Eleven Twenty-Three (34 page)

“Did you
see
this?” I say to her.
“We’ve got to get out of this town before Wednesday.”

“Why are you in my dad’s car?” she asks,
ignoring the flyer I wave in front of her face. “What happened to
your Accord? Were you at my parents’ house?”

“I stopped there for supplies and the Accord
broke down. I took this one back instead. I’m going to need a hand
with all the stuff I brought back.”

“Was my father—?”

“Yeah, he was still dead, Tara. I’m sorry to
be so blunt but I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment. Get everyone
to come out here and grab some of these bags, will you?”

“I was hoping you’d be in a little better
spirits when you got back from your trip into town,” she says,
folding her arms. “There’s no one else to help. It’s just me.”

“I thought it might be,” I grumble, carrying
three bags with my left hand and only one with the remains of my
right.

The handle of the attaché case takes up too
much of my grip and I drop the single bag on the ground. I leave it
there and waddle toward the house, nauseous and heartbroken when I
look at the area of my arm the handcuff is burrowing into. I need
to treat and bandage it. That obtrusive steel bracelet has been
strip mining into the infinitesimal layer of flesh on my wrist and
it’s now purple and swollen and riddled with constant pain.

After I place the first three bags on the
kitchen table and call out to no one, an empty house, a sad
penultimate night alone with Tara, I head back outside, where she
is carrying up blankets from the car. I smile weakly, realizing
something.

“I love you, Sunshine.”

She stops and stands in the front yard
looking at me as if it were the first time I’ve ever said this.

“I love you too. Hajime will be back in a few
minutes. He had to get some things from his house. Chloe is in my
room. She’s acting weird. I don’t know where Julie went, but she
said she wouldn’t be long.”

“And Mark and Mitsuko?”

“Told us they’d be back sometime after
midnight. Maybe. To be honest, Mitsuko and I kind of had it out,
and I doubt they’ll be returning.”

“I don’t need details,” I mutter, and we
carry the rest of the supplies in.

After everything has been put away and Tara
finishes her third Stella Artois, she sits me down at one of the
chairs on the front porch. The world is bathed in vague cloudy red
from the sun setting just beyond the barricades. Tara’s brought
rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, gauze and Neosporin. She lays my
wrist face up on the railing but waits for the two helicopters to
pass overhead and disappear before working on cleaning out the open
tears in my skin. I wince and clench off tears, trying to focus on
the vague outlines of five parallel chemtrails streaked across the
sky.

“Hajime might be right.”

“So what do you want to talk to me about?”
she asks, not hearing what I said.

To illustrate just how important my next
statement is, I pause, take a deep breath.

“We’re going to escape,” I declare.

“
Are
we, sweetie?” Tara smirks,
concentrating on her work.

“We are.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll have plenty of
money. This town has an abundance of that these days, you might
have noticed. We can maintain a low profile once we get loose and
figure out what to do later. Maybe we can get into contact with Mr.
Scott…”

“Why the hell would we want to do
that
?” Tara asks, brushing stray hairs out of her ashen
face.

“Because he gave me the briefcase, Tara. He’s
sending me text messages. He’s attempting in some small way to keep
me out of danger. Whatever is in this case is preventing me from
going crazy at eleven twenty-three.”

“Now wait—how do you know
any
of
that?” she says, shaking her head. “Since you put that stupid thing
on your wrist, there’s only been one more—whatever it is.
Furthermore, it may not even be Mr. Scott who’s sending those
messages on your phone. It could be any one of his buddies, just
taking pleasure in screwing with you. Layne, be rational about
this. You don’t know that you’ll be any safer than the rest of us
at eleven twenty-three tonight. You’re making a huge assumption
here, don’t you think?”

She turns my wrist over, slides the cuff up
on my arm, and gently rubs alcohol on the open sores.

“
Ouch
,” I hiss, wincing.

“Sorry.”

“Okay, I’ll admit, you may be right,
Sunshine. We’ll see what happens tonight. If I still lose it like
everyone else, I’m taking this handcuff off and promptly chucking
this case into the Atlantic. But even if it has nothing to do with
helping us, that doesn’t take away from the fact that I don’t want
to be anywhere near the End on Wednesday morning. And that’s
that.”

“What do you think will happen on Wednesday?”
she asks. “Maybe they’re doing exactly what they say they are.
Again, assumptions.”

“Look at the TV, Tara. Look at the bodies of
innocent townspeople shot at point blank range by these guys. Look
at what’s happening here and then do a quick Google search of
typical smallpox cases—”

“We don’t have the Internet.”

“
Exactly
,” I say, about to throw my
hands up in the air. Tara catches my right hand and keeps it flat
on the table as she begins rubbing Neosporin on the wounds with a
Q-Tip. “Have you ever heard of a smallpox case—or for that matter,
any
kind of case—even remotely like this, Tara? It’s absurd.
It’s a messy cover story, in fact. They’re not even
trying
on this one. Either that, or maybe they’re just very confident
about the general apathy and misguidance of the nation.”

“All political statements aside, what do you
think will happen on Wednesday?”

“Well, they’re certainly not transferring
hundreds of sick people to
Atlanta
, Tara. That much I can
tell you.”

She sighs, rubbing medicine into my arm.

“Are they going to kill everyone?” she
asks.

“I think so.” Pause. “Yes.”

Her facial expression doesn’t change. She
opens the package of gauze and spools out about two feet of the
bandaging, tears it off with her teeth.

“So then we escape,” she says decisively.
“You, me, and anyone else from our crew that wants to get out of
here. That’s it. I’m not getting gunned down by some fuck in a gas
mask.”

“I’m glad you see it my way,” I tell her,
leaning over the table and giving her a short dry kiss on her lips,
which taste like clay. It feels like our first kiss in quite some
time, but time is nothing more now than a somersaulting hourglass
roll-calling our names, so who knows.

“But if we make it out alive, what then?”

“We go back. Everyone else can do whatever
they want, but you and I go back, Tara.”

“Go back
where
, Layne?”

“To Shanghai. To Suzhou. We have our
passports and Z-visas. Why not? We came back here right before it
happened. Our presence in the End was a last-minute addition. We
weren’t meant to be here, and it’s not like our names are on a list
or anything. We can just go back. There’s nothing left for either
of us here in the States.”

“And you don’t think they’ll track us down if
we attempt something like that?” she scoffs. “You don’t think
they’ll find us and kill us or, worse, dump us back here in the
End? Logic is failing you.”

“Fuck it, Tara,” I say. “We deal with what we
do after the escape
after the escape
, okay? We need to start
formulating a plan on how to get out of here as soon as
possible.”

“That’s great, but go check on my sister
first.
I’m
going to formulate a plan for dinner. We’ve
barely eaten in two days. I’ll get another shirt ready for you,
too.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask.

“You have blood on the one you’re
wearing.”

I open the door to Tara’s bedroom. It’s dark
inside, and the room is musty and cold. At first I see no sign of
the older sister anywhere. The bed’s made and the window leading
outside is open, allowing mist from the light drizzle outside to
creep in. It takes me a moment to spot Chloe. She’s on the floor
leaning against Tara’s bed frame. Her head is burrowed between her
knees. She doesn’t respond to my intrusion.

“Chloe?”

She sniffs in the dark.

“Chloe?”

Silence.

“Chloe.”

She slowly turns to face me, her cheeks
smeared with red tear lines. Her eyes glint in the lamplight coming
through the window. At first I think that somehow my sight hasn’t
adjusted completely to the darkness, but then I realize that I
really am seeing straight through her chalk-colored skin to the
wall behind her.

When she sees my terrified reaction, she
places her head back between her knees and whispers something
inaudible to herself. I quickly snatch a random shirt from the
luggage next to her and shrink away into the hall. I try to forget
everything that just happened.

“So is my sister okay?” Tara asks, filling
the sink with hot water and tossing in five steaks to thaw.

“She’s—I don’t know,” I say. “She’s fine, I
guess.”

“I’m really worried about her. She’s been
sketchy since the whole thing began. Chloe never got used to the
idea of handling things on her own, I don’t think, and her entire
world is collapsing now.”

“Is that your psychology degree
speaking?”

“It’s common sense, Layne.” She dries her
hands off on a towel and peers around the kitchen. “What did you do
with the knife Hajime pulled earlier?”

“Um…I threw it into the kitchen, I thought.
Why?”

“I’m not seeing it now, is all. I just
thought about it.”

“Hajime’s a real asshole for that incident,
by the way. I hope he knows it.”

“I mentioned it to him before he left and he
said if he wouldn’t have gone under then it would’ve probably saved
his life. He said get over it.”

“And we probably will,” I sigh. “I hope he
comes back soon. I want to appeal his decision to sit on his ass
and wait for the troops to arrive. Maybe I can talk him into
escaping with us. I think we’ll need him. He’s smarter than
me.”

“You told me once in Qufu that
no one
was smarter than you, Sunshine,” Tara says from behind me as she
drapes her arms over my shoulders. “Remember?”

“When did we start the annoying habit of
calling each other ‘Sunshine?’” I ask, as it has suddenly become
very important for me to remember. It’s mostly out of fear that if
I don’t keep my mind occupied with useless information such as
this, inevitably I will start ruminating on topics such as my
mother, Adam Something-or-Other, stealing pills from a dead woman,
or how on Wednesday morning this town will more than likely be
erased from existence. “I can’t remember.”

“I don’t know either,” Tara murmurs, trying
very hard to recall the origin of such a trivial part of our
relationship, likely for reasons similar to my own. “Wasn’t it
after seeing some TV show together?”

“No, that was when we called each other
‘Schmoopy.’” I pause, see Hajime pulling up in his Vibe outside,
and it instantly comes to me. “Oh, I
remember
now. It was
two years ago when I got into your car and you had the
O,
Brother Where Art Thou?
soundtrack playing and we—”

“That’s
right!”
she exclaims,
clapping. “It was ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ right?”

“And it just stuck,” I finish. “That’s a
really,
really
good song.”

“It is,” Tara says, leaning over and kissing
me once more, this time with insistence and urgency.

Her tongue slips across mine, and I hold her
close, the chair creaking under my shifting weight. The room grows
warm and for a moment nothing else matters but this moment, except
there’s something wrong. Something is not the same.

Her kiss. Like her skin, it’s cold. It’s as
if I were kissing a dead person.

“We’re going to make it,” I whisper to her,
pulling away and trying not to shudder when I take in just how
spectral she looks. “We’ve already escaped Lilly’s End once. We can
do it again.”

“I know,” she says, and in the other room the
door opens and Hajime comes in carrying bags of random stuff from
his house. Tara gives me one more peck on the lips and gets up
quickly.

“Hope I’m not interrupting you two,” he says,
plopping down in Tara’s seat and lighting a clove. “There was
nothing on TV so I figured I’d come back and apologize for my
behavior at eleven twenty-three. Mitsuko told me I tried to take a
chunk out of your head, bro. Sorry about that.”

“It happens,” I shrug.

“And thanks for saving my life and
everything. I owe you one. Did you see the flyers?”

“I
did
see the flyers,” I answer.
“What was your impression?”

“My impression? My impression was that I have
seen the fnords, and we all have about three days to live. At
best.”

“And you’re okay with this?” Tara asks,
opening a large can of green beans that I took from her parents’
house.

“Oh, we’re about to have the escape
conversation again,” he says, nodding and stroking his little
goatee. “Am I right?”

“It’s better to at least
attempt
to
get out of here than just throw up our arms and let the military
guys finish off what the ‘smallpox’ doesn’t take care of first.
Don’t you think, Hajime?”

He doesn’t answer, just takes in our grave
demeanor before looking at the floor and deciding what to say. He
ashes his cigarette into a coffee mug.

“Hajime?”

“Do you have a plan yet?” he asks
quietly.

“No,” I tell him. “But we will. We’re going
to have a
great
plan.”

“And my sister?” he asks, casting me a
suspicious glance. “Are her and Mark in on this?”