All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  I crashed through the first red door, key card in my apprenticing left hand, my right reaching for the next handle, when I stepped on something, slid a yard and landed flat on the back of my head. My coat hangers went fwannnnggg like a tuning fork.

  I’d stepped on Pastemouth’s hand, flattened it, but I could still make out the little centaur tattoo.

  I limped through the last door but saw nobody at the window. Something had happened. I swiped the card, a green light blinked, the latch clicked. I tugged the door open.

  Colleen stood in front of me, gnawing the end of her finger as tears streamed down her face. Clint and Megan crouched behind her with their arms around each other. Megan blinked up at me, teeth chattering, but Clint kept his head buried in her hair. There was a mound of multicolored clothes at the back of the dark cell, and the place smelled astringent like a cider mill.

  “Doo lade,” I said.

  A bare arm lay between Colleen’s feet.

  peace out coppers * * this is franny’s left arm

  “I guess so,” said Colleen. “Don’t come in.” She extended a gray hand toward my badly wired face. “Is it okay if we touch you?”

  I held my arms out and she wrapped her entire body around my ribs. She steered me back into the hallway.

  “We’ve been saying prayers. We knew we’d die in there,” she said to my chest. “We knew they’d stopped you. Can we go now?”

  “As fah as I know, e’rybody’s dead foh fiddy mile a’ound.”

  “Maybe one of them was the one who killed Doug.”

  She looked up at me, our bodies tight together from top to bottom. I must’ve had breath like a bile duct.

  “Can you take all that stuff off your head?” she asked.

  “Nod yed.”

  The cell door clicked shut behind her and I had to swipe it again. Clint came out draped over Megan’s shoulder, his head down.

  “Do you wan do ’ery heh? In da ground?”

  “No,” said Megan. “We want to leave.”

  The two of them staggered out through the red door. Colleen kept her arms around my waist.

  “I wad do dake all da ’odies away frah heah, so no’ody can do dests on deh.”

  “What happened to those poor guys who were screaming at us before?”

  “All dead. Harr is dead too.”

  “Oh my god—Harvey was here?”

  “Yeh,” I said, and I made my throat relax so it wouldn’t catch. “He was.”

  She walked out ahead of me. We’d have to find some bacon in the mobile home’s fridge, before my jaw fell off again.

  And my own kids?

  The bigger logs started to crackle, the iron stove creaking as the heat pushed from the inside, so I threw the bacon in the pan but it wasn’t hot enough to sizzle yet.

  “Isn’t a yellow car on the whole property.” Colleen picked something out of her ear, inspected it. “Fuck. I’ll take a shower.”

  “Ight be cold,” I said. “Dere’s no hindow.”

  “Those two found a wheelbarrow out there.”

  As Megan and Clint passed the window, I flopped down at the desk, opened Carver’s laptop and fumbled for the power switch. The Microsoft logo and various start-up screens went by, then my breath caught in my throat. Carver’s desktop photo showed Ray Lewis stretching for that interception against Pittsburgh from Week 4 back in 2010.

  None of the desktop icons said cure for zombies. I tried a little blue shield marked ops, assuming that meant secret operations, and a window popped up asking for a user name and password so I couldn’t open it. But the heading across the top of that log-in window?

  contractor interface

  federal bureau of investigation

  I spotted a Word icon called penzler giller which sounded exciting, but of course it wasn’t, or it would’ve been inside the secure file. This was a questionnaire.

  Since your exposure, have you had cravings for any particular food?

  Is it conceivable that you might one day be defeated in a fight?Barehanded?

  With any particular weapon?

  Toward whom is your rage primarily directed?

  On behalf of your country, would you at any future date be willing to jump from an airplane at 500 feet without benefit of a parachute?At 2000 feet?

  At 10,000?

  To which enemy of the United States do you feel your aggression might most effectively be directed?

  Whoever had written the questions knew a lot about pink goo, maybe Carver himself, or Carver via Penzler. All phrased in administration-speak like minutes from a school trustees meeting—that was the soulless crap that would kill the world, not any mad scientist formula. I heard the shower running then got up to turn my bacon—of course I wanted it to burn, but evenly.

  I opened the desk’s top drawer and found a bottle of chewable vitamin C, a blue asthma inhaler, a couple of UHU glue sticks and, even better, a white Burger King takeout bag containing my wallet, the mummified pinkie of my right hand and Alice’s telegram—all green lights in terms of our getting somewhere.

  In the next drawer, I found credit cards and a checkbook issued to Josh Q. Carver by a Capital One in Indianapolis, and his record in the back showed checks written to Andy’s Mobile Oil Change, to the Indiana Bell Telephone Company and to Gary Yeung for “FBI chores.” Josh Q. Carver had deftly shoved my life up my ass but also supplemented his income with curbside lemonade and light babysitting.

  In the driveway Clint and Megan threw dog-parts into the blue wheelbarrow—neither kid vomited, just gathered hairy scraps in their fingers like they were twenty-year veterans of the profession. We were chemically hardened for the battlefield and hardly ever phoned home to Mom.

  I noticed a cell phone behind the laptop, then I was typing in 411.

  “Ohio infor’ation, please,” I said.

  I had to concentrate on where my tongue was in my mouth, but I was comprehensible. The Nebraska operator gave me a free Ohio number to call.

  “Preston, please,” I said into the phone. “Penzler. Is a res’dence.”

  The mobile home’s pipes gave a thud as Colleen shut off the shower. The phone hummed in my ear. I wanted Alice to pick up so I’d know she wasn’t still stretched in the dirt.

  “No,” I told the operator. “No, what I wan is a res’dence. Really? Huh. Okay.”

  No Penzler. That was probably the same for anybody with a corporation named after them, but then how were their daughters going to meet boys?

  In any case, the world still needed Natalia.

  I pulled up the Travelocity website and a blinking cursor asked where I’d like to fly from, then to where. I selected from the list of possible connections between LNK and SLO, then the next cursor asked how many travelers would be flying. I dragged down to 2. Then to 4. Then back up to 1. A screen came up asking for payment and Carver’s MasterCard was close to hand, then I wrote the confirmed departure time on a napkin.

  Colleen wandered out, her hair wrapped in a SpongeBob Square-Pants towel.

  “That’s better,” she said, though her simmering eyes hinted that no longer being a zombie would be better still. “What’d you book?” She was gazing at the laptop. “We going somewhere?”

  “California,” I said slowly. “Penzler’s daughter’s getting cured.”

  “When’d you find that out?”

  “Penzler’s ouse.”

  “And you never said?”

  “Never ad a chance.”

  “I guess, okay. Who’d you get tickets for?”

  “Everybody,” I lied.

  Eating bacon would be easier with the coat hangers off my head, so after I showered I wiped a hole in the mirror steam and stared at myself while I unwound the wires. So many plastic tendrils had spread in front of my ears, stitching my head back together, that it look
ed like I’d grown white sideburns. I resembled Martin Van Buren, eighth President of the United States, with blood spattered all down his presidential neck and one side of his face. I took a washcloth to my boots in the sink, then traded my shredded grandpa’s shirt and Hummer’s trousers for the charcoal dress pants hanging from the back of the bathroom door. Carver’s white Diet Pepsi T-shirt and green button-down were also unblemished by blood. Clean-living guy.

  I inspected my right shoulder where it had reattached.

  “If we’re taking a plane somewhere,” Colleen said behind me, “we need to pull those nails out.”

  I wrapped myself around the doorjamb while she set the claw over a nail.

  “Oh,” flushed Megan said from the doorway. “You guys are busy.”

  “Could take a little while, honey,” Colleen said through her teeth. “You done?”

  “No. But Clint keeps crying.”

  The nail slowly gave way, sounding like the last of a milkshake coming up a straw. She set the bottom of her bare foot against my hip. Her heel felt like a rasp.

  “I can’t watch this,” said Megan.

  “Got three more in my knee!”

  Under the checkbook I finally found the truck’s keys. We were fed and ready.

  But they left it to me to put the dead kids in the camper—Megan had managed to wrap Franny’s head in that chocolate-stained serape, and as I lifted it out of the wheelbarrow I saw where she’d scrawled everybody wants peace with a ballpoint, in the sprawling letters of a first-grader. And everybody did want that, but you can’t sit in your house in Hoover and wait for it, especially if your house has burnt down.

  Her torso was all one piece, still in T-shirt and underwear, and once that was in the camper I lifted out her limbs one at a time, the ends crusted over with what might’ve been old Dimetapp. I wondered if months of footage out of the Congo had desensitized me to such things or if it was the super-soldier serum, then I wondered whether it would be appropriate to send her father a piece or two—I pictured a wispy-bearded guy cooking in a mr. good-lookin is cookin apron, surprised by the package in the mail. I smiled, which felt crinkly on my Martin Van Buren face. You realize how little you knew a person when you’re holding her downy-haired arm and it isn’t attached to anything else.

  The last piece was her left leg. In his narrow printing Clint had written i love franny’s left thigh, right on the back where she’d never read it. Unless she’d seen it drop away, and it’d been the last thing she’d ever read.

  “Sucks,” I said to the dog crap smeared across the table leg.

  With the remains of the six adult males stacked in the three bunks, I wrapped Harv in the shower curtain and lay him in the middle of the floor.

  I took our last square of bacon and set it on Harv’s tongue.

  Five minutes beyond Carver’s we rolled past the clapboard houses of Inavale, Webster County, Nebraska, then east along 136. I would’ve bet cash money that the truck’s radio would be on a bluegrass station, but Colleen made no move to click it on. We sat in silence as Clint steered with his wrist propped over the wheel, four pairs of unfocused eyes trained on the pin-straight road and snow swirling across the pavement, Colleen clenching Megan’s hands, my jaw and wrist recapitulating in the spirit of twenty-first-century military science as I pressed my head against the cold window. It was tight, four of us across the cab, but even after we’d pitched the corpses out nobody wanted to ride in the camper.

  “Know what I kept telling her?” Clint steered lazily toward the shoulder, then back toward the line. “I said, ‘What happened to the jail guy will not happen to us.’ And then …”

  Megan was nodding.

  I shut my eyes and felt the drift of snow flatten under us, and for the first time I wondered what I’d do if Natalia refused to come home.

  At the end of our second hour we were still inhaling each other’s sawdust, but we were coming into Beatrice—19 years winner of the tree city usa growth award—and saw green signs reading lincoln 40 miles and pawnee city/falls city exit only. Colleen jerked against my shoulder like she’d stirred from a coma.

  “Not far to Pawnee City here,” she said. “Oh, and Lincoln! Say again how many plane tickets you bought?”

  “Enough for everybody.”

  Megan extricated her sweaty hand from her mother’s. “Don’t they check id?”

  “Does anybody have id?” asked Colleen.

  “I guess if we have time,” Clint murmured, “we could go to the factory and give them our bad news. I dunno.”

  Because he thought PBF still existed.

  “We’ll think of something,” I said. “We’ll manage. What’s this coming?”

  A plywood sign stood over the highway:

  open 363 d ys a year!

  you will love our “rides”

  zagat’s adventue world

  Beside it, a sagging amusement park stood in front of snowy wheat fields—the rides might have been painted fuchsia and teal but under that ceiling of cloud everything was gray.

  “Place must be a gold mine,” said Clint.

  But maybe it’d give me an opportunity—when else would I be able to bolt? Coming west with me would kill them, one hundred percent of studies had proven it.

  “Let’s stop.” I tapped the window with a knuckle. “I want to see it.”

  None of them said anything, but Clint slowed down and turned his flicker on. He had a yellow shoelace, patterned with jesus in red letters, twined around his finger.

  “I feel like Harv would want to see it,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Especially if he could throw stuff and win prizes,” said Megan.

  “But shouldn’t we just keep going?” Colleen took her daughter’s hand again. “What if there’s airport hassles? We’ll need time, and we can’t get split up anymore. I was so busy trying to kill somebody, I hardly even noticed you were back, I’m serious.”

  “No, Mom, it made sense that you—”

  “No.” She got an even better grip on Megan’s hand. “I’m not looking to kill anybody ever again, and we need a real plan for the airport.”

  It was getting too convincing—had to remind myself that they weren’t coming. I rubbed my shoulder against hers.

  “My brain’s too tired for that kind of scheming.”

  We bumped across a parking lot half-full with trucks and long Pontiacs. A long burgundy van read pawnee city masonic temple seniors express.

  “Jeez,” Clint said blandly. “Almost back to Pawnee City. How far away’s it?”

  “Probably thirty-odd miles.”

  “This seems like a lot of customers,” Colleen sighed. “It’s a Tuesday in November.”

  A twenty-foot fiberglass figure creaked over us, his fist full of glitter-painted lightning bolts, swallows flitting from under his rust-streaked beard.

  king zeus welcomes you

  to our world of zadventures

  seniors day mon–tues

  “Must be a lot of old people here on dates,” I said.

  “That sounds kind of nice,” said Colleen.

  “Who has money to get in?” asked Megan.

  I was the only one with a wallet, but Patrick and Pimples must’ve helped themselves to my cash. Colleen opened the glove box—a roll of bills sat wedged between a bottle of Famous Grouse and the wet wipes. It was all fifties and hundreds.

  “I call Ferris wheel,” Megan said quietly.

  “Never failed, at the wrecking yard,” said Colleen. “Cash in the glove box.”

  She passed me half the pile and I shoved it in my pants.

  “What wrecking yard?”

  “We run Avery Salvage back in Hoover. Jesus, the guys must be thinking I’ve—”

  “And you run the Farmers Mutual?”

  “We’ll call our screenplay Avery S
alvage,” said Clint. “That’s perfect.”

  “And that’s why you know every make of yellow sports car?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” she said wearily. “They’re the most likely to be wrapped around a telephone pole.”

  Then she didn’t scrutinize a single vehicle, just stumbled toward the park with an arm around poor Megan. Maybe she would be able to go back to living with regular people without kicking their asses. Zeus swayed over us, waiting to rain havoc on the unsuspecting.

  Around the first corner we found a padlocked concession stand called the Zucchini Zone, then a little kid’s carousel called Zebra Crossing. Toddlers with mullets straddled plastic zebras and blue-assed mandrills while grandparents in acid-wash jeans orbited the thing, taking pictures and hollering.

  “You keep a hold now, Tyler! All right, TJ!”

  “Here’s the ride for you, Megan,” said Clint.

  The four of us stood staring like we’d staggered out of a crashed elevator, but Clint still had his capacity for nasty—well, we probably all did. that’s the zombie advantage! the billboards would say.

  How was I going to make my break? The tattooed teenager running the ride was busy picking his lower lip, so I turned to the grandma next to me as she rolled a cigarette.

  “Do we buy tickets around here?”

  “Right around the, uh.” She motioned with her head. “Ziggurat.”

  Our two kids had an increasing spring in their step. We walked past the boarded-up Zodiac Hot Dog Stand, horned Aries emerging from a bun on its awning. Floating through an oddball dream, though for once I knew how a dream was going to end. At least I’d be leaving them with a few hundred bucks. Megan pointed out a ticket booth the size of an outhouse, labeled Zagat Zookeeper.

  “Tickets? How many?” a guy yelled from inside, voice muffled like his head was in a picnic cooler. “Ten rides for thirty-three dollars, that’s the special!” Right down to his yellow sou’wester hat, he was imitating a lobster fisherman. “Also popcorn balls, but they’re a week old, things’ll pull your fillings out!”