All-Day Breakfast (24 page)

“So is that real clear?” he asked. “Make sure they initial
there
before they roar off, or shit will hit the fan!”

I wasn't sure how he'd managed to find so many suppliers willing to barter but it had required hundreds of phone calls. He'd told his wife he'd suddenly found a better job outside Lincoln, so did that mean he'd cut himself a paycheck out if this too?

Outside the distant dormitory tiny figures ran back and forth—must've been eleventh-graders playing Frisbee in the snow—as the six guys for the afternoon shift came trudging across the white field. All that stuff about the chosen people and the promised land, was that out of Exodus
too?

Over the hum of the generator I heard something like a moaning from inside the factory. Jock scrutinized numbers and wrote happy faces in the margins.

“Listen,” I said, “we're kind of skirting the issue here. What I need to know is whether you've got a bead on a cure for this thing.”

“I guess you got all this straight—taught school, isn't that what Megan told us?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, though that life sounded distant as a
tv
show. “Listen, you hear something funny?”

“Anytime you want to talk about your condition, Pete, what it's doing to your life, where you're at, you just come to me!”

He pulled the door open, but long-haired, noseless Lonny stood there blocking our way. The last time I'd seen him he'd been in the cooler.

“Aw, shit, Giller!” Jock yelled. “You forgot to shut the door!”

Lonny gurgled and tried to grin at us. He didn't have much left in the way of lips and there was something purple smeared around his mouth.

“All right, you're okay!” Jock put a palm on his bare chest. “Let's get in and sit down!”

Then I noticed Lonny was holding a man's foot with eight inches of leg still attached to it—a blond-haired leg. Behind him, dark shapes shuffled up the corridor.

“Fuck, Jock!” I said. “He's eating Little Craig!”

After three days at PBF
there had to be as many nitrites in Little Craig as in any side of bacon—one of
my
students. Over Lonny's shoulder I could make out Jacob and more of the Dockside guys shambling up the hallway.

Jock folded his big ham arms. “Well, Lonny-boy, this is a big problem!”

Lonny looked from Jock to me and back again. Then his entire arm dropped off and lay there on the concrete, its hand still grasping Little Craig's foot. His teeth were already bared, of course, but he snarled at us like a dog then bent down with his good arm, picked up the detached one by the wrist and tried to wallop us with his gummy knob of shoulder!

I leaned back to let it swing by, then stepped in and punched lipless Lonny in the face as hard as I could. He flew five or six feet back into the hallway, stopped when he hit the crowd collecting behind him, then fell forward onto his face. He lost his grip on his detached arm, and
that
hand lost its grip on Little Craig's ankle, so did I pick up the lost arm and club him to death with it?

“Now, hold on, Pete,” Jock was saying, “he just needs—”

No, I ran in, pushed poor Jacob out of the way and stomped the back of Lonny's head in with the heel of my boot. I had to brace myself against the walls, and after the first couple of kicks his head made a wet sound like Jell-o salad.

“Hey, now, Pete!” Jock was shrieking. “Hey!”

“Stop it!” Jacob yelled sleepily, but it came out like maybe his tongue was falling out, and how screwed-up was that? So I pushed
him
down onto his back and started to strangle him. I could only stay calm for so long. His throat felt cold as a pickle. Jock grabbed my shoulders and tried to pull me off but I was too invincible. Jacob gazed up at me, forgetting how to blink, no arms to push me off, save himself. And in that state why should he have wanted to?

“Listen,” Jock hissed in my ear, “know what your problem is?”

I pushed my thumbs deep into his throat but he wasn't strangling fast enough—I needed a weapon. I elbowed past the other clammy dipshits crowding the hallway and ran out onto the factory floor. The whole noisy line was still running—sawing and skinning, injecting and trimming—and on the floor beside my stainless-steel table old Leopold from the cooler was crouched over Little Craig, eating his cheek. Leopold only had one leg but he'd been stiff enough that they'd leaned him against the cooler wall without any problem. Willow was chopping into the old guy's back with one of the hooks on a pole they used for the pork-belly tumbler, but he was having too good a time gnawing through to Little Craig's teeth to even notice.

I picked up a piece of two-by-four and jogged over. This was going to be great!

But then Colleen, dressed in dingy striped coveralls, a black grease stain across her forehead, picked up two steel combs from the table and buried them in the back of Leopold's head, like forks into mashed potatoes. He dropped onto Little Craig without a quiver, lying mouth-to-mouth like they'd been boyfriends.

“Oh,” I said, dropping my two-by-four, “that's great.” Because I'd had a beautiful long fight in front of me, and she'd gone and ended it.

Willow stumbled over to the wall and killed the power for the line, so it clattered to a stop with a disappointed groan. Half a cup's worth of blood coagulated on the floor, on Colleen, in spatters across the salt bags—we were all too viscous for any more than that. And based on Leopold and Lonny, it seemed that penetrating the brain was key to shutting off a zombie—
Jock, we really learned something about ourselves!
Colleen stood over the mess she'd made, breath huffing, hands out at her sides like a gunfighter.

I didn't feel like going back to kill Jacob anymore. I took the pole from Willow so she could push Leopold off her little dog-food boyfriend.

“How, how long we staying here?” Colleen picked up my two-by-four, broke it against the poor liquid-smoke-injector. “This is pointless!”

Jock ambled along the factory floor, holding hands with a couple of earless guys out of the cooler.

“You know what the problem with you guys is?” Jock asked again. “You lack a moral compass. I think we
all
do, a little bit, but you two
really
lack a moral compass.”

I swung the pole like a bat against the side of his head but the shaft only snapped in two. He and the cooler-zombies turned to watch the hook-end slide out of sight under the brine tank, then he turned back to me.

“My point exactly,” he said.

“My problem is that I should get the hell back to my kids!” I yelled.

“Then I think you should do that,” he nodded. “And stop leaving doors open.”

I picked Leopold up by the straps of his overalls and dragged him over to the pork-belly wheelbarrow. Guys in Dockside jumpsuits were running in by then.

“Sweet angel.” Willow kissed Craig's half-a-face then sat up with blood smeared across her chin. “He's alive, you guys!”

“Shnbe,” Little Craig announced.

“Clayton, do me a favor, buddy,” called Jock. “Run out back and find the kid's leg for him. Hey, Garth, you there? Run around to the shop, get some of the three-inch wood screws and a drill. Willow, honey?”

She massaged Little Craig's hand, sucking nervously on her lip-ring.

“C-can't I stay with—?”

“Take a peek inside Leo's mouth, hey? See how much cheek skin's in there.”

“Well, if you
do go away for good, you'll be the first,” old Arthur said. He swept snow off the hood of his truck while his little terrier hopped down from the cab and piddled on our footprints. “I told
my
kids I was on my way through to Lucinda's in Wichita but that I'd be taking my time, you see, and I do want to get there
eventually
, but…um.”

“It'll be hard to leave the bacon,” I said.

I picked at three flaps of forearm skin that Lonny had lifted off during the scrap. They felt ropy as licorice. Watching the dog sniff around, its owner keeping a step behind it all the time as I tried to form another sentence, that really reminded me of something from my messed-up recent past.

“Now that's not Frisbee anymore—what
are
they doing?”

I followed his gaze. In front of the dormitory, a dozen students shuffled from side to side, with significant jerks of the elbows, as a faint tinny beat drifted over the snow. Grace stepped out from the center of the line, pushed Shawn and Eric closer together, then the whole gang resumed dragging themselves back and forth. A slithery bassline.

“They're dancing to ‘Thriller,' ” I explained.

The kids were better off here, sure, but in the meantime all our everything had ground to a halt.

“You can't just walk away from nitrites,” Arthur went on. “I spent thirty-six hours in my own basement, without the basic strength to climb the stairs to the kitchen, and with bacon in my fridge!”

“How'd you get out of there?”

“Tinky kept barking until the next-door neighbors finally came home from Mexico. Am I likely to leave myself that vulnerable again? No.” He kept caressing the corners of his mouth with his gloved hand, and I guessed that as soon as I was ten feet away he'd start gnawing. “Nor should
you
. Make peace with Jock. Stay a few months with us lotus-eaters, that's what we are.”

“No, man, I told my kids I'd be back in a month. I meant it.”

He took some dry bacon out of his coat pocket and handed me a strip.

“So you did, you just explained that. But why the shovel?”

“He told me to bury Lonny. I guess just by the fence there.”

I spun the shovel in my hand like a majorette—my heart fluttered at the prospect of getting traveling, though it was only four hours since Rob had set the e-brake on the ambulance.

“But surely you were
right
to finish him?” Arthur asked. “His humanity had expired?”

“I guess, but who else should Jock get to dig, right? How about Tink, he much of a digger?”

The dog rolled on his back beside my shoe, his stupid little feet in the air.

“No, I'm afraid not,” Arthur said.

“You think Stephen Hawking would trade his beautiful brain for a reliable body?”

“Well, obviously he
does
have his brain.” Arthur studied a boot print in the snow. “And I've never read about him complaining.”

I couldn't dig the hole wide enough in the half-frozen ground, but I folded Lonny into the bottom and kept my boot pressed between his shoulder blades while I scooped dirt over him. Here was the quiet dignity I'd demanded of the kids.

“Sorry, man,” I said.

Jock hadn't given me any protocol for a funeral. No one at
pbf
had died before that particular Friday.

The kids stomped
toward me, each with a shovel over the shoulder—evidently from the start Jock had anticipated a lot of digging.

“We're going to clear the road!” Eric called. He wore lime-green earmuffs. “Mr. Jock says he wants you the fuck out of here!”

“Doesn't surprise me.” I stepped into the snowdrift to let them by. “Thank you.”

“Gillbrick, did you seriously kill the Lonny dude?” asked Franny. “Like that's not just an expression, you
terminated
him?”

“Somebody had to.”

“Cool,” they said in unison, letting out breaths of steam.

“Hardcore,” Lydia Dershowitz said, her upper lip flashing with staples.

Harv trudged by with a half-smile.

“How did it feel?” he asked quietly.

“Felt good at the time, I guess.”

“Yep.” He pulled his cap down to block the glare. “Bet it would.”

“You killed Leopold too, right?” Eric grinned. “That dude smelled like dumps!”

“No, that was, uh, Mrs. Avery, and he's back in the cooler. Combed his hair over the holes.”

Their hands crept up to their own heads. No one knows better than a sixteen-year-old how a hairstyle can make or break you.

Only Amber was in the dorm, writing at the table—demand must've been strictly for two-armed shovelers.

“I was left-handed before,” she grimaced, shuffling her hand across the page. “Writing to my folks so I don't bawl on the phone. Grace and I are starting a skate-shoe company, ask what it's called.”

“What's—”

“
Legless
. It's, like, the opposite, and it means drunk, so that's cool.”

“You guys all getting enough to eat so far? Everybody gone to the bathroom?”

“Yes,
Dad
.”

I took cold bacon from the platter.

“Your dad wasn't killed by that gravel truck, was he? He's still around?”

She shrugged. “Concussion.”

“What about Grace, she got a hold of her mom?”

“No.”

“Her dad's not around?”

“He, uh.” She looked past my shoulder and down the dorm. “He died the summer before ninth grade.”

I turned on the bench to see Grace, zipped to her chin in a sleeping bag, sitting up from her bed, exactly like a horror-movie scene where a guy rises from his morgue slab, and I thought
zombie
despite myself.

“Didn't they all talk about it, like in the staff room?” Grace asked sleepily. “They said, like, ‘If you don't like the Congo war shit, go complain to Grace'?”

“No…”

Amber tapped her chin with the pencil. “Her dad got killed.”

Grace swung her feet and set them on the floor, the bag still up to her chin.

“My dad wanted to prospect for coltan because you need it to make cell phones and laptops, and he heard Congo had, like sixty-five percent of it in the world, and he was going to buy us a boat for the summers if everything went okay, maybe Butler Lake. And my mom kept saying, ‘That's right by Rwanda,' but the State Department or whoever was like, ‘No problem, that was like twenty years ago. Let's not demonize Africa.' ”