All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  “Easy. Screwed more girls. Gravy on everything.” He nodded solemnly. “Wait with me another second. I’ll make it worth your while. Okay.”

  His eyes rolled away from me, and he tried to wipe yellow crud from his chin onto his shoulder. He still protected that cord in his right hand, though I couldn’t imagine who was going to hop in and unplug it.

  “Oops,” he said. “That doesn’t look correct.”

  My right knee had been up against my chest, but it’d flopped on the floor like a capital G, soft as an uncooked bratwurst.

  “Dudn’t,” I said, though I meant Doesn’t.

  I didn’t feel as calm about the end then as I had in the front yard. Because Alice and I had nearly made it out—it’s easier to relax when you’re confident every option has been exhausted.

  “You still get to have legs,” I murmured.

  “Nah. I’m done.”

  When my wife had been dying I’d sat beside the bed and stared at her face—there hadn’t been much left of her but at least the stuff they were putting in her arm relaxed her so she quit rolling her eyes back into her head. Night after night I watched where the shadows under each of her cheekbones came across to meet the wings of her nose in a perfect curve, and how the etched bag under each eye mirrored those curves, like nature had sculpted her in utero knowing how perfect her face would look when those last nights finally came. How perfect death could seem.

  I lifted my hand to my cheekbone.

  “You know what to do,” said Gary.

  He nudged the screwdriver with his foot. I took a deep breath while my lungs were still on my side.

  “Dif I was you,” I said, “hangin’ from ceilings, I’d keep sayin’ ‘Honored One’ all the dime.”

  Gary gazed at the far wall without blinking.

  “Funny you say that.” The corner of his mouth attempted a smile. “Because.”

  His head fell forward between his knees, then his whole body slumped against mine, like Keister used to do as he fell asleep.

  He’d pulled his a/c adapter out of the wall.

  Dust drifted down from the rafters and computers swayed on their tables. The wall behind us shook, Thud. Then Thud again—Penzler’s apes were making their own entrance, too scared of shuriken to use the regular doors.

  No sign of Alice.

  I looked down at the wet hemispheres of Gary’s brain against my right shoulder. His bright orange medulla oblongata was hidden below them, and according to that fucker Penzler it was full of A-1 Zombie Preservative, though I’d never been a zombie, right? There’s one thing zombies do that I’d never done.

  I reached across and picked up the screwdriver, my whole arm shaking like hell. Another minute and my nameless kids would never see me again unless it was as a head in a jar in a sideshow their sweethearts had dragged them to, spoiling their evening quicker than diarrhea.

  Thud, said the wall. Gary’s empty steel bands swung out a foot.

  I shut his eyes with the palm of my hand. Then I slid the sharp head of the screwdriver down into the fatty white stuff between his brain and the back of his skull, then dragged the screwdriver all the way around the perimeter like I was going to lift a cake out of its pan.

  The screwdriver came out again, slick with purple goo, and as I looked at it my arm started to bend back on itself like Plasticine. Stick with the job at hand. I’d have to lever those top halves out but didn’t want to spoil the medulla oblongata in the process—I figured it’d be near the back so I slid the screwdriver in just behind his right eye and jogged the handle until the suction around his brain let go, hissing like a soda bottle. I pushed the handle down flat and that right hemisphere lifted up as neat as a hatchback, but I realized I didn’t have another hand to pull it out.

  So I shuffled away and let Gary flop onto his side, then one more tilt of the screwdriver and that hemisphere toppled out. It was still connected to him with half-a-dozen gristly bits but the screwdriver tore those away, forever depriving Gary of his artistic nature.

  Then I could see the medulla oblongata at the bottom of his head, a bright orange thumb hitching a ride. I reached down and tugged at it but the thing was too wet and wired in, so I stabbed at either end with the screwdriver then reached in again and Gary’s warm medulla oblongata slipped into my hand like it’d been waiting to walk me down the aisle.

  I bit it in half with my incisors—had the texture of a baked potato. I chewed fast, willing my jawbone to stay attached and do its work well, and found that Gary’s medulla oblongata tasted like a rubber balloon filled with French’s yellow mustard. Funny how the brain tastes, no doubt about it.

  “Funny how the brain tastes,” I said to the lab.

  I swallowed, then swallowed again for good measure, and goosebumps rose all over my body and the cold of that stone floor seared my ass like it was a hot plate. I was freezing fucking cold, but instead of punching through the wall and biting on an electrical wire all I could think to do was wrap my one arm around my intact knee and wait to vomit. The sparks had quit shooting out of my shoulder.

  Penzler’s goo had rotted our brains away except for the brave medulla oblongata where, according to Penzler himself, the brain’s preservative resources had concentrated. There was something in that, hadn’t he said so? That an engorged medulla oblongata could even rebuild the all-important spindle cell, solidify our vanilla pudding, make us normal, and he’d tried everything to make his victims human again—suppositories, he’d said—short of actually feeding them a medulla oblongata. Like Duffy hadn’t thought to put Natalia in the fridge. Russians’ pencils! Hadn’t Camouflage Mike said that eating brains might paradoxically help me quit being a zombie?

  And now I only wanted to eat the tiger-tiger ice cream they sold at the U-Stop in Knudsen.

  I picked up the screwdriver in my solid, solid left hand and twirled it between my fingers. I straightened my right leg in front of me and it had a solid shin bone again, that remaining big toe once more triumphant.

  So I figured I was cured.

  I cradled the other half of Gary’s medulla oblongata in my palm and decided I’d give it to Alice as an early Christmas present, wherever she might have gone. That left three more people who’d need a bite, and Gary’s medulla oblongata couldn’t go that far. But I knew where to find more.

  Boom, said the wall, and the top bolts that had held the bands in place slid out of the cement and clattered to the floor.

  “Give it one more!” a guy shouted. “Everybody in place!”

  I could go home to Josie and Ray.

  I crawled four feet across the floor and up into the wheelchair. I dropped the chunk of brain into the side pocket, and even with one hand for steering I managed to navigate toward the hallway. My ass was freezing and pure human adrenaline made my eyelids flutter like castanets.

  With a crash I felt in my molars, the wall above Gary collapsed and buried him. I didn’t wait to see whether a battalion swarmed in through the cloud of dust, I rolled as straight as I could into the first lab. Maybe I’d stay ahead of the apes for five seconds. Thud, said a wall ahead of me.

  I banged into a hard drive and knocked over a bucket of something, but I got around to Natalia’s tank before the next thud. I peered under the table and there was my Styrofoam cooler from San Luis Obispo.

  I pulled the towel off, sat up tall and reached for her hair—I only had one hand now and I’d need a handle. The inside of her head might’ve looked and smelled like compost but that didn’t mean the medulla oblongata wasn’t in there.

  I heard something from the hallway, the slow clatter of hooves on the stone floor.

  “Shh, shh,” Alice said.

  With one hand clutching his bridle and the other stroking his velvet nose, she led tall, beautiful Shamanski through the lab. I saw a dozen pairs of black wings sprouting from each shoulder, and he shook his gray m
ane and brought the wings forward then back, ten feet out on either side like some ship in full sail.

  She said, “How’d you get in—”

  Eyes wide, she stared behind me. I looked too. Three guys in black Kevlar were watching us through a fifteen-foot hole in the wall.

  “Acknowledge—Mr. P a casualty in Lab G,” a gas mask buzzed. “Roger.”

  The tops of the desks exploded, filling the room with sparks and shards of glass. Purple blossomed across Shamanski’s chest and with a ripping sound out his nose he dropped to his knees, black wings flapping hard, that air pressure sucking the breath out of my lungs. Alice’s shoulder sent out a jet of dark blood and she dropped in front of me. I put my left arm in the sleeve of a perforated lab coat, then crawled back to the wheelchair and dropped that orange lump of cure in the breast pocket. Bullets clanged off the chair as Alice scrambled to her horse. I looked back at the hole in the wall and saw a half-dozen guys, standing now for a better angle.

  “Hrh!”

  Alice, behind me. She lifted a desk over her head, and bullets knocked holes out of the thing as she sent it flying toward the hole. The apes’ arms bent to cover their heads then they disappeared under the desk. Through the hole, the white farmhouse beckoned. Alice scooped me up in one arm while Shamanski scrambled to his feet.

  She threw me on his back. I reached across and lifted the cooler from the table, shoved it against my bare belly. Then I wrapped my arm around his neck—my intangible right arm tried to hold on too. Thoom, said the wall ahead of us. Thoom, thoom.

  Alice put a hand on my thigh then jumped on behind me, her bare arms wrapped around my middle. I saw three holes from bullets through her forearms but they didn’t look any worse than cigarette burns. What good work we fathers did, with our clouded judgement.

  “Ow,” she said.

  She pressed her legs against the back of mine. Shamanski jangled his bridle.

  Thoom again. A steel square came through the wall, knocking a hundred pounds of concrete onto the floor.

  “Okay, up,” Alice called.

  Shamanski walked in a half-circle until the wide smouldering room stretched in front of him, then he bounded forward six steps like he was going to jump a fence, and I squeezed like hell with my arm and legs. I took a mouthful of his mane between my teeth. Then all together the dozen wings against my knees went forward then concussively back, exactly as though he had one massive wing on either side, and that backward thrust flung us four feet into the air. I squinted down at the battering ram as it broke another hole the size of a garage door through the wall, then the wings were flapping hysterically and my left hand tried to dig into Shamanski’s throat to keep us from sliding off his back. We circled up, and instead of a horse it felt like I was riding the arm of a couch through a tornado as his wings pulled the air out of my chest then used that same air to batter me over the head.

  “Ow, damn it!” Alice yelled in my ear.

  She had a new bullet hole through her kneecap. He dove, tucking his wings in close, and we shot over the upturned desk then the light changed as we rocketed up again and, through my squint, I could see we were rising above the lab and the stables. The Penzler men, scrambling on the ground, shrank to the size of black mice running over toy tanks. Their helicopter lay on its side, blanketed with broken boards. We flew over the farmhouse as a corner of its roof burst apart in a cloud of shingles—they must’ve shot at us with artillery.

  Then we were flying over Hutchens Road with only a black van driving beneath us and snowy fields stretching out on either side. From up there, tangles of bare trees looked like barbed wire.

  Dressed in nothing but a lab coat, a thousand feet in the air, the smell of snow driving up my nose—before we got anywhere I’d lose that big toe. I was warm where Alice and Shamanski pressed on either side of me, sure, though his giant square vertebrae didn’t exactly feel like a sponge bath for bare testicles, and the wind pulled tears and snot down my face. Gray clouds in every direction. Stephen Hawking could not have explained Shamanski.

  I was cured and we were on a flying horse.

  “Want to go west?” Alice yelled in my earhole.

  I nodded, teeth chattering. “Can you find Interstate 80?”

  “There’s Preston down there,” she said. “Lean right a bit! See, there’s 91a going to the highway.”

  The leveled Penzler hq looked like a black map of Australia. She squeezed me tighter around the ribs.

  Then there was no road under us and I lost sight of the black van.

  Every time his wings beat it felt like I was getting smacked with aluminium bats, and they beat a couple of times every second. But Alice was kissing the back of my neck, and we were already beyond Preston, maybe over Indiana, and I’d keep that cooler tucked against my belly until my eyes fell on Josie and little Ray.

  The hole in Alice’s knee had already healed over—just a coin-sized tear in her jeans. I sucked back my snot and swallowed it.

  “How fast does he go?” I yelled.

  “Dad figured eighty miles an hour! And we were both on a nitrite drip,” she yelled. “Won’t need anything for a day or so!”

  Jesus, there were a lot of baseball diamonds in Indiana. Must’ve been one for every person.

  It started to get dark and the lump in my pocket banged against my chest. I loosened my grip on Shamanski’s massive throat so I could lean back, her collarbones hard against me. I could’ve let go and her zombie legs would have held us on that horse even if he’d flown upside down.

  “North at Schafer,” I said through chattering teeth. “Dirt road behind the dairy.”

  “Go to sleep!”

  Friday, November 4.

  Nebraska from the air is not rife with landmarks, though crossing the Missouri in the morning it was easy enough to recognize the One National towering like a pencil case over Omaha. Then we spent hours following the braided valley of the Platte, west, west and further west, above three hundred brown miles of either round or rectangular fields. The snow hadn’t stuck beyond Iowa.

  I was hungry as hell but if a horse could stay in the air I would too. An orange smear appeared on the outside of my pocket. Gary’s chunk of medulla oblongata was leaking but I still had that stuff in the cooler.

  We saw helicopters and planes off in the distance, but nothing came close. It looked like I’d taken sandpaper to the insides of my thighs. When the North Platte River met the South Platte River, just before the town of North Platte’s rail yard like an eight-mile ear of corn, Alice and I leaned hard to the left to hopefully point us southwest. The sky was so blue.

  “That’s Palmerston!” I yelled. “The yellow church? Ten more miles!”

  Alice nodded, knocking her chin against my shoulder. She’d peed onto Illinois. I was numb by then except for the searing pain across my perineum.

  Below us the trees sidled closer together and my pulse beat hard up in my throat. I draped myself over Shamanski’s neck and stared down at every inch of woody landscape though the tears streamed out of my eyes and away up my forehead. We were low enough to make out individual mailboxes beside the road and kids dropping their footballs to point up at us. The dairy’s long silver roof.

  “Is that it over there?” asked Alice.

  Off to the right—a turquoise smear in the shape of a frying pan.

  “That is Lake Picu!” I yelled back.

  Deb had known the camp’s owners since before I was born. Shamanski turned without us even steering him. He flew lower and lower. I could see the cabins framed against the lake, and a twist of smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney. The ground everywhere was red and orange leaves. There’d be no people at Camp Lake Picu who weren’t my people.

  I saw the roof of a red Corolla tucked between the trees behind the boat shed. We circled over the dirt parking lot, casting a long shadow that became wider and blacker as we descen
ded. A small figure ran out from under the trees—Ray, in his blue windbreaker, a green water pistol falling out of his hand. Then Josie in her Wahoo Warriors hoodie and what must’ve been a new orange scarf, running beside her brother but almost staggering, too, her mouth a perfect o, eyes pasted to us.

  The sides of our shadow flickered like clapping hands.

  Deb came out from under the trees in a pink sweater, sunlight glinting off her sunglasses, her arms wrapped around herself. She seemed to be laughing, doubled over.

  “Dad!” The boy skipped, showing gapped teeth.

  Beneath Shamanski’s wings the dead leaves danced up in spirals.

  “You fell off the horse,” said Ray.

  He leaned over me, crouching, his hands against my grimy bare chest. I was flat on my back on the ground, covered with a scratchy wool blanket. My feet were so cold! He felt heavier than he should have, my ribs too vulnerable. I focused my eyes and looked through black branches at the blue sky I’d just dropped out of.

  “Ray,” I murmured. “God, it’s nice to see you.”

  Then Josie knelt from above my head, pressing her warm hands to the sides of my face. With her features upside down she looked so much older than I’d remembered, tanned and paler simultaneously, and I knew that in distant years when she came home from college, slightly transformed, I’d look and say, “Déjà vu.” You look like that time I rode the horse out of the sky.

  She gazed down at me. Her hands pulsed with warmth.

  “Was I gone years?”

  Ray stood up, all business now, and slid his fingers into his pants pockets.

  “She said a week and one day. That coat makes it look like you’ve got one arm!”

  “Yeah, we’ll talk about that. You guys look very different too.”

  “You don’t have any ears,” said Josie.

  “That’s from the accident!” announced Ray.

  “A series of accidents,” I said. “Guys, I’m better now so I came straight back.”

  I propped myself up, Camp Lake Picu pebbles digging into my one elbow. I saw the cooler on the ground beside me, and Deb’s car, and all the cabins, and the smoking chimney and piles of leaves, but no other people.