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  We sat Donny up and he looked, wide-eyed, from me to Clint to the sergeant, smacking his lips like he’d eaten too much peanut butter. His nose was missing. His dry sinuses winked at me in unison.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “You—you’re all right, son,” said the sergeant, drawing his gun from its holster.

  “Doctor!” I shouted.

  “It’s your fault!” Clint jumped up, backing Dorfsman into the corner. “You want to hit everybody in the mouth, hey? Let’s do this!”

  A figure skater yelling at a bear. Sergeant Dorfsman waved his gun vaguely at all three of us, backing toward the door, then he tore through it and turned to lock us in. Clint punched the window, making a dartboard of cracks. I could see the dark-haired cop, Collis, staring at us while yelling into a phone. I helped Donny into the chair again.

  “Get me pounds of it,” he murmured. “And liquid smoke! How come one leg’s so much longer?”

  His bare right leg protruded six inches out of its pant-leg. His knee or his hip had given way. The chair Clint threw at the door bounced off, so he started stomping the steel legs into a tangle—he was exactly like Watson to my Sherlock Holmes. I gave Donny a hard look, though his gaze kept roving around the room.

  “We’ll get you out of here, hey?” Though we’d need a wheelbarrow. “I’ll get a—I’ve got a tarp in my car, I’ll run and get that, and then we’ll feed you, all right?

  Donny pawed his face. He’d lost the middle finger too—it lay under the chair—and the sawdust smell in the room was pungent as turpentine.

  “Hold tight.” I squeezed his shoulder, gingerly.

  I got Clint by the elbow—it didn’t come off in my hand!—and we ran down the particleboard hallway and let ourselves back into the foyer, where the pizza-box drunks quietly studied bouncy-castle advertisements. We banged out the front doors then down the steps and toward my car a hundred yards away. I already heard a siren.

  “So we peel out after that van that took the other guys, am I right?” Clint retied his scarf as we ran. “Somebody took those guys to fix them up—I know, right? Easy.”

  “How would we possibly follow that van?”

  “We just, uh, traffic cameras! Because I don’t want any of that shit with the hands and feet to happen to us, that was retarded. And the nose? The girls will barf when they hear that!”

  “We won’t tell the girls that part,” I said.

  “That’s cool. I get you. Know where it’d be cool if that van went? Miami.”

  “We aren’t following anybody right now. We’re going back in for Donny.”

  We’d come to Velouria to find an antidote or a magnetic wristband or a deep-breathing exercise that would put me on the path back to Ray and Josie, so what did one zombie in the back of a town lock-up have to do with it? That Penzler headquarters he’d mentioned obviously ought to have been my next stop, but if you belonged to a species of which only a couple of dozen individuals existed, and that entire species was about to crumble into slabs of chipped beef, wouldn’t you attempt to keep every one of them alive? Even Donny’s last breath might impart a lump of invaluable wisdom, Snowflakes will melt holes in your skin, maybe, or French’s mustard is all you’ll ever need or Go back to your children, man, hold them tight, and this nightmare will dissipate like steam from a mirror.

  I opened my trunk. The folded blue tarp, my old dog-burying shovel, two empty cases of Lucky Bucket—no bikers with snakes tattooed to their faces.

  “But,” Clint panted, “you were all, ‘My name is Chuck Norris, I run alone.’ ”

  I turned my head to peer out of the alley at Ye Olde Candy Shoppe across the main street. And it must’ve served karaoke as well as ice cream, because Franny and Amber swayed in the front window, backs to us, each with an arm around the other’s waist, singing over “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks or possibly Van Halen, and they were both really nailing the guttural bottom of the Oh yeeeeeeah—maybe that was another blessing from Pipe #9. As their voices staggered over each other the track suddenly ended, and Colleen leapt up from somewhere beside them, clapping with her hands over her head. Might be I watched for a long while.

  “Is it nap time?” Clint asked.

  I pulled out the tarp and shovel and started back toward the police station.

  An ambulance stood at the curb in front of the station now, and I could see two people rolling a loaded gurney out across the sidewalk—could we possibly be more useful than paramedics? I knew more about Donny’s physiology, but was there a time limit to how long a hunk of one of our bodies could sit unattached before it…spoiled? It’d been at least five minutes since his left leg had dropped off.

  “Run up into the foyer,” I told Clint, “and get us a handful of thumbtacks.”

  The people were all inside the ambulance by the time we crept up, and it rocked at the curb like the medics were leaping up and down inside, and they probably were. I tapped the back door with the shovel handle. Kong, kong, kong.

  “What?” they yelled from inside. “Tina, we still can’t—”

  The door was thrown open by a young guy with a black moustache, and a stethoscope tangled around his neck. He looked sweaty and slightly blue—“shock” was my diagnosis. Behind him a middle-aged woman with short red hair was already labeling a big ziplock bag that contained one human foot. A lean, hairless arm lay in her lap. Donny was sprawled on his back with an oxygen mask over his face, but he pulled that off with his remaining hand to gaze down the gurney at me and grin. He’d lost both legs and his left arm, and though his face was just missing a nose and a strip of cheek, a plastic zip-cord had been fastened around his head, right across his pathetic sinuses. He was in his underwear and his stumps looked like charred driftwood.

  “Hey, it’s the guy!” he croaked. “He knows about it!”

  “What do you know about this?” spat the man, stepping down onto the pavement. “Is it crystal meth?”

  If he’d spent any time in a high school he’d have known that, despite many other drawbacks, crystal meth did not make your legs fall off.

  “No,” I said. “You can stick him back together if you’ve got a staple gun.”

  “Told you so,” said the woman.

  “No, just—how come he hasn’t bled to death?” The man sat down heavily on the bumper and found his pulse on the side of his neck. “Are you his dad or something?”

  “Hurry this up!” I said, throwing the tarp down, climbing in next to the gurney. “For all we know his head’ll drop off. Why’s that zip-cord around his face?”

  The woman slowly looked up at Donny, then across to me.

  “We’re trying to save the ears,” she said.

  A crack showed down the front of his ear where it was trying to come away. A shudder ran between my shoulder blades.

  “One of you has bacon in here!” I glared at the paramedics. “Give it to him! You want to save his goddamn ears, give it to him!”

  The blue-tinged guy lowered his head.

  “I asked you for bacon!” croaked Donny.

  “You shit,” said the woman. “Why’d you lie about it?”

  “It’s my dinner!” yelled the guy.

  He got up and stomped onto the sidewalk, then we could hear him thumping up in the cab until he reappeared at the back door and climbed into the seat behind Donny.

  “Hey, here we go.” Clint stood at the end of Donny’s gurney, offering me a handful of tacks. “I got you a baker’s dozen. Uh, he still alive?”

  “This is too many people,” said the redhead.

  The moustached paramedic was making a flourishy show for our benefit—unwrapping the wax paper, pulling his white-bread sandwich apart to extricate four pieces of dark, mayonnaise-y bacon. Salivating, I leaned in beside the kid’s head and jabbed a green thumbtack into the top of the crack in his ear. Donny didn’t flinch,
just threw his head back and opened his mouth like a baby bird, so the paramedic broke a piece in half and dropped it in.

  “Oh. Been dreaming of this,” Donny murmured.

  He must’ve just meant the bacon, because no one dreams optimistically of having no legs. Then he opened his eyes and gave me a long look.

  “You guys better have pieces too,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Clint and I.

  The paramedic handed me all of the bacon and I took exactly two pieces, in a feat of incredible willpower, and put one in my mouth.

  “Oh, burnt.” I let out a long breath. “Perfect.”

  “Hey, thanks a bunch, guy,” said Clint. “How you feel, you feel all right?”

  Donny grinned at us, his teeth full of black flecks, then before I could eat the rest myself I crumbled the strips and dropped the bits into his mouth—might’ve been an arousing situation if he’d been a woman I lusted after.

  “I’m going to run up to Dylan’s,” the redhead said as she slid past Clint. “He’ll have a staple gun.”

  “Good!” I said. “Now where’s his legs?”

  “In the cooler.” The guy pointed at a blue hatch beside me. “Hey, what’s that—what’s that stuck in his ear?”

  “Thumbtack,” I said.

  I took a yellow one and jabbed it in place below the first—I could’ve sworn the crack was closing up already! Donny just stared at the ceiling, still chewing. The paramedic scrambled past Clint then said Hunh and a second later we heard a generous splash. Funny what’ll turn some people’s stomachs. In fact the sound of his vomiting was making me a little queasy. Donny reached up and felt his ear.

  “More bacon?” he said.

  “Step the fuck out of that vehicle,” said Sgt. Dorfsman.

  He stood behind the ambulance with his pistol raised, immovable as Harry Callahan in Magnum Force. The dark-haired cop from the squad room, Collis, peered at us through the open window from the cab, his own gun somewhere in the foreground.

  “I’m trying to save this kid,” I told them.

  “Uh-huh,” said Dorfsman. “Came at me inside. You’ve got explanations to make.”

  “No, no!” the paramedic guy gasped from outside. “Don’t point that in there!”

  “If he dies, it’s your neglect that killed him.” I dropped my hand below the gurney to feel between my feet for the shovel. “All of these prisoners you’ve had have specific dietary needs. Clint,” I called, “go stand on the sidewalk.”

  If we were in custody we’d melt down to nothing, and so would the girls while they waited for us, and so would everybody. I’d have to take steps. Poor Sgt. Dorfsman—imagine the shift the poor jerk had been having already.

  “He put my ear on!” reassured Donny.

  A number of things happened then, in less time than it takes to inhale.

  “You step out of—”

  I heaved the shovel handle-first, and it flew over the gun and caught Dorfsman in the Adam’s apple. His firearm discharged, and simultaneously the oxygen tank beside Donny’s shoulder became this blue light that engulfed everything.

  The gurney rocketed out of the ambulance, and I kept a hold on its railing. After thirty feet the whole thing crashed onto its side and I tumbled across the wet pavement, scraping my back and elbows over and over again, but how come Donny wasn’t rolling beside me?

  Twenty yards away, I picked myself up. The inside of the ambulance was ablaze and Donny lay below the back bumper, and he was nothing but a black torso. We’d only come along to help the kid out, apparently, me and my good intentions, and now he looked like he’d been scraped out of a frying pan.

  My arms were black too. My windbreaker had melted away to nothing, and that tennis shirt I’d owned for seven hours hung in charred shreds from my shoulder.

  No sign of Clint from where I swayed. Dorfsman lay in the fetal position against the curb. Collis threaded his way between the ambulance and gurney, his gun trained on the ground, eyes fixed on me. Seemingly unfazed. I didn’t see the paramedic anywhere. A couple of civilian cars rolled toward us but stopped completely when they saw the situation that was unfolding, drivers rolling their windows back up. Pedestrians wavered on the sidewalk—those couples out enjoying the fact of their existence.

  “Hands behind your head!” Collis shouted.

  I stared at what was left of Donny and thanked God that Deb had removed Josie and Ray from my good intentions. And that man who held the door for me, Donny’s mother would say, huffing on her Marlboro, choking back sobs, that was the same man who killed him.

  “Behind your head!” the cop yelled again.

  In my peripheral another ambulance came screaming up from behind me. Maybe the driver was too focused on collecting bodies off the pavement to notice Collis waving them away, or maybe I looked more like a victim than a fugitive, but the driver squealed to a stop five feet to my right, the whirling lights almost blinding me.

  “No, no!” Collis hurried forward, gun raised.

  I took three steps and opened the ambulance driver’s door, engine still running—he was too busy pulling on latex gloves. I grabbed him by the shirt and threw him out onto the pavement.

  “Whoa!” said the girl medic in the passenger seat. “Whoa, whoa!”

  “Get away from there!” the cop yelled.

  I glanced over and saw him aiming. I knew he was going to shoot, he’d have been crazy not to. I noticed the blade-end of my shovel—I loved the damn thing—was two feet from my toe. The driver rolled onto his side on the pavement.

  Bam.

  The bullet must’ve gone through my left thigh. All I really felt was a pulling sensation, no pain, but I dropped onto my knee—I couldn’t help it.

  “Okay,” said Collis, shuffling forward. Eight feet, now five. “You’re real lucky there’s an ambulance here already. Now get—”

  Clint loped over the smoking gurney like a goddamn panther, and in one bound wrapped himself around the cop’s shoulder—beautiful to see—but Collis must’ve had some Rashard Mendenhall in him, because he shook the tackle off while I tried to put weight on my perforated leg. Clint sprawled against the bumper.

  “Now,” Collis huffed, gun coming up again, “get your—”

  I grabbed the blade of the shovel and whacked him across the knuckles with the handle. He dropped the gun. Lurching upright, I laid the wood across his right ear but he kept coming forward like an absolute zombie, reaching for his nightstick as blood ran down his neck, and since he was going to be that determined I threw my shovel over the driver’s seat and jumped in behind the wheel. The girl medic had already jumped out, and Clint jumped six feet straight up and came down on top of the open passenger door, so I hit the gas, tires squealed, and in the mirror I saw Collis crouched beside the gurney, firing after us, and even while we skittered around the post office Clint climbed down using the door handle and the edge of the window, then shut his door and pulled his seatbelt across like this was how he got to school every morning.

  “Holy shit,” I said, “you were pretty great with that stuff.”

  But then I remembered what I’d done to Donny Brown and couldn’t think what else to say.

  “Serious? You got shot, G—that was the best!”

  The green digital clock on the ceiling said 7:38. My leg gave a single, hesitant throb—that was all we had to show for the previous half-hour.

  “But we learned.” I came to a red light so I turned right without signaling—nobody was behind us yet, but they would be. “To be vigilant about our bacon.”

  “That dude was so sad!” Clint made big gestures. “Left behind like that?”

  I’d told Colleen to leave town if I didn’t order a banana split within an hour, so I still had thirty-two minutes—or twenty-five, plus driving time.

  My fingers were leaving coal-black skin on the steeri
ng wheel.

  With our headlights off we rolled back across the Dockside parking lots, then I gave the ambulance’s V-8 so much gas that she roared like a bull elephant and three seconds later we crashed through that chain-link gate. Closed For Renovation fluttered up past the windshield and away into the night for the first of its solo adventures.

  “Uruk-hai ambulance,” Clint said.

  Then because we weren’t actively looking for trouble I sent him back to close the gate—maybe the factory only had one of those drive-by security teams. In the side mirror I saw that the vehicle didn’t say velouria, just ambulance, so they must’ve ponyed up with some other towns to buy a bunch wholesale, which would be terrific for us remaining incognito over a wide radius. Already doing such a great job with that.

  That was the extent of my deep thinking, except for recalling Cam’s theory that a real zombie would never notice his mind going.

  We drove on past the vip parking lot, where our bus had waited so patiently for us six days before, and pulled around to a loading dock. I slid out but the wind bit into my half-naked self so sharply that I climbed into the back and hunted around for clothes. They had a ridiculous Papa Smurf figurine hanging up in one cupboard and because it reminded me of any kid anywhere, not even my own specifically, I had to climb onto the gurney and lay there for a minute.

  I hadn’t been apart from Josie and Ray for six months. Only six hours. The project was too hard. I’d only watched one person die in my entire life, one had been more than enough up until then—then in the space of ten seconds I’d seen two more, assuming Dorfsman wasn’t going to get up. I crumpled the blue gurney sheet again my chest. I had no way of knowing where my science-project mind and body would take me next, or take Colleen, or any of these rabid kids I was supposedly looking after.

  I sat up and found the bullet hole through my pants but there wasn’t much to see in the leg itself, just a spot that looked like a cigarette burn. I’d have to get some bacon soon to balance accounts with my body. I opened a cabinet behind the driver’s seat and found a crisp white velouria medical dress shirt in a dry-cleaning bag, and a fluorescent yellow velouria medical jacket and a pair of black pants hanging behind that. I retired that new tennis shirt to the biohazard bucket.