Eleven Twenty-Three (22 page)

Making one final stop, I jump out of my
Accord and pop the trunk. I grab the briefcase, holding it like a
letter bomb, and run across the hotel parking lot and along the
path leading to the beach. I trudge through the sand to the edge of
the freezing water and peer out into the blackness. For a long
while I do not spot any ships out there, and consider the
possibility that the coastline is not being monitored, and perhaps
we could make an escape from town by boat. Then I see the faint
flicker of a light about half a mile out and know they would not
have left this variable to chance.

I clench the case tightly and stare into the
breaking waves. I hold it over my head, rousing all the strength I
can muster. I tell myself to throw it, but nothing happens. Again,
I try to get rid of it, and again cannot bring myself to do it.

Somehow, this case may be the only reason I’m
still alive right now. It has a purpose, and I am a part of that
purpose, for better or worse.

I grab the handle and hold the briefcase at
my side, defeated. It occurs to me on the way back to the car that
every time I’ve ever faced the ocean from the vantage point of the
End, it’s always been through the lens of the same worn and beaten
eyes, the same feeling of childlike helplessness. This is the first
time, however, that my disposition was truly warranted.

North is no good. South is equally bad. West
is possible, but not likely. East is a graveyard at the bottom of
the ocean.

This town is facing the final still
point.

09:28:44 PM

“So do you want the bad news or the
really
bad news?” I ask upon entering Tara’s house again,
shaking the cold off of me in the doorway. The heater is turned up
and it’s stifling in here.

Julie is sitting on the couch in the living
room, hunched over and sobbing into Tara’s chest. My girlfriend
pats her on the back and widens her eyes at me, indicating I need
to give them a moment.

“I have to admit, Julie,” I stammer, “I have
never been so glad to see you.
Or
as surprised.”

But truth be told, I’m not surprised at all.
Her hour-long rants on what’s wrong with Lancōme, semi-constant
prescription pill daze, and innate tendency to fall madly in love
with every new guy she sleeps with (Hajime included)
notwithstanding, Julie Hines has always been surprisingly logical
and quite adept at getting through and even prospering from
difficult situations.

So when Julie sobs to Tara now that she had
to kill a guy with a garden hoe to make it back here alive, I am
not as shocked as I might have been otherwise.

I let Julie cry on Tara’s shoulder for a long
moment, standing around awkwardly before pointing at the bedroom to
Tara.

“Jules, I need to get up for just a minute
and go talk to Layne. I’ll only be gone a couple of minutes. Okay,
sweetie?”

Julie nods and sits up. Her face is red and
chapped, and her left eye is swollen shut and surrounded by a
purple bruise. Her neck is red and she rubs at it constantly.
There’s blood on the front of her lime green blouse. I smile
awkwardly at her when she stares me down, and without even knowing
how she came to be here or where her car is, I mutter, “I’m sorry,”
and Julie seems to understand, accepts something that will never be
spoken of.

Tara and I go back to her bedroom and sit
down on the bed. Tara takes a deep breath.

“So what’d you see? Were you able to get out
of town?”

“
No one
is able to get out of town,” I
tell her. “Access to the county road leading to A1A is blocked at
the gas station by a huge military encampment, and there’s another
one just past here at the north end of the End.”

“To the east and west?”

“There are boats and helicopters to the east
and west.”

“What kind of soldiers? Middle Eastern?
Russian?”

“The US Marine kind.
Russian
, Tara?
This isn’t the fucking Reagan-Bush years; it’s the Bush-Antichrist.
Those are
our
troops keeping us trapped in here. They’re
calling it a quarantine.”

“Well maybe it is, Layne,” she says feebly.
“All political statements aside, maybe we really are just sick or
something and they want to keep us isolated from the rest of the
state.”

“That’s what they told us was the reason,
yeah,” I say. “But if that’s the case, then where are the doctors?
Where’s FEMA? Where are the CDC and WHO? Besides, I watched the
troops shoot down a line of people just like us. I
saw
it
happen. And no one was quite able to explain to me exactly what it
is we’re infected with, other than something the rest of the state
doesn’t want. These bastards are keeping us here in town to
rot
. Did you forget the messages on TV?”

“No. I was just hoping for terrorists, that’s
all. It would make this a bit more palatable, I guess.”

“Sorry to disappoint you. With the exception
of one British fellow, these guys were speaking Midwestern English
through a gas mask and were dressed like they were on a night
mission in Baghdad.”

“Shit.”

“How is Julie? What happened to her?”

“She was in the grocery store with her
boyfriend when it happened,” Tara explains. “Her boyfriend—he was
one of them. He hit her and tried to strangle her. She got away and
he started—well, you know—he started banging his head into the
floor and she left him in there. When she got outside she
remembered that they came in his Eclipse and her car was at the
house.”

“So what did she do?”

“She hid under a truck in the parking lot
until things died down and then she had to walk back.”

“And she
just
made it back here?” I
ask. “Jesus Christ.”

“She had to spend a lot of her time
hiding.”

“From the people who went crazy? That doesn’t
make sense. It only lasted a few minutes. Who was she hiding
from?”

“She says everybody.”

I nod to this and light a cigarette.

“No sign of Hajime?” I sigh, a plume of smoke
blasting from my mouth.

“Not yet, Sunshine,” she says carefully. “But
that’s not to say he’s not coming back still—”

“Yeah. Okay, Tara. For all I know, Hajime
tried to get out of here and was shot just like the others. He was
trying to see his parents in St. Augustine, remember? And if he
said he’d be here at seven, he would have been here by eight-thirty
for sure. He’s never
this
fashionably late.”

I stand up and inhale on my cigarette, ashing
on the floor and stretching out the collar of my dress shirt, the
same one I was wearing this morning to bury my father. It’s
speckled with other people’s blood.

“What do you want to hear, Layne?” Tara asks,
looking up at me with tears in her eyes. “Do you want me to just
say, ‘Yeah, he’s dead, screw it’ and move on? Is that what you
want?”

“I’ve got to go out again soon. I still
haven’t checked on my mother, but I wanted to come back here and
tell you what I saw first. And why is it so god-damned
hot
in here?”

“Julie was freezing when she came through the
front door a little bit ago. I turned up the heat.”

“Okay, whatever. I think I’m going to bring
Mom back here, if that’s okay. Then I want to go out for supplies.
Do you think there will be anything left in the grocery store at
this point, aside from maybe Julie’s boyfriend?”

“God, how can you be so nonchalant in the
face of a situation like this?” she asks, sliding away from me on
the bed.

“Because the situation calls for it, Tara.
Now—do you think there’d still be food and supplies left in
town?”

“Yeah, maybe. This all just happened, so
maybe no one has caught on yet like we have.”

“We’re not models of cleverness and survival
instinct, sweetie. I’m sure a few people have figured the situation
out by now.”

“If you weren’t going to accept my answer,
then why’d you ask me at all, Layne?”

“I don’t know. Your optimism is encouraging,
I guess.”

But when I glance down at Tara again I see
that she is now looking behind me. I turn around. Julie is standing
in the doorway, holding a bag of ice to her eye and biting her
lower lip.

“Where’s Miranda?” she asks, rubbing her
neck.

11:17:08 PM

It’s dark in town. The wind crescendos and
tapers off before quickly building up again. Traffic lights swing
erratically and pieces of clothing and newspapers and pamphlets
from the Planned Parenthood clinic and empty cups and other random
pieces of trash roll along the asphalt. My headlights point out the
faint outlines of the corpses along the road. On Massachusetts, I
spot three teenagers ransacking a dead man’s wallet in the cold.
They disappear when my car approaches, leaving only their suspended
breath and a few stray dollar bills behind. Every once in a while,
I hear muffled cries and the random blast of a gun.

The electronics stores have all been looted.
The supermarket near Tara’s house is windowless and the parking lot
is half-full of haphazardly parked cars. Frantic hurricane veterans
stream in and out of the store with random survival products in
hand. I sigh and wish I had gotten an earlier start. It seems like
the only local businesses that have been left relatively unscathed
are the beach shops. Even one of the local hair salons has been
broken into, and a collage of glass litters the sidewalk out front.
A homeless man eats a huge sandwich in front of the charred
wreckage of a local Irish pub I never went to except once with
Mitsuko.

When I get to Coquina Shores, I park in the
same spot as earlier. It’s freezing outside. Steam dances around
the streetlights and the night croons human sorrow. Mr. Burgundy is
sprawled out in the same place as before, but now two feral dogs
are nibbling at his arms and face. When one of them tries to rip
his ear off, Burgundy’s entire frozen body slides stiffly along the
sidewalk before the ear finally gives way, taking some of the
sideburn and flesh underneath with it. I shoo them away from the
body and one of the mangy animals snarls at me with red teeth
before scampering off.

I reach the top of the stairs and knock
lightly on the door. I check my watch: 11:20:48. I didn’t mean to
get here so late.

She doesn’t answer. I knock again.

My mother does not come to the door. I decide
to just barge in, but the dead bolt is locked. I’m stuck outside.
There’s a woman moaning loudly in one of the apartments nearby and
instantaneously,
I know
.

As I realize how much danger I am in and how
bad things are about to become, my stomach cramps and the cold hits
me hard and I am shivering uncontrollably. My legs ache and I feel
light-headed.

Just before it all happened today, in the
moments preceding the mass hysteria, everyone began to feel ill.
The grandparents had to sit down. Pastor Robbins was sweating and
red-faced, unable to breathe. One of my uncles was clenching his
eyes shut. I felt nauseous.

My stomach tightens again, worse this time,
and I double over in front of my mom’s apartment, gritting my
teeth. The sickness is all encompassing, making every part of me
throb and swell and give out. I moan and try to call out to her,
but my breath has been sucked from my body and I can’t inhale the
night air, which feels like invisible floating knives randomly
stabbing their way out of my throat. The cold is alive. I’m down on
my knees, reeling in pain.

It’s about to happen again, but this time
it’s going to happen to me.

The cell phone in my pocket vibrates and I
bang on the door, hard this time, but she does not answer. I bang
harder, screaming for my mother to let me inside, but even through
the clenching and hissing and nausea, I can hear other people
nearby, every one of them violently ill and crying for help but no
one is coming to help any of us because they’re sick too, and in
just a few seconds a lot more people are going to die.

A thought miraculously holds itself together
and I glance down at my watch again, but then the cramps in my
stomach give way just long enough for me to vomit onto the landing,
splattering my jacket and pants and my arm. I wipe away the thin,
clear puke from my wrist and look at the time, but my head swoons
and the stars above me soar down and surround me, taking the pain
away…

I’m losing focus in my eyes and everything is
spinning and I can barely read my watch as the minute hand passes
to 23 and I pray for my mother just as the little girl speaks into
my ear and the world falls away beneath me, the sky turns gray
turns red turns to palpable timelessness, and I fall away from the
cold and into a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream
within a three within a dream within a dream within a scream within
a dream within a dream within a corpse within a dream within a
ghost within a

PARENTHESIS

It was just after five a.m. on August 26,
1993 when Roy Raymond pulled his Toyota into a near-empty parking
lot adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge. Wearing a tan Polo shirt, a
pair of Levi’s, and carrying sixty-seven dollars in his wallet,
Raymond left the keys in the driver seat, smoothed out his hair,
and began walking down the eastern footpath of the bridge.

He would have had a spectacular view that
final foggy morning, I thought to myself while crossing it with
Tara, Hajime, and Mitsuko. Alcatraz lay shrouded in the distance,
along with Angel and Treasure Island. The morning bustle would have
already begun in the city behind him, but I doubt it would have
much registered. He would have had other things on his mind. Then
again, maybe not. Maybe
all
he was thinking about was the
city behind him, or a brief insignificant moment when he was a
child, or a tender kiss shared between him and his wife many years
earlier. Perhaps Raymond would have been thinking about anything
other than the swirling waters of the Pacific murmuring dark
encouragement below.