Eleven Twenty-Three (40 page)

Self-delusion is remaining alive when the
world knows you’re dead.

“Layne…why did you cheat on me last
summer?”

“Why are we talking about this?” I ask,
lighting a cigarette. “It’s done and I feel like shit already,
Tara. Besides, our stomachs are going to start hurting in a second.
We should focus on the next fifteen minutes and then work on
escaping. Once we’re in the cozy confines of a hotel somewhere far
away from here, we’ll sit down and have a long, long talk.”

“Our hotel room days are done,” Tara says
hoarsely, looking down at the tile floor. “Just tell me why you did
it. It will take my mind off what’s about to happen.”

“Is ‘I don’t know’ an acceptable answer?”

“No.”

“Just checking.”

A bead of sweat cascades down my brow and
cheek and drips off the edge of my jaw, and I notice that I’m
lightheaded. Another eleven twenty-three. Jesus Christ.

“It wasn’t long after I was let go from the
school. The restaurant was pretty much miserable and I wasn’t
making ends meet and I didn’t really have a course of action other
than just staying afloat. I ran into Mitsuko one night after a
particularly rough dinner shift, and we ended up talking. We got
drunk. It just sort of happened. That’s the story. The end. There’s
no sequel.”

“But why
Mitsuko
? Why her, this girl
who’s so vile and who you knew would cause so much trouble for you
down the road? Why her, Layne? Are you a closet Sinophile or
something?”

“I guess I like Asian women, yeah, but—but it
wasn’t that—it was—let me think of a fair answer to the question
and we’ll come back to it. Next.”

“Okay,” she says, wincing when the next wave
hits her stomach. “Why somewhere so shitty like Dubliners? Why not
The Pearl?”

“Dubliners was close. I can’t stress
spontaneity enough, Tara. It really was an accident—”

“
Accidents
,” she corrects.

“Accidents. Yeah. Whatever. I was upset, she
was having some tiff with Mark, and it occurred. I liked her for
about three seconds. Then it was over.”

“Over how? Over because of you or over
because of her?”

“Over because of—well, both of us, I
guess.”

“That’s a lie,” she says. “Every time you
throw in a ‘well’ after a pause, I know you’re lying. One of the
hazards of being with someone for a long time, I suppose.”

“Fine,” I say, spitting and clenching my gut.
“It ended because
she
ended it. Now you know. I’m sorry. But
I need to tell you, just because she ended it first doesn’t mean
that I wouldn’t have—”

“Thank you. That will do, Layne. Now back to
the ‘why’ part. Why a girl like Mitsuko?”

I think back to the night it happened. To the
moment our eyes locked.

“When I was eleven years old, I watched an
old spy movie where a covert agent was handed a cyanide capsule by
his superiors just before embarking on his mission, just in case he
failed or became captured by the enemy or something. I didn’t
understand what was going on, and so I asked my mother about
it.”

“This had better be going somewhere,” Tara
groans.

“The moment my mother finished explaining the
purpose of a cyanide capsule, you know what my first impulse
was?”

“To become a spy?”

“No,” I sigh. “It was to get my hands on one
and immediately swallow it. Not because I wanted to kill myself,
but just to experience that moment where you know you’re swallowing
certain death.”

“Layne, I—I have no response to that.”

“Well, now you know why it happened,
anyway.”

We don’t say anything to each other for
almost a full minute. Too long, under the circumstances. Tara
fidgets in her chair and inspects the shitty job I did on her
restraints. She knows she could probably escape if she wanted to,
but for whatever reason doesn’t. Perhaps I’m not the only one
aching to place trust in an evil man.

She coughs and snot starts bubbling out of
her nose when Tara says, almost inaudibly, “Layne?”

“What is it?”

“Was it my fault?”

“Was what your fault?”

“With Mitsuko,” she says, almost breaking up.
“Was it my fault?”

“
No
, it wasn’t. It was my fault. Every
bit of it. And I would never, ever do it again. I’ve regretted what
happened for months, and regretted that last phone call the moment
after I made it. Aside from boarding that plane in Shanghai a few
days ago, Mitsuko has been the biggest mistake I’ve made in a whole
lifetime of mistakes. I want you to know
that
, at
least.”

“But I don’t feel any better now that I know
it,” she says, smiling sadly.

“Maybe I do then.”

The second hand on my watch ticks past the
12, and then the 1.

Lilly’s End responds.

Tara becomes a monster behind me.

I rush around her chair, avoiding her
snapping at me with her teeth. She shifts her weight to her left
side, then the right. Every time she pitches herself in one
direction, I have to steady the chair toward the other. She growls
and roars. She foams from the mouth and bleeds from the eyes.
Behind the chair, I grab the wire, which is already growing slack
and coming loose. I hold it tight, undo the last knot I made, and
tie another one. Tara raises her head toward the ceiling and
screams so loudly that her voice breaks and when she lets her head
fall again, blood drizzles off her lip. She licks it with her
tongue, and the possessed spirit inside my three-year girlfriend
realizes another way to harm herself.

Before Tara can chew off her lip, I grab the
nearest thing I can find on the floor—someone’s discarded cell
phone—and stuff it into her mouth. She clamps down on it and forces
her teeth into the casing. The phone snaps and buckles as Tara
clenches. Her teeth grind on the plating and one of her incisors
cracks like sweltering glass in ice water. Two tiny pieces of tooth
fall out of her mouth.

As Tara wrestles in her restraints, I bolt
back to Julie’s room and yell through the door, “Julie, are you
still you?”

“Um…I’m fine,” she calls out. “Do you want me
to—?”

“No, just stay in there,” I interrupt, and
run back into the living room. Tara tries to spit the cell from her
mouth, but I hold it in place with one hand while tightening the
knots with the other.

We’re adapting, I realize. We’re actually
adapting
to the eleven twenty-three.

Despite assurances from the TV a few feet
away that we are of less concern to the American people than a
floating island of garbage somewhere in the Pacific, I am suddenly
certain that, somehow, we will survive, that we were always meant
to, and that we—

The front door bursts off its hinges and
collapses amid a flurry of dust and shards of old wood.

“What was
that?”
Julie cries from the
bedroom, but I ignore her.

I’m too confused to yell out for help or even
move, and when I look up there’s a middle-aged stranger heaving in
the doorway. His sandy hair is combed over a receding hairline and
he’s wearing bunched up Dickies pants, a soiled Polo shirt, and
only one shoe. For a moment he doesn’t attack, instead inspects the
hand he just shattered on the door. The expression on his face
actually resembles one of regret until, as if a voice in his head
reminds him what mode he’s now in, his eyes and mouth drop and he
limps toward me. I see the rust-colored stain and the jagged lump
in his pants where the broken shinbone has poked through. The
protrusion rises and falls each time he puts weight on his leg in
his approach.

“Okay, I’m coming out,” Julie announces. It
doesn’t register.

Tara slides her right hand out of the flimsy
restraint and grabs me by the arm, digging into my bicep. I jerk
away from her, leaving some skin under her nails, and meet the man
head on.

I hold onto the briefcase like an oversized
truncheon, and when he gets within striking distance I smash his
nose in. The coil attached to my wrist contorts and clinks. The
stranger’s nose spurts out blood and he grabs onto the door frame,
balancing himself. I bring the briefcase down again, this time on
his head.

The corner blasts its way into the creases of
his forehead, leaving a triangular indentation. The stranger
clenches his eyes shut and waves his arms around, trying to snatch
at something for support. I use the briefcase to swing down on his
right arm, and then kick him in the chest.

Julie appears behind me, looking down on the
man as he struggles to find his footing again.

“Holy shit,” she mutters, breathless. “It’s
Mr. Dawson.”

“Mr.
Who
?” I gasp.

“From across the street.”

“Is he important to you?” I ask, remembering
the gun.

“What?” she stammers, already missing her
chance.

“Check on Tara’s restraints and don’t look at
what I’m about to do.”

As soon as Mr. Dawson gets both of his feet
down and begins to use the shattered doorframe to haul himself up,
I kick him again, this time driving him back onto the front porch.
I follow the man outside and see my breath steam in the late
morning cold. Flint Street is buzzing with panicking housewives and
militant senior citizens. I look across the street, at the two or
three houses where this guy may have come from. The front door is
hanging wide open at the place directly across from Tara’s. A
gurgle of smoke putters out of the window where the kitchen
probably is.

I hear Julie saying something behind me, but
when I glance back realize she’s talking to Tara, apologizing for
something that happened a long time ago. Tara jerks her head back
and forth, hissing and clicking her teeth. Julie’s composure isn’t
shaken and she goes on making useless amends for something
involving “that night at the lighthouse.”

Mr. Dawson’s skull is cracked and bleeding,
and he can no longer see through all the blood in his eyes. I grab
him by the bottom of his collar and wrench him to his feet. I grab
the revolver from my coat.

It’s missing one bullet
, the tiny evil
voice reminds me.

The man groans and lunges for my neck, but I
slam my boot heel into his exposed shinbone. Even in the throes of
the eleven twenty-three, Mr. Dawson wails out in pain. It’s a brief
glimpse at humanity I was hoping not to encounter now that I’m
holding the gun.

I check my watch.

“Eleven twenty-nine, Mr. Dawson,” I mutter,
looking again. “Should we keep you alive for another five minutes?
Should I be considering waiting it out for a man I don’t give a
shit about who just tried to kill me?”

But immediately after I say this, someone
calmly takes the gun out of my possession and pulls the hammer
back. In one motion, Julie places the barrel directly against his
temple and pulls the trigger. Mr. Dawson flips backward over the
banister, through the screen, and lands in his own brain matter on
the ground outside.

“No,” she says. “You shouldn’t be considering
it at all, Layne. For Christ’s sake, where’s the barbarian instinct
in you? How do you expect to escape this town without it? Now help
me with your insane girlfriend in here.”

I follow orders and trail her into the house,
where Tara is still writhing about in her restraints.

“You know something?” Julie says, grabbing
the back of Tara’s chair.

“What is it?”

“For a history teacher, you’re a real pussy.
Didn’t all those lessons and lectures you gave kids on the past
teach you
anything
?”

0
5:24:09 PM

The three of us inspect the map on the
kitchen table. There are circles and circles within circles
symbolizing nearby towns and cities. There are green blobs for
swamps and mangrove forests, a blue snake that meanders its way
south through the state representing the St. John’s, and one large
blue mass on the right side of the page that stands for the
Atlantic. Somewhere on the map is a single black dot, sure to be
erased in all future editions.

Lilly’s End.

“We’re going to have to make our move before
tomorrow night. That gives us a little over twenty-four hours.”

“It’s not enough time,” Tara says.

“It’s plenty,” I say. “We just have to figure
out our options. I’m still in favor of what I mentioned earlier,
about using the trucks to get out of town.”

“With the
bodies?
” Julie stammers. “I
thought you were joking—”

“I told you it was a bad idea,” Tara says.
“Why can’t we just go this way, through the swamp?”

She traces out a path on the map. I pore over
it, visualizing the southeast edge of town. Just beyond the last
trailers, there’s roughly a mile of thick mangroves and murky
water. Then the St. John’s River. Then more mangroves and murky
water.

“That’s too risky. They have the area
patrolled with the helicopters, remember?”

“They may not see us.”

“If there’s heat-seeking equipment on board,
then they definitely will. Besides, assuming we get through the
swamp and across the river,
then
what? There’s just more
swamp on the other side. We’ll be in there for days. No, no. We’re
better off getting lost in the crowd outside of town. At least it’s
near the main roads toward Tallahassee and Orlando. Toward the
nearest airport.”

“Layne, we’re three battered,
living
people not wearing gas masks,” Julie says. “Do we just hope none of
the soldiers notice?”

“Maybe we can—I don’t know—provide some kind
of distraction using the locals on the barricade lines. Maybe we
can provoke someone into starting a fire or a riot or
something.”

“How, exactly?” Tara asks, lighting a
cigarette. She winces on the first inhale though, and gingerly
fingers the ragged edge of the tooth she broke a few hours ago.