Eleven Twenty-Three (16 page)

Uncle Stan snatches at the gaping crater in
his throat just before his twelve-year-old daughter Stacey leaps up
at him, knocking him over. She bites into his ear and tears it off,
exposing black and crimson veins and milky blood underneath. Her
father twitches and gurgles for only a moment before his daughter
thrusts her own arm into his exposed neck, grabbing at the organs
inside. The little girl laughs hysterically when she pulls some
kind of slippery bluish cord from out of his throat and plays with
it under a shower of her father’s blood.

I don’t move. My mouth hangs open stupidly
and, somewhere, an alarm is ringing. A little voice is informing me
that
none
of this should be happening right now. I manage to
put together a single image and the realization that accompanies
it: less than a hundred yards away, a terrible briefcase from
Shanghai rests in the dark recesses of my car.

“What the
fuck
?” Hajime is stammering,
but the end of his simple question is lost when my grandfather
tackles him, snarling and foaming at the mouth.

“Run,” I say quickly to Tara, taking quick
panicked breaths. “Take my mother and go to the car. Don’t unlock
it. Hurry.”

I reach into my pocket and try to retrieve my
keys, but someone grabs me by my shirt and whirls me around. It’s
my mother, now biting at her lip and fluttering her eyes as if she
were possessed. She clenches both my shoulders until her nails dig
through the fabric and pierce my skin underneath. I squirm and try
to keep her fingers from going any deeper.

“Mom—what are—what are you
doing
?” I
choke. “What’s
happening
to everybody?”

“
Help me
, you assholes!” Hajime
wails.

He flounders about on the ground and attempts
to keep the old man at an arm’s distance, but Grandpa Prescott
keeps biting at Hajime’s hands with his weak half-real teeth. Tara
kicks off her heels and heaves Grandpa off of Hajime with her foot,
sending him tumbling over onto his back and squirming about like an
upended turtle.

I lose focus and go on trying to see my
mother in the rabid animal attempting to choke me and throw me to
the ground right now, but can’t. I attempt to trip her and knock
her onto her back, but she spasms and contorts every time I almost
get her into a headlock.

(A memory: the last time the two of us were
in this cemetery, I was eleven years old and it was stiflingly hot.
Mirages danced above the marble. A great-aunt was being buried but
no one could even feign caring because it was too hot and there was
something wrong with the graveyard.)

My mother tears into my shoulder the moment I
lose focus, and I screech and hiss in agony. I take the fabric of
her suit and jerk her away from me onto the ground. I begin to sigh
just as someone grabs me from behind. I stumble and wriggle free,
getting several feet away. When I turn to face my aggressor, I see
my cousin Mary, her eyes rolled back and her face covered in
crimson grime. She is holding a pink blanket full of the entrails
of her month-old daughter Jennifer. Mary smiles, exposing flesh and
meat-covered teeth. She takes the baby’s left leg into her mouth
and rips it from the corpse like a starving dog just before
smashing a jagged rock into her skull and dying instantly. I turn
away and vomit into the grass.

This isn’t happening, I promise myself
meaninglessly. This is not happening. It’s an illusion. It’s a
hypnotherapy session gone amiss. It’s a noteworthy American
nightmare in Suzhou. Moments as primal and vital as these don’t
exist but in third-world countries and bad horror novels.

After the vomiting subsides, I dry heave.
Cindy scrambles by, knocking me over.

“Layne, what’s going on?” Tara says more
calmly than I thought possible at this point, staying on the
opposite side of the coffin to keep away from Pastor Robbins, who
stumbles toward her in a blood-loss trance. His neck and chin are a
ragged disaster, and his tie and overcoat are soaked through with
vital fluids. Tara reaches out and helps me up, not taking her
stare off the preacher. He lunges at her over the polished wood
only once before crumpling over and dying in a heap next to my
father’s casket.

The blond twins stare hatefully into one
another’s eyes, making slow revolutions around an ornate headstone.
Then they attack, punching and biting and lunging at each other.
Luke kicks Lance in the leg so hard that the bone snaps, but Lance
quickly gains the upper hand and works his brother into a
half-nelson. He pounds Luke’s skull into the corner of the granite.
His ears bleed and his skull begins to collapse as if it were a
deflating kickball.

My grandmother backs against a tree, sobbing
hysterically and pleading with her husband to stop. Hajime feebly
throws both of his shoes at the unsteady old-timer who keeps moving
toward him. I take a place next to my best friend.

“What the hell is going on, man?” he
stutters. “What is this?”

I hear gunshots and screams in the distance,
and police sirens coming from what seem like every direction.

“I don’t know, but it’s everywhere,” I say.
“
Watch out!”

Grandpa Prescott takes quick awkward steps
toward us, his arms outstretched. I sweep my leg around and pummel
his weak shins, sending the old man flying forward and slamming
into the dirt. I grab Hajime’s shirt and pull him toward Tara, who
is still cowering behind the coffin and watching as my family kills
one another.

My mother crawls around on all fours,
growling and foaming at the mouth. I can’t see her pupils. One of
the young boys tries to run past her, but my mother snatches his
right leg and he falls. The small blond-headed child slams into the
earth and breaks his nose against one of the oak tree roots. He
wails in pain and cries for his mother, but his mother is fending
off her other two young children with a flower vase. My mom sinks
her teeth into the boy’s leg, making him squeal and shudder. His
blood fountains from the wound in his thigh onto her cheeks, and
she chokes and gurgles on it as she continues gnawing at the
exposed meat. She spits out purple muscle and quivering pink fat,
then swallows it again.

“Mom,
stop!”
I plead, but she does not
relent, and so I approach her with putty for legs and kick her
clumsily from off the boy. When she rolls over, she has slivers of
skin dangling from her mouth and red stains across her face.

(Another flash: the straps unrolling, a
polished gray coffin descending into a subterfuge earth. I glanced
at the Spanish moss hanging in the oak trees, and then at my
mother, who stood slightly taller than me and held my hand with
that occasional subconscious squeeze of hers. She smiled at me,
even as my great-uncle erupted into a bout of total despair. When I
looked off to my right, a little gray girl standing by a tree about
forty feet away waved to me giddily, grinned from ear to ear, and
slid into the bark. I broke up immediately and began shaking. Mom
clenched my hand tightly then, and when I glanced up at her, she
was trembling in the sun and her eyes were disappearing beneath
tears for the first time that day.

My mom had seen her too.)

“Dude,
forget
your mom,” Hajime is
yelling, shaking me. “Let’s get out of here, Layne.”

My grandfather pounds his own head into the
earth, and the blood that spews from his bald spotted cranium mixes
with the dirt and bits of grass. The elderly man cries to himself
when he pummels his skull again and again until his nose crumbles
and his eye swells shut and he goes unconscious in a pool of red
mud.

Tara screeches behind me, and Hajime and I
both have to struggle with Aunt Linda, who raves in tongues and
bulges her eyes so far out of their sockets that I am afraid
they’ll burst. She claws at Tara’s blouse, ripping it open and
exposing Tara’s silver bra underneath. Tara pleads for help, and it
takes all of our strength to wrench Linda off and ground her. She’s
back on her feet immediately, and picks up one of the chairs and
swings it at us.

“Aunt Linda, please stop it,” I cry, on the
absolute edge of breaking down completely. “What is
wrong
with you?”

Without a word, she throws the chair at me,
nicking my forehead. I cringe at the sharp unexpected pain and can
feel the warm blood trickle down my cheek. Aunt Linda suddenly
launches into a full run, her hands locked into grotesque talons.
Hajime grabs at the chair she just hurled and without a second
thought brings it down on the back of her head. She collapses and
he continuously stabs at her skull with the chair legs. Her hair
becomes a mound of dirt and gunk, and Hajime fumes with a rage I
have never seen in him before as he prods at her again and again
with the chair.

For a moment, I am afraid that whatever has
happened to so many of my father’s family has also happened to my
best friend, and I put my arms around him and try to pull him away
from my aunt’s body. He doesn’t stop striking her until the leg
breaks away from the chair, and he finally lets it slip out of his
grip and staggers away. What looks like pink cottage cheese gurgles
out of a wound in Aunt Linda’s skull.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tara pleads, trying
to pull up her torn blouse. “Let’s just go right now.
Please
.”

Lance smashes the heel of his boot into his
brother’s entrails, smearing them on the headstone. I can see
clumps of Luke’s blond hair embedded into the drenched marble.
Lance’s eyes are red with hatred and anger, and he howls maniacally
when he picks up Luke’s headless cadaver, slumps him over the
grave, and begins tearing out thick chunks of meat and tissue from
the neck cavity with both hands, throwing the pieces across the
cemetery.

I try to survey what is happening and figure
out who exactly has lost their nerve and who is trying to stay
alive. One of my father’s cousins runs frantically from Uncle
Oliver, who is gaining. The little boy that my mother chewed up is
now a bleeding pile underneath the stamping feet of his brother and
sister, and their mother is attempting to push her own eye back
into its socket a few feet away, but she can’t get it back in
because her hand is convulsing and then she gives up because she is
dead. My grandmother has collapsed and lies underneath the tree,
praying to God between spasms of breath. Wives peel strips of flesh
from their husbands, and husbands remove their wives’ arms from the
sockets. Children and teenagers toss viscera into the grass with
frightening abandon. My cousin Martin’s girlfriend swipes at his
face with long fake fingernails, and Martin begs for her to stop,
please stop, just as two of our pre-teen cousins fall on him and
bite into his chest. When his blood sprays across their faces, they
smile with glee.

Sometime during all this, I notice my
stepmother Cindy’s body, balled up against a stone bench with the
flesh removed from her back, her innards glistening in the sun. I
am reminded of something and spot my mother lying in a fetal
position on the ground, whimpering to herself as she jams dirt and
rocks into her mouth.

“Oh my god,” I mutter, and for a moment I
have to hold onto a chair to keep myself from just fleeing the
scene and never looking back.

Instead I skitter to a stop in front of my
Mom and grab her by the head, shaking her mouth open and trying to
make her spit the dirt out. She tosses her head from side to side
like a possessed child, attempting to push more grass and rocks and
random chunks of flesh and meat back into her throat. She begins to
gag, and I can’t stop crying long enough to shake the crud out of
her throat. She’s dying.

“What are you
doing?”
I wail.
“
Stop!”

On my command, my mother goes limp in my
arms.

Uncle Oliver, just as he is about to tackle
and murder a member of his own family, topples over and lands in a
heap.

The kids stop smashing their shoes into their
sibling’s blood and collapse on top of his body.

Half the family goes unconscious in the blink
of an eye.

Just as quickly as it all began, it’s
over.

(A final scene, this one from the confines of
a Volvo on the way back from my great-aunt’s funeral. There was a
stop through a drive-thru. Static. I dipped fries into my
milkshake. When I looked over at her, my mother was munching
nervously on her food like a rabbit’s first taste of grass
following a run-in with a human. We stopped by Target. Before we
got out of the car, she looked at my expression through the image
in the rearview and whispered, embarrassed, “Please tell me you saw
her too, Layne.”)

After it’s over, the foremost thing I hear
are the screams, followed by sobs and chokes. The ones who didn’t
turn and are still alive take short little breaths and react to the
grisly scene. Someone throws up. Someone else curses and rants.
Hajime and Tara and I just stand there, looking at my mother
crumpled at our feet, her face covered in black and crimson
mud.

I clench my eyes shut and try to calm down,
picturing quiet white sand beaches, Fifties-style dining room
tables brimming with clean decorative china and
TV-commercial-worthy vegetables and chicken dinners. I see silent
identical girls in sporty blue secondary school uniforms, parading
with glee up a random street in Suzhou. When they pass, the card
games stop, the sweeping ceases, and the old men pause their
fervent bargaining at the fruit stand to watch these young innocent
girls move peacefully and carefree through a frightening and
non-stop world. I imagine a serene cemetery, where the dead are
buried and lilacs bloom underneath a veil of benign Florida oak
trees…

I open my eyes and immediately, all hope
drains from me and I gasp for breath.

“Let’s—let’s do something,” I suggest
feebly.