Eleven Twenty-Three (17 page)

“Um—but what now?” Tara asks. “What do we
do?”

I shakily pull out my cell phone and dial
911.

“This is 911 emergency,” a message begins.
“All lines are currently busy. Please stay on the line and a 911
dispatcher will be with you immediately.”

“You have got to be goddamned
kidding
me,” I sigh, desperate and bobbing up and down where I stand. I try
calling the number again and get the same message.

“Are you trying to call 911?” Hajime
asks.

“Well I’m not calling to check my fucking
voice mail, Hajime.”

“Okay, well, what’s happening then?”

This is 911 emergency. All lines are
currently busy. Please stay on the line and a 911 dispatcher will
be with you immediately.

“What’s happening is that we are in deep,
deep shit, Hajime,” I say, snapping the phone shut. “We are in
deep
shit.
That’s
what’s happening.”

Just then, my cell phone vibrates in my hand.
I open it and listen carefully for a human voice, a 911 operator,
anyone who can help us. There is only silence. I inspect the screen
and see that no one has called.

Then I realize that it wasn’t an incoming
call.

It was a text message from an unknown
number.

I open it with Tara and Hajime trying to peer
over my shoulder. The message immediately causes me to swoon, my
face turning pale white and sweat beginning to form on my face. I
begin coughing, thinking I will throw up again or pass out. I read
it over and over and then snap the phone shut, barely
conscious.

Briefcase.

“Like I said: deep shit,” I repeat once more,
and then begin trying to wake up my mother, a dozing monster at my
feet.

“Whoa, whoa,” Hajime intervenes. “What the
hell are you doing? Dude, did you just get a
text
message?
”

“I’m trying to revive my mom, Hajime. Why
don’t you help some of the others?”

Hajime stares down at me in disbelief. Tara
keeps looking around frantically, expecting the worst to begin
again at any moment.

I get as much of the dirt out of her mouth as
possible, and then try to wipe away the blood from my mother’s face
with my shirt sleeve, which somehow got ripped all the way past the
elbow during the turmoil. Her breathing is peaceful. Her pulse is
normal. Her skin tone is returning. But she won’t wake up. Maybe
what’s left of her inside that motionless body refuses to confront
anything that just happened.

“Layne, I realize it’s your mom and all, but
she might wake up and be—whatever it is she was being just a minute
ago. This is
beyond
us, man. Let’s go get help and come
back.”

“We’re taking her with us,” I say
emphatically. “Something happened to them but it’s over now. We’ve
got to get her to a hospital.”

“Layne,” Tara says, “Hajime is right, baby.
All
of your dad’s family needs help. Let’s go into town and
get help. Let’s get the paramedics and the police out here.”

I shake my mother and gently swipe at her
face, trying to revive her. She does not show any sign of
rousing.

“I’m not leaving here without her,” I say,
glancing up at them. “I’m not going to.”

I try calling 911 again, but this time I
don’t even get the recorded message. Nothing happens. I try making
the call three more times, but am left staring at a blank
screen.

“My cell phone isn’t working,” I mutter,
rubbing tears out of my eyes.

“Really,
really
not good,” Tara
says.

“Well look, I’m not riding with her or
any
of them,” Hajime says, pointing at the unconscious
cousins and aunts and uncles. “I’ll take someone else’s car back to
town if I have to, but I’m not going anywhere with someone who just
tried to kill me. Call me crazy. Now get your shit together, Layne,
and let’s go.”

Tara places a clammy, shaking hand on my
shoulder and stands behind me. A pang of worry that she will
suddenly transform and accost my back comes and goes, and I slowly
lay Mom on her side. My vision blurs again and I swallow back a fit
of hysterics. I stand up and face them.

“If this happens again, do I get left behind
too?” I ask.

“Layne,” Hajime says, “I love your family,
and I love you and Tara, and I love my parents and my sister
Mitsuko. But I will leave
anyone
behind who stands in the
way of my own self-preservation. I’ll always try to help others to
the best of my ability, but not at the cost of my own life. And
that’s the way it is.”

“He sort of has a point,” Tara whispers,
gauging my face for a reaction. She receives none, as I have
already collapsed and shock has taken over.

“I’ll remember that from both of you,” I
mutter, confiscating my keys from Tara and heading toward the cars.
The two of them fall into a trot behind me. My mother rests
peacefully in a manger of gore, tucked away on a plane of
corpses.

11:52:01 AM

We drive away from the cemetery toward town
in a fury of terrified quietudes and random bursts of questions
stilted by unfathomable fear.

Hajime tries calling his sister, and when
that call fails, attempts to ring his mother and father. His cell
phone’s network is down. So is Tara’s. So was mine. Apparently from
this point on, communication will be face to face or not at all.
This may be difficult, however, since everyone around us is
potentially psychotic.

Our hometown is shaped roughly like the
sideways outline of a squat three-petal November Lily blooming out
into the Atlantic. The middle, shortest petal is represented by the
rocky outstretch where the old lighthouse is, and the top and
bottom petals signified by the sandy outcroppings of
government-protected mangrove swamps on the southern end and the
docks on the other. On the long western edge of Lilly’s End are
homes and cattle ranches, thick Nicaraguan-like wilderness and a
scary orange-lit power plant looming over the St. John’s. Our lives
and panic are confined to the inner sanctums of the sepals.

Oak Meadow is near the southwestern edge of
the End past the trailers of the retirement community, and we take
Jenkins Road north toward the police station.

“It’s like
folie ą deux
or something,”
I mutter, wiping tears out of my eyes. “Do you think she’ll be okay
out there? I mean, I can’t even
believe
we just left her
there like that.”

“She’ll be fine, baby,” Tara tries to
reassure me, but she looks away into the door panel when she says
this. She turns to a subject she can deal with rationally:
“
Folie ą deux
is a shared madness between two people. This
was, like, fifteen different family members that barely know each
other who lost it simultaneously.
Fifteen
.”

“It was instantaneous and totally random,”
Hajime points out from the back seat, appearing completely broken
down. “What you guys are talking about happens over time between
people who are in close contact and whose insanity evolves in both
of them slowly, over months and years. This happened to the kids,
to your grandfather, to the—it happened to your
mom
, Layne.
I mean, how does this occur? I’m telling you man, those fuckers
have been dumping that shit on us for
weeks
—”

“Not now, Hajime,” I say just before veering
left and tapping the brakes. “The same thing happened
everywhere.”

A naked woman wanders listlessly in the road.
An eye is missing, along with some of her forehead. She stops and
looks blankly at us as we pass her and the overturned SUV hanging
into the ditch a few feet away. The first flames lick up out of the
engine and a crooked plume of black smoke slowly rises into the
sky. A gangly teenager is slumped against the upside down window of
the vehicle, resting peacefully and having no idea what deeds he
has just committed.

“It happened all
over
?” Tara gasps,
panicked. “Everyone just went
crazy
like that?”

Soon after, my car rolls by the house where
my middle school friend Joey Lindo used to live. The brown front
door hangs open, and even in the brief moment as we pass I can see
the wall inside the home smeared with blood. There is a tricycle
lying on its side in the front yard about two feet away from a
small child who very recently planted two decorative pencils into
his own neck. Mosquitoes swarm around the drying blood but scatter
as the first of three black helicopters flies low over the
neighborhood, heading northeast toward the sea.

“Things in town might be really bad,” Hajime
warns us, coughing and gagging in the back.

As Hajime suspected, the farther we get into
the proper, the grimmer the situation becomes. Clothes and an
occasional mutilated body litter the streets, along with scores of
recent suicide victims with their insides piled on the pavement or
small objects thrust into their skulls. More than the dead,
however, are dozens of unconscious townspeople of all backgrounds
and ages. They sleep soundly, bathed in others’ blood. We see a few
shaken up groups of people attempting to revive the ones who just
attacked them, but not many. It seems like most of the denizens of
the End have already barricaded themselves inside their shops and
apartments and cafes, leaving their aggressors—and the wounded—to
their own devices.

Cars are pulverized into the sides of
buildings. Blood is randomly streaked across the asphalt with no
victim anywhere nearby. The air is rancid with burnt rubber and
souring entrails. There is a man in pale blue pajamas standing in
the middle of McCarthy wielding a handgun at anyone who comes near
him. Three teenage boys smash the display window of a local Radio
Shack using a trashcan and ransack the shelves inside. Smoke
billows out of various shops and houses, out of apartments and one
of three hotels in town. We pass a grocery store, where two
ambulances are parked out front with their double doors hanging
ajar in the back. A woman and her teenage daughter come running
toward my car and slap at the windows, begging for our help in
getting the bleeding to stop for someone named Tim. I hit the Lock
button on my door and pull away hurriedly, my eyes swollen and
forcing themselves closed.

The miniscule Lilly’s End Police Department
is on Massachusetts not far past Kennedy High School but before one
reaches the post office, wedged between a glass repair company and
a Walgreen’s. The number of bodies increases the closer we get to
the station. The desperate rabble has already appealed to the
authorities for help. There are women covered in bullet wounds, old
men with their throats ripped out, infants smeared across the
sidewalks, and dozens of petrified eyes staring accusingly at us
from behind the locked doors of small shops and boutiques.

Lilly’s End, which before this morning had
not seen a murder in two years, suddenly embodies the tyranny of
third world countries. A post-war wasteland. A curfew at sundown.
The silent hillside following a suicidal battle where the victors
lie in fly-covered heaps not far from the carcasses of the armies
they’ve defeated. Less than an hour ago, it was simply a dull beach
town, a Norman Rockwell painting. It was a nice place to live. But
now—

But now.

We have to park about thirty yards from the
station, as the road leading up to the squat gray building is
obstructed with corpses, hundreds of bullet casings, and destroyed
vehicles full of ragged holes. I spot two police officers among the
deceased, easily identifiable by their sand-colored uniforms and
the ransacked belts that came equipped with tasers, pepper spray,
handcuffs, walkie-talkies, and guns—all gone now. I shiver at the
implications.

Gray smoke tiptoes out of the open doors of
the police department, and we see the shadowy figures of two
officers inside, running from room to room and shutting the windows
and locking the steel shutters. They are barricading themselves
in.

“There’s no help here,” Hajime says. “It
looks like everyone already tried this route.”

“What happened?” Tara asks quietly.

But we already know. When several of the
officers in the station suddenly lost even the slightest hint of
their former humanity, weapons were immediately drawn. Panic took
over. Threats and warnings were made. A firefight ensued. It moved
from inside the department to the street outside, and ended with a
pile of dead officers, dead townsfolk, and the three of us in a
state of utter hopelessness.

We spot several townspeople peeking at our
car from around corners and through shop windows, but they don’t
make any attempt to speak to us. No one trusts the living when
standing among the dead.

I turn the car around precariously, and hear
the metal grinding against the asphalt as the tires run over empty
gun casings and debris. We head back in the direction from which we
came. I try to ignore the pleas for help coming from the
townspeople. I try not to see the dead who line the streets and who
turn from pale white to yellow and then to an almost transparent
gray inside transient beach shops and nothing-special eateries
along the way.

“We need to find help for the family,” I say.
“Maybe we should try the hospital.”

“God damn it, Layne, there’s
no
help
to find,” Hajime bursts. “Are you not seeing what’s going on out
there in the streets? Whatever happened at the cemetery happened
all over town. It may have happened all over the state, all over
the country—”

“It may have happened all over the world,”
Tara whispers to herself, lighting another cigarette and starting
to cry again. “We’re Myanmar now.”

“What?”

“Everything is going to shit and nobody can
do anything about it. We’re another nameless village in disarray.
We’re nobody, completely cut off from
everything
here…We
are
Myanmar.”