Eleven Twenty-Three (31 page)

After this, everything is set to a soundtrack
of screams and panic.

Below me, Mitsuko swoops down to tend to her
husband, who is rolling around the floor clenching at the gory
crater where his lip used to be. The blood won’t stop sputtering
out of the wounds, and it soaks through the quilts and blanket.

I’m about to do something—bark an incoherent
order, try to cover up Mark’s injury or the red fluid already
cascading down to the floor, hold my girlfriend in a gesture of
protection, or maybe just bolt for the front door—when I am seized
from behind and catapulted several feet into the wall bordering the
fireplace.

The impact knocks the wind out of me. I can’t
see who it is that tackled me, but I can smell the old pot ash and
musty house odor drenched over his clothes, and I can feel his tiny
puffs of breath against the back of my neck as Hajime forces all of
his weight against me and attempts to get a solid hold of my
head.

Hajime snarls and foams at the mouth, and
when I momentarily turn my head to face him, he is simply an
expression from one of his own paintings: no dialect, no
communication, and not a trace of himself anywhere inside that
blank, raging visage. My best friend for ten years is a chemtrail
lining the sky. He is a sickness, an instantaneous monster. He is
not Hajime. He is the imminent death of Lilly’s End. And of me.

The monster wraps his putty-like arms around
my head, curtaining my eyes so I can’t see. He tightens his clutch
and I immediately see stars, a blackness, a warp zone. His grasp
tightens still, his impossible strength only attributable to the
adrenaline of insanity.

“Help him,
help him
,” a fuzzy voice
pleads from somewhere in the background. “Why doesn’t someone
do
something?”

That’s when I feel the grind of incisors
against the top of my head.

As if attempting to bite into a hardened
apple, Hajime places his front teeth rigidly against my skull and
presses down. I can actually hear the crunching sound of my hair
under his mastication. A line of drool begins at my scalp and runs
down my ear and face. Then the drool turns thick and sweet and I
know my scalp is bleeding. That maybe I’m dying.

I sense myself losing consciousness amid an
ocean of migraine and suffocation. The sharpest and most miserable
pangs are coming from the top of my head, where he feebly attempts
to gnaw his way under the flesh and into the bone, exposing my
brain. I swing my arms, and even through the muted blackness and
ever-increasing pain, I hear the coil and the briefcase floundering
along the floor, against the wall. I try reaching for the
handle.

Someone grabs Hajime from behind and begins
to wrestle him off of me, but in one fluid motion he releases his
right arm, slams it hard into someone’s face with a loud dull
smack, and returns to his chokehold. There is a minor tremor when
whoever it was that tried to come to my aid collapses on the
floor.

More muffled screaming, and something wet
splashes across my back. It soaks through my shirt and is warm and
sticky.

Still lunging blind and deaf for the
briefcase handle, a weapon, anything to get me out of being
suffocated or having my head ripped open by my own best friend, I
begin to realize that maybe it wasn’t such a swell idea to purge
the room of potential weapons. It wouldn’t have been these
rampaging maniacs that used them; they’re frantic, inconsolable,
irrational, and only faint apparitions of the human beings they
once were. The weapons would have only benefited us that were left
behind.

I suddenly feel the segmented snake of the
coil writhing around in my right hand, and without a moment of
hesitation, begin retracting the length of cable leading to the
briefcase with my fingers.

Just as I find the handle taut in my fist,
Hajime relents his stranglehold and moves into a new position. I
can see again but in exchange I lose my ability to breathe.
Apparently abandoning his plan to chew into the soft spongy meat of
my brain, he instead focuses his attention on breaking my neck. His
left arm envelops the top of my shoulders and then my throat, while
the bony fingers of his right hand close over the top of my head,
digging into the pulpy flesh under my eyes and tugging
sideways.

The snarl escalates into a banshee-like wail
as Hajime tries to twist my head a full 180 degrees.

I hurl the briefcase up and over my shoulder.
The corner slams into his temple, and his grip relaxes and his arms
slump away from me, landing with a dull clunk on the floor.
Grunting in pain, Hajime falls into a heap behind me. I stand up,
still seeing stars, trying to collect my bearings.

“Are you okay?” Tara asks, her back to me,
and I can hear her gulping erratically and sucking in air. She’s
spotted with red, and there’s a tiny piece of torn away flesh—not
hers—dangling beneath three faint parallel cuts running diagonally
across the right side of her face.

I don’t even have time to nod or breathe
before another line of blood drip-drops across the back of my head,
and I turn around in the same direction as Tara.

Jasmine, whose beauty once ran unparalleled
in the End, reaches into the twitching viscera of her eyeball and
cheek. She digs her nails into the thin veil of skin around her
brow and wrenches away a long strip. Blood masks her face, which
involuntarily quivers and spasms. She digs her nails in under the
flesh that hangs loose and begins ripping more away. This
twenty-something product of a vain millennium now looks as if she
were mauled by an unhinged jungle beast. Jasmine holds the yellow
and crimson mass out for us to inspect, laughing, just before
collapsing over the arm of the couch.

Mitsuko pleads for help somewhere behind us.
Mark is sprawled out on the edge of the blankets, gingerly touching
the empty space where his bottom lip was. He keeps asking for
Mitsuko to help him, help him, but there is nothing to be done.

I look down at my watch but have to wipe away
the blood to see it: 11:30.

Jasmine, slumped against the couch cushions,
her feet twisted grimly over the arm, writhes around until she
flips over and lands on the floor. Blood quickly soaks through the
cushions. Two of her fingers are caught in a small hole she’s
attempting to hand-carve out of her cheek. When she opens her mouth
I can see the fingers moving around inside, scraping at her
tonsils.

Chloe rips off a sleeve from the sweatshirt
she’s wearing and uses it to soak up the blood as it seeps out of
the muscle in Jasmine’s face. Julie leans over to help her and Tara
joins in the effort to console Mark, who roars obscenities and
tells us, again and again, that his lip is gone.

“Check on Hajime,” Tara says, and leaves me
standing in the middle of the chaos trying not to go
unconscious.

Hajime is curled into an awkward fetal
position on the floor, a thin rivulet of blood running down his
forehead to the tile. I place my hand inches from his mouth and
nose to make sure he’s breathing. I feel nothing, and immediately
my stomach sinks again and I am certain that I must have hit him
too hard, that I struck his temple and killed him.

“Hajime’s not breathing,” I inform the group.
“I need some help, guys.”

“Yeah, well this girl Jasmine’s dead over
here,” Chloe yells. “So just
deal
with it, Layne.”

I climb down on my knees and lean over toward
the floor. I place my cheek right next to Hajime’s mouth, praying
for a soft warm puff of air against my skin. There’s nothing.

“Does anybody know CPR?” I ask the group. “He
is seriously not—”

That’s when Hajime head-butts me.

The force of the strike sends me reeling
backward, losing my balance on the blankets, which slide around
underneath me. I press my hand against my forehead. It throbs and
pulsates and everything is spinning.

I see the monster reach into Hajime’s pant
pocket. A second later, its hand emerges clutching a small kitchen
knife. The creature turns the blade in Hajime’s fingers, twirling
it, and light glints off the stainless steel. The immediate future
comes instantly into focus.

It clutches the blade in Hajime’s right
hand.

It snarls and foams at the mouth.

I know what’s about to happen, and am already
scrambling to my feet.

“Layne,
stop him!”
Tara screams.

My right arm outstretched, everything in
useless slow motion, I bolt toward the death about to take
place.

The creature that has possessed Hajime raises
his fist, the tip of the knife aimed directly at the eyeball.

It uses Hajime’s free hand to pin the eyelids
back, exposing the full retina and the cracked white sea
surrounding it.

The thrust comes. The knife slices the air in
half.

My fist clutches the briefcase and I lunge
forward, a half-plan floating out of the adrenaline.

The eyeball, pinned open by his free hand,
eagerly awaits the knife.

I throw the case between the stainless steel
and his eye. The leather swipes his nose and pummels his left hand
as the makeshift shield moves into position.

That’s when the entire room is hushed by a
sharp smack—the sound of a blade burying itself into the side of an
American Belting attaché case.

Hajime turns to face me, appearing almost
confused by what just happened. His mania doesn’t look like
Jasmine’s. His eyes narrow, his mouth opens, and he tries to pull
the knife from the side of the case. I retract the briefcase,
taking the weapon with me.

The monster emits a terrifying bellow, and I
brace myself for the next round.

Instead of attacking again, however, Hajime
almost imperceptibly glances down at his watch. Then, as if
realizing something, he flutters his eye, his mouth goes slack, and
he tumbles over onto the floor. He’s lost consciousness again, and
I know immediately that it’s over.

I look at my watch: 11:34:28.

Eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds after
it begins, the ordeal ends. Just as swiftly and sudden as the
onslaught may be when it arrives, it vanishes in a pathetic whimper
worthy of a TS Eliot poem.

Almost a full minute goes by before anything
else happens. A headache settles in the front of my skull and all I
can think about is how I must be the first American schoolteacher
in history to have been head-butted by a possessed Japanese
conspiracy theorist.

“Is it safe now?” Mitsuko eventually
whispers, her voice a mess.

“Maybe for twelve hours or so,” Chloe says.
“Oh my god I can’t do this.”

I rub my temples, focusing on the knife
jabbed into the side of the briefcase and trying not to crack.

Then I notice the blood: pooled on the
blankets, saturated into the couch cushions, spotted along the
wall, painted across our faces and slathered over our hands and
arms. Jasmine is frozen in a chalk-outline-worthy position on the
living room floor. The upper half of her body is a gory wreck; she
resembles a sketch drawing confiscated from a morbid high school
student.

“Is she…dead?” I ask Chloe.

“Would you rather her be
alive
like
that?”

I turn my attention to Mark, who only takes a
breath every five curses.

“I can’t god-damn believe it—that fucking
bitch,” he stammers in broken English. “I mean, my
lip
? Are
you
kidding
me?” He exhales, pauses momentarily. “She’d
better
be dead. I’ll kill that cunt.”

Except now that his has no bottom lip, his
rant sounds more like “
I canth god-damn believe it—that thucking
bith. I mean, my
lip
? Are you
kithing
me? The
bether
be dead. I
kill
that cunth
.”

“Hey,
watch
it,” Tara hisses. “It’s
not her fault, Mark. That’s still your friend over there, and she’s
dead
now, so why don’t you just shut up about your lip,
okay?”

“Is he going to be all right?” I ask
Mitsuko.

“He’ll live. But I’m going to be listening to
this diatribe of his for a while.”

“Is the piece she bit off laying around
anywhere?” he tries to say, virtually unintelligible. “Maybe we
can, like, sew it back on or something.”

“I’m not so sure, baby,” his wife says,
laughing grimly. “Just be comforted to still be alive, even if you
do sound like a gay stereotype now.”

“Oh thit. Ith that what I thound like?”

I pluck the blade out of the case and stare
at it, dumbfounded. Why did Hajime have this? We had agreed not to
hold onto any weapons during the eleven twenty-three hysteria for
this exact reason. Why does he not give a shit about anyone or
anything other than himself?

“Mitsuko, your brother’s a prick,” I mutter,
throwing the knife blindly into the kitchen. It lands somewhere out
of sight, and there’s a loud clang and some rattled dishes.

Outside, the neighborhood is slipping into
post-traumatic despair. The moans and wails and screaming of loved
one’s names grows, floats through the windows, passes through, is
gone again. I glance down at my watch, and then stand over my best
friend Hajime, regarding him as he sleeps at my feet.

He looked at his watch before passing out. If
the eleven twenty-three sickness was controlling his actions, why
would he have to check his watch?

Unless—

I try not to think of the matter anymore and
instead survey the rest of the group. Upon gauging the blank faces
and dry eyes among them, I realize that no one pities Jasmine, the
exquisite corpse lying motionless and ignored on the living room
floor. No one feels sorry for this girl at all.

What we feel is something closer to envy.

12:58:05 PM

The beach town of Lilly’s End, Florida has
made headlines on all the important news broadcasts this
afternoon.