Eleven Twenty-Three (41 page)

“I’m not—I don’t
know
how, to be
honest.”

“What about getting Hajime to do it?” Julie
mentions.

“Forget it. He’s throwing a fucking
party
tomorrow night. He’s done with us.”

“No, he’s done with
you
,” Tara says.
“Maybe Julie and I can talk to him.”

“Not even an option,” I say, snatching Tara’s
cigarette away and using it to light another of my own. “I’m
already half-worried that he’ll give our plan away in an effort to
save himself. I’m not going to try again to recruit him at this
point. I don’t trust him
or
his sister. Tara, save the
comment for later.”

My three-year girlfriend sucks bitterly on
her cigarette and pretends to study the map.

“It’s too bad money has lost all its value
here,” Julie says. “We could have bribed a homeless guy. I miss
exploiting people.”

I hear the sounds of muffled men’s voices
coming from somewhere outside, along with the rumble of a large
truck engine. The girls hear it too, and we leave the map and head
out onto the front porch. There’s a ragged hole in the screen just
above one section of the balustrade. The wood planks are slathered
with red, and the mesh is spotted with bits of skull and spinal
column. I glance over the rail to see Mr. Dawson crumpled up on the
dirt outside. Even in the cold, ants march over his face, neck, and
arms.

“They’re over there,” Tara says, motioning to
the men with her chin. “Assholes.”

Black-clad soldiers make their way through
the suburb. A large truck precedes them, shuddering in the
afternoon sun. The men grab bodies from both sides of the street,
loading them into the back. The three of us watch them. Two of the
MOPPs take positions at the feet and head of what looks like a
woman’s corpse. When they hoist her up, the woman begins
convulsing. Even from here we can hear her choked pleas for help.
The men drop her on the curb. One of them pulls a small pistol from
his belt and a moment later my heartbeat skips to the beat of a
gunshot.

“See, Layne?” Tara mutters. “It won’t
work.”

“She wasn’t trying to escape. Someone just
forgot she was still alive.”

The procession moves onto Flint Street from
Ampleforth. I narrow my eyes and glare at them as they approach the
front of the house. Two of them go for the cadaver stacked in front
of Mr. Dawson’s house, heaving them into the bed of the Humvee. One
of the faceless men momentarily inspects some kind of liquid
running down his glove and onto his sleeve before moving toward us.
The other two, once they see there are no bodies at the curb in
front of Tara’s house, have an inaudible conversation with the
driver.

“Hey,” I call out, watching them through the
hole in the screen. “Here’s one for you. Right here outside the
house.”

I reach out and point down at the dead man in
the front yard.

“What are you doing, Layne?” Tara whispers.
“I don’t want them anywhere near us.”

“Yeah, this is a bit real,” Julie concurs.
“Though Mr. Dawson’s going to reek pretty soon. Maybe it’s best if
they do get rid of him.”

“Besides, I want to see how they operate,” I
say, watching the two soldiers confer with the driver. “Maybe
they’ll be sympathetic to our plight and we can get information out
of them. You never know.”

They finally make their way up toward the
house. The other two, now finished loading, stand behind the truck.
One of them speaks softly into a walkie-talkie buckled to his chest
and aims his weapon in our general direction. The driver eyes us
from behind his gas mask.

Sweat trickles down my armpits as they make a
move for the body. Tara and Julie fidget nervously. I take a deep
breath and wait.

The soldiers take their places on both sides
of Mr. Dawson. In perfect coordination, they kneel down and scoop
up his arms and legs.

“Why are you doing this?” I find myself
asking. “This isn’t smallpox. Why are you just leaving us here to
die? We’re Americans just like you, after all. What gives
you
the right, huh? Why do this?”

The closest one of them looks back at us and
lets his grip slack on Dawson’s wrists. Even through the veil of
Plexiglas covering his face, I can tell that his eyes are blue. I
swallow and continue staring. His partner gives him a quick jab on
the arm and they begin struggling away with the corpse.

I go to the end of the porch and push the
screen door open, moving down the steps onto the front lawn.

“No, wait,” I plead. “Just wait a second. Why
is this happening? You can tell us
that
, at least. It’s not
like we’re going to be documenting this or telling our story to
anyone.”

The Marines next to the bed of the truck
place me in their sights. One of them cocks his gun. Inexplicably,
I keep taking steps forward.

“Zurück
stehen!”
he shouts. “Wir
möchten nicht dich schießen.”

I freeze, stunned. The cigarette hangs limply
from my lips, the ash growing at the end. The three of us do not
move again until they toss Mr. Dawson’s remains onto the top of an
already huge pile of past-tense in the back of the Humvee. The
truck rolls off to the next house, and the soldiers resume their
duties. After the rest of the bodies have been loaded on this
street, the MOPPs slam the gate on the back. The two foreigners on
corpse duty climb into the bed with the cadavers and the truck
picks up speed after it rounds the corner. They make no further
stops.

A revelation: Tara’s house is near the north
edge of town. It’s the end of this team’s pick-up route. We
wouldn’t be buried underneath the other bodies.

“So that was German they were speaking?” I
say absently, still thinking about the pick-up route as I take the
last drag from the cigarette and toss it. Somewhere in the back of
my mind, details are emerging. Plans are taking definitive shape
now. “Is that right, guys? German?”

“I think so,” Tara says. “But why?”

“Because they’re German, Tara.”

“And we’re in the concentration camp?” Julie
says.

“All political statements aside,” Tara
begins, “what just happened
is
significant, right?”

I repeat the scene from a few nights ago in
my head, from the first time I saw the barricade. I spoke with
Terry from high school. I went to the front line. The soldier said
some typical soldier things and—

Something occurs to me.

“The soldier patrolling the south side
barricade line had a British accent,” I tell them. “I didn’t think
anything of it at the time.”

“And oh my god, Layne, remember the other
night at the diner?” Tara gasps. “The creepy guy in the surgical
mask who spilled his coffee? He was speaking German to himself.
Remember?”

“I don’t remember that at all actually, but
I’ll take your word for it. A few of the doctors shown on the news
were Japanese, too, come to think of it.”

“That’s right, they were,” Tara nods. “So you
have the Japanese, the Brits, and the Germans participating in
a…
American
operation? I don’t get it.”

“Maybe it’s not an American operation,” Julie
says. “Maybe the Americans aren’t calling the shots on this one.
Maybe the destruction of Lilly’s End is only a single moment in the
timeline of this country’s deep future woes, brought on by other
nations.”

“Or Lilly’s End isn’t Myanmar at all,” Tara
speculates, her eyes wide and her gaze hypnotic when she focuses it
on me. “Perhaps Lilly’s End is only some little village in the
Irrawaddy Delta or something and it’s America that’s the next
third-world country.”

“Either that or your allegory just doesn’t
quite work,” I suggest irritably. “Not everything relates to
fucking Burma, you know.”

“I think it does, actually. The only
difference is that, in our case, guns and force are hardly
necessary. The regime can just employ secret technology and their
latest batch of biological weaponry to suppress us instead.”

The girls mull these developments over and
mentally outline a philosophy to accompany them. Julie puts
something small and blue on her tongue and swallows it dry.
Something catches Tara’s eye and I follow her gaze to the gray dome
over our heads. The wispy cirrus clouds, intangible in their
distance from our predicament, are blotted out by thick spreading
blotches of white smoke pouring out the tail ends of silent ghostly
aircraft. They’re in parallel lines again today.

I bring my intentions back to the ground and
face my fellow escapees.

“I’m going to be honest: I don’t think I care
who’s working with whom at this point, ladies. I don’t care if it’s
a German infantry regiment, a British quarantine, a modern Unit
731, or fucking Oompa Loompas, for that matter. I don’t care if
we’re all ghosts. I don’t need to be involved in outlining the true
history of the End and exposing the dark global forces at work
right now. History is always written from the viewpoint of the
living anyway, right?”

“I think it’s the viewpoint of the winner,
Layne—”

“Same difference,” Julie says.

“I for one would rather be a forgotten
survivor than a forgotten FEMA coffin,” I continue indignantly.
“I’d rather
be
a part of our nation’s unknown history and
take small steps to expose it from the outside than die futilely on
the inside. And if I’m ever going to accomplish that goal, I need
to forget about the chemtrails in the sky, ignore the fact that I
can see through
both
of you right now, and pay no mind to
this Hands-Across-the-Fucking-Planet genocide project that we’re in
the dead center of. I need to focus on my escape, and worry about
the bigger picture later. Wouldn’t you ladies agree?”

Julie looks away and wrinkles her nose at the
stench of rot that comes wafting over in the afternoon breeze. Tara
regards me intensely. I focus again on the chemtrails in the
sky.

“Tomorrow night,” Julie murmurs.

“Right,” I say. “Tomorrow night. Tara?”

“You can see through us right now, Layne?”
she asks back. “Is that true?”

“Well, I—”

“Because that’s really bizarre.”

“Yeah,” I nod, gulping. “I think it’s more
frightening than bizarre, though.”

“No, I mean—it’s bizarre that you can see
through me and Julie.”

“Why?”

“Because I can see through you
too
,”
she says. A single tear ice-skates down her cheek. “You’ve all
been…gray to me, ever since the first eleven twenty-three. I didn’t
want to say anything with all that was going on, but it’s true.
Everyone is becoming paler and paler until I can almost stare right
through them. Literally
,
I mean. Not metaphorically. Julie,
is it happening to you, too?”

“
No
,” she says, devastated. “You all
look the same. Why you two and not me, Tara? Why you
both
and not me? I’ve been with you guys the whole time. What’s
different? What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says, casting me
a glance that tells me she does. “I really don’t know.”

The handcuff from the case digs into my
bandage again. I wince, and in an instant the full ramifications of
what Tara just told me begin to register. Both of us have been
seeing ghosts in Lilly’s End long before anyone started going
crazy. This is not a coincidence.

Meanwhile, we’re haunting each other. We’re
haunting each other to death here.

1
1:20:27 PM

There is no evacuation.

Youll have to escape.

Ill meet you on the outside.

Tara closes my cell phone, hands it back to
me, and says, “What’s your point?”

“It’s just so terrible the way things
happened,” I mutter, putting the phone on the dresser and returning
to bed. I check the knots on her wrists and ankles again.

Tara clears her throat.

“You know, the more I think about that first
night, the less it makes sense to me. I mean, why wouldn’t your
mother let you inside if it wasn’t time yet? You said you got to
her apartment just before, right?”

“A couple of minutes before,” I say. “I’m not
sure I like this conversation topic.”

“Why wouldn’t she answer the door for her own
son
?”

“What are you saying, Tara?”

“I think you know, baby. I’m saying that
maybe she was dead before you even got there. Maybe she…you
know…killed herself on her own. Out of guilt for what happened in
the cemetery. Maybe she was afraid, or overwhelmed by everything
that was happening. I’m not sure, but I don’t think you should be
so racked with self-loathing over it—”

“Okay, I don’t want to talk about this
anymore either,” I declare. “In fact, I don’t ever want to have a
discussion on suicide again, if that’s okay with you.”

By the time I turn over onto my side, the
conversation is over.

Neither of us says anything else for a long
time. When I go to mention how cold it is outside tonight, nothing
comes from my mouth. I’ll never feel justified in making small talk
again. Instead, I stare at her stuffed animals scattered along the
wall, and when I look into the eyes of the yellow frog for too long
I start crying silently to myself. Tara knows what’s happening and
clears her throat again.

“It’s weird knowing that we’re going to die
tomorrow, huh?”

“That didn’t cheer me up one bit,” I
grumble.

“I wasn’t trying to,” she says. “You have to
admit, it
is
rather interesting, knowing we’re booked for a
nod and handshake with God in less than twenty-four hours.”

“We didn’t die back in Oak Meadow, or the
fire at my mom’s apartment. We didn’t kill ourselves, and
we—
you
haven’t been forced to kill anyone else. So many
people we know are gone now, but we’re not among them, Tara. It
means something, I think.”