All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  “You smed like Sunday ham!” Pastemouth announced.

  “Oh.” I smelled like Sunday ham?

  I jumped to my feet and, before he could do the same, I swung the bag of fertilizer and walloped him across the side of the head.

  “Gah!”

  He reared up and clubbed me across the face with the back of his good hand. I fell down across his old hand and arm, and it seemed like a good idea to throw them at him, but his hand flew out the hole into the hallway.

  “You hear something?” asked Colleen’s voice. “Fighting again.”

  “Collee!” I shouted. “Ih Heeda!”

  Pastemouth kicked me in the sternum and I went down on my behind, but even with my left hand tied in a sleeve I was still strong from eating fertilizer, though it was kicking my intestines like I was nine months pregnant.

  Colleen asked, “Did he say Peter?”

  Pastemouth blinked his Doberman eyes then jumped at me again, so I tugged Carver’s gun out of my belt and buried the butt in the top of his head. His skull was soft as cheese. He dropped to the floor beside Toby. “Collee?” I yelled at the vent. “Kick da wah!”

  “The what?” That sounded like Colleen and Clint.

  “De wah!”

  The wall above Pastemouth gave a dull thud.

  “Okay,” I said. “Ih kahing!”

  As I crawled out of the hole, I felt something hot trickle down the inside of my thigh. I’d crapped myself. Commercial fertilizer was not the zombies’ great way forward.

  “Giller!” yelled Clint’s tinny voice. “Franny has to get out of here!”

  “Yeah,” I called meekly.

  I’d been unfazed by the demise of Lars’s whispering head but figured the world had ended because I’d pooped my pants. Why does diarrhea need to smell so sour? Pastemouth was too big around the middle but I managed to get Hummer’s pants off without his legs coming too. In the gloom, I got the guy’s underpants too, then wiped myself with my former trouser leg. A minute, two.

  Then I remembered to pull the gun out of the twenty pounds of butter that was Pastemouth’s head, because I was going to need it to fight the United States Army.

  “Peter,” I heard her say through the vent.

  The blue door led to a corridor lined with four steel doors with a square window in each, and Colleen, Megan and Clint had their faces flat against the second one like they’d been pressed onto a slide for a microscope. I might’ve worried they were asphyxiating if it hadn’t been for all the yelling.

  Franny, they were all saying. They were gray skinned like they’d been painted with grease.

  “Jesus Christ!” choked Colleen. “What happened to you?”

  “I’d okay.” I put my hands to the glass. “Where ih she?”

  “Here!” Megan had two black eyes. “Get her out of here!”

  I tugged the big metal handle but the door felt welded shut. A black plastic slot sat against the doorframe.

  “Key card!” yelled Clint.

  “It needs the key card.” Colleen put her hands against mine, just the glass between us. “One of the beard guys has it!”

  “Where dey?”

  “Maybe out in that yard!”

  I ran out through the blue door. So long as one of them was dying I couldn’t be excited that three of them were alive. I barreled through the flickering red door, leading with my shoulder, then in the dark hallway I could see the yellow one ahead of me. I threw the deadbolt back and opened the door a quarter-inch. Light burst in. Blinking hard, I reached back to tug Carver’s gun from my belt.

  Snow at the bottom of the wooden stairs, and every footprint walked away to the left—the path just led around the corner of the building. It sure didn’t seem like 1,855 personnel were on-site, but Carver hadn’t been all by himself. Was that a dog barking? I closed the door gently because somewhere there was at least one guy with a beard.

  Wind whistled through my coat hangers and the snow under my boots crunched as loud as potato chips so I made sure to step in the icy, silent tracks that had been stomped down already. I was hurrying for the key card but had to keep from being disemboweled in the meantime. I peered around the corner—Carver’s building was only eighteen feet wide like the portable we’d used for drama class at Champlain High.

  I tiptoed the eighteen feet and looked past the next corner. The building formed one side of a compound, along with a beat-up green pickup truck with Nebraska plates and a camper on the back, a mobile home with smoke rising from its tin chimney, and the chain-link fence meeting at a padlocked gate. A road ran past, dusted with snow, and barking dogs were very nearby.

  “Got out, did you, little terrorista?”

  Two burly guys in camouflage vests strolled up behind me, shotguns over their elbows—they’d been walking the perimeter after all. One definitely had a beard.

  “Ouch!” he said. “What’d our boy do to you?”

  “You ha do o’en da doah!” I yelled.

  “Don’t be funny,” he said. “One day you’ll get a fair trial, ’til then—”

  I lifted the pistol and shot him through the beard. He raised a hand to his throat as a line of blood squirted onto the snow, like I’d shot a can of soda. The dogs kept barking behind me. Now the key card.

  But the second burly guy, with pimples between his eyes, opened his mouth and lifted his shotgun. I threw myself backward past the corner of the portable a half-second before he fired—plastic siding turning to confetti—and landed on my back on the hard snow. I’d lost Carver’s pistol. Pimples loomed over me as I skittered away on my back, picturing the chunks of me raining onto the snow. He lifted the shotgun but instead of firing he just kept lifting it, then brought it down on my head. That knocked me down on my side.

  For Franny I needed to get up and find the key card.

  “Your head’s fucked up!” said Pimples. “Let’s get you locked in here, how about that? Patrick, boy, you all right back there?”

  No answer from Patrick. Just the barking, and snow crunching under Pimples’ boots as he dragged me by the collar toward the mobile home. Carver’s jacket dug in under my jaw and I tried to swallow but totally couldn’t. A screen door creaked open. And now a noise like an engine from somewhere.

  “Check my amigo, see what the man says to do with you,” Pimples muttered. He dragged me over the doorframe, then green linoleum, then onto a pile of kindling. “Lay still here a minute, I won’t crack you another one. Aw, shit, now what?”

  Even over the barking from outside I could hear the clatter of a motorcycle. The greasy ass of Pimples’ jeans stomped past me.

  “Sleep it off, motherfucker, you’ve got about two—”

  The door slammed behind him then he bolted it, from the sound, locking me in with a fridge and woodstove and a laptop and stacks of papers—this was obviously where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be meeting on Tuesday. Pimples wasn’t familiar with a zombie’s constitution. The corner of my forehead throbbed where the shotgun had come down but I shambled to my feet and leaned over the desk to look out the window, half-dead flies buzzing along the sill. Even through the grime, I could see the yard.

  A motorcyclist in black had pulled up outside the gate, waving a thick yellow envelope, his face covered by helmet and visor. Pimples, shotgun in the crook of his elbow, shoved a key in the padlock. He unlooped the chain then reached through for the envelope. And did the rider hand it across then disappear down the road? No, he hit the throttle, rammed the gate and came tearing across the yard straight toward the portable. A Penzler elite ape, or maybe just Gary dorking around. He’d nearly passed the edge of my window when Pimples’ shotgun coughed a yellow flame. The rider flew sideways off the bike, spraying plastic helmet shards, and the bike skidded away without him. My buddy in black—he wasn’t any crony of Pimples’—lay sprawled like a banana peel.

&nbs
p; The barking dogs must’ve been in the camper because it rocked like they had the whole thing between their jaws. Pimples wandered up from the gate, methodically loading a fresh shell into the shotgun’s breech.

  And I needed the key card no matter what those two did. I reeled to the kitchenette and threw open the drawers but all I found were spoons and a potato peeler, and I wasn’t going to chop through any doors with those. I grabbed the peeler anyway and ran back to the window. The tough-bastard rider was sitting up, his arms propped across his knees, while Pimples stood over him, shaking his head like they were talking about the real-estate downturn. The helmet had a ragged chunk out of the back so it looked like the half-built Death Star. The rider flopped sideways onto the snow and I figured that was it, Pimples’ work was done, but then the rider sat straight up again, fiddling with the strap under his chin like he had ants in his helmet, while Pimples marched across to the truck without even looking back at him. The helmet came off and the rider threw it away across the snow.

  It was Harv Saunders.

  “Havvah!” I shouted, slapping the glass.

  He didn’t budge from where he sat. His head was bloody. As Pimples stood behind the camper I could only see him from the knees down—the legs took a step to the right then three dogs bounded down onto the snow, beelining for Harv. He climbed to his feet but then the first dog took the back of his arm between its teeth.

  Down Harv went.

  The dogs were all pit bulls, white with brown patches. The other two piled on and pieces of Harv and his clothes started to fly.

  I pounded the window, dropped my peeler. I ran to the door, pulling back on the knob, but the thing might as well have been the wall. I unzipped Carver’s awful fucking jacket, took it off my right arm then gently extricated the left—the poor hand was still balled in a fist but I thought hard and the fingers started to open. Jesus, how long was Harv going to last? Or Franny? My wrist looked like crushed tomatoes but it had these white filaments running through it. I looked at the kindling and realized there had to be a hatchet, out back, a weapon, so I circled the woodstove and found another door, a bathroom, with a frosted glass window over the toilet. I gripped the sides of the frame—with both hands—and kicked the window out into the snow.

  I had to tumble through sideways, falling onto a couple of trash cans. I was out of the mobile home but on the opposite side from Harv. I could hear the dogs still chewing him, and then how long before Pimples blew his brains out? I got to my feet, and under a blue tarp there was a woodpile with a black-handled hatchet stuck into the chopping block. I tugged it out. Its weight in my hand felt perfect. My brain showed me Colleen’s gray face up against the glass.

  I crashed through flats of beer cans, then out into the yard, around the truck and camper—I had to squint like hell, the prairie was so bright. Pimples stood with his back to me, watching the show while two dogs tugged Harv’s arms in opposite directions like they were opening a Dickensian Christmas cracker, and the third darted in to bite his groin. He’d been torn above his right hip so a loop of intestine lay beside him in the snow. He raised his head.

  “Screw off,” he called weakly. They’d already taken half his face, so no part of him was easy to look at.

  “Har-la!” I yelled.

  Pimples turned, the gun only beginning to swing in my direction as I brought the hatchet down through his collarbone—the assholes happened to own the sharpest hatchet in the world. As he dropped to his knees, the shotgun pivoted upward and went off. I felt the heat against my elbow, no harm done, but Pimples’ left hand spiraled off through the crisp air to slap against the camper door. It left a wet handprint.

  He screamed like he was auditioning. He pressed the stump of his wrist to his chest, then fell flat on his back and lay still. Blood sprayed across his face from his wrist—real, unmodified blood will do that. His groans slowed down like somebody’d unplugged his record player. I tried to pull the hatchet out of his collarbone but only lifted his shoulders off the ground. The bones pinched from either side. So I stepped on his chest, hurrying, and brought the hatchet out with another spray across the snow.

  “Carver’s the tough fucker.” Pimples looked up at me. “He’ll gut you.”

  Then his eyes rolled back in his head. I figured that was shock. After all of the pieces that had fallen off me, I’d forgotten what was supposed to happen when part of a person came off. The ground looked like a jam factory had exploded.

  “Hip hip,” Harv said. “Hooray.”

  One pit bull had his arm and another his leg, shaking them like they meant to break their necks—luckily for Harv those limbs weren’t attached to him. The third dog looked tired as it dragged him by the arm across the yard. So when was I supposed to tell Harv that Amber and Grace were dead?

  “Mr. Giller, hey,” he murmured.

  The dog with the leg dropped it and stood looking at me, its eyes microscopic, his mouth giant and wide—the shark’s mammalian cousin—then lowered its purple-frothed muzzle and ran for me and jumped, almost faster than my eyes could follow, lips curled back—it was an ugly piece of shit!—and I sidestepped just enough to bury the hatchet in the bone between its ear and eyeball. It dropped to the snow like I’d pulled its electrical cord out of the wall. That left the other two, pink-eyed, running at me from opposite sides. I dropped to the snow beside Pimples and tugged the shotgun out from under him, my good right hand already on the trigger. But my left hand had to pump the stock. All I could see down the barrel was a dog’s black mouth. I threw my left elbow back, the stock slid and clicked. I pulled the trigger. The dog’s head flew apart like ground beef thrown into a fan.

  I pumped again and fired the second barrel at the last dog, but nothing came out but a breeze. I sat up and stuck a leg out in front of me, so instead of my throat the dog took my shin in its mouth. I lifted the shotgun high, as Pimples had taught me, then clubbed the thing across the eyes. It just blinked at me with those tiny lashless things and ground me even harder between its teeth.

  “Good bie,” I reassured it.

  I reached back and jerked Pimples’ camouflage jacket open—he wore a fluorescent vest underneath, stocked neatly with shells. But they were jammed tight in their loops so I had to lay the gun in my lap and hold the vest steady with my creaking left hand. The dog dragged me across the yard toward the gate, one foot back, another, so while I held tight to the vest, Pimples slid with us too, ridiculously. The dog produced so much drool I was wet to the ass of my pants. I’d loved Keister, but not this dog.

  Finally I tugged a shell free, let go of Pimples and lay on my back as the dog slid me across the snow. I slid the shell into the breech then pulled the pump back without any trouble. I set the barrel against the dog’s shoulder. Franny was still waiting.

  “Here bie,” I said.

  The jaws clenched tighter as I pulled the trigger, so I wavered to my feet and dragged the half-a-dog and myself over to the first one, with the hatchet through its head.

  “Cool,” muttered what-was-left-of-Harv.

  I stepped on the snout to provide enough leverage to yank the hatchet free. Then along with my pet dog I limped over to Harv. Even his guts spilled in all directions didn’t make the sinew and bone and grimacing teeth of his face any easier to look at—I guess the face is a person’s main thing. I knelt beside him.

  “Hey, kid,” I managed to say.

  “I’m fucked up,” he said softly.

  “Nah, yuh be okay. We heal okay.”

  Though his bare arm still showed those cigarette welts.

  I went to work on my dog’s jaws, pulling the folds of lip back then prying the slimy back teeth apart with the hatchet’s handle.

  “Don’t bother, Mr. Giller.”

  “I sure a-heciate yuh co’ing here,” I said.

  “It’s cool.”

  The hatchet handle was too thick to go between the t
eeth.

  “Car was leaking oil,” he murmured. “Took a real long time. I went to get you after a long time and a car was in the yard. So weird. This Chinese guy put Franny in the back! I jumped behind the tree. She’s okay now, she’s here someplace?”

  “Ranny? She hine,” I said.

  So he’d somehow shadowed Gary all the way here? I still saw Colleen’s face against the glass. Could I fit the blade between its teeth?

  “Cut off the snout,” Harv muttered.

  “Oh, hey,” I said.

  I twisted my knee around so the angle would be right. Of course it would’ve been a shorter route to have chopped through the lower jaw but he’d said snout, I thought snout. Funny how the brain doesn’t work. With the first chop there was a spurt of blood.

  “I had this awesome idea,” Harv whispered, “for a movie. Zombies like us are sent to this jail…”

  “We art zom’ies,” I said. “Don’t eat rains.”

  As I went on thwacking I concentrated on his every word. I was tired of dogs.

  “There’s zombies and normal people in there. And the zombies don’t get bacon so their arms’ll fall off. So we take up less space. So more of us can go into one cell. Then a zombie survives the electric chair. Then all the guys on death row want to be zombies. They really want to.”

  I’d nearly chopped through to the top teeth.

  “We cah turn so’one into a zomhie?”

  “If my dad came,” he said, “I’d mess him up.”

  I straightened up, hatchet dangling.

  “Nah, Harr. You nah lie dat.”

  “I guess,” his teeth said. “Are we the last two?”

  “Colleen and guys are insie.”

  “Oh,” he said. He was looking at the sky, eyes wide open. “Good.”

  Then I watched for a full minute, but his one eyelid didn’t flicker.

  Of the many dead things on that property, Patrick had to be the tidiest—he just had a hole in his throat and a beard and clothes matted with blood, his camouflage ball cap rolling in the wind beside him. Inside his jacket I found the card on a Farmers Mutual key fob.