Tomsen is awake too and already sitting in the driver’s seat, her vivid green eyes lost in a sleepy haze while she waits for the vegetable oil to warm up.
“Get up,” Nora says. “Important shit to do, remember?”
“Not yet,” Julie pleads, pulling the pillow onto her face as if to smother herself.
“I thought you wanted to save the world, you fucking walrus. Get up!” Nora yanks the blanket off her, and this time it’s not her back that’s exposed. This time M does look, but I can hardly blame him.
“Oh my!” Nora laughs as Julie scrambles to grab her shirt. “Looks like you had a good night after all!”
Tomsen watches in the rear view mirror with a look of creeping apprehension: what have I gotten into?
“I hate you,” Julie grumbles, staggering out of the bedroom while buttoning up her jeans. “Like, so much.”
Nora makes a kissing noise.
Julie plops down onto the couch-bed and looks at the floor with puffy eyes. Her hair is the usual postmodern sculpture of crazed angles and spikes. She offers me a faint smile as I sit beside her, but it’s clear that her night was not the restful repose that mine was. Wherever she went in her dreams, part of her is still there, chasing her mother down dark alleys while the flood rises at her feet.
“Coffee,” she croaks at the floor, then looks at Tomsen. “Please tell me you have coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Tomsen says, but before Julie can burst into tears, she adds, “but I know a place.”
She starts the engine.
As day dawns on the highway, we begin to encounter traffic. The first car behind us triggers a panic; M and Nora reach for guns we don’t have and Julie starts rattling off a plan for how to overpower the attackers when they stop us, but then the car passes with a honk and a wave and we all feel foolish. We remember that not everyone in the world is a thief, a rapist, a killer, a cannibal, or an employee of an insane corporate militia. Some people are just people, on their way to wherever, and as more and more of them pass us on this crumbling highway, cars and trucks and bikes and horses, I realize our posture toward life may need some adjustment.
Somewhere between Baltimore and DC, we pull into a diner.
It looks the way a diner should look. Old, ugly, clean but well-worn. A blinking neon sign makes an unbelievable claim: OPEN.
“Is this real?” Nora wonders as we park between a boxy red camper van and a row of horses tied up saloon-style. “It’s some kind of secret base, right? A rebel front? Or are we in some suggestible universe shit?”
Tomsen’s eyes dart over to Nora. “You’ve read The Suggestible Universe?”
“Of course I have. Everyone was reading it back when zombies first went public. Fascinating stuff.”
“Too bad more people don’t believe it,” Tomsen says, hopping down from the driver’s seat. “But no, we didn’t think this into being. Lynda’s Diner, established 2021, best and only breakfast in town.”
The diner is busy yet eerily subdued. Most of the customers have a look of soggy exhaustion, and I realize these aren’t just customers, they’re refugees. Less than twenty-four hours ago, New York City sank a little deeper under the tide of inevitability, and the labor camp that called itself Manhattan vomited its population into the world. The few busloads that Axiom deemed valuable got free shipping west, to be reinstalled into the machine as soon as possible. Everyone else was left to scatter, and with all that traffic funneling through just a few remaining highways, Lynda’s will be a popular pitstop on the route of the New York diaspora.
Lucky for us, the rush hasn’t hit yet. We have been racing nearly non-stop since the moment the hurricane passed, driven by desperate quests, and our urgency has put us ahead of the brunch crowds.
Tomsen leads us to a booth by the window, and Julie and I squeeze in next to her on the red vinyl bench. M and Nora take the other side, but M sits near the edge, projecting none of his usual attempts at charm. Nora notices, and a curious frown hovers on her face.
A weary, middle-aged waitress approaches the table with a notepad at the ready, just like in the movies, but instead of “What can I get you?” she asks, “What’ve you got?”
Tomsen reaches into one of her jacket’s many pockets and pulls out two black objects: little bundles of wires encased in tape and plastic. “Signal filters,” she says. “Hook them to your walkie’s antenna, reduce jammer noise by ten percent. Limited stock, act now.”
The waitress picks up the gadgets, eyes them skeptically, disappears into the kitchen for a minute, then returns with a look of amazement. “I just talked to my husband on the farm. Still squealy, but I can hear him. You could get rich off these things.”
“They won’t be worth much once we destroy BABL.”
The waitress smiles patiently. “Right. And how’s that going, ‘H. Tomsen?’ Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Tomsen glows with the pleasure of being remembered. “I was in jail but these people helped me escape. I killed the jammer in New York, now we’re going to blow up the west coast.”
The waitress raises an eyebrow.
“It’s going to be beautiful.” Tomsen is bouncing in her seat like a child, and I wonder if someone should try to stop her before she gushes our plans to the whole world, but it’s coming out so fast… “You’ll be able to walkie your farm man whenever you want, tell him you love him and have radio sex, lost kids will find their families, weird people will find friends, we’re going to untie the gag so the world can talk again.”
I glance around, but no one is listening to us. The waitress scans our faces, dirty and bruised and tired, hair matted and wild, and I realize we probably look more like delusional drug addicts than villains, heroes, or any other threat to the norm.
“Good for you,” the waitress says with a faint smile. “So what can I get for you?”
“Five days of food and all your fryer oil.”
“Deal.”
“And coffee,” Julie mumbles, staring into empty space. “All your coffee.”
The coffee comes first and Julie nearly dunks her face in the mug. Tomsen slides hers over to Julie, who grabs it with her free hand and holds it at the ready.
I look down into the black well of my mug. Aromatic steam drifts up to my nose. Iridescent oils swirl on the surface. I take a sip of the inky brew, bitter and bracing, and I feel the caffeine meeting my neurons. A cautious greeting, then recognition, old friends reunited. My brain lights up like a city.
Ten minutes later, the food comes: a classic breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and fruit, and not the thin, pale, reconstituted versions I remember from diners of the old world. Not frozen food ingots dumped out of a bucket off a ship from China. Real food, fresh from a nearby farm, thick and brimming with life.
For the first time in weeks, I feel hungry.
I take a bite of pancake and my eyes snap wide when the flavor hits my brain. I can taste it. It doesn’t taste like carbohydrates and proteins and the knowledge that I won’t starve; it tastes like butter and maple and rich, doughy warmth. I pop a bulging strawberry into my mouth and my tongue ignites with tangy sweetness so overwhelming my eyes roll into my head.
“R,” Julie says with a wondering smile. “Are you…enjoying your breakfast?”
My cheeks are too stuffed to answer, so I just nod and keep chewing. The only thing I don’t inhale with rapture is the bacon. Staring at that thick rasher of smoky meat, my mouth tingles with desire, but my mind backs away. I am not ready for that. Maybe I never will be. It’s harder to decontextualize meat when you’ve chewed it off a living, screaming body. Perhaps some parts of my humanity should be left unremembered.