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  “Oh.” Amber set her hand flat on the table. “Feel that?”

  “Ah, shit,” said Grace. “That’s a good high.”

  The nitrite euphoria had spread to every part of my body. I shut my eyes and could’ve sworn I was floating above the table.

  “I’m at my limit,” said Colleen.

  After five minutes I started back to the buffet for thirds.

  “Giller!”

  From the far corner of the restaurant Rob beckoned me over, his white hair combed flat onto his forehead. He was sitting with two other guys. I balanced my behind on the edge of the seat and put down my empty plate. All three of them nodded at me, but none of them quit chewing—immediately across was Clayton the first-aid guy, with his big brown moustache and orange Dockside jumpsuit, and beside him was a bald guy with his unzipped jumpsuit over a bald eagle T-shirt, two unsubtle staples connecting his left eyebrow to his forehead.

  Need zombies? I could’ve told Tom Exegesis. Check an all-you-can-eat bacon restaurant.

  Each of the three had a pyramid of bacon in front of him that must’ve weighed three pounds, like in those bacon-eating contests that won the English Civil War for Cromwell. Rob slid the saucer from under his coffee cup and stacked it with bacon, then the two guys pitched in too until strips were tumbling onto the tablecloth.

  “Help yourself, Mr. Giller,” he said through a mouthful.

  “They aren’t going to let us back in here,” Clayton muttered, his mouth full. “That girl talked to the manager.”

  “Let’s see what happens if they don’t,” said Bald Eagle. His patch said garth.

  Rob swallowed and wiped his hands on a paper napkin.

  “If they say no,” he said, “we’ll get that “Baconalia” deal at Denny’s. And we’ve got more than we could eat in a month at home anyway.” He straightened, burped, then grinned out the side of his mouth. “This is the Mr. Giller who was the teacher when the accident happened. This is Garth, Clayton.”

  “Mr. Giller?” Harv loomed over the table, his plate stacked high again. “You want some help?” He held his shoulders forward so his neck looked thick. “Everything cool? These the guys we’re supposed to meet?”

  “It’s cool, Harv. You’re a good fella, keeping an eye out.”

  “I thought you looked familiar,” bald Garth said to me. “Thought you might’ve been the pet store guy back in Velouria. Forget his name.”

  “You forget your own name,” said Clayton.

  “Look who’s fuckin’ talking,” said Garth.

  “So you all came out here from Velouria?” I asked.

  “Yessir,” said Rob, “day before yesterday some of the guys got word about this place starting up so I figured I’d check it out. Wife and kids weren’t too sad to see me go after that last day or two, so…”

  The two other men nodded at that, sitting with a hunk of bacon in each hand.

  “So how did word get through to you?” Clayton asked.

  “I told you already,” Rob beamed. “Giller tracked our number down.”

  “And on the radio!” said Harv as he slid into the booth.

  “Oh, yeah, Out There!” said bald Garth. “Little Lydia!”

  “And that is why she was put on toilets,” said Rob.

  “Not that anybody uses ’em,” Clayton said into his moustache.

  “Last thing we wanted, security-wise. Just sloppy.”

  “Giller, hey,” said Clayton, “that looks pretty fresh. Forget to pick it up off the ground or what?”

  His fork pointed at my right hand—the sticky socket from my little finger.

  “Shit!” I yelled.

  I pawed at my shirt pocket but it was like the damn thing was sewn shut.

  “What’s the limit again?” Clayton asked.

  “Five minutes,” grimaced bald Garth.

  “Jock says ten at the outside,” Rob grinned, “but, yeah, five’s more like it.”

  “Aw, don’t mess with him,” said Clayton. “The poor guy.”

  I finally fished out the dried husk of my pinkie finger. Looked like it had been snapped off a mummy.

  “Leave it as a tip,” suggested Garth.

  “All right, we’re on our way.” Rob fed his arm into a leather bomber jacket. “I’ll go up and pay—you’ll bring your people up front, Giller? Maybe I’ll drive your vehicle, if that’s all right, so we all know where we’re going.”

  “Absolutely, yes.” I got up too, shoving strips haphazardly into my mouth. I looked like a bacon dispenser. “There’s a, uh, woman with us, Megan Avery’s mother.”

  “She’s affected too?”

  “She threw Mr. Giller into a car!” said Harv. “He was whaling on her, and—”

  “No, no,” I said. “Other way around.”

  “Well, if our research ever gets to that point, it might be interesting to compare their problems, with their common genetics. So far it’s only been three days, and I think the operation’s pretty—”

  “Mr. Aiken!” Colleen ran up, cheeks flushed, even her eyes somehow younger. She held his leather sleeve. “You do have Megan?”

  She led the kids and me out after the three men. Snow was everywhere, filling the air like when they used to empty flour out of the new mill’s high hopper back in Knudsen, though instead of making me cough it just settled over my shoulders.

  “You call her ‘The Fugitive’ from now on, right?” Garth grinned, wiping a final slick of bacon grease across his eagle. “The one-armed man, am I right?”

  Amber tapped bacon against her front teeth. “Hardy har har.”

  Harv bent to tie a sneaker, wisps of snow snaking around his feet. Grace set her hands on his back and leap-frogged over him.

  “Don’t let it worry you, darling,” said Rob, throwing an arm around Amber. “Some guys were getting hit with it this time last week, the company’s doctors told them all their symptoms were, what—”

  “‘A pre-existing medical condition,’ ” snorted Garth, jangling car keys.

  Clint leapfrogged Franny, then she vaulted over him, serape flapping, then her cowboy boot went out from under her as she landed. Went down hard on her ass, and man did we all laugh.

  “The gp was no better,” Rob was saying, “so by Tuesday our old graveyard foreman, Jock, he was getting a hold of everybody—”

  “He said, ‘Let’s get our heads together about this,’ ” Clayton grinned beneath his moustache. “‘Let’s look after what needs looking after.’ ”

  Amber shoved Harv between the shoulders, and he stumbled forward with an almighty fart. She hooted so loud that I didn’t even pay attention to how embarrassed he was. The Dockside guys talked about guys’ parts falling off but thanks to the Glory of Bacon most of us weren’t paying attention.

  “Can we please just get there?” said Colleen.

  “And anyway, after just a couple of days some of the fellas, well, they’ve taken a real turn for the worse.” Rob wiped snow from his brow. “In fact, a couple of them—”

  “Aw, yeah, old Maximilian!” whooped Garth.

  “Christ Almighty!” Ron held his fists to his head. “Let me finish a sentence!”

  “But, hey,” said Colleen, stopped beside a blue sports car. “What kind of vehicle do you guys drive?”

  “See for yourself,” said Rob.

  Clayton circled to the passenger side of a big yellow crew-cab pickup.

  She shot me a look. “Well, you never know, do you?”

  We’d driven through miles of empty farmland, then before noon we turned into a snowbound driveway. Rob gunned the engine and ploughed through the drifts, sashaying right and left as the snow bullied the wheels.

  “And there’s our bacon factory!” he grinned.

  The ambulance rounded a snowcapped fence and coasted to a stop beside oblong shap
es that might’ve been other vehicles. Thanks to my breath steaming up the passenger window I could make out only a couple of darker rectangles under the fluttering gray sky. Clayton and Garth in their yellow pickup crunched to a halt next to us. Rob killed our engine.

  “Welcome, sir, to Pork Belly Futures.”

  “Everybody out!” I called into the back.

  As we hopped down from the cab I was kicked in the chest by a wind from the Arctic’s armpit. Rob and Garth tramped toward the distant left-hand rectangle and Colleen pushed past me, high-stepping over the snow to keep up with them. The snow was higher than my knees but the two men had packed down a choppy path. Nebraska: The Lost In A Blizzard State. Clint charged past as I blinked away Froot Loop–sized snowflakes.

  “He said bacon factory!”

  “The promised land!” Franny sprinted by too, her wispy hair diffused like a sparkler. “Like the fridge magnet!”

  Clayton tromped up behind Amber and Grace, his moustache coated so he looked like Burl Ives. “No shuttle across for another hour, children, so you better haul ass!”

  I fell into line behind Harv. I ignored the snow blowing through the front of my shirt by studying the back of his white high-tops kicking through the drifts. It was Friday, so if I hadn’t taken him on our field trip he could’ve planned on running down a court in Hoover that very evening, waiting for a bounce-pass and hoping no girls could spot the acne between his shoulders.

  Ahead of us, Clayton disappeared through a dark door, then I fumbled with the latch too and we hustled out of the snow into the quiet gloom inside the rectangle, a long room—I didn’t realize how the wind had been yowling in our ears until we thudded the door shut behind us. The place smelled of pig shit. My crew stood stomping snow onto a blue tarp, but Colleen was already sitting on the nearest bed, her arms wrapped tight around her daughter, both with their hair in their faces, a fleece blanket decorated with baseball players thrown over their shoulders. Appliqué aficionado Megan wore greasy gray coveralls.

  “I wanted to talk to him about my eye!” She suddenly bawled, ropes of spit between her teeth. “I wanted to say something about it!”

  Colleen wrapped her arms tighter around her daughter, peered up at me.

  “Hello,” she said meekly. Her eyes were red and wet.

  My own eyes felt hot and damp at the sight of them—my own kids’ crunchable bodies tugged at me from across the miles—but I blinked it away with the snow.

  “C’mon, guys,” I said. “Let’s not all stand here.”

  “But do you even know it was Dad?” hissed Megan. “Maybe it wasn’t!”

  We were between two long rows of cots, each bed strewn with blankets and backpacks and inflatable camping pillows and the occasional stuffed animal. Curtains were still drawn over the big square windows, but reading lights had been nailed to the wall over each bed and the yellow hemisphere cast by each one made the place like a movie theater as the lights go down. I could taste acrid pig shit on the end of my tongue.

  “He wasn’t mangled, Megs, anyone could’ve recognized him.” Her talk trembled with enforced calm. “And once we get a bead on that fucking driver I’ll pull his guts out like an inch at a time, I mean he will suffer, all right? Peter, how long are the guts in the human body?”

  “Fifty feet in both intestines.”

  “No word of a lie, Sweetheart, I am going to chew up his guts and spit them out, I don’t care what he’s been eating, that’s all I’ve been thinking the whole way here.”

  “All right,” said Clint. “Cozy place here.”

  “Mom, okay,” Megan murmured, her face pressed to Colleen’s flushed neck.

  “Who puked?” asked Grace, waving a hand in front of her nose.

  “Guess it’s not too hard to figure out this was a pig barn!” called Rob. He marched up the aisle between the beds and, with a flourish, threw a blanket around Harv’s shoulders. “Hang your coats above the heater there. Linoleum’s still shiny, see that? Jock fixed it up this past weekend, we put that plastic over the windows yesterday when it really started getting cold—but it holds everybody! Come on down here.”

  He led us up the aisle.

  “Few sleepers here, came off the graveyard shift after breakfast—I did too, but heck, nitrites keep you limber!”

  He thumped his chest. Lights were off where figures lay curled in sleeping bags, but the far end of the long room was bright thanks to a bulb dangling from a rafter. Beneath it, a bunch of my eleventh-graders played Monopoly on a long plank table.

  “All right, guys,” Rob announced, “as promised, here are the new additions to the wonderful happenings at the factory!”

  Ryan, Eric, Shawn, brace-faced Lydia Dershowitz and dumpy Ursula got up from their benches—they all looked a little pale but otherwise intact.

  “Hey, Mr. Giller,” said Shawn, hair down over one eye. “You, uh, want something to eat? They’re fixing you something.”

  Rob’s phone rang—“Takin’ Care of Business”—and he hustled into a corner.

  “I could eat again,” I said. Eat all the pigs that ever lived in the place!

  “But how come you guys are all here?” Harv murmured. He shuffled a step behind me. “Like a bus brought you.”

  “Didn’t you see the big ad in the paper?” Lydia ran her tongue over her teeth. “Jock ran that big-ass big ad in the Hoover paper—”

  “ ‘Do you crave bacon an unnatural amount?’ ” the old-timers all blurted together.

  “Really?” murmured Amber.

  “Nice arm,” Ryan said, and as he grinned at her the skin from his cheek folded down like a strip of old paint. He casually pressed a hand over it.

  “And then it gave Jock’s phone number!” said Ursula. “And everybody was at my house so we called it, and Eric, Eric was like—”

  “I’m like, ‘Shit, yeah, do you got bacon pills or something? Cause this is brutal, man,’ so Arthur drove the shuttle out to get us ’cause he’s out of his mind!”

  “Main thing,” I said, “is that everybody got the hell out of Hoover. Did he pick up those Dockside guys in Velouria—Lars, I think it was?”

  Shawn cleared his throat, moved his hair from his eyes. “He just got us.”

  Lydia suddenly brought her hand back and slapped Clint hard across the face.

  “Whoa,” I said, “kids—”

  He rocked back a step, and before he could take a swing Grace clubbed a sturdy fist into Lydia’s middle, and as she doubled over, Amber brought her knee up into Lydia’s face. She flew backward onto the plank table, sending their lines of plastic houses flying. Awesome, I thought. Tear her head off!

  “Cut it out,” I said, and slid in front of my girls.

  I helped Lydia down to the floor, and saw that the combination of train-track braces and Amber’s bony knee had sliced clean through her upper lip and a solid inch up toward her nose.

  “It’s just fun.” She prodded it with her tongue, separating the sides.

  “How long did Rob and Jock say you were going to be staying here?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Clint, “I mean, are you guys, uh, cured?”

  “There’s plenty to eat,” said Eric.

  “But they didn’t say anything about going home after a while, or bringing your parents out here or anything?”

  The old-timers shook their heads. Lydia fingered her wound.

  “Well, what is the cure?” asked Amber.

  “I get the feeling there isn’t one,” I murmured. “They never said there would be.”

  “But, hell,” said Eric, “there’s bacon, and I don’t mind if we stay three years!”

  He gave a Nerf football a delighted squeeze.

  “Want to see where the bathrooms are?” asked Shawn.

  Franny collected Community Chest cards from the floor. “If we’ve got three year
s we should totally start a 4-H!”

  “I could use the ladies’ room,” Colleen told Shawn.

  “Hey,” Eric called, “Mister, uh—”

  “Giller,” hollered Megan.

  “Mr. Giller, sorry, right—you can totally take that bed, it was Jacob’s and he won’t need it now, right? Dude sleeps standing up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Very funny.”

  From their benches the kids sat looking at me, orange money in their hands.

  “Did anybody ever mention that a place in Ohio might have a cure for all this?”

  “There’s a place in Georgia called Bacon County,” said Eric, rattling the dice.

  My crew had collapsed on various beds, except for Colleen, who was in the bathroom, and Franny, who’d started playing as the pewter thimble. Now that we were a big pack, I could probably quit keeping tabs on them. By then the pig smell wasn’t making my head snap back—it was more like an Acrid Animal Shit aromatherapy candle burning off in a corner. I stretched out on Jacob’s snarling-wolves blanket.

  “When you sleep with your own kind,” I’d once said as a bedwetters’ camp counselor, “you might not pee the bed so much.”

  A pot-bellied, wispy-haired little guy pushed past a plastic curtain at the end of the room and set plates and a handful of cutlery on the table. It wasn’t cold in there but he wore yellow work gloves.

  “I’m Arthur, gentlemen and ladies,” he called, “and I’ll be feeding you. Just letting it burn for a minute longer.”

  And my kids and I vaulted to our feet—our legs were that ready for us to eat. The smell filled my head so suddenly that the walls became strips of bacon, bubbling with grease, the beds were bacon, the rafters.

  “Lydia, dear,” Arthur said, “look what’s happened to you! I’ll fetch a staple gun.”

  “My mom’s cool,” Megan slid onto the bench beside Franny. “Except when they saw my eye hanging out that time, man.” She wiped snot across her canvas sleeve. “They completely lost their shit.”