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  Eric waved his hands, a panicked spinster.

  “Like, ‘Agh, zombie!’ ”

  “Aaaaaagh!” the kids all sang.

  Megan laid her pristine face on the hard table, swallowed hard. Neither of her parents had mentioned her eyeball ever hanging out.

  “It has to have altered us at a genetic level,” wispy-haired Arthur said across the crowded table, with an intensity like he’d been up all night thinking about it. He’d already explained that he’d subscribed to Discover “back when we were in Velouria”—as though that life were years distant, instead of a couple of days—and still listened to npr out in his truck with his dog, so he sort of had a background in science too. He’d been six months from retirement before he worked on that cleanup crew with Donny Brown, still feeling hungover from the company cookout three days before.

  “See, the dna strains they introduced have to act in combination with the dna we’ve got already.” He moved his hands apart as though dna chains were eighteen inches long. “And nobody has the exact same dna as the person next to them, you see, so that’s why we have the same problems but with variations, like, uh, none of the girls seem to get as angry as you or I do, or you say you don’t mind the cold, or some of us are held together by the bacon for a very long time and others of us aren’t. Or in my case, I’ve got a thing with my fingers that not many people know about.”

  He held up those yellow leather gloves, wet with grease.

  “I can so fart,” said Shawn. “Fart anytime I want to.”

  “So do it!” Eric crowed.

  “Don’t want to.”

  Lydia laughed and light from the bulb flashed off her braces.

  “No, no,” said Colleen, three diners to my left. “We need to define ‘a zombie.’ ”

  Kids had their elbows on the table, mouths agape like she was Santa Claus.

  “A zombie’s anything that’s wounded, like left for dead, but keeps moving forward, against all odds, okay?” She smiled laboriously at her daughter—trying to make sense was such hard work that sweat beaded her brow. “Could be a mouse in a trap, a whacked-out substitute teacher or a real—what did they call it?—reanimated corpse, even—”

  “Could be an impoverished African nation,” suggested Arthur. “But young lady, you’ve barely touched your pork!”

  “You said yourself we’re all a little different,” she replied. “I go my own speed.”

  “Eating meat and salt,” Arthur smiled coldly, “reminds us that we’re human.”

  He must’ve listened to Out There.

  “Arthur,” Colleen asked, “what do you drive?”

  “The snow’s nearly quit.” He stood up, clearing his plate. “Get enough of us out there with shovels, we’ll be able to take you on the annotated tour!”

  Jock had red hair, a faceful of stubble and forearms like a couple of hams. God, they looked delicious. We stood on the floor of the fabled bacon factory operated by fourteen of Penzler’s victims—now twenty-one—my brain already so filled with operating procedures that it felt ready for slicing. Across the longest wall they’d painted pork belly futures with a blue roller.

  “Because what future would we have without the place, am I right? If it wasn’t for that ol’ economic downturn we’d have been so screwed!” he shouted. “If Schwarz had stayed in business, where the hell would we have gone, right? I mean, you got a lot of disused pork-processing plants sitting around your hometown?”

  He had to yell because we were walking between the skin-removal saws—which shook and rattled like hell as they started the process—and the liquid-smoke-injector needles that finished the first stage and also rattled like hell. The conveyor belts carried the product in a big horseshoe so we could watch the untouched fatty pork bellies drop out of the tumbler to the left while ten feet to the right the perfectly rectangular bacon sides, dripping yellow, slid onto the steel table to have metal combs shoved into them so they could be hung up inside the smoker. The combs were even sharper than Lydia’s braces, so a first-aid staple gun dangled from a nail every ten feet or so.

  “No, not in Hoover,” I said, shoving a comb in a couple of inches from the top of the slab. “We’d have mobbed the place. There’s really no phone in here, hey?”

  “Nope, nope, sorry—the phone company is one outfit that won’t barter!”

  Apparently he’d been one of the guys who’d corraled the meat truck at the Pegasus station back in Velouria, but instead of getting arrested he’d driven home where his brother-in-law Gord had kidded him that if he still had a jones for bacon then Gord knew a pork-processing plant sitting empty outside Lincoln. That afternoon Jock had driven out from Velouria and just before dinnertime he’d seen the future waiting like Noah’s ark here in the field. First thing he’d done was to patch all the shot-up windows with black garbage bags, because, truth be told, Gord had discovered the place when he’d been looking for things to shoot at.

  “Listen,” I hollered, “I’d love to call my kids one more time, so is Rob the only one with a phone?”

  “Hey, Jock?” shouted Willow. “Should we still get ready for the truck out back?”

  Pierced-lip Willow, her legs all goose-pimples in her jean shorts, stood holding hands with black-clad Little Craig. Even though most of the eleventh-graders’ duties were in the dormitory, these two had been assigned to the factory, but there didn’t seem to be anything specific for them to do so—according to Arthur, anyway—they just wandered around looking for corners in which to copulate. They don’t have any more birth control than God gave a jackrabbit, so if she doesn’t miss her period we all learn something else about our true natures.

  And if it hadn’t been for the pink goo coursing through our systems we might’ve bothered to put in earplugs, too.

  “What?” said Jock. “Oh, yeah, propane day! I suppose we can get ready, no way to say how fast this’ll melt. Give me a hand, Pete, you don’t feel the cold, right?”

  I followed him down the back hallway.

  “I’m happy to pitch in,” I said, “but I really need to talk about—”

  “I’ll shovel the stairs, you roll the skid out of the freezer—you remember, third door on your left just there,” he called over his shoulder. “The county might do the main road any minute, then the guy I called’ll plough the—”

  The outside door clicked shut behind him. I took the third door on the left into the freezer, ready to roll out a whole skid of finished bacon—apparently that was how they paid off the propane guy and every other supplier. But I must’ve gone in the second door instead, which seemed to be the cooler. They were all standing there, looking at me if they still had eyes.

  Except for poor legless Maximilian sitting propped in the corner, Jock had stood all of them up so they wouldn’t look quite so dead, despite the lacy frost tracing patterns up their cheeks and necks. They’d all been in for a couple of days already—Lonny, Jacob from my class, Leopold, others whose names I’d immediately forgotten—and unless there was a cure on hand they were never coming out.

  “Oh, guys,” I murmured. “Hi.”

  Jacob had staggered off the shuttle from Hoover, forgetting both of his arms on the seat—and too late to nail them back on, so those cold sores were now his most attractive blemish. He still wore his hoover high hoodie but the sleeves hung empty as burst balloons. Jock had wondered whether the cold might stop any subsequent parts from falling off, and so long as the guys didn’t mind being borderline-vegetative, with barely a pulse between them, the experiment was a roaring success.

  And their eyes would follow a guy whenever he wheeled a rack of bacon in for the three-hour rest between smoking and slicing. That might sound creepy, their sluggish eyes creaking back and forth on near-dead batteries, but it was mostly reassuring, considering that one day I might find myself standing there. Moving eyes were better than nothing. If I could get near a
phone Ray and Josie might come in from MacArthur to tickle me under the armpits, then come back a day or so later for when I started to giggle.

  Jacob’s gaze crept sideways toward the open cooler door even though I stood in front of him. A door clacked open out in the hallway.

  “Pete!” Jock hollered. “Get the lead out! Might be on his way, am I right?”

  I trotted next door to the freezer, picked up the loaded skid with the dolly and steered it out into the hallway. Each shrink-wrapped pound of bacon carried a blue schwarz meat products sticker because a couple of thousand had been left in the packaging machine. It was true the cold didn’t bother my hands much, but it still felt weird to hold onto things when I didn’t have a pinkie, I felt more like the four-fingered Thing from Fantastic Four comics than I did like Captain America, even though Captain America was also a super-soldier secretly created by the US military. But if his blood was plasticky goo they’d never mentioned it in any comic I’d ever read. I turned backward so as to push the door open with my behind.

  “Nah, forget it!” Jock called. We were beside the big generator, so it was just as loud as the factory floor. “He’ll be a while yet!”

  He’d only cleared a couple of ribbons down the concrete ramp, and though melt-water was dripping twenty feet down from the corner of the roof, deep snow still surrounded the place like we were a boat out at sea.

  “I need a smoke anyway,” he said. “Let me show you the forms just in case.”

  I pushed the skid against the wall. Every minute at Pork Belly Futures, the sicker I felt at not being en route to MacArthur. Bodily and mentally I felt solid as a cinderblock, but I’d seen in myself and others how quickly that could dissolve, and I couldn’t remember the names of Ray and Josie’s teachers at Colts Neck, that blue cartoon dog from Laff-A-Lympics or our phone number back in Wahoo.

  “You know, I’m not stopping long,” I said.

  He lit a Marlboro and patted the step beside him. I set my bottom on the damp concrete as he unfolded a sheaf of paper. Our dormitory, containing poor Harv and at least one telephone, sat like a long shoebox across the fields.

  “Even if you’re only here for the afternoon,” Jock said, “I still figure you’re a rung or two up on some of these other meatheads.”

  Jock had spent years as managing supervisor at Dockside and had been coming in from a cigarette break when Arthur and the rest had started the cleanup. Garth said if he ever met any of those higher-ups from Dockside in the street he’d rip out their hearts—and speaking from my own experience that wasn’t just an expression—but that Jock was all right because he couldn’t have known what the pink goo was really about if he’d been willing to roll his sleeves up that day and dip a mop in a bucket.

  Maybe he ought to have known, though, which was why he was breaking his back to make PBF a going concern—Boy Scout leader to your poor, your hungry, your limbless and staggering. Or maybe that was me. But Jock was the only zombie I knew who was in regular contact with his family, even planned on going home for the weekend.

  “So is that real clear?” he asked. “Make sure they initial there before they roar off, or shit will hit the fan!”

  I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to find so many suppliers willing to barter but it had required hundreds of phone calls. He’d told his wife he’d suddenly found a better job outside Lincoln, so did that mean he’d cut himself a paycheck out if this too?

  Outside the distant dormitory tiny figures ran back and forth—must’ve been eleventh-graders playing Frisbee in the snow—as the six guys for the afternoon shift came trudging across the white field. All that stuff about the chosen people and the promised land, was that out of Exodus too?

  Over the hum of the generator I heard something like a moaning from inside the factory. Jock scrutinized numbers and wrote happy faces in the margins.

  “Listen,” I said, “we’re kind of skirting the issue here. What I need to know is whether you’ve got a bead on a cure for this thing.”

  “I guess you got all this straight—taught school, isn’t that what Megan told us?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, though that life sounded distant as a tv show. “Listen, you hear something funny?”

  “Anytime you want to talk about your condition, Pete, what it’s doing to your life, where you’re at, you just come to me!”

  He pulled the door open, but long-haired, noseless Lonny stood there blocking our way. The last time I’d seen him he’d been in the cooler.

  “Aw, shit, Giller!” Jock yelled. “You forgot to shut the door!”

  Lonny gurgled and tried to grin at us. He didn’t have much left in the way of lips and there was something purple smeared around his mouth.

  “All right, you’re okay!” Jock put a palm on his bare chest. “Let’s get in and sit down!”

  Then I noticed Lonny was holding a man’s foot with eight inches of leg still attached to it—a blond-haired leg. Behind him, dark shapes shuffled up the corridor.

  “Fuck, Jock!” I said. “He’s eating Little Craig!”

  After three days at PBF there had to be as many nitrites in Little Craig as in any side of bacon—one of my students. Over Lonny’s shoulder I could make out Jacob and more of the Dockside guys shambling up the hallway.

  Jock folded his big ham arms. “Well, Lonny-boy, this is a big problem!”

  Lonny looked from Jock to me and back again. Then his entire arm dropped off and lay there on the concrete, its hand still grasping Little Craig’s foot. His teeth were already bared, of course, but he snarled at us like a dog then bent down with his good arm, picked up the detached one by the wrist and tried to wallop us with his gummy knob of shoulder!

  I leaned back to let it swing by, then stepped in and punched lipless Lonny in the face as hard as I could. He flew five or six feet back into the hallway, stopped when he hit the crowd collecting behind him, then fell forward onto his face. He lost his grip on his detached arm, and that hand lost its grip on Little Craig’s ankle, so did I pick up the lost arm and club him to death with it?

  “Now, hold on, Pete,” Jock was saying, “he just needs—”

  No, I ran in, pushed poor Jacob out of the way and stomped the back of Lonny’s head in with the heel of my boot. I had to brace myself against the walls, and after the first couple of kicks his head made a wet sound like Jell-o salad.

  “Hey, now, Pete!” Jock was shrieking. “Hey!”

  “Stop it!” Jacob yelled sleepily, but it came out like maybe his tongue was falling out, and how screwed-up was that? So I pushed him down onto his back and started to strangle him. I could only stay calm for so long. His throat felt cold as a pickle. Jock grabbed my shoulders and tried to pull me off but I was too invincible. Jacob gazed up at me, forgetting how to blink, no arms to push me off, save himself. And in that state why should he have wanted to?

  “Listen,” Jock hissed in my ear, “know what your problem is?”

  I pushed my thumbs deep into his throat but he wasn’t strangling fast enough—I needed a weapon. I elbowed past the other clammy dipshits crowding the hallway and ran out onto the factory floor. The whole noisy line was still running—sawing and skinning, injecting and trimming—and on the floor beside my stainless-steel table old Leopold from the cooler was crouched over Little Craig, eating his cheek. Leopold only had one leg but he’d been stiff enough that they’d leaned him against the cooler wall without any problem. Willow was chopping into the old guy’s back with one of the hooks on a pole they used for the pork-belly tumbler, but he was having too good a time gnawing through to Little Craig’s teeth to even notice.

  I picked up a piece of two-by-four and jogged over. This was going to be great!

  But then Colleen, dressed in dingy striped coveralls, a black grease stain across her forehead, picked up two steel combs from the table and buried them in the back of Leopold’s head, like forks into m
ashed potatoes. He dropped onto Little Craig without a quiver, lying mouth-to-mouth like they’d been boyfriends.

  “Oh,” I said, dropping my two-by-four, “that’s great.” Because I’d had a beautiful long fight in front of me, and she’d gone and ended it.

  Willow stumbled over to the wall and killed the power for the line, so it clattered to a stop with a disappointed groan. Half a cup’s worth of blood coagulated on the floor, on Colleen, in spatters across the salt bags—we were all too viscous for any more than that. And based on Leopold and Lonny, it seemed that penetrating the brain was key to shutting off a zombie—Jock, we really learned something about ourselves! Colleen stood over the mess she’d made, breath huffing, hands out at her sides like a gunfighter.

  I didn’t feel like going back to kill Jacob anymore. I took the pole from Willow so she could push Leopold off her little dog-food boyfriend.

  “How, how long we staying here?” Colleen picked up my two-by-four, broke it against the poor liquid-smoke-injector. “This is pointless!”

  Jock ambled along the factory floor, holding hands with a couple of earless guys out of the cooler.

  “You know what the problem with you guys is?” Jock asked again. “You lack a moral compass. I think we all do, a little bit, but you two really lack a moral compass.”

  I swung the pole like a bat against the side of his head but the shaft only snapped in two. He and the cooler-zombies turned to watch the hook-end slide out of sight under the brine tank, then he turned back to me.

  “My point exactly,” he said.

  “My problem is that I should get the hell back to my kids!” I yelled.

  “Then I think you should do that,” he nodded. “And stop leaving doors open.”

  I picked Leopold up by the straps of his overalls and dragged him over to the pork-belly wheelbarrow. Guys in Dockside jumpsuits were running in by then.

  “Sweet angel.” Willow kissed Craig’s half-a-face then sat up with blood smeared across her chin. “He’s alive, you guys!”

  “Shnbe,” Little Craig announced.