“Grandma,” I whispered, “doesn’t like this kind of behavior.”
What the hell was I doing? I kicked the dude in the side of the knee, then my big elbow to the side of his head, like I was filming the kind of movie Lydia had hated. A final knee to crush his testicles against his pubic bone and the third swat guy went over like a stack of dimes. Ought to have worn a cup.
And the room was empty of conscious people. The fourth muscle-head had got Pat clear, the guy with the hole in his throat too, that was good, but I figured Ange might never find him back there if I didn’t pull the couch out, so I dragged it eight feet. I had a hard time doing anything with delicacy.
I turned Chad on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, and when I stood up, the tank’s treads were flush up against the doorframe and the eight-foot barrel was pointed right at me. Could they shoot through that battering-ram thing? If it pegged me I’d never even feel it, I’d just be in pieces—but that meant Josie and Ray believing, even when they’d retired to the Caymans, that maybe their father had never intended to come back—so I did a somersault and ended up across by the tv, and the end of the barrel followed me, whirring like a blender, so I shuffled back onto the door by the bed, and then whoever was aiming the thing must’ve got tired of that particular square dance and the whole tank pushed right in through the wall, sending plaster and two-by-fours flying at me like I was a dartboard. In the top corner of the gaping hole it’d made I glimpsed a square of greenish evening sky, and I figured I could fling myself through that square if I hustled. But in the second I spent thinking that, the barrel shifted.
All I saw was the flash of orange, but the noise was like an ocean flattening my head against a gravel beach. The concussion of air sent me flying against the couch and I lay there for about four heartbeats wondering if the tank was going to keep rolling in and squash the guys still on the carpet. Then through the smoke and falling plaster I saw that the wall behind the bed had disappeared, though the air-conditioner still dangled there in its bracket. I stumbled to my feet and dove out into the night, landing with my bare elbows on broken glass. The tank’s shell had also taken the roof off a white hatchback and caved in the side of a dumpster, so I realized I was behind the motel—not far from twenty-six.
I ran into the dim glow of those units at the back, all of the guests outside, shouting, “What in hell?” And there was my ambulance, praise God. Moving away from me. A tow truck—white with fluorescent strips down its mud flaps—was pulling it away, and I heard the driver gun his V-10 as I lifted my knees and ran after him.
But then a bluish shape ran out from between the parked cars to my left, throwing itself at the side of the truck—the driver’s door flashed open and something tumbled onto the pavement. I couldn’t check my stride in time and tripped over it, heavy as a sandbag, so I skidded across the parking lot on my back. Then I was up again, ready to keep after the tow truck, but it had stopped thirty feet away, its right blinker on like it was turning onto the highway, our ambulance dangling patiently behind. It looked like I’d tripped over the truck driver, stretched out unconscious behind a red Honda Fit.
I trotted to the tow truck and found Harv, resplendent in his hoover high sweatshirt, fiddling with every knob beside the steering wheel. Gave me a harried look.
“How do I set it down?”
“It’s just a Vulcan 810!” Colleen said from behind us. “Watch your feet!”
She hauled on a lever behind the cab. Women were resourceful—once at Toddler Storytime, Lydia had produced a library card from her bra. The ambulance came down and Colleen disappeared under the front of it, chains clanking, then she hopped up, face blue from the Lamplighter’s neon sign.
“Don’t you have keys?”
She hopped in the passenger side as I climbed into my regular seat, then Harv slid in next to her so she fell across my lap. He slammed his door. Keys were in the ignition. I backed away from the tow truck in a half-circle so I didn’t flatten that sad-ass driver. Black shapes darted across my mirrors.
“The other three!” I said.
“They’ve been in the back for like ten minutes!”
“Please drive,” Franny whispered behind me.
Sunday, October 30.
The fields looked crinkled with frost. We must’ve still been driving east, because the sun was coming up through the trees ahead of us. We’d driven for an hour, not finding enough road signs to be able to connect our blearily lettered Preston Chamber of Commerce map to the actual landscape, so we’d pulled over and slept, Harv and me in the front seats, and Colleen and the rest in the back. I suspect we all farted in our sleep. I woke up in the dark to doctor my burns again with antiseptic wipes, but they’d scabbed over—a medical marvel, sure enough. Colleen staggered back up to us as soon as I got the engine started.
I looked up at the sign again—the white letters said we were on Hutchens Road but could fork off onto gravel McCauley Road if we gave a damn.
“Go slow.” Colleen peered at the map. “Looks like the road’s pretty short.”
“What’ll we do when we find it?” asked Harv.
“Find a place to park,” I said.
“We’re awake back here,” yawned Megan.
“So don’t talk shit about us,” Franny said.
Used-up orchards appeared on either side of McCauley, row after row of upended trees in craters of black soil.
“Looks like somebody’s grandpa’s blowing them up as a long-term project.”
“Really?” asked Colleen. “Yours too?”
“Exploded half of Pawnee County. He was missing a finger too, come to think.”
I flexed my four-fingered hand on the wheel.
“You’re genetically disposed,” said Harv.
“Hey, G,” said Franny, “listen, we got another text from the God of Thunder.”
“Who?”
“Amber. Sent at three-thirty am. ‘We danced in the cooler for Grace but she didn’t notice. Sucks ass!’ she says. That does suck.”
“But then they got to eat,” Clint said. “Where’s our breakfast at?”
“Okay,” said Colleen, a shudder at the back of her voice. “I think this is it.”
I braked and we squinted to our right through the trembling aspens, the ambulance shuddering beneath us. A rambling white house stared back at us—peaked roof, windows, chimney. No cars or people in sight, but the tire tracks frozen in the mud made it look like vehicles came and went on a regular basis. A white picket gate and a path of overgrown bricks. A shed in the side yard, and what looked like a blue barn in the back—that lined up with the cop’s description. No chimney smoke, and though I could hear dogs barking they sounded far away, maybe at the next property. Harv unglued his eyes from the side window to look back at me.
“What’ll we do?”
“Um. Go in with my paramedic routine, play on the man’s sympathies.”
“I’ll come in with you,” said Colleen.
“Aren’t we all going?” asked Harv, eyes large.
“Well, hold on,” I said. “We’ve got one chance to do this with some kind of legitimacy, and I’m the only one who’s dressed for that.”
“Fuck that,” Franny hollered from the back, “we came to rip heads off!”
“Yeah,” Megan said faintly.
“I’m the only one,” I went on, “who’s dressed like he could legitimately, um.” My mind went blank. “Inquire. If he kicks me out, I guess then we’ll start breaking windows and screaming we want a cure and we want it now.”
“Man, I thought you were serious about this!” said Harv. “Don’t you want to get fixed up? We came out—”
“I am serious. This is my whole thing, kid. I’ve got nothing else.”
“There’s another jacket in the back you should put on,” said Colleen. “You look like something shat you out.”
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br /> “I appreciate the advice.”
We drove another fifty yards until we found a faded old driveway between the trees, and it led to a clearing full of brown weeds, surrounded by a collapsed wire fence.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll walk back and knock on the front door.”
“I don’t get this!” Harv glared at me, mouth half-open. “Are you going to tell him you walked from Nebraska?”
“I know it might seem weird but—”
“Yeah,” said Colleen, “I think it’s better if—”
“What if they don’t buy the act for a second,” I said, “so he sends one of his boys out to, I don’t know, throw a grenade at you guys? At least if you’re squirreled away over here then you’ll be able to get me out if it all goes south.”
They glanced at each other, tense as a couple of broomsticks.
“I’ll take the shovel,” I offered.
“How long do we wait?” asked Colleen.
“Five minutes,” Clint hissed, the ambulance swaying. “Then we’re going mad scientist!”
A path started through the woods in the direction of the house, thick with thistles in spots, but what was the harm in staying out of sight for as long as possible? The long grass was stiff with cold and the birch branches creaked around me, but it felt more like I was running across the high desert with the wind in my hair, because I was on a righteous mission with my shovel in my hand—though the path seemed to wind too far to the left to be taking me to the house. I hopped one log after another and waited to glimpse white walls between the branches.
Instead the underbrush crackled in front of me and two dogs crept out—dogs they’ve always got at the pound, skinny-hipped shepherd-crosses, but even Josie wouldn’t have adopted these. They crept between the thistles, growling and bristly, each with a square patch shaved off its hip like they’d escaped from the vet’s. One circled a tree to get behind me, like I was a baby goddamn zebra, and a chill went up me—I could take a bullet, sure, but what the hell good was I against teeth? I waved the shovel.
“Get out of here!” I shrieked. “Go home!”
Genius, right? The one in the path bent low then jumped, and I swung the shovel to intercept him but missed by two feet. He took my forearm between his teeth and shook the hell out of it, gummy saliva spraying my face, his back feet dragging through the twigs, and I brought the handle down across his snout as I felt the second dog sink its teeth into the back of my right knee. And pull. Something snapped back there, I felt it, but instead of real pain I felt pins-and-needles as though its teeth were hooked to a car battery, and I kept yelling “No!” because dogs obey commands, right?
“Yah, yah!” someone yelled behind me. “Yah, yah!”
There was Harv with a fire extinguisher in each hand—he brained the knee-biter so it staggered into the bush with a hunk of me in its teeth, then I raised the shovel as the other one leapt for my arm but one of Harv’s extinguishers hit him so hard across the jaw that he thudded onto his back then twisted to dart up the path toward the ambulance.
“I got him, you go!” Harv shouted, starting between the trees after the poor dog. “I was only checking—promised Colleen I wouldn’t go with you!”
“Oh,” I said to the suddenly empty woods. “That’s okay.”
Though there didn’t seem to be much holding my right knee together. It couldn’t take any weight, so I put the end of the shovel under my armpit for a crutch. My wrist looked like it had gone through a lumber mill but maybe that was just cosmetic.
I started back for the ambulance. The Penzler Mission: over before it’d begun. Each of my medical-professional pant-legs hung in shreds, like the Incredible Hulk’s clothes after he turned back into Bruce Banner, who then had no choice but to carry on with his fucked-up life, tattered pants or not.
I fell along the path more than I walked it. Car-battery sparks snaked up and down my thigh, telling me I was about to lose the knee for good if I didn’t get in the ambulance and find staples—five minutes total, Rob had said. Saplings whipped my belly. Then the house’s white gables loomed over me because I’d gone the wrong way.
The crimson front door was fifty feet ahead of me and my stumbling momentum could have taken me straight through, but immediately in front of me stood that side-yard shed, with a Gemtop truck canopy leaning against it and STP stickers across the door. A workshop. Padlocked, but I popped the hasp off with the shovel and hopped inside.
The shed was crowded with dusty shelves and a decade of John Deere calendars sagging off the walls. Down to thirty seconds and I didn’t see a staple gun, and though there were spools of fishing line and a pair of needle-nose pliers there wasn’t time for sewing. I heaved myself onto the stool, lifted my leg onto the workbench and dumped out a jam jar of four-inch galvanized nails. Between the shreds of pant-leg I set the point of the first nail against the top of my kneecap, then I grabbed the hammer from its hook and brought it down hard on the nail head. Viscous blood spurted out across my hand. The angle wasn’t perfect and I had to hit the nail eight more times, but I figured that at least meant it was finding the tibia at the other end. The rest of my body made its opinion known by bucking like a mule with every whack.
“Quit it,” I whispered.
Then I lined up another nail to the right of the first—I figured three would be enough. I raised the hammer again.
When I was finally done I leaned against the counter to keep from falling on the floor, and after a minute I was able to wipe up the beads of blood with paper towels, a single-father habit. Behind the roll of towels, a cardboard box sat stuffed with coils of blue and yellow wire stuck to finger-size metal tubes—blasting caps, maybe for blowing out those stumps. They gave me the creeps somehow. As I grabbed my right ankle and lowered the foot to the concrete, nausea submerged me like I’d plunged into a bathtub of the stuff. I grabbed the empty nail jar and puked into it. Then I set both feet on the ground and took a lot of deep breaths, my forehead against the oily bench.
Another minute, then I’d head back to the ambulance and whatever new plan of attack they’d concocted. Colleen would coo over my hardships, Harv could gape at my saddle-leather toughness. I took comfort, really, from that jar of vomit—it seemed a very human reaction to nails through a kneecap. How often did zombies throw up in the movies? Were self-inflicted nails so much worse than a bullet?
Then, behind me: “Mister?”
A woman’s voice, raspy but young. She must’ve been in the doorway, the padlock’s busted hasp dangling beside her hip. If she was one of Penzler’s people I’d have heard the gas mask in her voice and she’d have recited corporate dictum concerning we victims of pink goo, The brood of folly without father bred. That was Milton, from English Literature 12—funny how the brain works. If I’d thought she was one of Penzler’s I’d have thrown the jar in her face then fired up the electric drill and aimed for her bladder. But I left the jar on the bench and turned around.
“Sorry to have busted in,” I said.
She had dirty-blond hair braided into pigtails and wore gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt that said flava. She held a frying pan down by her side. She had that overripe look around her eyes like she’d been crying, though there was no evidence of tears and her eyes weren’t red. She was somewhere between nineteen and twenty-six, and barefoot. Your basic Ohio-style country girl, I figured.
“I’m Alice,” she said. “I heard a noise.”
Her breasts were small. She wasn’t wearing a bra and it was a cold morning.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I can fix your door there, promise.” I felt flecks of vomit at the corners of my mouth so I wiped them with my sleeve. “Some dogs went after me in the woods and I had to stitch up my leg in a hurry.” I stood up from the stool. “Look at that now,” I said. “Weight bearing!”
“Those must’ve been the Ogles’ dogs,” she said. “I guess you
’re a paramedic.” She spoke with little intonation while she studied my shovel. I’d propped it blade up, crusted with blood and fur, against the bench. “Has there been an accident around here?”
“So far just this one,” I smiled. “The Ogles friends of yours?”
“I went to school with their boy.” Alice switched the pan to her left hand so she could scratch that shoulder. “Their dogs went after me and my horse once, and we didn’t get clear of them ’til we hit the pump house.”
“I don’t know the pump house.”
“It’s a long way away.”
I made myself smile again. If the Penzler apes weren’t there already then maybe they weren’t coming at all. Alice leaned to one side to peer at the jar on the bench.
“You sick?” she asked.
I picked it up, ambled forward a couple of steps and the knee held, but with my nitrite levels dipping into the negative I was pretty woozy. The jar was warm, like it was full of hot chocolate.
“Anywhere I can dump this out?”
“Just out here on the grass,” said Alice, and stepped back to let me by.
Tall dry wildflowers that I hadn’t noticed before swayed beside the shed. I threw my sick over them in a long arc.
Then I felt Alice’s frying pan connect with the back of my head, and for that eighth of a second, as all light faded to a pinpoint, I could smell what she’d been cooking.
Bacon, my lips nearly said.
I let Josie and Ray ride yellow bicycles across the blankness. But then Josie rang the silver bell on her handlebar, and that sent a message: my wrists were tied with prickly ropes, and my ankles with a smooth nylon polymer, all four with sufficient tension for me to know, even before I opened my eyes, that Alice—if that was really her name—had me royally incapacitated. I heard a distant whinny, then another, but she’d said she had a horse, and it wasn’t even strange that she should treat blatant intruders so unkindly. The back of my super-soldier head felt a glassy calm.
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