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  “Burnt?”

  “Burnt is fine, sure.”

  She shook her head over the order pad.

  “For each of the two hundred pieces?”

  “Peter,” Colleen muttered. “Don’t.”

  “I get the feeling you’re taking our goodwill for granted here!” I called.

  “Oh!” The waitress swallowed. “No, sir.”

  She hurried through the swinging door into the kitchen, where she and a guy in a crumpled chef’s hat looked out at us through the rectangular order window. I waved at them, half-heartedly, to show that I was a regular guy, really just as bored to death as anybody else. Clint finally got his chair back beside the table.

  “Know what my dad would say?” Franny folded a napkin into a hat. “Exactly.”

  “You don’t tell them what you want, how’re they supposed to know?” said Clint.

  Colleen rubbed her eyes then looked across at me. They were bloodshot as hell.

  “I like this place!” Harv spread his arms. “This is…really great.”

  Then I realized I didn’t have cash in my wallet. Credit cards were gone in the house fire. After the shit I’d just stirred up! I must’ve looked confused as hell because the kids started to get up out of their chairs—I felt in the velouria medical jacket’s pockets and found nothing but chapstick and some flimsy business cards, burroughs county emergency medical services, without anybody’s name on them.

  “Don’t you have money?” Colleen asked quietly.

  Throat constricted, I nodded dumbly. I was only capable of overreacting.

  “I’ve got plenty now, and I’ll get plenty more.” She set her purse on the table and it clattered like it was full of cutlery, though maybe it was just her baton. “Doug wanted Megan not to have to worry, so he got us both the fattest policies Mutual offered, and, oh, he was so excited!”

  She smiled at all of us around the table and the kids did their best to smile back.

  “Megan’s great,” said Grace.

  “She’s hilarious!” said Amber.

  “Insurance is excellent,” I said. “Hope we’re around long enough to collect it.”

  Then I was so relieved about the money that I had to push my chair back and sit with my head between my knees.

  “Say, buddy?” One of the truckers smiled ingratiatingly.

  I straightened up. “What?”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “Champlain State,” I snapped.

  Though I’d gone to UC Denver. Before Wahoo we’d lived in Champlain, where the upstairs neighbor’s son had written his paramedic-qualification exam up at the university, though for all I knew he’d taken the actual courses on Planet Krypton.

  “That a good school?”

  I must’ve heard that as an accusation, because my ears went hot—I had sufficient circulation for that, apparently, though the pins and needles had spread up to my knees so that walking the four steps to crack his skull might’ve been a chore.

  “Why do you ask?” I gulped, all ho-hum and normal.

  “Oh, ’cause my niece is down in Velouria, too, thought I’d pick your brain to see how far away she’d need to go to qualify, you know? Good program at Champlain?”

  “Oh, sure.” I dropped a sugar cube in my coffee. “The lectures weren’t so hot but the field practicums were amazing. Every night on shift I thank God I went to that school, their practicums are killer.”

  “That right?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “There’s a bloodwork research program in the lab that’s just awesome.”

  “Huh, okay.” He turned back to his friends. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Bathroom?” asked Amber.

  All four females got up and went. Colleen took her purse. I sipped coffee that tasted like weak tea. I’d impressed the hell out of myself—as long as all I had to do was talk, I could pass for a paramedic any day of the week, and that could get me in the door at Penzler Industries, 1616 Highway 91a, Preston, OH. A concerned medical professional representing the equally concerned citizens of Velouria. Harv and Clint were tearing their napkins to shreds and eating them.

  “Say, buddy,” the trucker called, “you all right?”

  I was sitting with my cheek against the placemat.

  “Just hungry,” I answered. “Thanks.”

  “Shit, Harv,” Amber said as she slid into the chair across from him. “What’s up with your arms?”

  The other girls sat and we all stared at his bare arms—they were peppered with what looked like scabbed-over chicken pox. He folded them to his chest.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re just old cigarette burns. Not healing too good.”

  “How exactly did you get them?” Colleen asked, her chin on the heel of her hand.

  “Well.” He gazed past my shoulder. “After the thing with how my head healed up, they wanted to make a movie of everything else. They wanted to break a world’s record for all the bacon they got in me, so that was cool, they filmed that for like two days straight. Then he and Kim were arguing like crazy, and Dad came in with the tin-snips and told me to put out my fingers and I just thought, I am getting out of here.”

  He smirked at us. Clint and Franny had lost interest and played demolition derby with salt and pepper shakers.

  “Hey, what’d the team do this week if you were home?” asked Amber.

  She’d smeared on mascara for some reason, then I remembered the Harv conversation in Cam’s office.

  “Dunno. We weren’t answering the phone.” He chewed a fingernail—his lips seemed too heavy for his mouth, so he looked slightly stupid. “You know I hit eleven threes last Friday?”

  “I knew that,” said Grace.

  The waitress set down two platters of bacon, heaped high as footballs. The kids began to rake it onto their side plates, but I did not pick up a single piece, though my arms shook.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” I said. “I’m sorry about before.”

  She smiled down at me, squinting too much for it to be genuine.

  “Well, we’ve both come out the other side. Stressful job you’ve got there.”

  “You’re very understanding.” I felt a vein twitch in my neck. “We’re going to want some to go too, yes?”

  “You give me a number,” the waitress said, “and I’ll see what’s in back.”

  “My brother never even took Chemistry 11,” said Clint, “and he could eat all this!”

  “Wouldn’t he barf?” asked Grace.

  “He’d just burp in my face.”

  “You think he’s doing okay?” asked Franny.

  He glanced at her, tucked his chin down but kept on chewing.

  “Christ almighty,” one of the truckers said. “I never saw so much bacon!”

  “Oh, we do this now and then.” I rolled up my sleeves. “Our night to howl.”

  Colleen hadn’t wanted to go to the till so she’d handed me the cash and taken the kids outside, so now I had four strips crackling in my mouth, my jaws working like shears, and another forty side orders crammed into three Styrofoam takeout containers that sent angelic gusts of steam up my sleeve. Backing out the diner door in my fluorescent jacket, I nodded once more to the wide-eyed truckers—obviously I was trying to drum up resuscitation work for myself—and considered beatifically that before long I’d have my whole litter of kittens well-fed and hidden away while I went off to serve my still-higher calling of figuring out how to deplasticize us. And who’d be accomplishing that? Just me, alone again.

  I trotted around a Freightliner semi just in time to see Clint’s denim elbow arc back, then his fist flashed out to connect with Harv’s nose, reproducing the pop of an ice cube dropped in lukewarm lemonade. Harv swayed back one step then fell down.

  Franny stomped the pavement. “Yeah!”

  “W
oot, woot!”

  Amber slapped her thigh and Grace clapped. The four women stood beside the ambulance like a boisterous police lineup under the lot’s yellow lights.

  “Fuck him up!” Colleen yelled, hands cupped to her mouth.

  “Aw, bash me around all you want,” Harv said, licking his upper lip, propping himself on an elbow. “You are a panty-wearing faggot.”

  “Shit, just get up, man,” said Clint, holding his fists stiffly in front of him. “I got to hit something so bad.”

  “Fuck! Him! Up!” the women yelled.

  “Why do I have to deal with this?” I asked. “You two need bums wiped, you wipe each other’s bums. The rest of us need to be somewhere.”

  The boys dropped their arms and stared at me like I was directing a Raging Bull remake and I’d told them their acting stunk.

  “Don’t listen!” Colleen yelled, slapping her thighs. “Fight!”

  “Is that the bacon?” asked Clint.

  Then all six shuffled toward me, guided by salivary glands, so I circled to the driver’s side where I threw a long shadow. Colleen stumbled ahead of the others, arms extended.

  “I’ll hold those,” she said. “You’ll be driving.”

  I carefully set the three tepid containers between her hands, and she turned and gave them to Grace. Then she spun back and clocked me across the jaw with her left—like me, she still had a wedding ring on, so of course that stung. I teetered around a step, trying to shake it off as the blaze from the floodlights wove between my eyelids, then she must’ve leapt right on me because my head was jammed in an armpit as I looked at the ground and a elbow, pointy as a chisel, tenderized the middle of my back. Then I was slammed backwards into the ambulance, and a pair of fists tried to break through my belly to my spine. I could barely get an eye open to see her tracksuit bobbing there but, snaking my hands in front of me, I managed to get hold of her wrist.

  “Don’t you goddamn!” she said, and head-butted my chest.

  I brought my foot up hard into her crotch then my knee connected with her chin so her teeth clacked together. She straightened up and I rammed a shoulder into her chest so she stumbled backward, pinwheeling her arms until she spread-eagled across the hood of a silver car with reptilian headlights. The old guy inside woke up, hollered and leaned on the horn, then he was out beside the little car before Colleen was even on her feet. He sported a comb-over and a puffy down vest.

  “Look at my fucking hood!” He actually stamped a foot. “Lady, you better, you better have a checkbook, because…”

  He couldn’t have noticed the half-dozen of us happily beating the shit out of each other fifteen feet away or he might not have gone on, screaming at the bum-shaped dent in his hood. She meekly stood beside him, one hand pressing the small of her back while she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She gazed up at the guy, back at the car. Its paint looked distinctly yellow under those lights. She looked back at the guy

  “You in Hoover yesterday?” I heard her ask.

  Then she grabbed the back of his collar and slammed his face into the car’s roof, jumping back onto the hood for leverage. Blood and drool ran down the edge of the windshield, but after four or five good crunches, he pulled himself out of the vest and reeled away backwards. By then I had my arms around her waist. Thrashing, she flailed the vest at me so the zipper caught me in the lip.

  “The thing’s gray or something!” I bawled at her. “Not yellow!”

  She went limp, spread her hand on the roof while I still held her an inch or two in the air. Her breathing hammered against me.

  “Right,” she huffed. “Hand’s yellow too.” She frowned at me over her shoulder, her eyes barely open. “So this isn’t the guy.”

  I set her down. One side of the hood had the texture of a corn flake.

  “Not ready for recycling, but it’s getting there. I should leave him a number. Doesn’t even have a spoiler, Jesus. A Chevette coupe.” She shook her head, defeated, then her fist snaked out to whack me in the chest. “But that was fun, right? And the next guy’s going down twice as hard!”

  Amber threw an almighty swing that Franny ducked beneath, one palm to the ground like a ninja, but as she came up Clint hit her with such an uppercut that she wound up with the back of her head on the pavement and her groin against a lamppost. In the meantime I carried the vest to where the old guy crouched against the wheel of a Coca-Cola trailer, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. His hair had flopped over his left ear so he looked like a harassed rooster, and his forehead was nothing but oozing lumps. The saturated handkerchief dripped onto his already-bloody shirt.

  “Sir,” I said, “I cannot apologize enough. She’s between facilities and she got away from me.” My throat felt rough from what Colleen had done to me—I tasted blood. “Call this number, they’ll be eager to discuss your compensation.” I held out a business card. “You’ll find first-aid personnel inside the restaurant, patch you up in a jiffy, but me, I have to get my patient on the road before we get another incident, alrighty?”

  He pulled the handkerchief away and blinked up at me, his swollen eyes streaming tears. One of his front teeth had been shattered into an isosceles triangle.

  “I’m taking the car to my son,” he sighed.

  A bubble of blood burst on his lip. Even compared to me, Colleen had turned into a full-on nut.

  “Okay,” I said. “You call that number first chance you get.”

  I strode back to the ambulance. Franny had Amber backed against the front of it, that ugly serape bunched in one fist and the other thrown back, knuckles already bloody. Clint lay on his side on the pavement, Grace’s boot buried in his middle. Harv stood half-asleep, arms around the takeout containers.

  “All right, everybody,” I called. “Let’s go.”

  Like a Sunday School shepherd I beckoned to them, even Colleen as she rocked the Chevette up and down like its shocks needed testing. The kids all unclenched fists, helped Clint to his feet, hobbled around to the big back doors. I climbed up behind the steering wheel and put the key in the ignition. Colleen walked through the headlights as they flared on, then stopped and picked something up off the pavement. She came around to the passenger door.

  “Got a thumb here—any takers? Doesn’t have nail polish.”

  Silence from the back.

  “Wait, yeah,” said Clint. “That’s mine.”

  “I call staple gun!” yelled Grace.

  As we rolled onto the highway Colleen kept pressing a tissue to her lip then looking to see how much it was bleeding, which wasn’t much. She threw me a smile.

  “Know how fun that was, smashing his face? That really was just a lot of fun!”

  Friday, October 28.

  Every time I saw a police car coming I tried to let my face droop so that in his headlights I’d look like an authentically haggard paramedic, when really I was so buzzed with nitrites I felt like a sparkler on a birthday cake. Every cop gave me the single-finger-off-the-steering-wheel salute.

  “But losing fingers must be a distinguished Nebraska tradition!” From the passenger seat Colleen addressed the window to the back. “Think about it, all those poor stupid pioneers, caught out in snowstorms without mittens, and farming accidents—my god, the early days of threshers!”

  “My mom’s dad lost three fingers in a mill,” Harv said. “He never—”

  “And we don’t know the first thing about the Native Americans,” said Colleen. “This whole road might be finger bones!”

  The driver ahead of us, in a black F-350 pickup, threw a cigarette out his window and it sparked across the road.

  “No more deep thinking,” I said. “Grab every smoker and kill them.”

  The remnants of unpopulated cornfields flickered past in the dark. An early-hours call-in show called Out There came on the radio. With his cleverest-person-living-but-God-I’m-tired delive
ry, Tom Exegesis kept proclaiming, “The truth is…somewhere…in the middle.” With my fingers looking green in the light of the gas gauge, that sounded extremely profound.

  “The truth is up yours,” said Clint.

  “Turn it up some more,” called Grace.

  He took an enthusiastic call from Scott regarding the pre-Halloween ghost tours recently conducted in Asheville, North Carolina, and how more than one visited spirit had followed overjoyed tourists back to their hotel.

  “Now,” Tom concluded, “is this a case of fifteen apparitions genuinely wanting to go home with these fifteen people, or is it a case of fifteen people inexplicably organizing themselves to tell the same story? The truth, I believe, is somewhere…in the middle.”

  A nervous-sounding guy named Vince came on—I pictured him huddled in his parents’ basement, sweat trickling behind his glasses.

  “Love the show, I’m a first-time caller….”

  “First time for everything, glad to have you.”

  “I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and it just says, ‘A corpse said to be revived by witchcraft,’ but, God, there’s more to it than that, am I right?”

  “All right, hold on, so you’re talking about a zombie? You’re asking what constitutes a zombie?”

  “Yes, exactly!” said the caller. “What constitutes—”

  “And that’d be way at the back of the dictionary—I wouldn’t have the stamina to go back that many pages, so I salute you, Vince. Now, why don’t you start us off, what makes a zombie a zombie in the popular imagination? Or if you’re of a more critical stripe, what makes a zombie in the academic imagination?”

  “Bacon!” we all announced.

  “They ought to eat brains, that’s for sure,” said Vince.

  “All right, brains,” Tom said wearily. “And they’ve got to have limbs falling off, things like that?”

  “Seen it happen,” I agreed.

  “Right here,” Amber said behind my head. “Poster girl.”

  “That’s a—that’s a sick zombie,” said Vince. “That’s ill health that makes ’em fall apart. A well-nourished zombie can walk around like anybody else, no problem.”