Eleven Twenty-Three (38 page)

Julie positions herself next to me and stares
for what feels like a long moment. Her pupils are black, her mouth
curled into a vicious inhuman grin. She exposes her teeth and leans
in, ready to tear into my throat. I can feel her body pressed
against me and her breath hot and rancid on my neck.

As I wait for the first indescribable wave of
absolute agony, it becomes clear that Julie and Tara really are
about to kill me. Then they will kill themselves while still under
the control of the eleven twenty-three. The final seconds of my own
life will be spent in the debilitating throes of an all-too-real
nightmare, while Tara and Julie simply ease into the afterlife
following a hazy skewed dream, having no idea how they died or how
pitiful and embarrassing their last moment truly was.

Here, suicide is better.

“This makes us even,” I hear Hajime say.

Just then, there’s a shifting weight on the
couch, and I catch only a glimpse of Julie somersaulting through
the air. The house shudders when she strikes the wall and lands
with a dull thud against the tile. Out of the corner of my eye, I
see Hajime working Julie into a half-nelson, unable to squirm free
or harm herself. I take a cue from this sudden development and use
the briefcase as a shield between me and Tara. Then I shove her
away, hard, and she topples backward onto the floor. Before she
realizes what just happened, I grab her by the belt and flip her
onto her stomach. I flatten the case against her lower back and
then kneel on it, forcing my weight against her spine. My
girlfriend jerks and spasms beneath me, but I simply increase the
weight and pin down her arms. She’s paralyzed.

Hajime keeps Julie in the headlock. She
twists her head violently to the left, then the right, trying to
bite at him. He doesn’t budge, and I am momentarily shocked at how
strong and efficient this wiry Japanese man actually is. It’s
almost as if he’d been specially trained to deal with this kind of
insane behavior.

Tara slams her face into the floor. When she
pulls away, she leaves a small bloodstain on the wood. I have to
let go of her arms and keep her head pulled back, unable to move.
She tries to reach around and grab for me, but can’t. Her nails
slice graze my arms and side, leaving slivers of red. She sneers
and barks underneath me. I don’t budge. Hajime takes note of our
rudimentary control over the situation and genuinely laughs a
little.

We stay in these weird contorted positions
for another seven minutes. Until it’s over. Then the girls go lax
in our grips, and we allow them both to slump comfortably into
unconscious. There’s a long moment where Hajime and I just stare
down at Tara and Julie. We don’t say anything, and instead try to
collect our thoughts and breathe.

“Well,” he finally sighs, looking at his
watch. I look at mine too, troubled.

“Well.”

“Why couldn’t we have been that cool and
composed the other times? It might have saved Mark his bottom
lip.”

“I’m not sure,” I answer, gazing at Tara, who
is completely dead to the world underneath me. “Maybe different
circumstances? Or the fact that they’re just not as physically
strong as we are because they’re, uh—you know—”

“Women? Yeah, probably.” He stands up,
mindlessly brushes the saliva deeper into his clothes. “We’re both
okay. The girls are okay, though probably due for a major migraine
when they wake up.”

“Julie’s going to want some Percocet,” I
say.

A long pause.

“But anyway—I think I’ll be going now.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay, man.”

“Good luck with your whole escape thing.”

“Good luck with…whatever you end up
doing.”

He heads into the other room, comes back a
moment later with some of the bags he brought with him. But not all
of them.

“I’m going to go and check on Mitsuko and
Mark,” he says, barely audible.

“That’s a good idea,” I attempt. “I hope
they’re all right.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Hajime stands awkwardly in the middle of the
living room, shaking and slightly transparent and completely
gray-skinned, before finally moving toward the front door.

“Hey. Hajime.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for helping me.” Pause. “I didn’t
deserve it.”

“You’re right, you didn’t. But it wasn’t too
bad for a lazy hypocrite, huh?”

“You know, when I said that, I—”

“Save it, Layne. Tara was right. You’re not
getting redemption. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a Tuesday
afternoon party to plan.”

And just like that, he is gone. I can hear
his car start outside and a moment later headlights peek through
the blinds before retreating into the night.

Darkness. Two unconscious girls at my feet. A
quiet house. A town pleading for a quick death. A nation misled. An
unfaithful boyfriend. An end-of-the-End party that no one should
attend but without a doubt will. A world that no longer knows us,
and maybe never did. I blot out the world, exhausted, and try to
recall a single moment in all my silent past that wasn’t narrated
in illegible, transparent subtitles.

Document Four

“Ghosts become fugitives and the palmettos
grin like patiently waiting beasts in the shadows of a third-world
jungle.”

Lilly’s End, Florida

Population at 08:46 AM EST on Monday,
December 10, 2007: 1,597

“We accept the verdict of the past until the
need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice
between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of
action.”

- Learned Hand,
The Spirit of
Liberty

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We
tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We
are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old
certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we
laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on
these faces there are no smiles.”

- Hilaire Belloc,
The Path to Rome

“Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the
medicine.

I’m on the pavement, thinking about the
government.

The man in the trench coat, badge out, laid
off

Says he’s got a bad cough, wants to get it
paid off.”

- Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick
Blues”

08:46:28 AM

Lilly’s End was founded in 1897. Before that,
it was nothing more than a secluded little fishing village that
bore no name. And before that, it was home to a forgotten
indigenous people who left no traces of their existence other than
a massive circular stone with ornate spiral carvings in its center.
Even further back, it was a coral reef at the bottom of the
Atlantic. In the beginning, a minor concept in the grand scheme of
a confused planet.

When Abraham Tyson arrived at the outpost
with his wife Olivia and young coal-haired daughter Lillian in late
December 1896, he took little interest in fisherman’s wharves or
the stories about a pleiosaur that lived in the St. John’s River
nearby. What Tyson
did
take interest in, however, was the
dwindling giant sturgeon population of the region. Marine
biologist, cetologist, and frequent contributor of articles on rare
and disappearing sea life in scientific journals, he arrived in the
fishing village immediately following his investigation into the
supposed
Octopus giganteus Verrill
specimen found on the
shore of St. Augustine a month earlier. He had brought his wife and
little girl everywhere with him after losing his teenage son to
tuberculosis in May, and this trip was no different. They rented
out a single room from the only hotel in the village, and Lillian
was able to build sandcastles with her mom while her dad went off
to look at big fish.

Mr. Tyson spent the next three weeks
chartering trips out into the Atlantic and up the narrow inlets and
tributaries of the St. John’s. He recorded numbers on sturgeons and
their prey, interviewed the local fishmongers and boat captains,
and compared his newest findings to those documented in a trip he
had made to the Adriatic Sea two years prior. His prediction: the
sturgeon would be extinct from the region within the next five
years.

While Abraham gallivanted up and down the
east coast of Florida, Olivia and Lillian could often be seen
wandering aimlessly along the cobbled streets of the hamlet,
playing in the coarse beach sand, and staring for hours into the
whitecaps together. The eleven-year-old daughter didn’t ever seem
to talk, and folks assumed she was deaf and dumb. The mother was
odd herself, often losing track of what she was saying in the
middle of a sentence and once mentioning a dream to the innkeeper
in which a little girl under an oak tree ordered her to head east
and never look back.

One morning, a Tuesday according to most
Lilly’s End residents, Tyson tagged along with a fisherman named
Marley (whose lineage, incidentally, are still peppered throughout
town) on one of his typical trips to catch the lucrative oversized
fish. Back on shore, his wife of twenty years decided she would
take Lillian out to the edge of the old wooden pier to feed the
seagulls.

Tyson returned to the docks just after noon
that day when Marley turned in early due to an approaching storm.
Walking back along the shore, Tyson noticed a crowd gathered at the
edge of the pier, and as he got closer saw his wife in the middle
of the throng.

His daughter, Lillian, was nowhere to be
seen.

I watch from a distance as soldiers in MOPP
gear load countless human bodies into the back of a covered Humvee
troop carrier.

Every so often, a teary-eyed resident
attempts to make contact with the gas mask men, but quickly gets an
automatic weapon pointed in their direction and an indiscernible
order to back away. They do so, devastated and sobbing
hysterically. One man, the manager at Walgreen’s, walks right up to
one of the teams and says something I can’t make out just before
placing the muzzle of a Walther semi-automatic to his temple and
pulling the trigger. The men wait for the smoke and red mist to
clear before scooping his body up and tossing it in with the
others. One of the soldiers does a double take over his shoulder at
one point, spotting me and chuckling, but then goes back to his
duties. He doesn’t look back at me again.

I have seen at least four teams working their
way through Lilly’s End this morning, each one consisting of a
driver, a point man who walks several feet ahead of the trucks, and
two more troops who trudge along and load up corpses from the curb.
Unless provoked, they do not communicate with the residents or with
each other. I shadow one of the teams from about a hundred feet
away, watching their efforts through a pair of old binoculars.
They’re equipped with submachine guns, thick black tactical gear,
gas masks, and radios.

The soldiers barely check to make sure each
person they load is dead, quickly feeling the neck for the lack of
a pulse before stacking them on top of the others. Bodies lucky
enough to be wrapped in sheets or stuffed into oversized bags
aren’t even examined, instead simply tossed in with the rest. I
make a note of this on my pad.

Tara meets up with me in front of the
miniscule town bookstore just after nine. She holds a small bundle
of maps in her left hand. It’s cold and gray out this morning, and
Tara is shaking.

“Did you get them?” I ask.

“Everything I could find. One of them looks
promising. It’s a detailed map of the central Eastern coastline of
the state.”

“Fantastic.”

“What did you find out?” she asks.

“Well, they’re not interacting with anyone.
They just load up and move along. I’ve seen four different teams.
They’re not really checking the bodies very well either, especially
the ones wrapped up. I wonder what Julie is seeing on the other
side of town. If they’re not doing thorough checks, and we found
out where the end of one of their pick-up routes was—”

“Okay, I can see where this cliché is going,
and I just want it made clear that I am
not
hitching a ride
with my dead sister,” Tara says, lighting a cigarette. “So, like,
don’t even mention it.”

“I’d take a ride in the confines of an
elephant’s ass if it got me out of here, Tara. We’re going to have
to make do with the circumstances as they are.”

“Layne, it seems to me that there are
many
things you’ll do that I won’t. And you’ve made do with
the circumstances
quite
well, from what I can tell.”

I sigh and fidget around in the shirt I have
on. It’s still wet from the shower I took while wearing it early
this morning and I’m not sure I managed to rinse all the soap from
my chest.

“Tara…I don’t know how to apologize any more,
so I’m not even going to try. It’s done. It’s over. I can’t take it
back. Can we just stay focused on the task at hand? Please?”

“Sure, asshole,” she says, blowing a plume of
smoke into my face. Another chemtrail. “No problem.”

To this day, no one knows exactly what
happened. My father used to tell me that the little girl was
leaning too far over the railing and just fell in. Hajime swore
that the villagers, who had not taken kindly to the intrusion of
this highfalutin scientist and his snobby deranged wife, attacked
the outsiders and managed to toss the child in. Tara once theorized
that perhaps the kid just killed herself, an early victim of the
geographic region’s violently hypnotic allure. Still others, me
included, proclaim that this town was founded on the aftermath of a
crazy woman’s whim.

Whatever the circumstances, Lillian drowned.
They never recovered her body, but there was little doubt among
town residents that her remains were drifting along the bottom of
the Atlantic somewhere.