Eleven Twenty-Three, page 12
Robbins gives a short speech on salvation, and of the golden streets and diamond palaces of heaven. I glance at my Timex.
11:20:23.
Aunt Linda coughs. My mother sniffs and looks at the oak tree’s roots a few feet behind the grandparents. I glance at the shoes my cousin Arnold is wearing. They’re blue and black sneakers. Uncle Oliver clenches his eyes shut and runs his hand through greasy lifeless hair. I look back at my watch and swallow what tastes like citric acid. I’m not sure why I suddenly feel so queasy. Maybe I’m catching whatever it is my mother was warning me about.
11:21:10.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters—”
I have heard these words before, but only now do they mean anything, and that meaning is this: the world is a better place without him.
Tara grimaces and gently rubs her stomach. Hajime’s facade does not crack, but he leans heavily on his right side. My head begins to defy gravity, and I glance back down at my wrist again.
11:21—it turns 11:22. I want this to be over.
“And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, Lord—”
When I look back up, I notice that suddenly Pastor Robbins is sweating profusely even though it is very cold outside this morning. He wipes at his brow and I notice his face is red. My grandparents take a seat in one of the complimentary plastic chairs a couple of feet behind them, and my grandfather pats his wife’s hand delicately. He whispers something reassuring into her ear. My mother scratches at her face and narrows her eyes, looking up at pale sky and a freshly deposited chemtrail over our heads. The birds stop chirping and the wind dies down and everything is still, silent.
This is when I know without a doubt that something terrible is about to happen.
“Surely…goodness and mercy shall…follow me…all the days of my life…and I will dwell—”
Pastor Robbins stops, begins breathing heavily. Fear grips me and I clench Tara’s hand in mine.
“I will dwell—”
He stops short again and begins taking methodical steps toward Uncle Stan, who tries not to notice what is happening and focuses very carefully on the yellow flowers that adorn my father’s coffin.
“I will dwell—”
I look at my watch. Pastor Robbins stands directly in front of my uncle and gathers a deep breath. Everyone at the funeral is uncomfortable, fully cogniscient of dark times approaching.
11:23:05.
“And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!” Pastor Robbins heaves, and with one quick motion of the hand not gripping the Bible, he pops open the sheath attached to Uncle Stan’s belt. He removes the pocketknife from inside and extends the longest blade.
Then, without a moment’s hesitation, the pastor slices open Uncle Stan’s throat.
He never drops the Bible.
We open our mouths and widen our eyes at the sight of the blood that spigots out, but no one can move.
Aunt Linda then collapses to her haunches, presses the palms of her hands deftly against her ears, and releases a banshee-like scream just before one of my cousins kicks her hard in the chin, sending her flying backward and landing on her side. Teeth fall out of her mouth and she chokes up red spit.
Pastor Robbins takes the soaked pocketknife and begins jabbing it violently into his own neck. It’s surprising how much blood comes from the wounds.
In one instant, everything falls apart.
They start killing each other.
For a moment the scene is simply too much to take in, garbled staticky transmissions and stuttering incomprehensible images bathed in sunlight and blood.
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.
“Um—but what now?” Tara asks. “What do we do?”
I shakily pull out my cell phone and dial 911.
“This is 911 emergency,” a message begins. “All lines are currently busy. Please stay on the line and a 911 dispatcher will be with you immediately.”
“You have got to be goddamned kidding me,” I sigh, desperate and bobbing up and down where I stand. I try calling the number again and get the same message.
“Are you trying to call 911?” Hajime asks.
“Well I’m not calling to check my fucking voice mail, Hajime.”
“Okay, well, what’s happening then?”
This is 911 emergency. All lines are currently busy. Please stay on the line and a 911 dispatcher will be with you immediately.
“What’s happening is that we are in deep, deep shit, Hajime,” I say, snapping the phone shut. “We are in deep shit. That’s what’s happening.”
Just then, my cell phone vibrates in my hand. I open it and listen carefully for a human voice, a 911 operator, anyone who can help us. There is only silence. I inspect the screen and see that no one has called.
Then I realize that it wasn’t an incoming call.
It was a text message from an unknown number.
I open it with Tara and Hajime trying to peer over my shoulder. The message immediately causes me to swoon, my face turning pale white and sweat beginning to form on my face. I begin coughing, thinking I will throw up again or pass out. I read it over and over and then snap the phone shut, barely conscious.
