“Zombie!” a man’s voice barked out. “Line up for attendance!”
I knocked against Colleen’s shoulder and peered into the ambulance: our gurney had disappeared and the four kids lay on their faces on the rubber floor. None of the kids so much as wiggled. A hefty guy, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, grinned at us as he crouched over them in his tan suit.
“I’m James Jones, Mr. Giller. Put down the hams.”
The kids were ants and Jones was the jerk with the magnifying glass—I ought to have come to Penzler alone. I’d always cleaned up messes by myself, right? But my legs were cemented like fence posts, and I couldn’t make my fingers let go of the hams. I’d been ready to hop to California on one foot, but this bullshit dropped a blanket over me.
“Two-by-four,” Colleen murmured. “He’s a dead man.”
Jones lifted Megan’s hands behind her back—her wrists had been cuffed together with plastic zip ties—then he dropped them like overcooked asparagus.
“High school kids, they love their Rohypnol. Here, maybe this’ll calm you down.” He pressed a black handgun to the back of Megan’s neck. “I said drop what you’re carrying.”
“I am calm,” I said, dry-mouthed. “You don’t need to do that.”
But Colleen only made fists, and I thought of the Preston gas station and how many different ways she was going to get shot. Behind me, an ape on hands and knees reached up to extricate the plastic bag. The wrench and gun were lifted out. There was more movement and I felt a pinch in my neck, but I didn’t twitch because point-blank to the back of the neck might’ve been more than even Megan could take.
“That’s the first of them!” said a gas mask at my shoulder.
My legs went woozy. The apes turned to Colleen.
“That’s real good,” smiled Jones. “And let’s maintain that perimeter.”
“Megan?” Colleen called, though Megan was unconscious. “Stay there, baby!”
She did a dive roll beside the woodpile and came up with a two-by-four in her hands. She bounded toward the ambulance and I figured Jones had eight seconds to live—he threw an arm up in front of his face like he’d forgotten the gun. As Colleen whooped like a baboon, two guys materialized on either side of her, one grabbing the board, the other jamming something into her shoulder. She shuffled forward a step then pitched forward onto her face.
“The excitable type,” said Jones.
Her back arched then she lay still. Jones wiped his palms with a hankie.
“Giller, you stroll around front, we’ll strap you in up there. We doctored this cocktail for you zombies especially, so you’ve got thirty seconds before you zonk out.”
I set one foot in front of the other. Couldn’t risk the kids getting hurt.
“Something moving back there,” a ventilator announced.
“All right, all right!” Jones was taking Colleen’s limp elbows as they loaded her in the back. “Keep that perimeter solid! They might’ve brought fifty of these people!”
I must’ve had a different angle than the apes, because I looked toward McCauley Road and there was Alice astride a big black-and-gray horse, the famous Shamanski, trotting up from beside the ditch. Tendons flexing in her arms, Alice looked so beautiful with that blue sky behind her. Here she came to swoop me away.
The air cracked. Shamanski reared up, baring teeth.
“Shit!” yelled the ventilators. “Hold your fire!”
Alice had fallen below the skittering hooves, her whole belly suddenly a wondrous tomato-red. Black elbows flapped as apes raced toward her.
“All right, zombie shit,” Jones said pleasantly. He gripped my arm to guide me onto the passenger seat—my wrists had been cuffed. “Let’s get you someplace private.”
I watched an ape take Shamanski’s reins and another sit beside Alice and lift her head into his lap. She stared right at me through their grove of legs. The deal stands, she was saying, because why else would she have kept staring?
“Hey, there, man!” Some kid behind the wheel with a penzler ball cap and a scar cut across both lips. He grinned like a fellow son of Nebraska. “Welcome aboard!”
We drove between muddy little farms and small-engine repair shops with yards full of rusting crap. Jones was hauling us away from Penzler’s so he could kill us anonymously out in the boonies. I could picture it so well that my chest got tight, right out to my armpits, but all I could do was simmer like a pan of onions.
It was 905 miles from Preston, Ohio, to the pale-blue bedrooms where Josie and Ray slept in MacArthur, Nebraska, but I would never drive that distance. It was over.
But it wasn’t going to end in the boonies—we turned onto 91a and slowed down at the Lamplighter Motel, rolled past the black tarp and yellow police tape that covered the front of seventeen, then drove all the way around the back to twenty-five. The day was steel-gray overcast now, and the air flecked with snow.
“What’re you doing to the kids in back?” I asked. “You going to hurt them?”
The driver shrugged; he’d be happy with anything he got for Christmas. I was breathing through my front teeth like an incensed mother badger.
Three Penzler apes opened the passenger door, grabbed my shoulders and hauled me down to the pavement. The line of parking spots was crowded with pristine pickups and suvs but without any sign of people—not even Chad and Pat creeping along with knives clenched between their teeth. The door to twenty-six opened and they shuffled me in. Instead of a double bed, a desk sat in the corner, and the spinning titles for WNBS-10 News flickered on the silent television.
Jones hustled in past me, lighting a cigarette.
“Come sit down, Giller.”
They uncuffed me and I staggered a step—the sedatives made me feel like I’d been hit with the flu. I wouldn’t be bursting through the roof.
“We’ll hash it out right after this,” said Jones, settling his backside on the desk.
He was addressing a lean Asian guy in a black tracksuit who was lounging on the couch, a Penzler guy scowling on either side of him. Maybe he was in trouble too. My apes sat me down in a steel-frame chair, then threaded my arms through the back somehow and cuffed my hands again.
“I only ever let girls tie me up,” I said.
“You sent me a fax,” said Jones, getting up from the desk.
“Yeah!” I tried to keep my head upright, my eyes focused on him. “You’re the douche who sniffed around my school. Probably pissed on my front door.”
“I’ll read you the fax.” Jones sat up on his desk—he was pretty spry for a heavier guy. “The handwriting’s awfully shaky but it appears to say, ‘Mr. James Jones. What the fuck do you want from me? Peter Giller.’ ” He lifted the paper over his head like it was a winning ticket. “Classic, isn’t it? That’s going in a ‘Do Not Destroy’ file, definitely. It came in three days ago, Thursday, but I just got it this morning. I went sailing on Thursday.”
“No,” I said. “You faxed me back.”
“Good God, you’re sharper than most! I’ve never sailed in my life, not one fathom or whatever those assholes would say. No, I only read you that because by now I bet you have a pretty good idea what it was that I wanted on Thursday. It’s obvious, right? I wanted you and your family to disappear so we wouldn’t have to deal with you the way we’re dealing with you now. And it would’ve been for the best for you if you had disappeared, it certainly would. You could have dispersed with some dignity then. Messy either way—fatal!—but you could’ve at least had the dignity.”
“Sorry, Chief,” said my scar-lipped driver, tiptoeing past me. “These came.”
Jones took the thick yellow envelopes and ripped the first open with his thumb. As he read, he rubbed the cigarette’s filter against his temple. The driver gave me a dimply smile as he went out, then my sluggish eyes lingered on the silent tv. did u.s. pay lra $10 million to
divert kinshasa supply-route attacks? The screen showed dusty palm trees, and a jeep so crammed with men and rifles it looked like a porcupine.
Then nebraska squatters: no survivors found. It cut to a long building on fire, framed by shards of night sky, the wet ground in front reflecting such a brilliant orange that it must’ve been painted for Halloween. Nebraska. The building’s silhouette could’ve been the PBF dormitory. It felt like all of my blood was moving into my face, and the cuffs stopped hurting.
4 am explosion. voice of lincoln, ne fd chief:
The shaky camera panned left to show a fire truck parked a couple of hundred feet away, just hosing down the ground—no effort made to save the building. Or anyone, my muddy brain calculated, who might’ve been inside. Firelight catching the airborne water looked like clouds of bugs.
bodies found in converted pig barn as well as nearby industrial building
I continued swallowing Jones’s cigarette smoke, sludgy pulse throbbing in the tops of my ears, just staring. What else could I have done? All of those PBF faces blurred together in my mind into one small frightened person.
vehicles on site traced to burroughs county, ne
The camera panned right as an orange burst spilled out of the dormitory and across the horizon, then the person with the camera must’ve turned away into the blackness, giving us occasional glimpses of his running legs. Flickering orange shapes dropped across the screen, and after a second I realized they were burning shingles.
Guys smelling of sour coffee strolled around the room, and I chewed the inside of my mouth and forgot any plans, any ambition, or Lydia, bacon or even my kids. I only watched as the shingles dropped like poisoned birds.
The picture cut to a grave-looking newscaster in a red blouse. The graphic over her shoulder showed a smoking barn, with the title lancaster co. disaster.
When had Amber last sent us a text, three-thirty?
After I’d told her, “It’s better you don’t come.”
But at least you drove five of them away with you, part of my brain whispered. Get out of this room. They need you now.
Strategy. Maybe if I got Jones mad it’d confuse him. My drugged neck had turned into a Slinky.
“You’re so concerned with keeping secrets,” I announced.
“Hey?” Jones set his envelopes down. “What’s that?”
“So.” I swallowed hard, trying to remember where I was and to not imagine the charred skin of Amber or Grace or even Arthur’s stupid dog. “Why’d you let a lot of schoolkids into your top-secret facility?”
“My gosh,” smiled Jones, shifting his backside, “that does seem like a contradiction, hey? You’re sharp as a…as, man, I don’t know what!”
“Shuriken,” the Asian guy suggested. “Sharp as a shuriken.”
“Sure, that sounds just fine!” Jones rubbed his jaw. “What is that, a shuriken?”
“Throwing star.” With a flick of his wrist, he mimed launching one. “Fwip.”
“My gosh, Gary, you know a little bit of everything,” said Jones.
“Jack of all trades,” the Asian guy agreed.
The tv had already cut to a dreadlocked Red Sox batter striking out, then spitting.
“What’re you doing to those people I was with?” I asked.
“Say, this is interesting for you, Giller—Gary here is the guy who burned your house down, isn’t that something? Now here you are like bugs in a rug!”
Jones grinned as though my dad and Gary’s had come over together on the Mayflower. Gary stretched his legs out and stared at his feet—he wore black Converse All Stars just like the high school kids. I forgot the dormitory burning down and remembered my own house.
“Gary,” I said. “Thanks for rigging them to go off when nobody was home.”
He glanced up at me a second, his mouth stiff as a slide rule.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“All right, a pair of kidders.” Jones slid off the desk and slowly circled my chair. “I haven’t answered you, Giller. Why’d we let schoolkids into Dockside if the product was so volatile? Because when you stop letting schoolkids in, that’s what a competitor notices—certainly we would notice if DuPont or 3M suddenly barred their gates—and that is when uninvited people start to poke their noses in.”
I was maintaining good posture but my eyelids felt heavy as sidewalks.
“But not people like me, supposedly. Like us.”
“Ah. You all must be the exception that proves the rule.”
“That expression’s never made a lick of sense to me.”
“Me neither. And yet...” He brought his fingertips to his lips, then spread his hands dramatically. “Here you are!”
He could’ve been a French 12 teacher, he liked to talk so much. He lifted a wallet from his desk—it looked like mine. Was Lydia still squirreled away inside? Jones held the driver’s license up, maybe comparing it to my present face.
“Taken just last March.” He grinned, which spread a roll of fat over his shirt collar. “Eighteen months ago you were a handsome man.” He dropped the wallet into a ziplock bag. “Yet three days ago you received my fax and promptly tried to bite off a gentleman’s ear, and seventeen hours after that you torched our head office and murdered thirty-five people.”
“I didn’t murder your head office.”
“I have footage of you at the scene. Helicopter cameras.”
“An hour after your place got murdered, I was still driving east across Indiana.”
“I really believe that with all of my heart.”
“You’ve got my ambulance, right?” I squirmed against the cuffs while I had a minute. That had to be the reason I was arguing. “Ashtray’s full of gas receipts, look—”
“Barney Jordan died that day. Our head of marketing. Twenty years with the company, right from when Kirk Penzler came back from Kuwait. Every year we show the staff an exceptionally good time at our Christmas party, and do you know what Barney wanted to see, ever since the ‘Enhanced Personnel’ project started sliding off the rails? He wanted to see one of you zombies fight a shark. Get a big tank of water, drop the two of ’em in, right there in the Ramada ballroom. hr never finished the paperwork but plenty of bets had already changed hands, so you know what? We’re still going to do it, zombie versus shark, in memory of Barney.”
Guys in dark suits started to wander in from all sides, slim guys and heavy guys, crowding. Maybe they’d all established their offices at the Lamplighter.
“You’ve been nominated to represent your species,” said Jones.
If I peered through the crowd of potbellies and three-button jackets, I could still glimpse Gary on the couch, staring at the ceiling and moving his lips like he was trying to remember his state capitals.
“Another two-fifty on the shark,” someone called.
Maybe it was because Gary was the only other guy not wearing a flack jacket or a business suit, but I liked the fucker. Even so, I figured if I had a card to play I’d better go ahead. Jones and a bearded guy stood over me, corners of their mouths twitching as they fought between poor grieving Barney and grinning at the prospect of seeing me chewed apart. Maybe there’d still be a finger and thumb left for them to mail to my kids.
“I spoke with an officer at the scene yesterday,” I announced. “Your office was torched with a series of explosive devices set the night before, which is exactly what happened to my house. And to all the houses torched in Hoover. Maybe even this place that burned down on the tv.” I nodded in that direction, my spine feeling more solid by the minute. “I wasn’t here to blow up your office and I wouldn’t have known how, right? What am I, special ops? So maybe you ought to look closer to home.”
Jones lost any semblance of a grin. He and the bearded guy narrowed their eyes at each other, then at Gary. But Gary wasn’t on the couch anymore. The Penzler gu
ys who’d been on either side of him sat slumped against each other, sound asleep with their mouths hanging open.
“The fuck?” said Jones.
In a heartbeat the Christmas-party enthusiasts quit crowding me like a soft-serve dispenser. They backed toward the walls. The apes who’d dragged me in stood in a corner, pistols drawn.
“Remember?” whispered the bearded guy. “I said, ‘Don’t meet him in person.’ ”
Jones was staring up, an unlit cigarette between his lips, so we all looked up. The ceiling panel above the couch had been removed and the resulting black rectangle wasn’t telling anybody what Gary was planning.
“Fucking contractors,” muttered Jones.
The overhead fluorescents blinked off and even though there was light through the curtains, the unnerved businessmen turned the air pretty blue, as my grandma used to say. Suddenly I was the one who couldn’t stop grinning. My body had woken up. All my pointless talk had accomplished something.
“Open the door!” someone yelled from behind the desk.
But nobody wanted to see what would happen to the first guy through.
Then my eyes were streaming from the rotten-egg smell permeating everything. I wiped my nose on my shoulder while the suits coughed and gagged. And then the door got opened! I could barely see through my own eyes, and on their way out the businessmen stumbled against me.
“Keep a hold of Giller!” Jones barked from the corner.
I realized that my cuffs had somehow separated from each other. I leaned forward and my arms came free of the chair.
“They’re in 28,” a quiet voice said in my ear. “Get up and walk out.”
I stumbled forward until I bumped into Jones’s desk, groping around until I found the ziplock bag. Then as a couple of suits stumbled for the door I threw my arms around their shoulders like we’d been dragging each other out of bars for years.
Outside I squinted at the parked cars and the businessmen leaning over to gag, wiping their eyes on their shirttails. Room 28 had to be to my right so I lurched along the stucco wall, coughing my guts out, until I looked up and saw the brass number. I twisted the knob but it was solid as brick.
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