All-Day Breakfast (49 page)

“Funny how the brain tastes,” I said to the lab.

I swallowed, then swallowed again for good measure, and goosebumps rose all over my body and the cold of that stone floor seared my ass like it was a hot plate. I was
freezing
fucking cold, but instead of punching through the wall and biting on an electrical wire all I could think to do was wrap my one arm around my intact knee and wait to vomit. The sparks had quit shooting out of my shoulder.

Penzler's goo had rotted our brains away except for the brave medulla oblongata where, according to Penzler himself, the brain's preservative resources had concentrated. There was something in that, hadn't he said so? That an engorged medulla oblongata could even rebuild the all-important spindle cell, solidify our vanilla pudding, make us normal, and he'd tried everything to make his victims human again—
suppositories
, he'd said—short of actually feeding them a medulla oblongata. Like Duffy hadn't thought to put Natalia in the fridge. Russians' pencils! Hadn't Camouflage Mike said that eating brains might paradoxically help me quit being a zombie?

And now I only wanted to eat the tiger-tiger ice cream they sold at the U-Stop in Knudsen.

I picked up the screwdriver in my solid, solid left hand and twirled it between my fingers. I straightened my right leg in front of me and it had a solid shin bone again, that remaining big toe once more triumphant.

So I figured I was cured.

I cradled the
other half of Gary's medulla oblongata in my palm and decided I'd give it to Alice as an early Christmas present, wherever she might have gone. That left three more people who'd need a bite, and Gary's medulla oblongata couldn't go that far. But I knew where to find more.

Boom
, said the wall, and the top bolts that had held the bands in place slid out of the cement and clattered to the floor.

“Give it one more!” a guy shouted. “Everybody in place!”

I could go home to
Josie
and
Ray
.

I crawled four feet across the floor and up into the wheelchair. I dropped the chunk of brain into the side pocket, and even with one hand for steering I managed to navigate toward the hallway. My ass was freezing and pure human adrenaline made my eyelids flutter like castanets.

With a crash I felt in my molars, the wall above Gary collapsed and buried him. I didn't wait to see whether a battalion swarmed in through the cloud of dust, I rolled as straight as I could into the first lab. Maybe I'd stay ahead of the apes for five seconds.
Thud
, said a wall ahead of me.

I banged into a hard drive and knocked over a bucket of something, but I got around to Natalia's tank before the next thud. I peered under the table and there was my Styrofoam cooler from San Luis Obispo.

I pulled the towel off, sat up tall and reached for her hair—I only had one hand now and I'd need a handle. The inside of her head might've looked and smelled like compost but that didn't mean the medulla oblongata wasn't in there.

I heard something from the hallway, the slow clatter of hooves on the stone floor.

“Shh, shh,” Alice said.

With one hand clutching his bridle and the other stroking his velvet nose, she led tall, beautiful Shamanski through the lab. I saw a dozen pairs of black wings sprouting from each shoulder, and he shook his gray mane and brought the wings forward then back, ten feet out on either side like some ship in full sail.

She said, “How'd you get in—”

Eyes wide, she stared behind me. I looked too. Three guys in black Kevlar were watching us through a fifteen-foot hole in the wall.

“Acknowledge—Mr. P a casualty in Lab G,” a gas mask buzzed. “Roger.”

The tops of the desks exploded, filling the room with sparks and shards of glass. Purple blossomed across Shamanski's chest and with a ripping sound out his nose he dropped to his knees, black wings flapping hard, that air pressure sucking the breath out of my lungs. Alice's shoulder sent out a jet of dark blood and she dropped in front of me. I put my left arm in the sleeve of a perforated lab coat, then crawled back to the wheelchair and dropped that orange lump of cure in the breast pocket. Bullets clanged off the chair as Alice scrambled to her horse. I looked back at the hole in the wall and saw a half-dozen guys, standing now for a better angle.

“Hrh!”

Alice, behind me. She lifted a desk over her head, and bullets knocked holes out of the thing as she sent it flying toward the hole. The apes' arms bent to cover their heads then they disappeared under the desk. Through the hole, the white farmhouse beckoned. Alice scooped me up in one arm while Shamanski scrambled to his feet.

She threw me on his back. I reached across and lifted the cooler from the table, shoved it against my bare belly. Then I wrapped my arm around his neck—my intangible right arm tried to hold on too.
Thoom
, said the wall ahead of us.
Thoom, thoom.

Alice put a hand on my thigh then jumped on behind me, her bare arms wrapped around my middle. I saw three holes from bullets through her forearms but they didn't look any worse than cigarette burns. What good work we fathers did, with our clouded judgement.

“Ow,” she said.

She pressed her legs against the back of mine. Shamanski jangled his bridle.

Thoom
again. A steel square came through the wall, knocking a hundred pounds of concrete onto the floor.

“Okay,
up
,” Alice called.

Shamanski walked in a half-circle until the wide smouldering room stretched in front of him, then he bounded forward six steps like he was going to jump a fence, and I squeezed like hell with my arm and legs. I took a mouthful of his mane between my teeth. Then all together the dozen wings against my knees went forward then concussively back, exactly as though he had one massive wing on either side, and that backward thrust flung us four feet into the air. I squinted down at the battering ram as it broke another hole the size of a garage door through the wall, then the wings were flapping hysterically and my left hand tried to dig into Shamanski's throat to keep us from sliding off his back. We circled up, and instead of a horse it felt like I was riding the arm of a couch through a tornado as his wings pulled the air out of my chest then used that same air to batter me over the head.

“Ow, damn it!” Alice yelled in my ear.

She had a new bullet hole through her kneecap. He dove, tucking his wings in close, and we shot over the upturned desk then the light changed as we rocketed up again and, through my squint, I could see we were rising above the lab and the stables. The Penzler men, scrambling on the ground, shrank to the size of black mice running over toy tanks. Their helicopter lay on its side, blanketed with broken boards. We flew over the farmhouse as a corner of its roof burst apart in a cloud of shingles—they must've shot at us with artillery.

Then we were flying over Hutchens Road with only a black van driving beneath us and snowy fields stretching out on either side. From up there, tangles of bare trees looked like barbed wire.

Dressed in nothing but a lab coat, a thousand feet in the air, the smell of snow driving up my nose—before we got anywhere I'd lose that big toe. I was warm where Alice and Shamanski pressed on either side of me, sure, though his giant square vertebrae didn't exactly feel like a sponge bath for bare testicles, and the wind pulled tears and snot down my face. Gray clouds in every direction. Stephen Hawking could not have explained Shamanski.

I was cured and we were on a flying horse.

“Want to go west?” Alice yelled in my earhole.

I nodded, teeth chattering. “Can you find Interstate 80?”

“There's Preston down there,” she said. “Lean right a bit! See, there's 91a going to the highway.”

The leveled Penzler
hq
looked like a black map of Australia. She squeezed me tighter around the ribs.

Then there was no road under us and I lost sight of the black van.

Every time his wings beat it felt like I was getting smacked with aluminium bats, and they beat a couple of times every second. But Alice was kissing the back of my neck, and we were already beyond Preston, maybe over Indiana, and I'd keep that cooler tucked against my belly until my eyes fell on Josie and little Ray.

The hole in Alice's knee had already healed over—just a coin-sized tear in her jeans. I sucked back my snot and swallowed it.

“How fast does he go?” I yelled.

“Dad figured eighty miles an hour! And we were both on a nitrite drip,” she yelled. “Won't need anything for a day or so!”

Jesus, there were a lot of baseball diamonds in Indiana. Must've been one for every person.

It started to get dark and the lump in my pocket banged against my chest. I loosened my grip on Shamanski's massive throat so I could lean back, her collarbones hard against me. I could've let go and her zombie legs would have held us on that horse even if he'd flown upside down.

“North at Schafer,” I said through chattering teeth. “Dirt road behind the dairy.”

“Go to sleep!”

Friday, November 4.

Nebraska from the
air is not rife with landmarks, though crossing the Missouri in the morning it was easy enough to recognize the One National towering like a pencil case over Omaha. Then we spent hours following the braided valley of the Platte, west, west and further west, above three hundred brown miles of either round or rectangular fields. The snow hadn't stuck beyond Iowa.

I was hungry as hell but if a
horse
could stay in the air I would too. An orange smear appeared on the outside of my pocket. Gary's chunk of medulla oblongata was leaking but I still had that stuff in the cooler.

We saw helicopters and planes off in the distance, but nothing came close. It looked like I'd taken sandpaper to the insides of my thighs. When the North Platte River met the South Platte River, just before the town of North Platte's rail yard like an eight-mile ear of corn, Alice and I leaned hard to the left to hopefully point us southwest. The sky was so blue.

“That's Palmerston!” I yelled. “The yellow church? Ten more miles!”

Alice nodded, knocking her chin against my shoulder. She'd peed onto Illinois. I was numb by then except for the searing pain across my perineum.

Below us the trees sidled closer together and my pulse beat hard up in my throat. I draped myself over Shamanski's neck and stared down at every inch of woody landscape though the tears streamed out of my eyes and away up my forehead. We were low enough to make out individual mailboxes beside the road and kids dropping their footballs to point up at us. The dairy's long silver roof.

“Is that it over there?” asked Alice.

Off to the right—a turquoise smear in the shape of a frying pan.

“That is Lake Picu!” I yelled back.

Deb had known the camp's owners since before I was born. Shamanski turned without us even steering him. He flew lower and lower. I could see the cabins framed against the lake, and a twist of smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney. The ground everywhere was red and orange leaves. There'd be no people at Camp Lake Picu who weren't my people.

I saw the roof of a red Corolla tucked between the trees behind the boat shed. We circled over the dirt parking lot, casting a long shadow that became wider and blacker as we descended. A small figure ran out from under the trees—Ray, in his blue windbreaker, a green water pistol falling out of his hand. Then Josie in her Wahoo Warriors hoodie and what must've been a new orange scarf, running beside her brother but almost staggering, too, her mouth a perfect
o
, eyes pasted to us.

The sides of our shadow flickered like clapping hands.

Deb came out from under the trees in a pink sweater, sunlight glinting off her sunglasses, her arms wrapped around herself. She seemed to be laughing, doubled over.

“Dad!” The boy skipped, showing gapped teeth.

Beneath Shamanski's wings the dead leaves danced up in spirals.

“You fell off
the horse,” said Ray.

He leaned over me, crouching, his hands against my grimy bare chest. I was flat on my back on the ground, covered with a scratchy wool blanket. My feet were so cold! He felt heavier than he should have, my ribs too vulnerable. I focused my eyes and looked through black branches at the blue sky I'd just dropped out of.

“Ray,” I murmured. “God, it's nice to see you.”

Then Josie knelt from above my head, pressing her warm hands to the sides of my face. With her features upside down she looked so much older than I'd remembered, tanned and paler simultaneously, and I knew that in distant years when she came home from college, slightly transformed, I'd look and say, “Déjà vu.” You look like that time I rode the horse out of the sky.

She gazed down at me. Her hands pulsed with warmth.

“Was I gone years?”

Ray stood up, all business now, and slid his fingers into his pants pockets.

“She said a week and one day. That coat makes it look like you've got one arm!”

“Yeah, we'll talk about that. You guys look very different too.”

“You don't have any ears,” said Josie.

“That's from the accident!” announced Ray.

“A series of accidents,” I said. “Guys, I'm better now so I came straight back.”

I propped myself up, Camp Lake Picu pebbles digging into my one elbow. I saw the cooler on the ground beside me, and Deb's car, and all the cabins, and the smoking chimney and piles of leaves, but no other people.

“I guess you guys are totally real,” I muttered.

“They're putting the horse in the boathouse,” said Ray.

“Shamanski,” Josie corrected.

“Yeah, so nobody can see him.”

“Let's go see him,” I said.

But my hips and the small of my back were so stiff I could barely sit. I spat something orange onto the dirt between my legs. Ray squeezed his arms around my knee.

“You're dying?” he asked.

Man, my head was spinning.

“No,” I said. “Don't look in that cooler, you with me? Don't look in there.”

“Okay,” said Josie.

“Why not?” said Ray.

They tugged my arm and I got up and started under the trees for the boathouse, though I felt like I was on stilts. The lake looked like gray shingles. I rubbed the back of Ray's head and then Josie's, like my fingers would evaporate if they ever weren't touching my kids' hair. The boathouse door stood open, a black square, but I was having trouble walking a straight line to get there—I kept watching for one of the women to step outside into the sun, but no sign.

“Are you here for a long time?” asked Josie, an arm draped over my wrist.

“Just until we go see Grandma in Pawnee. But we'll stick together.”

Ray squinted at me so hard that I had to steer him away from a tree.

“There's something gross in your pocket.” He pointed.

Oh
, I could've said,
that's part of a ninja's brain
, but if I had, it would've constituted Ray's dinner conversation for the next ten years.

“I told Grandma you weren't going to find us, but it's okay to be wrong.” Josie let her hair hang over her face, then flashed a smile as though I wouldn't see it. “You look so weird with one arm. Are you going to a doctor?”

“No,” I said.

Though it was tough to walk straight with the toes gone, too. Neither of them had mentioned those.

“You smell a bit like the bathroom garbage,” my daughter informed me.

“You heard from Grandma Jackie?” I asked. “Did Evadare call?”

Ray knotted invisible eyebrows. “Nobody's supposed to know we're here!”

“Okay, okay, that's good. I'll call them in a minute.”

We ambled onto the boathouse path, brown grass between the cobblestones, and even as I led my kids toward the weather-beaten walls I realized that the place was too quiet to be sheltering two women and a strange horse. It meant Penzler, though I'd seen him violently killed.

“Hello?” I called.

“Right here,” said Deb.

So I led the kids in, touching one on the back of the head and then the other. The floorboards were sandy, the place still had its sweet, old mouldy smell, and a couple of the canoes had been moved against the wall to make room for Shamanski, who stood with his head down to better stare at a bucket of water.

Deb sprang up from a hay bale, wrapped herself around my ribcage and squeezed, then swung her face up beside mine and didn't do anything for a second. Then she kissed the point of my chin, since she couldn't kiss the side of either ear like she used to.

“I can't believe it,” she said. “Peter. And one arm.”

Something purple trickled out of Shamanski's eye and a dark seam ran up the back of his leg like it was going to split open. He shuffled forward a step, a shiver running through his wings, and I finally spotted Alice asleep in a wicker basket chair beneath the rack of canoe paddles. Her head had dropped back, her chin in the air and her scabbed-up arms stuck straight out on either side like a robot whose spring had run down. She had a big square scab on her temple, too, and the bullet hole through the knee of her jeans.

I didn't look across at her or at the kids hanging off my arm and think that I was about to lose them and had to run away again, even though there was an outside chance that
swat
teams were on the way. I thought,
Things get better now, and plenty of things still to do
.

“I'd thought you could carry her up to the cookhouse,” said Deb, fidgeting with her glasses, “but—”

“Can we feed him the hay?” asked Josie.

“We tried, honey!” said Deb. “There's twenty bales from archery up in the shed, and he wouldn't even sniff them!”

“We should get a pan of bacon started for her,” I said.

“No!” Alice sat up, wild-eyed. “Give the horse the bacon!”

“Oh, and this is for you,” I said, digging into my pocket.

“I guess it's
weird I came without Lydia,” I said to the oncologist.

“It's not unheard of.” She clicked her four-color pen then put it back in her shirt pocket, beside a pen with a plastic fox for a lid. “What can I do for you?”

So I went into the speech I'd been practicing at red lights and in the classroom while I wiped the whiteboards, unsuccessfully trying to stay scientific, without my voice catching, glue on my larynx: could I donate blood, bone marrow, a kidney? What about our friends? We had a hundred friends who said they'd help if they could, and I'd read two dozen papers on these stem cells that can—

“Nothing like that.” The oncologist pulled her braid onto her shoulder then shrugged it off. “And I'd say if there were. All I can tell any patient's partner is to go home and take care of them the best you can.”

“You think I'm
not
taking care of her, seriously? You need to tell me that?”

“Nothing like that—just sit down, Mr. Giller. All I meant is that you're already doing everything possible.”

“Well, I'm tired of making tea, okay, that doesn't keep her—I mean, if I'm not willing to do something crucial for her, who is?”

“All right.” She briskly cracked her knuckles, loud as a pistol shot in the mint-green room. “I don't want to sound like the textbook but I really do understand how powerless you feel. In my own situation, I—wait, do you have medical training? You're a teacher, yes?”

“I started a biochem master's. My mom has got a disease similar to Parkinson's and I wanted to research that, but then, you know. Kids coming, needed an income. Seemed like there were already plenty of people getting nowhere as it was—though nowadays there's ten times more cash for stem cells.”

“Parkinson's?”

“Her specialist in Lincoln says it isn't Parkinson's exactly.”

“Jesus, you've got it coming from all sides.”

I stared at the faux-brass knob of her office door and willed my eyes to remain dry, because she was describing what I spent my waking hours actively
not
thinking about. What I thought while I was sleeping was beyond my control.

“All I mean to say,” she went on, “was that I have a good idea of what's going on inside my patients' bodies, and even so I feel powerless a good percentage of the time, I still lose patients, so if you feel like your head is, I don't know, a boiling kettle, you're not alone.”

“How many patients have you lost?”

“It wouldn't help you or Lydia to know that.”

“I think she should be on oxygen,” I said.

“It hasn't metastasised to her lungs. There's no sign of it there.”

So that night I climbed into bed and like always I let Lydia jam her iceblock feet between my thighs, and as she slept she went right on dying. You spend your life trying to fix a thousand problems and you're about as successful as a hole in the ground. How often are you actually handed the solution to any one of them?

We'd never be old people who stood in their yard to endlessly contemplate the positioning of a sprinkler. I felt like I was minutes away from an empty bed, without her cold callused feet or her new musty smell that neither of us mentioned.

“Thought you were getting
out
of bed,” she said through her sleep.