Zombie Bake-Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

“[The] tale of a zombie horde reigning terror on the few humans left inside a building . . . a refreshing nod to the George Romero movies of old.” —Mourning Goats

There’s not much rumbling during the Recipe Days show at the Lubbock Municipal Coliseum—except for stomachs, that is—until the professional wrestlers arrive early for their Saturday night matches. Chaos ensues when the home cooks are overrun by Xombie, the Hellbillies, and Jersey Devil Jill.

They’re not everyone’s idea of family fun . . . especially when the rowdy wrestlers descend on the free donuts brought for the security team—and are turned into brain-eating zombies. The night’s main event starts early with undead wrestlers squaring off against kitchen divas and soccer moms. And as the contagion spreads, the few survivors, armed with mixers, booth poles, and a Zamboni, must fight to keep their heads on straight—and off the menu.

“Zombie specialist Stephen Graham Jones shows how to put a fresh spin on a classic dish.” —The Denver Post

“Zombie Bake-Off is fast, witty, original and ridiculously entertaining. Stephen Graham Jones has created an action-packed literary pastry that packs a sugar rush you just have to experience.” —HorrorTalk

 

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Release date: October 1, 2024

Publisher: Open Road Media

Print pages: 200

Sample

the night before

It all starts with the unmistakable splat of metal on skin. That can’t-go-back thunk of a body against a grill, and then the feel coming up through the floorboard, of a body crumpling under the truck, scraping along the asphalt.

But that’s more of an ending. Where the night started ending.

Where it began was with Rex and Shaney and Mark and Lewis pushing Rex’s dad’s bakery truck out of the driveway and then coasting down the slight grade of the street, waiting to start it until they were far enough away.

If there’s any better place to get stoned than a rolling box full of every kind of pastry, then they didn’t have the keys for it, anyway.

Fast-forward thirty minutes, six joints and one spilled but still serviceable bong later, and it’s the dead time after midnight, way on the industrial part of town, where the streets are tumbleweed empty and wide enough that Rex, just with one hand, has time to correct each last overcorrection. But they’re stacking up behind him, this curb-to-curb action, and his dad’s truck is handling like the tires are, well, donuts. Which makes him laugh enough to lose his smoke. He tries to make up for it by telling Shaney, crammed next to him on the long bench seat, that he drives great when he’s—

Then cue the sound of a raggedy man meeting the grill and bumper and undercarriage of a moving truck. Shaney clamping onto Rex’s knee, screaming his name, the night slowing down enough around them that just screaming his name like that, it takes minutes.

Rex stands on the brakes with both feet, loses Lewis into the dashboard, Mark into the floorboard. The truck is dead now, stalled out. The only sound Lewis, cussing, and then the radio glowing on, the sound trailing on moments after, something about tomorrow’s to-the-death grudge match at the Lubbock Municipal—

Shaney winds the dial, kills the announcer. “Did that really just happen?” she says.

Rex is studying the bear claw in his shifting hand. “My dad’s gonna kill me,” he says.

“If he doesn’t first,” Lewis says, tilting his head behind them.

Rex, weakly: “He?”

“I don’t think he’s getting up, Lewis,” Shaney hisses. “Would you?”

Because Rex is still standing on the brake pedal, the street behind them is washed red. Finally Lewis opens his door. It’s a signal. Rex and Shaney and Lewis pour out, feel their way back to what they’ve done here.

“Shit,” Shaney says, like she’s about to have to run. Like it’s not even going to be her choice.

The raggedy guy is bent and broken, the blood on him already black in the taillights.

“My dad’s going to kill the hell out of me,” Rex says again.

Lewis looks up to him, then, just with his eyes, around, at how alone they are here. “If we, like, tell him, you mean?” he says.

As emphasis, he opens his arms to the night and spins around once, a ballet move. To show that, here, with nobody watching, even ballet is okay.

Rex turns away from this idea. “It never works like that,” he says. “Somebody always … it gets all fucked up.”

“More like you only hear about the times that don’t work, think?” Lewis says.

“We can’t just—” Shaney starts.

“Then you come up with something better,” Lewis tells her. “Or, if you think there’s anything we can do that’ll bring him back. Voodoo, electricity, radiation—did we pack the radiation? Tell me we packed the radiation.”

Shaney shoves him away hard. He rolls with it, had been expecting it.

“It’s just,” Rex says, and Shaney finishes for him, touching his wrist like they’re together: “The rest of our lives, right? Just because of one … one—”

“Suicide,” Lewis fills in. “Not like we were on the sidewalk or anything.”

“Not like anybody’s going to miss him,” Rex adds, shutting his eyes to even be hearing that, much less from his own lips.

But it is what it is.

Ten seconds later, with Shaney holding the cargo doors, Mark tranced out on his feet but out of the truck, Rex and Lewis are heaving the dead guy into the back, with the pastry stash. They let go on three, but the guy’s head still catches hard on the bumper. They grab onto his legs, throw him the rest of the way in. He crashes into whatever trays and cases are back there.

Shaney tries to latch the door shut but can’t figure out how, so Rex steps up, wrenches the complicated latch around.

“Get him,” Rex says about Mark, and Lewis guides Mark around, and the four of them are back in the wide front seat now. Just sitting there.

 

Finally Shaney asks it: “Where are we going to … y’know. Put him?”

Lewis leans forward to run his fingers along the dent his head made in the dashboard. “Somebody

else’s turn, man. Had my one genius idea for the month.”

“We can’t be doing this.”

It’s Mark who says this, just out of the blue, or whatever color the smoky inside of his head must be.

Rex and Shaney and Lewis focus in on him, wait for more, then go on.

Shaney says, as if not sure, “Did y’all notice how he smelled?”

“He’s dead, Shaney,” Lewis tells her.

“Just for, like, two minutes, right?” she says.

Lewis looks hard into his side mirror. “Okay, yeah. There was a definite scent, McGruff. Like he was, I don’t know, homeless? If you’d actually, like, touched him, you might—”

Mark: “We can’t be doing this.”

“Shut up,” Rex says, and cocks his elbow out, straightens his leg against the clutch, and starts the truck. “We’ll take him to that lake by the hospital. With all the ducks. We can pretend we’re …” He lifts his bear claw to show: feeding the ducks. “The day-olds,” he says. “We used to do it when I was in second grade. Just a bread truck … ducks. ‘Nothing wrong here, officer.’”

He nods like talking himself into it, pushes the truck up into first, but then Lewis is talking again: “They even come out at night?”

“Ducks?” Shaney asks.

“They’re scarier in the dark,” Rex says, still nodding, and then the buildings to each side of them get washed red and blue.

The cop car’s siren blips once, then drags down.

“Nothing wrong here,” Rex says again, but weaker.

 

“The duck police,” Lewis floats across the cab. “They heard us, shit, are going to give us a ticket—no, I mean, a bill, right?”

No takers. Not a single smile.

At the last moment before the cop gets to them, Shaney’s hand darts forward, for the roach in the ashtray. She rubs the end into her palm, doesn’t know what to do it with now. Rex takes it calmly, eats it. It makes his eyes water, shoot even more red.

From the other side of the seat, Lewis is saying that it’s not a hit-and-run, it’s not a hit-and-run. “We haven’t even left the scene, right?” he whispers.

“Yeah, yeah,” Shaney says, breathing hard now, “Rex even said ‘hospital.’ We were just—”

“He can’t look inside without probable cause,” Lewis says, not even listening anymore. “He can’t look inside without probable cause. Listen, nobody act stoned, okay?”

Mark: “We can’t be doing this.”

The cop, who’s already been standing there a bit, watching, finally taps on Rex’s window with the butt of his flashlight. “All done in there, Cheech?” he says.

“We were just taking him to the hospital!” Shaney blurts back.

The cop flips the light around, shines it right into Rex’s face. “Good thinking, little miss. Looks like he might need his stomach pumped there. For evidence, I mean.”

“We can’t be—” Mark starts, but Lewis stuffs Rex’s bear claw into his mouth before he can finish.

The cop watches this, his eyes tired. Amused, almost.

But not quite.

“Not anything illicit going on in here now, is there?” he says.

“No sir,” Shaney and Rex chorus.

 

Mark can’t say anything. Especially with Shaney’s elbow in his ribs.

“Like gambling, you mean?” Lewis tries, smiling.

The cop levels his flashlight on Lewis, holds it there.

“We have … donuts,” Lewis says, holding up the greasy bag.

The cop waits for Lewis to wither back into the seat then looks out to the night, the city. And comes back to the kids.

“I’d hate to think of the paperwork I’d have to be filling out if the four of you didn’t have permission to be in this truck,” he says.

“It’s my dad’s,” Rex says.

“And I’m sure if I call him, he’ll confirm this?”

Rex just stares straight ahead.

“Think I was never sixteen?” the cop leans forward to say, just to Rex.

“He just—he just went under the truck—” Mark finally gets out, using his hands to show.

The cop: “Excuse me?”

Shaney’s already lying, though: “It’s … a brake line came loose. Sir. Earlier. We had to fix it. Rex had to go under the truck.”

The cop waits to see if there’s going to be more. When there’s not, he just says, “The brake line?”

He shines his flashlight down to the street, and, yep, there’s some red glistening there. He follows it under the truck, is gone long enough for Rex to say to Shaney, “Brake line?”

“I thought it would—” Shaney starts, but the cop’s already back now.

The tip of his index finger is smeared red. Ugly red.

“My dad hasn’t changed it in a while,” Rex says, both his hands on the wheel. Just for something to hold onto.

“Changed the brake fluid?” the cop says.

“I just live around the corner,” Rex says back, his eyes full and hot now.

 

The cop shakes his head, truly amused now, wiping his fingertip on the side mirror. “Word of advice, kid. Off the record. Don’t ever say that. Every DUI I’ve ever processed tries that one.”

“But I’m not drunk,” Rex says.

The cop paints another red line on the mirror now, so there’s an X over Rex’s face.

“Strike two,” he says.

Rex opens his mouth to say the third thing but Shaney shuts him up.

The cops nods thanks to her, then looks across the cab to Lewis. “You, with the mouth. Tell me the street address.”

“I don’t know,” Lewis shrugs, insulted. “This is just by that Goodwill, right? Add two blocks to whatever its number is.”

“Where he lives, numbnuts,” the cop says, twitching his light at Rex.

“6819 Ninety-Sixth,” Mark recites.

The cop cocks his head to Rex. “Right around the corner?” he says.

Rex looks down, his lips moving in something like prayer, or song lyrics.

The cop laughs to himself, starts to scratch his jaw then catches a whiff of his finger, flinches away. Kneels to shine his light under the truck again.

“This shit is everywhere,” he says. “You hit a deer filled with brake fluid or what?”

“It wasn’t a deer,” Mark says.

“It’s a figure of speech,” the cop says back.

“We can make it,” Rex says. “I can stop with the transmission, I think.”

The cop considers this, finally shrugs.

“Yeah, well. I do know the four of you won’t fit into the back of my cruiser, not without one of you turning up pregnant.” He laughs at his own joke, one of those old people smiles that are really a frown, then pulls his shoulder radio up to his mouth, says, “This is 2 Adam 18. I’m here at the 2400 block of G.”

“By the Goodwill?” the dispatcher comes back.

“G as in Goodwill, yeah,” the cop says, slashing his eyes up to Lewis.

Lewis turns away, just stares at the dashboard in front of him. Without looking over to Rex, he whispers, “I drive great when I’m stoned, man.”

Shaney closes her eyes in pain, so that Rex is the only one to see the cop lift his chin to another cruiser, turning the corner, sweeping the street with its dummy light.

Cop: “Looks like it’s y’all’s lucky night, here, guys.”

In reply, Mark throws up the bear claw, and more.

The cop backs away, indicating to Rex that it’s time to roll the window up now.

Five minutes later the bakery truck is crawling along a main street, 50th. In front of it, red lights flashing, is a fire truck. Behind it, the cop. Alongside, the backup cop. On the other side, an ambulance.

In the cab Rex and Lewis are wearing their shoulder straps, Rex’s hands on the wheel at precisely ten and two.

“I always wanted to be in a parade,” Lewis says.

“Shut the fuck up already,” Rex says. “We wouldn’t even be here if—”

“Are the brakes really—?” Mark stammers, his hands pushed against the dash.

As they make a slow turn, the dead guy in back slumps over into a rack, takes it down with him.

“Your dad is going to fucking kill you, Rex,” Shaney says.

“Not if he has a heart attack first,” Rex says, straightening the truck back up.

 

Finally they get to Rex’s neighborhood, 96th Street. Lights flashing, engines rumbling, gravel crunching.

“Almost over, almost over,” Rex is saying, but then angles the truck wrong, so it won’t fit all the way into the drive.

The cop’s bullhorn crackles on about this: “Keep going, keep going …”

“I wish he’d just take me to jail already,” Rex says.

“No you don’t,” Shaney tells him.

“But my dad’s going to—”

“We know,” Lewis finishes.

The cop: “Keep going, keep … yeah. All right. There.”

‘There’ is halfway onto the manicured lawn, the front tire of the bakery truck half-crushing a curled up plastic fawn. The air bleats out of it.

“Donuts my ass,” the cop says to himself.

As Rex and Shaney and Lewis and Mark do their perp walk from the truck to the front door, all the firemen and paramedics and the two cops raise their hands in fond 

 farewell.

“It could be worse,” Shaney’s saying, parade waving back.

“At least he didn’t look inside,” Lewis says, not using his lips at all.

“We can’t be doing this,” Rex says.

Mark: “I know.”

At the door then, Lewis turns around, pops his Z-Boys t-shirt—part of the wrestling thing that was on the radio—and says, “So we still on for tomorrow night, yeah?”

“In what, dillrod?” Shaney says, pushing him. “Your dad got a candlestick truck we can take?”

“How’d you know he’s not a butcher?” Lewis says, insulted.

They trudge into the house still arguing, pull the screen shut, and, behind them, that first cop stops waving, holds his hand in the air a moment then drops it all at once, like starting a race.

 

On cue, every siren on every emergency vehicle there splits the night wide open, and rubs sound into it.

Up and down the street, lights come on.

The only important one is in Rex’s house, though.

It doesn’t go off, even hours later, dawn seeping in around the edges of the neighborhood.

Rex is bleary-eyed on the couch now, Shaney half on him, Mark curled up in an easy chair, Lewis just a pair of feet under the curtains he’s been using as a blanket.

In the kitchen is Rex’s dad, already strapped into his baker’s apron. What he’s doing is filling his mouth with orange juice straight from the carton. His ears trailing white earbud wires.

“There a fire last night?” he over-enunciates, deaf from his music. “Crazy ass dreams, man.”

Rex focuses in on the white lines, the earbuds.

“Those are mine,” he says.

“What?” his dad says back, freeing one of his ears.

Rex shakes his head no, nothing, and then his dad’s asking him what time he crawled in anyway, but Rex isn’t listening, is already drifting through the front door, shielding his eyes against the morning.

The truck is still there, cocked at a bad angle in the lawn, one headlight cracked.

That’s not what he’s worried about, though.

Keeping his distance, he walks wide around the truck, to the rear doors.

They’re open, one of them swinging.

Rex catches it, keeps it still, and looks inside.

No dead guy. Not to either side of the truck, and not down the street either.

He swallows, is trying to think.

 

“Hey, check the day-olds while you’re out there?” his dad calls out to him.

Rex has to translate this into words that make sense. When he understands, finally, he looks

to the right rack, calls back inside that there’s about four dozen glazed, five if you count mixed.

And the truck is still just so empty.

Rex closes one door then the other, and never sees, through one of the clear-plastic windows in the boxes of donuts, the half an index finger, twitching.

It’s leaking maggots down into the bed of glaze.

 

 

Six hours later, noon, give or take, a security guard named Chapman’s standing out in the heat, just past the slight line of shade the sloping dome of the Lubbock Municipal Coliseum allows. Chapman’s wholly forgotten about the double-barrel popsicle that was supposed to last the fifteen minutes of his break. He’s just staring slackjawed out into the parking lot. Not at the mothers and daughters and aunts and grandmothers flowing toward him, or toward the RECIPE DAYS banner he’s standing under anyway, but to the ramshackle line of buses and Cadillacs and out-of-date limousines and Harleys easing down through all the parked cars.

The wrestlers. They’re here early.

Leading the pack is the glossy black XOMBIE bus, its twin windshields tinted to look like the glass eyes of a thick, giant worm. Or, going by the vanity plate, ‘WYRM.’

Standing behind those eyes, Xombie himself, the dark lord of this procession. He’s all skin and scowl and leather. Six and a half feet, easy, with hair like a shroud and eyes lost in last night’s makeup.

“Shit,” Chapman says, dropping his popsicle.

“Dear?” one of the grandmothers says, touching him on the arm, but he’s already shaking his head no, pawing his cell phone up to his ear. He backs in out of the sun and scrolls fast to TERRY, punches green then sees it, damns it: no signal.

He tries again, harder, then just flips the cell shut and starts prairie dogging for a payphone.

Finally he wades through the sea of blue hair to the unskinny woman planted in the ticket booth.

When she can’t hear him, and won’t even put her magazine down to try for longer than an eyebrow lift or two, he slaps one hand hard on her plastic glass and leaves it there, holds his other hand up in the shape of a phone. An urgent one.

She nods down the hall, couldn’t be more bored with Chapman’s little emergency.

It’s almost too late, though. Already there’s wrestlers parting the crowd, bunching up at the gate, attracting second and third looks. And smiling about it.

They all look back in appreciation when the past-its-prime monster truck that was far back in the line crunches over a railing, cocks one wheel onto a planter. The gullwing door opens and a muscular arm lowers a halter-top girl down to the concrete.

A few lengths in front of that, the Xombie bus kneels down the way buses do, all hiss and clank, until its frame’s on the ground.

Xombie lowers the remote he was pointing at the bus, smiles behind his hair and turns back to the gate.

At the ticket booth, Chapman

 finally unfreezes, staggers backwards a few steps then falls into a shuffling run, zeroes in on the lone payphone.

The lone, taken payphone.

It’s somebody’s cigarette aunt, complaining about how she can’t get any reception in this place. But that—

Chapman places his hand on her shoulder.

 

She gives him half her face. Not the happy half.

“It look like I’m done here?” she says, palming the receiver.

“Ma’am,” Chapman says, his fingertips drumming on his Batman belt, “it’s really—I’ve got to call—”

“Sorry, Lu,” the woman says into the phone, staring hard at Chapman. “Some rent-a-cop’s getting ideas, if you can imagine that.” Then she laughs, follows with, “Yeah, I know.”

Chapman smiles his tolerant Gary Cooper smile—he’s the law here, after all—and reaches around the woman, pushes the plunger down on the phone.

Before she can say anything, he flashes the ID card around his neck, thins his lips behind it.

“That expires tonight,” the woman says about his ID.

“I don’t think you understand the situation here, ma’am,” Chapman tells her.

“You’re commandeering this phone in the name of law and order?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“You want it so bad,” she says, taking a step towards him, “take it,” and yanks hard on the receiver, giving it all her weight.

The whole plastic shelf the phone is set in shudders, but the phone holds, that metal cable anchored deep.

“Thank you,” Chapman says, taking it as gingerly as he can.

The woman huffs off a few feet and stops, stares hard at Chapman. “You see that?” she says to a passing mom.

The mom didn’t, but stops anyway, her neighborhood watch eyes already suspicious.

Chapman turns his back, gets Terry’s number on his cell screen and dials it in fast.

What the phone tells him back is that he must deposit fifty cents to place this call, please.

He shifts the phone to his other ear and digs in his right pocket, then his left, and comes up with twenty-two cents, one of the pennies maybe not even a penny at all.

And then he looks back up at the wall of women, watching him over their strollers and purses and tall coffees.

He shuts his eyes.

 

 

In the drop-off lane at school Terry looks down to her ringing cell phone. Her ten-year-old goth daughter picks it up. Terry snatches it back, flashes her eyes to her slightly older son in the backseat, oblivious, plugged into his earphones. He’s wearing one of the Z-boys shirts, like Lewis. Z FOR XOMBIE.

He lifts his chin for her to repeat whatever she’s asking.

Terry shakes her head no, gets cut off hard by a rhinestone SUV. It towers over Terry’s mod little bug.

“Mrs. Vanczesi,” the daughter announces, about the SUV.

Terry is livid by the time she answers the cell.

“What?” she says instead of hello, then, quieter, as if the kids can possibly not hear the profanity, “Well you tell the goddamn—the WW-fucking-F that they’re booked for the evening, okay? The other event’s over at four. That should give them plenty of time to—”

“That him, Mom?” the son asks, leaning over the seat.

“Xombie?” the daughter shrieks. “Mom, Mom!”

Terry: “School, now.”

“But Mom—” her son starts.

“It’s Uncle Chapman,” Terry interrupts.

This deflates the kids. Maybe even ruins their whole day.

“Thought you weren’t hiring him anymore?” the son says, climbing out.

 

“Last minute, hun,” Terry says, reaching out with her right arm. “Now kiss, kiss.”

“Can you at least get his autograph?” the daughter tries.

“He’s not even there until tonight, baby girl. Not supposed to be, anyway.”

“But if you do see him?”

“If I see him, sure. Okay.”

“And,” the daughter says, suddenly worried, “tell him he can’t fight the giant. He’s too big. Everybody knows, Mom.”

Terry asks Chapman what she’s doing here, if her ten-year-old daughter’s hero is a scumbag wrestler.

Her son answers, bummed: “It won’t matter after tonight. After Tiny Giant, y’know.”

“It’s all fake, you know?” Terry says.

“Like school, right?” the son says back, smiling, already leaving, and the daughter chimes in with “Like Mrs. Vanczesi, like you’re always saying?”

Mrs. Vanczesi who’s just prissing by, her two mannequin kids in tow.

Upon hearing this, however, she stops, her back straightening a little more, even.

“Okay, okay,” Terry says, “I’ll try to get him to sign something, dear. If I see him. But don’t tell your dad about this, agreed?”

“It’s his weekend already?” the son whines from his safe distance.

“Really! You’ll do it?” the daughter’s saying, her eyes going cheerleader round.

“Three-fifteen,” Terry says, touching her watch to show then waving them off, “no later—” but doesn’t get to finish.

Mrs. Vanczesi has managed to wedge herself between, her eyes flint.

 

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes, fingertips to her freckled, enhanced chest, “were you still yelling across the sidewalk to them? Was it important?”

“Judy,” Terry says, in hello.

“Still waiting for you at Junior League now,” Mrs. Vanczesi says, her eyebrows up. Her school-model daughter beside her not just wearing heels, but a tiara too, God knows why. “And did you get a chance to talk to my hairdress—oh,” leaning down to look into the bug, “I did give you the right telephone number, didn’t I?”

“Chap?” Terry says into the phone, still smiling so fakely, setting the emergency brake tens of clicks deeper than necessary, “if anybody comes asking, I was there five minutes ago, okay?”

And then she steps up from the car.

 

 

In the coliseum, on the floor, neck-deep in Recipe Days, Kent Simons is hamming it up for his cameraman. Walking backwards through the booths and exhibits, doing the whispery prologue for the segment they’re taping: “And this week on How Would You Cook It, Then?, the lady, the legend, the Blind Lemon Minnesota Fats of the kitchen, ladies”—plenty of playful lisp on ‘ladies,’ so everybody knows how gay he is—“the one, the only, Madame Beatrice.”

He stops to untangle himself from the blender booth’s tangle of power cords then finger waves to the attendant, posh-poshes her help away, points to the camera instead, keeps going:

“Is Madame Beatrice really blind, you ask? Since birth.”

“Whoa—” the cameraman calls out, reaches even, but it’s too late. Kent takes a backwards header over

 a giant wok. He comes up with the clip-on mike in his hand though, his collar bent all wrong, his eyes as glittery as ever.

Through the camera’s eyepiece, over Kent’s shoulder for an instant are two out place … bodybuilders?

“Hunh?” The cameraman lowers the camera, squints around Kent. When he comes back, Kent’s waiting for him, his shoulders raised in question.

“We doing this, or should I call for another backup?” Kent says, not into the mike. “If you’re second string, I mean, I’d hate to see third …”

 

“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” the cameraman mumbles, and settles the camera back on Kent, nods for him to go.

Kent’s smile is back instantly.

“But it’s that very blindness, ladies, that allowed Beatrice’s sense of taste to distinguish itself across the nation. Well, that and growing up in the kitchen of her mother’s renowned restaurant, Villi’s—has anybody out there heard of Villi’s? I thought so, yes. Now picture a little girl behind the scenes, a little girl in those black sunglasses, one hand clamped onto her mother’s apron, her mother teaching her the subtle differences not between paprika and rosemary, that’s for children and barbarians. No, Madame Beatrice”—whispering again, telling a secret to his audience—“can taste between salt that’s been in the sun and salt that’s been in a cabinet, away from all that degrading UV. And, because she grew up in a world of recipes, she can even—”

But then he’s there, to Beatrice, seated behind her simple booth.

“Because she grew up in a world of recipes, Kent?” Beatrice says, each of her palms flat on the white tablecloth, the very picture of prim and proper.

Kent smiles to her, hides his face and eeks! for the camera, says, “I see your taste wasn’t the only sense to go into compensation mode, Bea.”

Beatrice nods, directs her face to the sound of the whirring camera, and finishes for him: “As your kind host was saying, growing up surrounded by ingredients—as all of you did, I might remind—I can now tease them back out of anything I sample.”

“What that means,” Kent says, kicked back on her table now, ankles crossed, “is beware. Guard your cookies—I’m talking about cookies now, the sweet kind … no, I mean—you know what I mean! If you’ve got a secret family recipe, and you see kindly little her coming your way, it might be time to pack up the picnic basket”—out one side of his mouth now, playing like she can’t hear—“and run like hell, pardon my dirty French mouth.”

Beatrice smiles her grandma smile and finds Kent’s hand to pat it, says, “I give advice, Kent. You know that. Never secrets. My lips are sealed.”

“Well, I’m just—” Kent starts, then stops, at a loss for words for maybe the first time in his life.

It’s because Beatrice’s whole table has fallen into shadow.

Standing above them, in oversized street clothes, is Tiny Giant. He’s Andre-big, if not bigger, and, it looks like, not all that complicated a person either.

But interested.

“She a gypsy?” he says.

Kent mouths it to himself twice before backtracking Tiny Giant’s thinking—Madame, Madame—then

flashes his eyes to the cameraman, for him to record, record, and steps forward, his fingertips to Tiny Giant’s forearm. “An honest mistake,” he says. “Lady Beatrice, I should say, perhaps. Current Dame of the—”

“She doesn’t have a ball,” Tiny Giant says, shrugging one huge shoulder.

Kent swallows, stands, his head not even to Tiny Giant’s sternum. Not even close.

He scooches around so they can both be in the shot, says for the camera, “Are you real, or have I died and gone to heaven? And if I have”—eyes burning with meaning here—“where’s your toolbelt?”

Tiny Giant’s all about Beatrice, though. “Do you make her eat just anything, because she can’t see how gross it is?”

 

His voice booms, resonates, but somehow manages not to be a challenge either.

“I’m blind, dear, not deaf,” Beatrice says, looking up to the general area of Tiny Giant.

“You can call her Aunt Bea,” Kent says, smiling a mischievous smile, “we’re all Opies to her. And no, we only let her sample what she wants to, not including meat, and nobody would ever—”

Before he can finish, Tiny Giant comes up with a handful of mixed bills from his pocket. He stuffs them down into Beatrice’s GIVE THE BLIND A BOOK donation bowl, then threads a Slim Jim from behind his ear, unwraps it, and sets it down as gently as he can on Beatrice’s white china plate.

“Um, like I was saying, big guy,” Kent tries to get in, “she’s a vegetaria—”

“It’s okay,” Beatrice says, patting Kent’s hand away from the Slim Jim. “I can already smell it.”

Kent mouths You getting this? to his cameraman, and the cameraman nods back with the whole camera. It makes Kent grimace with pain, but the show’s already going on.

Slowly, delicately, with class somehow, Beatrice inserts the Slim Jim into her mouth and bites off the tip, closes her eyes to chew, then taste, then chew again.

Above her, Tiny Giant’s holding his breath, rapt.

“You want to know what’s in that—that delicacy?” Kent whispers up to him.

“Wrestlers eat them,” Tiny Giant says, as if just reciting here. “I saw it on TV.”

“On—?” Kent says, but can’t even get the question phrased.

“Snap into a Slim Jim,” the cameraman supplies, more of a hiss than a whisper, and this does get Tiny Giant’s attention. He looks down to the cameraman like a lizard studies a bug, and, when he doesn’t look away, the cameraman falls into full-on simper mode, trying on his most innocent, most apologetic smile, his camera now recording just the top of the booths across the aisle.

After enough gears have turned in Tiny Giant’s head—each heartbeat a year off the cameraman’s life—Tiny Giant nods, says the words to himself, Snap into a Slim Jim, even clipping the words like Randy Savage, and the cameraman nods, just can’t stop nodding.

“Snap into a Slim Jim!” Tiny Giant booms then, and now some of the women in the aisles are paying

 attention. And keeping their distance.

Kent pats Tiny Giant on the wrist. “I think she’s done,” he says, tilting his head over to Beatrice.

Tiny Giant settles his eyes on Beatrice.

“Is—it wrestler food?” he says.

“Call me Bea,” Beatrice says.

“Bea,” Tiny Giant says, a child again, for her. Just stealing looks from under his heavy eyebrows.

“Well I can tell you it doesn’t have any meat,” she says primly, handing it up for Tiny Giant to take. “Other than that, though, I don’t think it would be my place to detail—to go into any of the other, um, ingredients. The real question is the same question as always, though, dear. Do you like it?”

Tiny Giant takes the Slim Jim, studies it, wipes off where she bit then inserts the whole thing in his mouth, plastic and all.

“He does,” Kent says.

“Well then,” Beatrice says. “Growing boys need their food, I always say.”

“If you call this—”

Beatrice stops Kent by grabbing onto his arm. But her face never changes expression, even for an instant.

 

“Your heart,” she says to Tiny Giant. “I can hear it from here. Like a horse.”

Tiny Giant puts his hand over his heart, smiles.

“Can you hear mine too?” Kent says, all dreamy for the camera. Always for the camera. 

The first thing Terry sees at the coliseum is that there’s a ragged Cadillac parked across her EVENTS COORDINATOR slot.

She stares at it for a few controlled breaths then nods to herself, parks her trusty bug right up against it, where the limo’s doors can’t open.

Again she sets the emergency brake hard, but this time she reaches over, arranges a stray fast food bag over the tiara now sitting, broken, on her passenger seat.

She pats it like it’s been a good dog then collects herself in the mirror. At first she scrunches her hair up on one side, just trying the look on, then hates herself for even considering that, pulls it all back into the most severe pony tail possible. When she twists the mirror away from her face, she does it with enough violence that it comes off in her hand.

Any other day, she might laugh at this.

Now, though, she can’t even muster a smile.

She stands, locks the door with a double beep, and is walking away before she realizes the mirror’s still in her hand. When it won’t fit in her purse she just stuffs it into the pocket of her no-nonsense slacks, keeps huffing across the parking lot.

Above the line of concert doors, the RECIPE DAYS banner is still flapping.

 

Because walking is wasting time, she unfolds her cell, scrolls down to MELINDA and calls her.

After six rings, Melinda’s voice-mail self comes on, giving Terry a whole series of options for who to call if it’s this case, that person, after five, a weekend, whatever. Terry holds the cell phone out in wonder, just that there are people like Melinda in the world, and, because she’s looking at the phone, not at the ramp leading out from under the coliseum, she almost gets run over.

The guilty truck stops in a squeal of rubber, close enough that gravel pelts Terry’s slacks.

She looks up from her cell into the broken headlight and cracked grill of a bakery truck.

Hovering over the wheel, his ears still leaking white cable, is Rex’s dad, his mouth pulled wide in apology.

Terry takes a step back, closer to his door, and Rex’s dad goes meek in the shoulders. Turtle Man rides again.

Terry stops herself, though. Visibly.

“Save it, save it,” she says, and steps aside, ushering the bakery truck past.

The two signs on the twin back doors of the truck are HOW’S MY DRIVING?, followed by some identification number and a toll-free number, and then, in the same style, FOLLOW ME TO THE DONUTS, only some joker’s messed the words, so that FOLLOW ME is FOBLOW ME.

Terry hangs up on Melanie’s voice-mail and means to keep her thumb there on the red the whole way to the gate but then is stopped by Xombie’s death bus.

She just stares at it, nose to tail, tail to nose, then pulls the cross up on her necklace, holds it out in front of her like an insult or a joke but flinches when a door closes behind its black glass.

She turns on her heel, clacks up to the gate.

 

Behind her, on the concrete, is the necklace that must have broken when she flinched, the cross glinting in the sun.

What she sees from the first tier of seats doesn’t calm her down any. But it does help her resolve, maybe.

First, and closest to her, two barely-clad female wrestlers are feeding each other icing from one of the confectionary displays. Doing their own slow-motion. And not getting just all of the icing in each other’s mouths. A few feet shy of them, a matronly woman is trying to cover her menopause-age daughter’s eyes.

Terry makes herself look away.

Next.

A squat, flamboyant wrestler in a gaudy luchador mask is studying a line of shot glasses set up at the Waffle Emporium booth. Each shot glass is filled with a different syrup, then arranged by color. Lightest to the left, darkest to the right. Finally the luchador decides which end to start at then makes his way down the line, slamming each of them, stringing syrup all over the place and screaming victory to the booth attendant, who’s already cowered back in the corner, just holding out a bottle of syrup. Maybe in trade for her life.

Terry hisses air between her teeth.

Far above the coliseum floor, two roadies are unrolling a huge banner they’ve already anchored to the supports. It slams open all at once, almost to the floor. Pictured on it, face-to-face, are Xombie and Tiny Giant. A ‘Grudge Match to the Death!’ All the black parts of the plastic poster are made up to look like velvet.

“To the death,” Terry says, her hands already balled up, “exactly,” and is about to duck under the rail, step down to the floor, when there’s another development: from one of the long halls, a group of hick wrestlers are playing pallbearer for a long black coffin. The flag above it, and the headshot, are Xombie.

“Can’t say I much approve of that,” a man to Terry’s left says, his voice deep and snaky.

She looks into the darkness of the seats, two rows up.

It’s Xombie. Amused by all this.

“By the birdhouse,” he says, leaning forward, pointing, his long fingernail painted black, his whole hand framed by the billowy sleeve of his leathery robe.

Terry follows. The birdhouse crafts booth is made-up to look like a giant birdhouse. Of course. Beside it, up against the barn-red fake wood, is a tall, blonde mom in a conservative dress. Leaned up to her in the classic pose, the back of his fingers already brushing her hair, is that underwear model of a wrestler, Tennessee Stud. The mom’s hand already to his bicep, her eyes minnowing around for some place more private.

“Touching,” Terry says to Xombie. “True love, I’m sure.”

“Uh-oh,” Xombie says back.

Terry follows where he’s looking now: an old, thick wrestler and his younger, more charming self have just brushed shoulders in the main promenade, are circling back around to go chin-to-chin. Not only are the Recipe Days attendees giving them room, but the wrestlers themselves are arranging themselves on one side or the other, Methuselah or Adonis, good or evil.

Walking out into the middle of them, his chest and nightstick out, Chapman. His serious face on.

Terry closes her eyes, is barely able to get them open again.

“This is all your doing, I guess?” she says to Xombie.

Xombie looks across to her like she’s lunch.

“Give my kind a lot of credit, don’t you?” he says.

In response, Terry holds her hand up to the giant banner.

 

Xombie shrugs, leans into his seat, propping his legs up on the seatbacks again. “Yeah, well,” he says, no eye contact.

“I’ll say it again,” Terry says. “Are you who I need to be talking to here?”

“If you knew what was good for you, yeah,” Xombie says, “but as you’re intent on conversational suicide, I’d say that one’s more your kind of ticket.”

Who he’s jutting at is some manager-type, equal parts Jimmy Hart and Don King, but greasier, even from a distance. Terry zooms in on the gaudy keychain hanging along his leg. Even from this distance, it looks to read EL DORADO in smushed, chrome letters.

Around him in some practiced formation are the hick wrestlers, complete with 2x4’s and lug wrenches and an outsized bible and, swinging by its tail, its handle, what looks like a concrete armadillo.

“They call themselves the Hellbillies,” Xombie says, in a way that sounds like he’s about to have to spit. “More like rejects from the Waltons.”

Terry coughs out a little laugh about this.

“His name?”

“Johnny T.”

“T for trouble, I take it?”

After she’s gone, Xombie shakes his head in pity, says, “Thesaurus, actually.”

 

 

 

Johnny T. makes his Hellbillies let Terry through. Like she needs permission.

“Johnny T., I take it?” she says.

She’s shorter than any of the Hellbillies, and both aware of it and already bored by it. Even Johnny T., he’s got some size to him. Like he retired into managing, maybe, after a career on the mat, the gridiron, somewhere. Enough leftover bulk to handle his clients, anyway.

Feeling up his neck like vines, or flames, are tattoos. If there’s more, they’re hidden by his snake skin jacket.

“Just ‘Johnny,’ please,” he says, managing half a bow without breaking eye contact. “The ‘T’ is just vestigial, from another life, another person. Now, charmed to make your acquaintance, Mrs.…?”

“I’m Terry. We spoke on the phone a few weeks ago. Specifically, about the exact time these facilities would become available.”

“Yes, yes, Terry. My apologies. I speak to so many events coordinators throughout the country, I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sure I don’t. Unless you’re still on Florida time.”

“Alabama, actually,” Johnny T. says, stepping in close, used-car-salesman close, so that Terry’s eyes sting from his cologne. “But as you say, circumstances have intersected to deliver us here ahead of schedule, ma’am, yes. A situation in Dallas precipitated a hastier departure than—”

“I don’t need to know. It might legally obligate me to pull your dance card for tonight.”

“For which we’ve already paid, yes?”

“No refunds, Mr.…” Terry smiles about it: “T?”

“Like I said,” Johnny shrugs, his voice a touch lower, his smile a smidge thinner, “Johnny will do, thank you. And we’re gracious for your concern about our tenuous ability to earn a living.”

Terry’s already half-tuned him out, though.

On the floor, the brawl’s official now. The Recipe Days attendees are scattering, making room for the wrestlers, all going at each other. Just for the thrill of it, it looks like.

Terry’s expression doesn’t change a bit, even when a broken nightstick comes skittering across the concrete, stops between her and Johnny T.

Johnny T. picks it up. Terry snatches it from him.

“That your Cadillac out there?” she says, nodding to the idea of the parking lot.

“A fellow enthusiast,” Johnny T. smiles.

“You’re parked in my slot.”

Two of the Hellbillies can’t help smiling at this. Even Johnny T. has to tongue his lower lip out to keep a straight face.

“I’ll have it removed from.… I’ll have one of my boys repark it at our first convenience, Terry. My deepest apologies.”

Terry blinks an intentional blink. For control.

“This is my brother’s,” she says about the nightstick, then unfolds a piece of paper from her pocket. “This is his too. He left it in the security booth back there.”

Johnny T. takes it, holds it at armslength to unblur it.

 

It’s Chapman’s last will and testament. I bequeath this, I bequeath that.

“He wrote it when he saw your crowd crashing the gate,” Terry says.

“You’ve got a loyal staff, Terry,” Johnny T. says, his tone all about condolences. “A good brother, I mean. I take it he intended for you to have his … his—is this something to do with Star Wars?”

“It’s a suicide note, Johnny.”

“And I’m the suicide hotline, correct?” he says, sliding the will into his own pocket, as if for safekeeping, or to hide the evidence. Before Terry can answer, he flicks his head to the Hellbillies and all but a couple slope off, down to the floor, their boards limber in their hands.

Terry shakes her head about it, says, “This how you put out fires where you’re from? With grease?”

“A cooking metaphor,” Johnny T. says, stepping in beside her to watch, “apt, considering the venue. But, you’re not impugning I grew up in a Western Sizzler, are you?”

“I’m not—”

“It means ‘suggesting,’ more or less.”

Terry looks across to him about this.

“When I start insulting you, Johnny T.,” she says. “You’ll know it.”

The hick girl left behind steps forward about this, but Johnny T.’s in his element, and loving it. He raises his hand, dismisses and thanks her with the smallest, most regal wave.

“What you don’t seem to be aware of, Terry,” he says, quieter now, “is that we paid at the gate to attend

 this event, like the good citizens we strive to be. On the road twenty-four/seven, the idea of home cooking, of that soft maternal—I’m sorry, domestic touch, of bread still warm from the oven … Well.” Blinking away nostalgic tears. “And some of us are even amateur cooks ourselves, did you know that? We’ve only come to the temple to worship, ma’am. Will you cast us out for our devotion, for not driving the right kind of car, not wearing the right kind of clothes?”

Terry taps the broken nightstick into her palm twice, catches it on the third slap.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, Johnny, but this isn’t a church,” she starts. “Do you want me to tell you what it is? Since you seem to be confused, I mean. What it is is a flock—no, a herd of women who have been brainwashed into thinking that making the perfect cake will somehow complete their otherwise empty lives. Or—you say it’s a church, that it’s holy, that it’s sacred? Okay. Sure. What the hell. A whole fucking generation of women coming together to chant ancient recipes, try to keep their dead religion alive so they can infect their daughters with it, not let them grow too far from the role society deems appropriate for them.”

“These women you’re protecting, you mean?” Johnny T. edges.

“These woman who scheduled and paid for this facility until four o’clock, yes. Those women.”

“Business, of course. I understand completely. Intimately, even. I’m not always proud of who I conduct business with myself.”

Terry looks to him about this. Johnny T. cocks an eyebrow back at her.

“But that’s precisely what I’m saying too,” he continues. “Business. We’re the paying public here, Terry. Come to sample the wares, taste these ladies’ goods, as it were, or is.”

“Goods,” the lanky, ink-stained Hellbilly left behind repeats.

Johnny T. doesn’t chastise

him, even when Terry looks over and up to the guy.

 

She shakes her head again, still disgusted, and raises the nightstick to pop it down into her palm.

The hick girl thinks Terry has other plans. She steps forward in a huff.

Terry’s ready. Before the hick girl can even get close, Terry has the splintered end of the nightstick to the girl’s throat, so that the girl’s chin is up, and if she doesn’t keep standing up on her toes, it’s not going to be pretty.

“You sure I’m that soft, angel?” Terry whispers. “That I’m one of them?”

“Girls, girls, girls.…” Johnny T. says, trying to step in. “What would Good Housekeeping think?”

Terry backs off but wants the fight. The hick girl too.

“And not before we’ve sold tickets for it anyway,” Johnny T. adds, smiling at himself.

Terry slashes her eyes back to the floor.

“Okay,” she says. “You want to be here early to set up, to get your big rock ’n’ roll clown show going, I can appreciate that. It’s good business.”

“Your tolerance knows no bounds,” Johnny T. sneers.

“Wrong,” Terry tells him. “But how about this? Call your steroid junkies off, keep them away from the floor, and the minute attendance here drops below fifteen, not counting vendors, I’ll have security start clearing the rest out.”

“Fifteen?” Johnny T. says.

“Most of them have kids to pick up at three or dinner to get started,” Terry says, “or both, plus PTA and cheerleading and Junior League. Trust me, this place’ll clear.”

Johnny T. nods to himself and starts counting blue-haired heads. ...