Eleven Twenty-Three (33 page)

It starts raining just then and soon the
smell of decomposition is washed away and I can barely see the
bodies anymore in the downpour. I try to forget that they’re out
there, but can’t. Shortly thereafter I run toward my car.

I’m haunted. We all are, I guess. We’re
parentless, friendless, unloved, abandoned. The spirits of our
deceased emotional anchors and proofs of existence will follow and
demean us until we too roam a quiet lifeless world alongside
them—unable to speak—our histories written in beach sand.

03:48:01 PM

The house is stale, decomposing, a cracked
marble sculpture. Whoever the last one alive was left the door open
when they fled, and the foyer is humid and the tile floor is
slippery with muddy rainwater. I cross the kitchen and dining room
before spotting two stiff legs emerging from behind the sofa. Then
it’s the huge lollipop-shaped puddle surrounding them. Bill
Tennille’s face is locked in a ghastly smile. His arms have been
hacked to bits. Somewhere in another part of the house, Nancy
Tennille is trapped in a memory—a memory of a time when she was
rich and happy and hosting a party, and she could probably trust
her husband with her life.

On the way here, I was menaced by the cold
stares of Lilly’s End ghosts, peeking out from corners, through
Venetian blinds, and from the darkness within battered beach shops.
I watched two locals execute a sobbing man with a hunting rifle in
front of a ransacked Publix, and caught a glimpse of a teenage boy
standing over a woman’s twitching body, casually zipping up his
pants and spitting.

After collecting a handgun lying on the
sidewalk not far from an old couple drying out on a bench and
pocketing several thousand dollars from the wallets of corpses, I
stopped by the Tennille place.

I open the kitchen cabinets. As I thought it
might be, the house is stocked with food and wine and liquor. I
load up plastic bags with canned goods and begin cutting through
the open garage to pack them into the trunk of my car outside. I
raid the freezer and fridge as well, removing the junk food and
steaks and six-packs of Stella Artois. Then I creep upstairs to
stock up on blankets and to go through Mrs. Tennille’s medicine
cabinet.

There are half-consumed bottles of Xanax and
Paxil on the nightstand. Mrs. Tennille watches in frozen horror
behind me when I toss the pills into a plastic bag and slip
ninety-four bucks from her purse into my own pocket. I can’t stop
staring at her drab reflection in the vanity mirror.

“Sorry, Nancy,” I mutter, and glance at the
reflection of myself.

I’m still me. My skin has retained its
pallor. I’m the only hue in an otherwise graying population.

Downstairs again, bags of random crap
swinging from one arm and the dull weight of a briefcase on the
other, I glance through the living room window and see him.

A gray young man in sunglasses. Hanging
around in the front yard. Wielding a crow bar.

He doesn’t see me, so I bolt for the kitchen
and set everything but the case down. I carefully open the door to
the garage and peek outside. He hasn’t moved from the front yard,
and he’s about twenty feet from my car. Poking around. Looking at
the sky. Pushing grass aside with his foot. I wait for some
minutes, sneaking glances of him through the window. He’s a tall,
blank-faced young man with auburn hair, wearing a white thermal and
corduroy pants. He doesn’t look at the house, but he doesn’t leave,
either.

I sigh and pick up the two most important of
the five bags left on the counter. I slip into the garage. The door
to the kitchen hangs wide open behind me and this really bothers me
for some reason as I make my surreptitious trek.

Before I even realize it, treading lightly
and doing my best at being elusive, I’m standing right next to my
Accord. The man hasn’t seen me yet. I take a breath and open the
back door and toss the last two bags into the seat. That’s when he
realizes there’s someone behind him. He spins around, startled, and
smiles when he sees me. He launches into a trot, the crow bar
clutched tautly at his side.

I’m trying to figure out how to open the
driver door, my hands slipping off the handle.

“Hey, wait!” he yells. “Oh man, it really
is
you, Mr. Prescott. I thought I recognized you when you
went in there—”

“Dude, stay the fuck away from me!” I bark,
pointing awkwardly at him with my useless right arm. I get the car
door open.

“It’s
me
, Mr. Prescott—my right eye
got pretty messed up—”

He raises the bar with one hand while lifting
the sunglasses up from the bridge of his nose with the other.
There’s a bandage covering most of his right eyeball, and the
center of the gauze is soaked slightly through with something
brown.

“I just want to get out of here,” I try to
explain to him, but he’s standing there now holding the weapon up
with both hands as if he’s about to swing. “Just let me leave, man.
I don’t want to mess with anyone from town if I don’t have to.”

“Mr. Prescott, I want to go with you.
Please—”

He knows my name somehow, but I am absolutely
certain that I have never seen this guy in my life. That’s when I
remember the gun beneath the driver seat.

“Look—I don’t know you,” I begin, “but you’re
not coming with me. The people I’m with, they—sometimes we have to
do things on our own, you know? So I’m going to go now, man.
Okay?”

“I need help,” he pants, and I suddenly
notice the sweat on his face and spotted across his sticky greaser
shirt. His covered up eye socket is signaling something, a warning
for what he’s about to do to me. “It’s Adam. I was one of your
students. Don’t you
remember
me?”

As he poses his question, I make a dash for
the driver seat and try to slam the door behind me, but as I am
shutting it, the boy lunges and blocks the path of the door with
his crow bar. There’s a terrible clang when it collides with the
steel. I visualize the briefcase on my wrist, but reach for the gun
on the floor.

“Look, I don’t know you. I don’t remember
teaching you. You weren’t my student. I’m not a teacher anymore. So
just get away from my car,
please
.”

“You gotta take me with you, Mr. Prescott,”
the ash-colored kid declares. “My parents are dead.”

“Yeah, mine too, Adam. And my girlfriend’s.
Everyone’s
parents are dead, okay? I’m sorry, but I can’t
help you. So please, I’ve got to get out of here. I don’t want to
hurt you.”

“I have
no one else!”
he suddenly
wails, his one good eye tearing up and his forehead creasing with
wrinkles. “Let me in the car!”

He grabs the crow bar with both hands and
uses the hook to wrench the driver door open. I try to push him
back with my free hand, but he slaps wildly and attempts to crawl
over me and into the passenger seat. I’m involuntarily reaching
under the cushion with my right arm. The briefcase coil gets caught
on the emergency brake and I can’t reach the gun. I punch the kid
in the stomach and he makes a guttural squeal, like I hit him in an
already open wound. He struggles over me and knees my groin as he
tries to slip over the center console. Without even realizing it,
I’ve grabbed the revolver with my free hand. It’s heavy and I’ve
never fired a gun in my life.

“You’re taking me with you,” he says,
heaving. “I’m coming too. You’re my teacher. You
gotta
help
me.”

He swings the crow bar at me, striking my rib
cage. I involuntarily suck in air that feels like tiny needles
being launched through my esophagus. He hits me again, and this
time the hooked end of the weapon tears off a long strip of my
sweater.

“You’re taking me with you, Mr. Prescott. Do
you
understand?”

That’s when I remember him. Sort of. It’s
Adam Something-or-Other, Class of 2005. He was usually a C student
but managed to pull a B in my class due to his overbearing mother.
He was one of those youths that had what we called “choppers” at
Kennedy, the kind of parents who attended every school function,
called the front office twice a day, yelled at the teachers on a
weekly basis for what was always their kid’s own fault, and
basically hovered over us incessantly. Like a helicopter.

Adam slides into the passenger seat, knocking
bags of supplies onto the floor. I recall the things I witnessed in
town today and become frantic. Adam grabs for his seat belt and I
barely register the fact that I can
see through him
before I
make a decision and aim the revolver.

I pull the hammer back, aim, turn my head
away, and clench my eyes so hard I am afraid my muscles will burst
and I’ll weep blood. In the darkness I see that final image of Adam
less than two feet away, his flesh literally transparent, his eyes
meeting mine: the murderer and the murdered, the present and the
past.

The crow bar strikes me again, this time in
the shoulder. I flinch. It’s over.

The report shatters two of the windows and
momentarily silences everything but the post-gunshot humming in my
ears. With my head twisted so far around, the only part of me still
facing Adam is my right cheek, which immediately gets soaked with
something still quivering and alive. When I finally open my eyes
and look at what I’ve done, the car is smoky and dense, there’s
glass on my lap, and what was only a moment ago a real person named
Adam Something-or-Other is now a faceless tangled corpse twitching
in the seat. I managed to shoot him just left of his nose,
shattering his skull and flattening most of his face. The bullet
exploded out the back of his head and through the car window.

Smeared across the dashboard, upholstery, and
ceiling is this boy’s entire lifetime. His parents, his siblings,
his recollections of video game marathons and text messages and
lazy summers gadding about on the sand bar of the local beach with
friends, is nothing but slimy gobs of brain muscle and pools of
thin red blood now. Even his memories of me, standing in front of a
random class and pointing out where the greatest American Indian
insurgencies took place, of me grading his mid-term and saying
faux-disappointedly how the highest he could hope for that nine
weeks was a 78 C, of our year together at Kennedy High School, and
all the way to our final shared moment in the confines of a
battered car—the entire cosmic force at work that creates life and
that beautiful tragedy known as memory—is now just another random
cadaver ripe for a smallpox story.

I go back into the house once more. I find
the keys to Mr. Tennille’s 320i, and after loading everything but
what was in the front seat of my car into the back of his BMW, I
take a can of gasoline from the garage and pour it over the inside
of the Accord. It doesn’t mix with the islands of blood spotted
throughout the car, and ends up surrounding it like a hellish lake.
The site of it makes me weep.

I can’t stop shaking. When I get to the end
of the block, I hit the brakes and watch the smoke build in the
rearview mirror of my new car for a long time, a murderer
pretending much like other murderers before him that if only the
fire was hot enough, the past and all the men who speak of it would
somehow be forgotten.

05:19:40 PM

Around five in the afternoon, it begins
raining leaflets. A dozen or so small single-engine planes fly in a
gridlock pattern over the End, dropping thousands of sheets of
white and pink and baby blue paper down on the town. On the
multi-colored sheets are plainly written instructions for the
surviving citizens of Lilly’s End. I pick one off the street in
front of Tara’s house when I pull up in the BMW. The paper
reads:

TO ALL CITIZENS OF LILLY’S END:

THE GOVERNMENT AND MEDICAL COMMUNITY IS DOING
EVERYTHING WITHIN ITS POWER TO STOP THE SMALLPOX OUTBREAK IN YOUR
TOWN, IN ADDITION TO MAINTAINING THE SAFETY OF THE SURROUNDING
COMMUNITIES. CITIZENS WILL REMAIN QUARANTINED UNTIL
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12
, AT WHICH POINT ALL UNINFECTED
WILL BE TRANSPORTED TO
C
ENTERS FOR
D
ISEASE
C
ONTROL
HEADQUARTERS IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA TO RECEIVE MEDICAL CARE AND
EVALUATION. MORE DETAILS AND PROCEDURES FOR THIS EVACUATION WILL
FOLLOW SHORTLY.

ALL GOVERNMENTAL MEASURES ARE BEING TAKEN AS
PART OF AN EFFORT TO BOTH PREVENT THE DISEASE FROM SPREADING TO
OTHER OUTLYING COMMUNITIES AND TO AID IN AN ONGOING FEDERAL
INVESTIGATION INTO THE SOURCE OF THE OUTBREAK. ADDITIONAL METHODS
OF ISOLATING THE TOWNSHIP FROM NEIGHBORING MUNICIPALITIES MAY ALSO
BE IMPLEMENTED FOR THE SAKE OF NATIONAL SECURITY. PLEASE REMAIN
PATIENT AND COOPERATIVE WHILE AUTHORITIES WORK TOWARD ASSISTING YOU
MOST EFFECTIVELY.

IN THE MEANTIME, SPECIALLY EQUIPPED AGENTS OF
THE U.S. MILITARY WILL BE MAKING DAILY SWEEPS OF THE COMMUNITY,
BEGINNING AT SUNRISE ON
MONDAY, DECEMBER 10
. IN ORDER FOR
THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL TO SUCCESSFULLY END FUTURE SMALLPOX
INFECTION, BODIES OF THE INFECTED MUST BE COLLECTED AND STUDIED.
PLEASE DEPOSIT THE CORPSES, ALONG WITH VALID IDENTIFICATION, NEAR
THE STREET IN FRONT OF YOUR HOMES PRIOR TO SEVEN A.M. AND RETIRE TO
YOUR RESIDENCES IMEDIATELY AFTERWARD. A SQUADRON WILL REMOVE THE
DECEASED FROM THE AREA EACH DAY.

WARNING: ANY RESIDENTS WHO ATTEMPT TO HINDER
THE AGENTS FROM PERFORMING THEIR DUTIES IN ANY WAY WILL BE SUBJECT
TO STRICT MILITARY FORCE.

Incredible. They didn’t even have someone do
a read-through before dropping the word “imediately” on the
township.

I’m studying the flyer and picking up another
as if it will tell me anything different when Tara comes running
outside, waiting for her dead father to climb out of the BMW parked
out front. From another part of town, a short burst of gunfire,
argument, and a scream muffled by a final gunshot. Then
nothing.