All-Day Breakfast (19 page)

“The thing's gray or something!” I bawled at her. “Not yellow!”

She went limp, spread her hand on the roof while I still held her an inch or two in the air. Her breathing hammered against me.

“Right,” she huffed. “Hand's yellow too.” She frowned at me over her shoulder, her eyes barely open. “So this isn't the guy.”

I set her down. One side of the hood had the texture of a corn flake.

“Not ready for recycling, but it's getting there. I should leave him a number. Doesn't even have a spoiler, Jesus. A Chevette coupe.” She shook her head, defeated, then her fist snaked out to whack me in the chest. “But that was fun, right? And the next guy's going down
twice
as hard!”

Amber threw an almighty swing that Franny ducked beneath, one palm to the ground like a ninja, but as she came up Clint hit her with such an uppercut that she wound up with the back of her head on the pavement and her groin against a lamppost. In the meantime I carried the vest to where the old guy crouched against the wheel of a Coca-Cola trailer, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. His hair had flopped over his left ear so he looked like a harassed rooster, and his forehead was nothing but oozing lumps. The saturated handkerchief dripped onto his already-bloody shirt.

“Sir,” I said, “I cannot apologize enough. She's between facilities and she got away from me.” My throat felt rough from what Colleen had done to me—I tasted blood. “Call this number, they'll be eager to discuss your compensation.” I held out a business card. “You'll find first-aid personnel inside the restaurant, patch you up in a jiffy, but me, I have to get my patient on the road before we get another incident, alrighty?”

He pulled the handkerchief away and blinked up at me, his swollen eyes streaming tears. One of his front teeth had been shattered into an isosceles triangle.

“I'm taking the car to my son,” he sighed.

A bubble of blood burst on his lip. Even compared to me, Colleen had turned into a full-on nut.

“Okay,” I said. “You call that number first chance you get.”

I strode back to the ambulance. Franny had Amber backed against the front of it, that ugly serape bunched in one fist and the other thrown back, knuckles already bloody. Clint lay on his side on the pavement, Grace's boot buried in his middle. Harv stood half-asleep, arms around the takeout containers.

“All right, everybody,” I called. “Let's go.”

Like a Sunday School shepherd I beckoned to them, even Colleen as she rocked the Chevette up and down like its shocks needed testing. The kids all unclenched fists, helped Clint to his feet, hobbled around to the big back doors. I climbed up behind the steering wheel and put the key in the ignition. Colleen walked through the headlights as they flared on, then stopped and picked something up off the pavement. She came around to the passenger door.

“Got a thumb here—any takers? Doesn't have nail polish.”

Silence from the back.

“Wait, yeah,” said Clint. “That's mine.”

“I call staple gun!” yelled Grace.

As we rolled onto the highway Colleen kept pressing a tissue to her lip then looking to see how much it was bleeding, which wasn't much. She threw me a smile.

“Know how fun that was, smashing his face? That really was just
a lot of fun
!”

Friday, October 28.

Every time I
saw a police car coming I tried to let my face droop so that in his headlights I'd look like an authentically haggard paramedic, when really I was so buzzed with nitrites I felt like a sparkler on a birthday cake. Every cop gave me the single-finger-off-the-steering-wheel salute.

“But losing fingers must be a distinguished Nebraska tradition!” From the passenger seat Colleen addressed the window to the back. “Think about it, all those poor stupid pioneers, caught out in snowstorms
without mittens
, and farming accidents—my god, the early days of threshers!”

“My mom's dad lost three fingers in a mill,” Harv said. “He never—”

“And we don't know the first thing about the Native Americans,” said Colleen. “This whole road might be finger bones!”

The driver ahead of us, in a black F-350 pickup, threw a cigarette out his window and it sparked across the road.

“No more deep thinking,” I said. “Grab every smoker and kill them.”

The remnants of unpopulated cornfields flickered past in the dark. An early-hours call-in show called
Out There
came on the radio. With his
cleverest-person-living-but-God-I'm-tired
delivery, Tom Exegesis kept proclaiming, “The truth is…somewhere…in the middle.” With my fingers looking green in the light of the gas gauge, that sounded extremely profound.

“The truth is up yours,” said Clint.

“Turn it up some more,” called Grace.

He took an enthusiastic call from Scott regarding the pre-Halloween ghost tours recently conducted in Asheville, North Carolina, and how more than one visited spirit had followed overjoyed tourists back to their hotel.

“Now,” Tom concluded, “is this a case of fifteen apparitions genuinely wanting to go home with these fifteen people, or is it a case of fifteen people inexplicably organizing themselves to tell the same story? The truth,
I
believe, is somewhere…in the middle.”

A nervous-sounding guy named Vince came on—I pictured him huddled in his parents' basement, sweat trickling behind his glasses.

“Love the show, I'm a first-time caller….”

“First time for everything, glad to have you.”

“I've looked it up in the dictionary, and it just says, ‘A corpse said to be revived by witchcraft,' but, God, there's more to it than that, am I right?”

“All right, hold on, so you're talking about a
zombie
? You're asking what constitutes a zombie?”

“Yes, exactly!” said the caller. “What constitutes—”

“And that'd be
way
at the back of the dictionary—I wouldn't have the stamina to go back that many pages, so I salute you, Vince. Now, why don't you start us off, what makes a zombie a zombie in the
popular
imagination? Or if you're of a more critical stripe, what makes a zombie in the
academic
imagination?”

“Bacon!” we all announced.

“They ought to eat brains, that's for sure,” said Vince.

“All right, brains,” Tom said wearily. “And they've got to have limbs falling off, things like that?”

“Seen it happen,” I agreed.

“Right here,” Amber said behind my head. “Poster girl.”

“That's a—that's a
sick
zombie,” said Vince. “That's ill health that makes 'em fall apart. A well-nourished zombie can walk around like anybody else, no problem.”

“Ah, unless,” countered Tom, “the corpse had decomposed
prior
to reanimation to the point that, you know, it was structurally
unable
to walk around like everybody else. That's your
Night of the Living Dead
model, am I right? That's an entire graveyard revived indiscriminately.”

I waited for Vince to somehow bring the citizens of Hoover, Nebraska, into the conversation, but whether it would be to prove or refute a given theory I couldn't decide.

“C'mon, babies, ask how well they take a punch!” said Franny.

“You there, Vince?” asked Tom.

“The real reason zombies in the movies
only
eat brains,” the caller murmured, “is Hollywood screenwriters can't think of anything else for them to do.”

“Now, hold on one second,” Tom replied lethargically. “
You
were the one who said they
had
to eat brains, right off the top of this conversation.”

“Yeah, but I was only—”

“And if you go back to Bela Lugosi as the zombie-master in
White Zombie
in the thirties, Lugosi was killing these Haitian field workers and bringing them back the same night they were buried, just so he'd have a more complacent workforce, wasn't that right? And not one—and here's my point—not one brain consumed in the entire picture.”

“Movies weren't good back then,” said Vince.

“Bullshit. I beg your pardon,” said Tom. “But my reading on Haitian zombies, which is by no means comprehensive, doesn't rule out the
possibility
of brains, since apparently if you fed a zombie even a speck of meat or—what was the other one?—
salt
, meat or salt, if they tasted either one they'd be reminded they once were human and collapse on the spot, never to be revived.”

“Oh, ho!” the kids hollered in the back.

“Okay,” I told the radio. “We're talking different species.”

“But that whole scenario still begs a
couple
of questions,” Tom said, ignoring us entirely, “the first of which is whether it would have been possible for Bela Lugosi to reanimate a sugarcane picker, say, five, ten minutes after death, and for that zombie to maybe think that he'd only taken a
nap
, you see what I mean? The cells in his brain wouldn't have deteriorated, maybe the only reason that the zombie of the
popular
imagination shambles and slurs the way he does is that his mind has rotted down to that little lizard-brain at the top of his spinal cord, isn't that possible? The medulla oblongata? But my initial thought—and I appreciate your patience on this, Vince—is that there might be people walking around right
now
who aren't aware that they're zombies because they weren't clued in that they had died in the first place, is that a possibility? You see what I mean, is that an acceptable stretch?”

I couldn't help but grin. Someone was speaking frankly about our lives. Donny had in the Velouria jail, true, but this was less disturbing visually.

“Vince?” asked Tom.

“I'm here. You just cut a little close to the bone there.”

“Fucktard!” Franny yelled in the back.

But
was
there any chance the stuff from Pipe #9 actually
had
killed us dead and brought us back to life an instant later? Jesus, but the hippie doctors of Preston, Ohio, had a lot to answer for!

“Perfect. An intellectual battle. All right, the second question is whether the zombie you're defining is the
cinematic
zombie, in which case we should look no further than the oeuvre of George Romero, or if it's the
anthropological
zombie, in which case we look—where?—no further than rural Haiti? But does it have to be
one or the other
?”

I squeezed the steering wheel giddily as I waited for it.

“The truth,” Tom drawled, “is some…where in…the middle. Thanks for that, Vince. Next caller is on the line from Alberta, Canada. How are you, Betty-Anne?”

She wanted to talk about the past summer's
astronomical
increase in UFO sightings in southern Alberta compared to any previous year on record, and Tom countered with alarming statistics concerning the number of F-18s airborne over the North American continent on any given night, then he wondered aloud whether extraterrestrials might not be more attracted to the tarsands projects in
northern
Alberta.

Then he played a Pan-American Rent-a-Car commercial.

“Clint, get on the cell,” said Grace. “Tell 'em what went down in Velouria!”

I passed a pickup truck pulling a shiny aluminum horse trailer. I remembered Rob Aiken mentioning an Old Man Penzler, and I pictured him as Bela Lugosi, with the widow's peak and eyebrows. Hell, was there even such a person as Old Man Penzler?

“Next caller's from out in Nebraska. Go ahead, Lydia.”

I drew breath in so hard I nearly coughed.

“Hi,” she said, “thanks.”

“Aw, yeah!” Amber whooped. “My homegirl Lydia Dershowitz!”

Of course, with the braces. I reached across to the passenger seat for bacon.

“I'm calling because of the guy a minute ago—Vince?”

“Yes, recollections of Vince bring a warm bloom to one's cheek. Zombies, yes.”

“She wasn't at school Tuesday,” Franny announced.

“I, um, I guess I want it to be made public that a lot of the people like you talked about are living together as a community, uh, a co-operative, I guess, and I think that means they have more intelligence than that caller was giving them credit for. They're
organized
, I mean.”

I took my foot off the gas and let the ambulance coast along the shoulder.

“Where is she?” asked Amber. “What the hell's she talking about?”

“Oh,” Colleen exhaled. “Megan.”

“Okay,” said Tom, “so by ‘people you were describing,' you mean zombies?”

“Guess so.”

“And these people are zombies because, what? They eat brains to survive?”

“No, not at all! They eat—”

“Their limbs drop off as they shamble around, is that it?”

“They
do
,” intoned young Lydia. “Yes.”

Which was exactly how older Lydia would've phrased such a critical point. Colleen had her fingertips over her lips.

“Could be leprosy,” Tom suggested.

“What that other guy said about it depending on what they eat, he
was
right, and that's not leprosy.”

“Okay, but if it's not asking too much, what's
your
connection to all this? They shamble through your yard, is that it? Ride your school bus?”

I straightened the wheel and steered back into our lane.

“I'm one of them,” Lydia said finally. “My job's to drive the shuttle between the factory and where we're living.”

“Good enough. Thought as much. Now, where exactly is this zombie refuge?”

Silence.

“Okay, when did you first know you were a zombie?”

“Oh, man, before I got here my arm was just hanging there, like by one tendon, and I hadn't been hurt or anything!”

“No?” asked Tom.

“Slid off by itself!” I called out.

“It just started sliding off,” said Lydia. “Wasn't eating right.”

“Represent!” Amber yelled.

“All right, so zombies are organized. Listeners can knock the arms off Rosie the Riveter and paint her lips green, zombies
can do it
! Lydia, did you have a question? What prompted the call?”

“Because nobody here is eating brains,” she said.

Then a split second of dial tone before the program engineer cut it off. She'd excused herself, goddamn it, from wherever it is she was.

“That is one example,” said Tom, “of why we're on the books as entertainment programming and not as an informational show, folks, though we can all appreciate that culturally the zombie continues to resonate because each is, essentially, their own
worst enemy
. Their ignoble self. Yes, apparently I've given it some thought. Before we break for commercial I'll advise listeners with Egyptology questions to hold their calls until tomorrow night, when our good friend Dr. Leonard Avril returns to—”

Colleen shut it off. Beamed at me.

“It's that guy's place,” said Grace. “Rob. That's where it's at.”

I passed a sign for a rest stop and was tempted to pull in and put my head between my knees, but instead I maintained my beeline east. Lincoln, Preston, Pawnee City—every holy grail lay to the east.

“How come Harv's the only one not hollering back there?” I asked.

“He's asleep,” said Clint.

Lights flew up behind us, then, with an annoyed honk, swerved around us into the passing lane. I caught a glimpse of a white Alice's Flowers
van.

“You see that?”

Colleen nodded. “Flowers is all I've been thinking about,” she said slowly. “I couldn't even stay to give him a funeral. He always talked about one Tom Waits song he wanted for when the people got up to leave.”

“There's always time for a funeral. They have them for soldiers, I don't know, fifty years later if they find a body out in the jungle.”

“His body was
right there
! I kissed his hand!”

“We had to go to prevent needing more funerals.”

On the trip back to MacArthur I'd have to buy a Nerf football, definitely, and a book about astronauts.
Souvenirs of those couple of days when Dad was away, you remember that, Ray? That seems so long ago now.
Something yellow moved into the left lane to pass us.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Take a look at this!”

I glanced at the front bumper going by, then I had to look at the road.

“No,” she murmured. “No spoiler.”

And I'd have run it off the road if it had? That seemed reasonable. The silver
chevrolet
flashed on its square back end before the car fishtailed into the night.

“Front end looked like a shark,” I said.

She'd already shut her eyes again. “That was a Corvette.” The closer we got to Lancaster County the more the exit ramps seemed to laugh up their sleeves, because they knew what was coming and we didn't.