All-Day Breakfast (23 page)

“Well, what is the cure?” asked Amber.

“I get the feeling there isn't one,” I murmured. “They never said there would be.”

“But, hell,” said Eric, “there's bacon, and I don't mind if we stay three years!”

He gave a Nerf football a delighted squeeze.

“Want to see where the bathrooms are?” asked Shawn.

Franny collected Community Chest cards from the floor. “If we've got three years we should totally start a 4-H!”

“I could use the ladies' room,” Colleen told Shawn.

“Hey,” Eric called, “Mister, uh—”

“
Giller
,” hollered Megan.

“Mr. Giller, sorry, right—you can totally take that bed, it was Jacob's and he won't need it now, right? Dude sleeps standing up.”

“Sure,” I said. “Very funny.”

From their benches the kids sat looking at me, orange money in their hands.

“Did anybody ever mention that a place in Ohio might have a cure for all this?”

“There's a place in Georgia called Bacon County,” said Eric, rattling the dice.

My crew had collapsed on various beds, except for Colleen, who was in the bathroom, and Franny, who'd started playing as the pewter thimble. Now that we were a big pack, I could probably quit keeping tabs on them. By then the pig smell wasn't making my head snap back—it was more like an Acrid Animal Shit aromatherapy candle burning off in a corner. I stretched out on Jacob's snarling-wolves blanket.

“When you sleep with your own kind,” I'd once said as a bedwetters' camp counselor, “you might not pee the bed so much.”

A pot-bellied, wispy-haired little guy pushed past a plastic curtain at the end of the room and set plates and a handful of cutlery on the table. It wasn't cold in there but he wore yellow work gloves.

“I'm Arthur, gentlemen and ladies,” he called, “and I'll be feeding you. Just letting it burn for a minute longer.”

And my kids and I vaulted to our feet—our legs were
that
ready for us to eat. The smell filled my head so suddenly that the walls became strips of bacon, bubbling with grease, the beds were bacon, the rafters.

“Lydia, dear,” Arthur said, “look what's happened to you! I'll fetch a staple gun.”

“My mom's cool,” Megan slid onto the bench beside Franny. “Except when they saw my eye hanging out that time, man.” She wiped snot across her canvas sleeve. “They
completely
lost their shit.”

Eric waved his hands, a panicked spinster.

“Like, ‘Agh, zombie!' ”

“Aaaaaagh!” the kids all sang.

Megan laid her pristine face on the hard table, swallowed hard. Neither of her parents had mentioned her eyeball ever hanging out.

“It has to
have altered us at a
genetic
level,” wispy-haired Arthur said across the crowded table, with an intensity like he'd been up all night thinking about it. He'd already explained that he'd subscribed to
Discover
“back when we were in Velouria”—as though that life were years distant, instead of a couple of days—and still listened to
npr
out in his truck with his dog, so he sort of had a background in science too. He'd been six months from retirement before he worked on that cleanup crew with Donny Brown,
still
feeling hungover from the company cookout three days before.

“See, the
dna
strains they introduced have to act in combination with the
dna
we've got already.” He moved his hands apart as though
dna
chains were eighteen inches long. “And nobody has the exact same
dna
as the person next to them, you see, so that's why we have the same problems but with variations, like, uh, none of the girls seem to get as angry as you or I do, or you say you don't mind the cold, or some of us are held together by the bacon for a very long time and others of us aren't. Or in my case, I've got a thing with my fingers that not many people know about.”

He held up those yellow leather gloves, wet with grease.

“I
can so
fart,” said Shawn. “Fart anytime I want to.”

“So do it!” Eric crowed.

“Don't want to.”

Lydia laughed and light from the bulb flashed off her braces.

“No, no,” said Colleen, three diners to my left. “We need to
define
‘a zombie.' ”

Kids had their elbows on the table, mouths agape like she was Santa Claus.

“A zombie's anything that's wounded, like left for dead, but keeps moving forward, against all odds, okay?” She smiled laboriously at her daughter—trying to make sense was such hard work that sweat beaded her brow. “Could be a mouse in a trap, a whacked-out substitute teacher or a real—what did they call it?—reanimated corpse, even—”

“Could be an impoverished African nation,” suggested Arthur. “But young lady, you've barely touched your pork!”

“You said yourself we're all a little different,” she replied. “I go my own speed.”

“Eating meat and salt,” Arthur smiled coldly, “reminds us that we're human.”

He must've listened to
Out There
.

“Arthur,” Colleen asked, “what do you drive?”

“The snow's nearly quit.” He stood up, clearing his plate. “Get enough of us out there with shovels, we'll be able to take you on the annotated tour!”

Jock had red
hair, a faceful of stubble and forearms like a couple of hams. God, they looked delicious. We stood on the floor of the fabled bacon factory operated by fourteen of Penzler's victims—now twenty-one—my brain already so filled with operating procedures that it felt ready for slicing. Across the longest wall they'd painted
pork belly futures
with a blue roller.

“Because what future would we have
without
the place, am I right? If it wasn't for that ol' economic downturn we'd have been
so
screwed!” he shouted. “If Schwarz had stayed in business, where the hell would we have gone, right? I mean, you got a lot of disused pork-processing plants sitting around
your
hometown?”

He had to yell because we were walking between the skin-removal saws—which shook and rattled like hell as they started the process—and the liquid-smoke-injector needles that finished the first stage and also rattled like hell. The conveyor belts carried the product in a big horseshoe so we could watch the untouched fatty pork bellies drop out of the tumbler to the left while ten feet to the right the perfectly rectangular bacon sides, dripping yellow, slid onto the steel table to have metal combs shoved into them so they could be hung up inside the smoker. The combs were even sharper than Lydia's braces, so a first-aid staple gun dangled from a nail every ten feet or so.

“No, not in Hoover,” I said, shoving a comb in a couple of inches from the top of the slab. “We'd have mobbed the place. There's really no phone in here, hey?”

“Nope, nope, sorry—the phone company is one outfit that won't barter!”

Apparently he'd been one of the guys who'd corraled the meat truck at the Pegasus station back in Velouria, but instead of getting arrested he'd driven home where his brother-in-law Gord had kidded him that if he still had a jones for bacon then Gord knew a pork-processing plant sitting empty outside Lincoln. That afternoon Jock had driven out from Velouria and just before dinnertime he'd seen the future waiting like Noah's ark here in the field. First thing he'd done was to patch all the shot-up windows with black garbage bags, because, truth be told, Gord had discovered the place when he'd been looking for things to shoot at.

“Listen,” I hollered, “I'd love to call my kids one more time, so is Rob the only one with a phone?”

“Hey, Jock?” shouted Willow. “Should we still get ready for the truck out back?”

Pierced-lip Willow, her legs all goose-pimples in her jean shorts, stood holding hands with black-clad Little Craig. Even though most of the eleventh-graders' duties were in the dormitory, these two had been assigned to the factory, but there didn't seem to be anything specific for them to do so—according to Arthur, anyway—they just wandered around looking for corners in which to copulate.
They don't have any more birth control than God gave a jackrabbit
,
so if she doesn't miss her period we all learn something else about our true natures.

And if it hadn't been for the pink goo coursing through our systems we might've bothered to put in earplugs, too.

“What?” said Jock. “Oh, yeah, propane day! I suppose we can get ready, no way to say how fast this'll melt. Give me a hand, Pete, you don't feel the cold, right?”

I followed him down the back hallway.

“I'm happy to pitch in,” I said, “but I really need to talk about—”

“I'll shovel the stairs, you roll the skid out of the freezer—you remember, third door on your left just there,” he called over his shoulder. “The county might do the main road any minute, then the guy I called'll plough the—”

The outside door clicked shut behind him. I took the third door on the left into the freezer, ready to roll out a whole skid of finished bacon—apparently that was how they paid off the propane guy and every other supplier. But I must've gone in the second door instead, which seemed to be the cooler. They were all standing there,
looking
at me if they still had eyes.

Except for poor legless Maximilian sitting propped in the corner, Jock had stood all of them up so they wouldn't look quite so dead, despite the lacy frost tracing patterns up their cheeks and necks. They'd all been in for a couple of days already—Lonny, Jacob from my class, Leopold, others whose names I'd immediately forgotten—and unless there was a cure on hand they were never coming out.

“Oh, guys,” I murmured. “Hi.”

Jacob had staggered off the shuttle from Hoover, forgetting both of his arms on the seat—and too late to nail them back on, so those cold sores were now his most attractive blemish. He still wore his
hoover high
hoodie but the sleeves hung empty as burst balloons. Jock had wondered whether the cold might stop any subsequent parts from falling off, and so long as the guys didn't mind being borderline-vegetative, with barely a pulse between them, the experiment was a roaring success.

And their eyes would
follow
a guy whenever he wheeled a rack of bacon in for the three-hour rest between smoking and slicing. That might sound creepy, their sluggish eyes creaking back and forth on near-dead batteries, but it was mostly reassuring, considering that one day I might find myself standing there. Moving eyes were better than nothing. If I could get near a phone Ray and Josie might come in from MacArthur to tickle me under the armpits, then come back a day or so later for when I started to giggle.

Jacob's gaze crept sideways toward the open cooler door even though I stood in front of him. A door clacked open out in the hallway.

“Pete!” Jock hollered. “Get the lead out! Might be on his way, am I right?”

I trotted next door to the freezer, picked up the loaded skid with the dolly and steered it out into the hallway. Each shrink-wrapped pound of bacon carried a blue
schwarz meat products
sticker because a couple of thousand had been left in the packaging machine. It was true the cold didn't bother my hands much, but it still felt weird to hold onto things when I didn't have a pinkie, I felt more like the four-fingered Thing from
Fantastic Four
comics than I did like Captain America, even though Captain America was also a super-soldier secretly created by the US military. But if
his
blood was plasticky goo they'd never mentioned it in any comic I'd ever read. I turned backward so as to push the door open with my behind.

“Nah, forget it!” Jock called. We were beside the big generator, so it was just as loud as the factory floor. “He'll be a while yet!”

He'd only cleared a couple of ribbons down the concrete ramp, and though melt-water was dripping twenty feet down from the corner of the roof, deep snow still surrounded the place like we were a boat out at sea.

“I need a smoke anyway,” he said. “Let me show you the forms just in case.”

I pushed the skid against the wall. Every minute at Pork Belly Futures
,
the sicker I felt at not being en route to MacArthur. Bodily and mentally I felt solid as a cinderblock, but I'd seen in myself and others how quickly that could dissolve, and I couldn't remember the names of Ray and Josie's teachers at Colts Neck, that blue cartoon dog from
Laff-A-Lympics
or our phone number back in Wahoo.

“You know, I'm not stopping long,” I said.

He lit a Marlboro and patted the step beside him. I set my bottom on the damp concrete as he unfolded a sheaf of paper. Our dormitory, containing poor Harv and at least one telephone, sat like a long shoebox across the fields.

“Even if you're only here for the afternoon,” Jock said, “I still figure you're a rung or two up on some of these other meatheads.”

Jock had spent years as managing supervisor at Dockside and had been coming in from a cigarette break when Arthur and the rest had started the cleanup. Garth said if he ever met any of those higher-ups from Dockside in the street he'd rip out their hearts—and speaking from my own experience that wasn't just an expression—but that Jock was all right because he couldn't have known what the pink goo was really about if he'd been willing to roll his sleeves up that day and dip a mop in a bucket.

Maybe he
ought
to have known, though, which was why he was breaking his back to make PBF
a going concern—Boy Scout leader to your poor, your hungry, your limbless and staggering. Or maybe that was me. But Jock was the only zombie I knew who was in regular contact with his family, even planned on going home for the weekend.