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  “Ah, unless,” countered Tom, “the corpse had decomposed prior to reanimation to the point that, you know, it was structurally unable to walk around like everybody else. That’s your Night of the Living Dead model, am I right? That’s an entire graveyard revived indiscriminately.”

  I waited for Vince to somehow bring the citizens of Hoover, Nebraska, into the conversation, but whether it would be to prove or refute a given theory I couldn’t decide.

  “C’mon, babies, ask how well they take a punch!” said Franny.

  “You there, Vince?” asked Tom.

  “The real reason zombies in the movies only eat brains,” the caller murmured, “is Hollywood screenwriters can’t think of anything else for them to do.”

  “Now, hold on one second,” Tom replied lethargically. “You were the one who said they had to eat brains, right off the top of this conversation.”

  “Yeah, but I was only—”

  “And if you go back to Bela Lugosi as the zombie-master in White Zombie in the thirties, Lugosi was killing these Haitian field workers and bringing them back the same night they were buried, just so he’d have a more complacent workforce, wasn’t that right? And not one—and here’s my point—not one brain consumed in the entire picture.”

  “Movies weren’t good back then,” said Vince.

  “Bullshit. I beg your pardon,” said Tom. “But my reading on Haitian zombies, which is by no means comprehensive, doesn’t rule out the possibility of brains, since apparently if you fed a zombie even a speck of meat or—what was the other one?—salt, meat or salt, if they tasted either one they’d be reminded they once were human and collapse on the spot, never to be revived.”

  “Oh, ho!” the kids hollered in the back.

  “Okay,” I told the radio. “We’re talking different species.”

  “But that whole scenario still begs a couple of questions,” Tom said, ignoring us entirely, “the first of which is whether it would have been possible for Bela Lugosi to reanimate a sugarcane picker, say, five, ten minutes after death, and for that zombie to maybe think that he’d only taken a nap, you see what I mean? The cells in his brain wouldn’t have deteriorated, maybe the only reason that the zombie of the popular imagination shambles and slurs the way he does is that his mind has rotted down to that little lizard-brain at the top of his spinal cord, isn’t that possible? The medulla oblongata? But my initial thought—and I appreciate your patience on this, Vince—is that there might be people walking around right now who aren’t aware that they’re zombies because they weren’t clued in that they had died in the first place, is that a possibility? You see what I mean, is that an acceptable stretch?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. Someone was speaking frankly about our lives. Donny had in the Velouria jail, true, but this was less disturbing visually.

  “Vince?” asked Tom.

  “I’m here. You just cut a little close to the bone there.”

  “Fucktard!” Franny yelled in the back.

  But was there any chance the stuff from Pipe #9 actually had killed us dead and brought us back to life an instant later? Jesus, but the hippie doctors of Preston, Ohio, had a lot to answer for!

  “Perfect. An intellectual battle. All right, the second question is whether the zombie you’re defining is the cinematic zombie, in which case we should look no further than the oeuvre of George Romero, or if it’s the anthropological zombie, in which case we look—where?—no further than rural Haiti? But does it have to be one or the other?”

  I squeezed the steering wheel giddily as I waited for it.

  “The truth,” Tom drawled, “is some…where in…the middle. Thanks for that, Vince. Next caller is on the line from Alberta, Canada. How are you, Betty-Anne?”

  She wanted to talk about the past summer’s astronomical increase in UFO sightings in southern Alberta compared to any previous year on record, and Tom countered with alarming statistics concerning the number of F-18s airborne over the North American continent on any given night, then he wondered aloud whether extraterrestrials might not be more attracted to the tarsands projects in northern Alberta.

  Then he played a Pan-American Rent-a-Car commercial.

  “Clint, get on the cell,” said Grace. “Tell ’em what went down in Velouria!”

  I passed a pickup truck pulling a shiny aluminum horse trailer. I remembered Rob Aiken mentioning an Old Man Penzler, and I pictured him as Bela Lugosi, with the widow’s peak and eyebrows. Hell, was there even such a person as Old Man Penzler?

  “Next caller’s from out in Nebraska. Go ahead, Lydia.”

  I drew breath in so hard I nearly coughed.

  “Hi,” she said, “thanks.”

  “Aw, yeah!” Amber whooped. “My homegirl Lydia Dershowitz!”

  Of course, with the braces. I reached across to the passenger seat for bacon.

  “I’m calling because of the guy a minute ago—Vince?”

  “Yes, recollections of Vince bring a warm bloom to one’s cheek. Zombies, yes.”

  “She wasn’t at school Tuesday,” Franny announced.

  “I, um, I guess I want it to be made public that a lot of the people like you talked about are living together as a community, uh, a co-operative, I guess, and I think that means they have more intelligence than that caller was giving them credit for. They’re organized, I mean.”

  I took my foot off the gas and let the ambulance coast along the shoulder.

  “Where is she?” asked Amber. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

  “Oh,” Colleen exhaled. “Megan.”

  “Okay,” said Tom, “so by ‘people you were describing,’ you mean zombies?”

  “Guess so.”

  “And these people are zombies because, what? They eat brains to survive?”

  “No, not at all! They eat—”

  “Their limbs drop off as they shamble around, is that it?”

  “They do,” intoned young Lydia. “Yes.”

  Which was exactly how older Lydia would’ve phrased such a critical point. Colleen had her fingertips over her lips.

  “Could be leprosy,” Tom suggested.

  “What that other guy said about it depending on what they eat, he was right, and that’s not leprosy.”

  “Okay, but if it’s not asking too much, what’s your connection to all this? They shamble through your yard, is that it? Ride your school bus?”

  I straightened the wheel and steered back into our lane.

  “I’m one of them,” Lydia said finally. “My job’s to drive the shuttle between the factory and where we’re living.”

  “Good enough. Thought as much. Now, where exactly is this zombie refuge?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, when did you first know you were a zombie?”

  “Oh, man, before I got here my arm was just hanging there, like by one tendon, and I hadn’t been hurt or anything!”

  “No?” asked Tom.

  “Slid off by itself!” I called out.

  “It just started sliding off,” said Lydia. “Wasn’t eating right.”

  “Represent!” Amber yelled.

  “All right, so zombies are organized. Listeners can knock the arms off Rosie the Riveter and paint her lips green, zombies can do it! Lydia, did you have a question? What prompted the call?”

  “Because nobody here is eating brains,” she said.

  Then a split second of dial tone before the program engineer cut it off. She’d excused herself, goddamn it, from wherever it is she was.

  “That is one example,” said Tom, “of why we’re on the books as entertainment programming and not as an informational show, folks, though we can all appreciate that culturally the zombie continues to resonate because each is, essentially, their own worst enemy. Their ignoble self. Yes, apparently I’ve given it some thought. Before
we break for commercial I’ll advise listeners with Egyptology questions to hold their calls until tomorrow night, when our good friend Dr. Leonard Avril returns to—”

  Colleen shut it off. Beamed at me.

  “It’s that guy’s place,” said Grace. “Rob. That’s where it’s at.”

  I passed a sign for a rest stop and was tempted to pull in and put my head between my knees, but instead I maintained my beeline east. Lincoln, Preston, Pawnee City—every holy grail lay to the east.

  “How come Harv’s the only one not hollering back there?” I asked.

  “He’s asleep,” said Clint.

  Lights flew up behind us, then, with an annoyed honk, swerved around us into the passing lane. I caught a glimpse of a white Alice’s Flowers van.

  “You see that?”

  Colleen nodded. “Flowers is all I’ve been thinking about,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t even stay to give him a funeral. He always talked about one Tom Waits song he wanted for when the people got up to leave.”

  “There’s always time for a funeral. They have them for soldiers, I don’t know, fifty years later if they find a body out in the jungle.”

  “His body was right there! I kissed his hand!”

  “We had to go to prevent needing more funerals.”

  On the trip back to MacArthur I’d have to buy a Nerf football, definitely, and a book about astronauts. Souvenirs of those couple of days when Dad was away, you remember that, Ray? That seems so long ago now. Something yellow moved into the left lane to pass us.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. “Take a look at this!”

  I glanced at the front bumper going by, then I had to look at the road.

  “No,” she murmured. “No spoiler.”

  And I’d have run it off the road if it had? That seemed reasonable. The silver chevrolet flashed on its square back end before the car fishtailed into the night.

  “Front end looked like a shark,” I said.

  She’d already shut her eyes again. “That was a Corvette.” The closer we got to Lancaster County the more the exit ramps seemed to laugh up their sleeves, because they knew what was coming and we didn’t.

  The back of the ambulance was quiet, though I couldn’t imagine how more than two of them could lie down at one time. Or what their sleepless parents back in Burroughs County had to be thinking. Clint’s brother lying wide awake in his hospital bed.

  Eighteen inches to my right, thirteen hours after Doug had his brain spilled out, Colleen finally let out one brittle sob like she was choking on a cracker, her face against her knee. I squeezed her bony shoulder, and she sucked a mucousy breath up her nose.

  “I can’t be hard,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m so tired.”

  I rubbed between her shoulder blades, steering with one hand down the highway, pin-straight as Josie’s hair. I had rubbed Josie’s back too, when their mom had died, and held little Ray in my lap, their faces wet and ribcages shuddering. Loss affects you structurally. My hand felt gigantic across Colleen’s back.

  The mid-morning sky above southeast Nebraska was charcoal gray, like a saturated sponge hovering over us. Colleen slept sitting up, suspended by her shoulder strap against her cheek, snoring through the roof of her mouth. As I steered the ambulance onto the driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels, her eyes snapped open and she slapped her hands against the dashboard. Kids thumped in the back, empty bacon containers sliding around my feet.

  “Who’s house is that?” Clint muttered, throat sticky from sleep. “That your house, Mr. G?”

  I slowed down between the blue-jay whirligigs and the umbrella clothesline.

  “Shit,” Colleen said between her teeth. “Is this Hoover? Is this a genius, what do you call it, hiding-in-plain-sight thing? These people’s lives in your hands, and—”

  “This is Pawnee,” I said, peering at the front window’s white curtains before I shut off the ignition. “This is my mom’s house.”

  Colleen wiped a kernel of sleep from her eye. “What does she grow out here?”

  “Got a hundred acres that she rents out for hay. Not in shape to do it herself.”

  “What about your dad?”

  The curtains shifted six inches and, sure enough, Evadare’s horn-rims peered out. I put the thing in park and turned the engine off, and without its rumble the world suddenly seemed so quiet that a section of my brain wondered if I’d finally fallen asleep.

  “She’s a widow.”

  “Oh,” Colleen sighed. She fell back in her seat, though her hands were working on the seatbelt latch. I knew from experience that Doug couldn’t have been out of her mind for long, but maybe she hadn’t specifically thought widow too much.

  “This looks like kind of a boring place,” said Grace. “Just saying.”

  “Does she have chickens, though?” Franny asked.

  The seven of us stretched our military-secret arms and legs as we navigated around the puddles—evidently it’d been raining out here. The non-ambulance air smelled fresh as daisies. The kids let us walk ahead, as kids will. A quarter-mile to the east, Sit-Stay Dog Food reared its gray roof, but I didn’t bother to point it out. Franny brought her camera out from somewhere and asked us to turn around.

  “You could leave them here for a while,” Colleen muttered. “We’d find Megan faster—nobody’d look here for them.”

  “Not just them,” I said.

  “Does she maybe keep rabbits?” asked Franny.

  I went up the front step—most of the white paint Lydia had brushed on during her first pregnancy had been scuffed out of existence.

  “Well, don’t take it personally,” Amber said to Harv. “Just go in the bathroom when we get in, okay? Look if they have hair gel.”

  The white door swung open, releasing the hybrid scent of split-pea soup and ammonia, a monstrous thing. Evadare, in sneakers and daisy-print vinyl apron, stood with the toilet brush in her hand—hadn’t thought to put it down when she’d heard us drive up. She’d put on weight around the middle and trimmed her perm.

  “Pete!” she said, twisting her legs in the doorway. “I never expect to see you!”

  Evadare was some kind of Ozark name though she was Czech. This apparent contradiction was more than I could stomach at that moment, and the gentlemanly hand I’d put behind Colleen curled into a fist.

  “This is Colleen Avery,” I grinned, “and these all are the collective pride of Hoover High, out on the junior class field trip! Everything quiet? All right if we come in and say hi to Mom?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, do your best. Oh, sorry about this.” She flourished the brush like a tennis racket. “You know how a toilet gets!”

  Though that would’ve been her doing alone, since Mom didn’t use a toilet. One by one we slid past her.

  “Oh, but I hear about Hoover on the radio—so many fires, isn’t it terrible?”

  “Yeah, maybe this isn’t a bad time to be out of town.” I kicked my shoes off, like always, under the rack of gilt-edged State Fair plates. “I need to talk to you about that.”

  “But don’t the children worry about their parents, they want to be at home?”

  “No, no, not at all.” Colleen flashed a smile like burnished steel. “Everyone’s families are just fine!”

  “Anyway, let the children come in and eat a meal. I always want potatoes with breakfast, will they have potatoes?”

  Evadare addressed this to the kids but they were too busy staring at the crocheted afghans and driftwood clocks. The eternal blue-and-white palm-tree wallpaper.

  “Oh, but your arm?”

  “I was born this way,” explained Amber.

  Clint dropped to the floor, pulled the Life magazines from under the coffee table. Sure, there was enough here to entertain them for a week, maybe two. Keep a low profile, but still do some work around the plac
e—maybe repaint the step!

  “Colleen, okay, then you can help me with the frying pans, it will be nice to have someone to talk to. They want toast too? Peter, you go to your mother—no, not down the hall, she is in the study now during the day.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Then I’ll need to talk to you. About a big favor.”

  She turned in the doorway of the paneled kitchen, cleaning her glasses on the hem of her chiffon shirt. Her naked eyes looked vulnerable as egg yolks.

  “I will be here whenever you want.”

  The study was off the back of the living room, so I went through the bead curtain and straight to the love seat beside Mom’s big recliner. She wore a plaid shirt and purple sweatpants that she filled as though she were made of bread dough. She’d been sleeping, and she flinched a fraction of an inch when she heard the curtain, but when she saw it was me she managed to flicker an eyebrow and make a sound in her throat. That was the most she could do, because the year Ray was born she’d been diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the nervous system—it was hard to know exactly what to call it. Most times I came through the door Evadare announced that now it was something else.

  The acrid smell of sick person went up into my sinuses, distinct from that of a dying person—whether or not she wanted to, the last doctor said she’d stabilized, so there was no reason she couldn’t last forever. Her hair was white now and stuck up like straw, and the shunt for the feeding tube made an extra lump on the side of her big belly.

  “And how are you, Mom?” I squeezed her hand, and though I could feel the elastic strength running the length of her fingers she didn’t squeeze back. “Josie and Ray, they’re good. Send their love. I’m here with my school from Hoover, so they couldn’t come. It’s too bad.”

  I spoke loud and slow, though there was no reason to think her ears weren’t working. Her head twitched like maybe she was trying to get a clearer look at me, so I knelt beside her footrest and looked up at her.

  “Maybe I don’t look so good,” I said. “Been a hard trip so far.”

  Her eyes were the same as they’d always been—boring into me, then a smile flashing across her green irises, then boring in again. The rest of her I could never have identified as the person she’d been in Knudsen.