then the square of light went off again.

I crouched and waited to see if the bodies would get violent. I was in the mood for that, to be honest, until something else occurred to me.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You guy know 'Onny 'Own? Ih 'Elouria?”

No response.

“I was at ‘Ockside doo, at day. I was da deecha.”

The coughing-cat sound turned into indisputably human gagging, loud and wet, and somebody else started to slowly hum. I recognized it.
Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really—
“California Girls.”

“Wha you know about Dockside?” asked a guy to my right. Sounded like his mouth was full of paste.

“I know na-hin. Any kids in heah? Ha do ged dem outta heah!”

“What's in that bag?” someone else whispered. “Smells good.”

“Why's id so dah in heah?” I asked.

“Tim smashed the bulb,” said Pastemouth. “Tired of looking at each other.”

“Give me some of that to eat,” said the whisperer.

I scooped a cupful of pellets out of the bag and held it out to the dark. I couldn't see exactly who'd been talking.

“What's he s'posed to do with that?” asked Pastemouth.

“Ih calciuh nidrade.”

“He cand reach it,” said Pastemouth. “You a retard.”

“You got to put it in my mouth,” the whisperer agreed. “Please.”

On my knees I shuffled toward his voice, handful of fertilizer extended.

“Tell him where you are, Lars,” said Pastemouth.

“Nah, I'm down here,” said Lars, the whisperer.

The light flickered on again. I was kneeling over Lars's bare leg but the leg wasn't attached to the rest of him, which was propped in the corner dressed in a T-shirt and underpants. Just below his right elbow his head lay on its side. Only the head. His eyes looked up at me, blinking as the pupils dilated to pinpricks in the light.

“Oh,” I said. “This stuh is dry.”

“Just cram it in,” he whispered. “I'd like to choke on it.”

He opened his mouth wide like a child in a high chair. I set my hand on his forehead to roll his head back so the stuff wouldn't fall out of his mouth.

“Pour it in,” Pastemouth said—I saw now, he was a fat bearded guy with his left hand lying by itself in his lap.

I dropped the pellets into Lars's mouth. He shut his eyes and said, “
Mm-nn
,”
as he tried to swallow, trying to get his throat to work even though it was a couple of feet away. He made a wet, determined sound, “
Mm-nn!
” Then he tried to get a breath in through the stuff and his eyes opened wide.

His eyes shut again and didn't move. I figured he was really dead then. I brushed his hair out of his eyes. Must've looked like I was petting a football.

“He had a girlfriend in Velouria,” said the hummer, his voice warbling like a flute. “She had sex with him in the interview room in jail.”

“Whad were dey gi'ing you to eat heah?” I asked.

“Chicken breast,” Pastemouth mumbled. “Fuckin' salad.”

“We just have to wait,” said Colleen.

I quit breathing, waited for her to say something else.

“Whed da hoice cah rum?”

“Vent up dere,” said Pastemouth. “We dought they were on that side, hey, made a hole, but we guessed wrong. I don't figure I'm intact down below anyway. Crawled back in here for a rest.”

He tugged at his handless forearm. It was tattooed with a bare-breasted mermaid, the fucked-up product of science gone wrong.

“Delicious
salad
,” the hummer said.

“I tole hib we need bacon. Dockor saib, ‘Human body dond need
bacon
,' I saib, ‘This
in't
a human body, fuggin'
asshole
.' ”

Pastemouth's shorter arm dropped away at the elbow. We both sat looking at it. A single drop of blood trickled sluggishly across the mermaid.

The hummer started into “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”

“We said we'd wait,” Colleen whispered out of the vent, “so we'll wait.”

“
I
never said I'd wait!” Megan yelled.

“Toby?” said Pastemouth. He prodded the hummer with his toe.

“He's aslee,” I said. “Ow do I ged negt doah?”

“Toby ain'd
adleep
,” said Pastemouth.

I felt hungry as hell, I realized, a real emergency, so with nothing else in front of me I scooped a half-cup of calcium nitrate past the coat hangers and crammed it into my
own
mouth. Tasted like chalk and tonic water.

“You smed like Sunday ham!” Pastemouth announced.

“Oh.” I smelled like Sunday ham?

I jumped to my feet and, before he could do the same, I swung the bag of fertilizer and walloped him across the side of the head.

“Gah!”

He reared up and clubbed me across the face with the back of his good hand. I fell down across his old hand and arm, and it seemed like a good idea to throw them at him, but his hand flew out the hole into the hallway.

“You hear something?” asked Colleen's voice. “Fighting again.”

“Collee!” I shouted. “Ih Heeda!”

Pastemouth kicked me in the sternum and I went down on my behind, but even with my left hand tied in a sleeve I was still strong from eating fertilizer, though it was kicking my intestines like I was nine months pregnant.

Colleen asked, “Did he say Peter?”

Pastemouth blinked his Doberman eyes then jumped at me again, so I tugged Carver's gun out of my belt and buried the butt in the top of his head. His skull was soft as cheese. He dropped to the floor beside Toby. “Collee?” I yelled at the vent. “Kick da wah!”

“The what?” That sounded like Colleen and
Clint
.

“De wah!”

The wall above Pastemouth gave a dull thud.

“Okay,” I said. “Ih kahing!”

As I crawled out of the hole, I felt something hot trickle down the inside of my thigh. I'd crapped myself. Commercial fertilizer was not the zombies' great way forward.

“Giller!” yelled Clint's tinny voice. “Franny has to get out of here!”

“Yeah,” I called meekly.

I'd been unfazed by the demise of Lars's whispering head but figured the world had ended because I'd pooped my pants. Why does diarrhea need to smell so sour? Pastemouth was too big around the middle but I managed to get Hummer's pants off without his legs coming too. In the gloom, I got the guy's underpants too, then wiped myself with my former trouser leg. A minute, two.

Then I remembered to pull the gun out of the twenty pounds of butter that was Pastemouth's head, because I was going to need it to fight the United States Army.

“Peter,” I heard her say through the vent.

The blue door led to a corridor lined with four steel doors with a square window in each, and Colleen, Megan and Clint had their faces flat against the second one like they'd been pressed onto a slide for a microscope. I might've worried they were asphyxiating if it hadn't been for all the yelling.

Franny
, they were all saying. They were gray skinned like they'd been painted with grease.

“Jesus Christ!” choked Colleen. “What happened to you?”

“I'd okay.” I put my hands to the glass. “Where ih she?”

“Here!” Megan had two black eyes. “Get her out of here!”

I tugged the big metal handle but the door felt welded shut. A black plastic slot sat against the doorframe.

“Key card!” yelled Clint.

“It needs the key card.” Colleen put her hands against mine, just the glass between us. “One of the beard guys has it!”

“Where dey?”

“Maybe out in that yard!”

I ran out through the blue door. So long as one of them was dying I couldn't be excited that three of them were alive. I barreled through the flickering red door, leading with my shoulder, then in the dark hallway I could see the yellow one ahead of me. I threw the deadbolt back and opened the door a quarter-inch. Light burst in. Blinking hard, I reached back to tug Carver's gun from my belt.

Snow at the bottom of the wooden stairs, and every footprint walked away to the left—the path just led around the corner of the building. It sure didn't seem like 1,855 personnel were on-site, but Carver hadn't been all by himself. Was that a dog barking? I closed the door gently because somewhere there was at least one guy with a beard.

Wind whistled through my coat hangers and the snow under my boots crunched as loud as potato chips so I made sure to step in the icy, silent tracks that had been stomped down already. I was hurrying for the key card but had to keep from being disemboweled in the meantime. I peered around the corner—Carver's building was only eighteen feet wide like the portable we'd used for drama class at Champlain High.

I tiptoed the eighteen feet and looked past the next corner. The building formed one side of a compound, along with a beat-up green pickup truck with Nebraska plates and a camper on the back, a mobile home with smoke rising from its tin chimney, and the chain-link fence meeting at a padlocked gate. A road ran past, dusted with snow, and barking dogs were very nearby.

“Got out, did you, little
terrorista
?”

Two burly guys in camouflage vests strolled up behind me, shotguns over their elbows—they'd been walking the perimeter after all. One definitely had a beard.

“Ouch!” he said. “What'd our boy do to you?”

“You ha do o'en da doah!” I yelled.

“Don't be funny,” he said. “One day you'll get a fair trial, 'til then—”

I lifted the pistol and shot him through the beard. He raised a hand to his throat as a line of blood squirted onto the snow, like I'd shot a can of soda. The dogs kept barking behind me. Now the key card.

But the second burly guy, with pimples between his eyes, opened his mouth and lifted his shotgun. I threw myself backward past the corner of the portable a half-second before he fired—plastic siding turning to confetti—and landed on my back on the hard snow. I'd lost Carver's pistol. Pimples loomed over me as I skittered away on my back, picturing the chunks of me raining onto the snow. He lifted the shotgun but instead of firing he just
kept
lifting it, then brought it down on my head. That knocked me down on my side.

For Franny I needed to get up and find the key card.

“Your head's fucked up!” said Pimples. “Let's get you locked in here, how about that? Patrick, boy, you all right back there?”

No answer from Patrick. Just the barking, and snow crunching under Pimples' boots as he dragged me by the collar toward the mobile home. Carver's jacket dug in under my jaw and I tried to swallow but totally couldn't. A screen door creaked open. And now a noise like an engine from somewhere.

“Check my amigo, see what the
man
says to do with you,” Pimples muttered. He dragged me over the doorframe, then green linoleum, then onto a pile of kindling. “Lay still here a minute, I won't crack you another one. Aw, shit, now what?”