Eleven Twenty-Three (18 page)

“Oh good,” I sigh. “A context.”

“All political statements aside,” Hajime
says, eyeing Tara with unease, “the point is that we have no idea
what’s going on out
there
or even here in the End. The only
thing we
do
know, Layne, is that so far no help has come.
Hell, there may not be any help coming period. This whole
piss-water town may be getting swept under the proverbial rug as we
speak. But that doesn’t change the fact that I need to see about my
sister and my parents up in St. Augustine, so why don’t we just
skip the hospital clichés and go help them?”

“I need to check on my mom and dad too,” Tara
says. “Then we need to find a TV and see just how widespread this
is, or if anyone outside of town even knows what’s happening here
yet.”

“You’re right. Forget the hospital. I’ll take
you back to your car at the funeral home, Hajime. Tara, we’ll go by
your parents’ house and make sure they’re okay.”

They nod, dazed and smoking cigarettes past
the filter line.

“But first I’m going back to the cemetery for
my mom,” I declare, gripping the steering wheel tautly. “We’ll
check on everyone and do what we need to do, but I’m going back for
her
now
. And if you have a problem with that, you can just
get out right here. Now give me a cigarette. I’m out and I’m pretty
sure I just pissed my pants, I’m so scared of what happens
next.”

People grab what they can and throw it into
the trunks of their SUVs and minivans. They place sleeping or dying
children in car seats and assure their adolescents that everything
is fine. They comfort wives and hastily lock the doors to their
houses. Everyone is looking to escape their End.

When we get back to the cemetery, some of my
father’s kinsmen are sitting blank-faced in pools of red mud.
Others are trying in vain to revive the family members they
themselves murdered. Others have already taken off; several of the
cars that were here earlier are now gone. My mother is next to my
grandmother, trying to awaken Grandpa Prescott.

“They’re awake,” I say. “They don’t look—they
don’t seem to be—”

“Crazy anymore,” Tara finishes. “Thank Christ
for that, at least. Maybe it’s over.”

I park and come scrambling out of the car
toward my mother.

“Mom!” I yell, already losing it. “Are you
okay?”

She stands and turns to face us, this
stranger.

“Layne?”

“Yeah, Mom, it’s me.” I grab her and wrap her
in a tight, desperate hug. She smells like dirt and sweat, like
throw-up and other people’s blood. “Are you hurt?”

“Baby boy, what happened to the family?
Why—why is everyone like this? How did so many of them die like
this?”

“You mean you don’t remember?” Hajime asks
incredulously, approaching us with hesitation. “You don’t know what
happened here, Ms. Prescott?”

“No,” she murmurs, glancing down at my
grandmother as she shakes and shakes her husband, trying to awake
him. “I just remember the funeral home this morning, and the drive
over here—and then I was dreaming…I was dreaming for forever, it
seemed…”

“Well something really terrible just went on
less than an hour ago, Mom. I don’t have time to explain right now,
but it was awful, and we need to get out of here. I’m going to take
you home.”

“I don’t feel so well, baby,” she says,
becoming wavy and unsteady on her feet. I have to hold her up. “I
feel really sick. I think I might need to go to the hospital.”

“There is no hospital, Mom,” I tell her,
draping her arm over my shoulder and already heading toward the
car. “Let’s just get you home, okay? And Grandma, you need to leave
right away and go home, too.”

“I’m not leaving without my
husband
,”
she barks, still trying to shake him back into consciousness. He
lost a lot of blood after grinding his own head into the earth.

“Hajime, can you and Tara help her get
Grandpa into their car?” I say.

“Whoa,
what?
” Hajime says, folding his
arms and looking at me in disbelief.

“
Now
,” I say, and do not look
back.

“Layne, why can’t I go to the hospital?” my
mother asks me. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know exactly, Mom. I really don’t.
But it’s bad.”

“And it might happen again, Ms. Prescott,”
Hajime adds from behind us.

As he begrudgingly helps Tara hoist up
Grandpa’s limp frame, he glares at my mother contemptuously,
apparently allocating blame on her and all the rest of them for
evils they committed while in the depths of a seemingly endless
dream.

My mother bursts into hysterics when she sees
the state of Lilly’s End. She looks with horror at the fire that
consumes a house on Larson unchecked. She gets sick and I have to
pull over when she spots the intestines hanging limply from a
woman’s stomach on Shire, and the woman attempting to push them
back into her belly with a bloody index finger. When we get to
Coquina Shores, the old man who lives next door, Mr. Burgundy, lies
mangled and crooked at the foot of the stairs that lead to Mom’s
apartment.

“You guys wait here in the car,” I tell
Hajime and Tara. “I’ll be right back.”

We can discern soft whimpers and crying
coming from random apartments throughout the complex as old people
revive and discover their gruesome handiwork without a clue as to
what transpired in their cognitive absence. On the way toward Mom’s
building, I veer right to avoid the headless woman cramped between
a flowerbed and the leasing office, but we can’t avoid Mr.
Burgundy.

“Just don’t look at him,” I whisper when we
get there, leading her over his body and up the steps toward her
front door.

When we get inside the apartment, the cats
immediately scamper off. Everything is still. The room feels like a
cell, a lifetime sentence for the vicious crimes my mother has
committed from the hibernating end of an out-of-body
experience.

“Layne—you have to tell me what’s going on
here,” my mother says when I lead her to the couch. “Tell me what
you know, at least. There’s dead people all over the streets, son.
I have to know what’s going on.”

“It was—we were at the funeral and—well, the
pastor—”

I sigh and stare idiotically at the floor,
trying to put the events from earlier into a coherent narrative. In
the last hour and a half, hundreds of people have died, and the
ones left to account for the departed have been transformed into
rambling infantile dumb-asses. I have to begin three more times
before finding my voice.

“We were at Dad’s funeral, just like we had
planned to be. Pastor Robbins was delivering the eulogy. Then—I
don’t know what happened. He just
lost
it. He attacked Uncle
Stan just before killing himself. Right then like half of the
family went crazy. They, um—they started trying to hurt one another
and then themselves. I don’t know why. Their eyes were rolled back
in their head. They were foaming at the mouth. They weren’t
themselves at all anymore. It was like they had schizophrenia and
rabies at the same time or something. And then, just like that,
everyone who had been crazy the minute before went unconscious, and
that was it. Things have been quiet since, I’m pretty sure.”

My mother attempts to process this as I lie
her down on the sofa. She touches her face gingerly and pulls her
hand away, inspecting the streak of reddish dirt on her fingers. I
quickly go into the kitchen and wet down a rag and fill a glass
with water. When I return and sit on my haunches to try and wipe at
her face, she pushes my hand away and stares intently at me.

“It didn’t just happen in the cemetery,
though. Am I right?”

“You’re right. It happened across the End, it
looks like.”

“And everywhere else?” she asks, clenching
her eyes shut.

“I don’t know for sure. I don’t think so,
though. I think it might just be here in town. Let me clean your
face up.”

Before I can take three swipes at the area
around her mouth with the damp rag, she suddenly clenches my wrist
and keeps my hand suspended in mid-air.

“Layne, tell me the truth. I was one of the
people that went crazy, wasn’t I?”

Her eyes stab at me, and her grip tightens
until my hand goes numb. I focus on the dress shoes I am wearing,
which are covered in dead filth.

“It’s okay,” she says. “You can tell me. Was
I one of them, Layne?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my—oh my
God
. Did I—?”

“
No
,” I say emphatically. “No you
didn’t.”

Only because you stopped her, a tiny evil
voice reminds me. But what happens the moment you walk out that
front door?

“You’re
sure
?” she chokes.

“I’m positive, Mom.”

“What is this blood on me then if I didn’t
kill anyone? Don’t lie to me, Layne.”

“You attacked people, just like the others.
But you didn’t kill anyone.”

“
Who
did I attack?” she asks through
her tears.

The image of my mother, her teeth ripping
into the child’s leg and filling her mouth with dirt and rocks and
trying desperately to choke herself, sears my memory. I swallow the
acid in my throat.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t remember who
it was. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not your fault. None of
this is anybody’s fault. It just—it just happened, Mom. But look:
Tara and Hajime are down there, and they have no idea if their own
families are okay. I promised to take Tara and check on her parents
and her sister, and Hajime has to go back to his car so he can see
about his mom and dad in St. Augustine, so I’ve got to go, Mom. But
I promise—I
promise
—that I will be back in a few hours to
check on you. I’ve just got to go and see if I can help them right
now. Okay?”

She smiles weakly and lets go of my hand. I
finish wiping what I can from her face and then hastily stuff the
soiled rag into my pocket. I try to offer her a reassuring grin,
but can only succeed in a ghastly flash of my teeth. While she
rests and tries to undo in her head what’s been done to the End, I
head into the kitchen and surreptitiously remove all of the kitchen
knives from the sink and slip all but one of them into the trash
before stuffing the last one into my back pants pocket.

“Should I go with you?” she asks, keeping her
eyelids shut and pretending not to notice me scanning the room for
anything potentially harmful.

“No. You’re weak and it might be dangerous
again. It’s best if you just stay here and find out as much
information as you can from the news so you can update me later
when I come back.”

What occurs to me as I open the cabinet under
the sink and begin pouring out the contents of her household
cleaners is that, if things
were
to devolve again, it truly
is best if she’s alone here in this apartment, so that she can’t
hurt anyone but possibly herself.

Once everything goes, it doesn’t take long
for any and all of us to assimilate to the new math of heartless
solutions to the coldest of equations.

“I hope Tara and Hajime’s families are okay,”
she says vacantly from the living room.

“Me too, Mom.”

I open the cabinet and remove the sleeping
pills and the aspirin. They end up buried underneath layers and
layers of trash. After getting rid of the pills, I scan the rest of
the room, but already know how futile my efforts are. If what
happened earlier were to occur again, she could cave her own skull
in against the wall in less time than it takes to figure out how to
open a prescription bottle. There is nothing I can do to stop this.
I sigh and return to the living room.

“All right, I’m going.”

“Be careful, baby boy,” she murmurs, looking
away. “You’re all I have.”

“I will. Lock your door after I leave, okay?
And be on the lookout for any news about help coming or what’s
going on outside of town. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Wait for
me. Don’t leave the apartment. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise me you won’t leave unless you
absolutely have to.”

“But what if—?” she begins.

“
Promise
me, Mom. Don’t be
that
lady right now. Please?”

“Okay. I don’t want to be that lady, whoever
she is.”

“So?”

“So I promise—I’ll stay here.”

“Good,” I say. “Thank you. I’ll be back and
everything will be all right again, I swear.”

“Don’t swear to things that are clearly
beyond your control, Layne,” she warns. “That was always your
father’s problem.”

“Well…I’ll swear anyway, Mom.”

I lean over and gently kiss her forehead
before leaving. Once outside on the breezeway, I listen for the
sound of the deadbolt clicking behind me. After the lock snaps into
place I sprint for the car, wiping my mouth off with the back of my
hand, disgusted.

01:15:41 PM

Hajime told me not long before I left the
States that FEMA has been stockpiling hundreds of thousands of
black plastic coffins at a facility in rural Georgia for some time.
He showed me images on Google Maps and Youtube to prove it. Then he
chuckled grimly and told me that the same government agency that
couldn’t provide food, clean water, and necessary provisions for
the people of Louisiana in 2005 was apparently quite capable of
hording vast numbers of industrial containers to toss everyone’s
corpses into once the next unnamed, yet wholly unpreventable
disaster of Biblical proportions struck the South sometime in the
near future.

He also told me just last night that the most
powerful men in the world—from politicians to oil tycoons, media
personalities to billionaire industrialists—met at a retreat called
Bohemian Grove every summer in a forest outside of San Francisco.
Once there, they would denigrate prostitutes, drink themselves into
a Republican stupor, stalk around the compound nude, and burn
wooden effigies in the shape of children before a mammoth Celtic
idol of an owl. Then they would light cigars and discuss their
plans for the world’s collective future.