John Dies at the End

by David Wong

  Amy said, “While you do what? Can I come?”

  Tyler reacted to this for some reason, looking at John with a “when are people gonna learn” look, and then he spat on the ground. Tobacco spitting is a kind of nonverbal communication in many parts of the Midwest. He must have spilled his coffee a lot as a kid because he had one of those big spill- proof mugs, the kind that flare way out at the bottom. It looked like he was speaking into a megaphone every time he took a drink.

  I said, “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Amy dropped the bottle, made a frustrated sound like somebody stepping on a cat. I reached out as if to help her and she slapped at my hand, then went back to twisting at the cap.

  I continued, “She can’t go back to that house. I don’t know if she has any money but we can work something out. She can sleep on my couch if it comes to that.”

  John eyed me as if to say, “really?” but didn’t say anything.

  Tyler got a sly look in his eyes and said, “I got an interestin’ story. My brother, he and his wife gave birth to a Down’s kid. He drools all over the place, he shits himself. They made my ma babysit a few times, and then some more times, and then it was every night. Every damned night. You know what happened then?”

  “Your brain fell out?” I noticed Amy had stopped messing with the bottle and was sort of just looking at it, frozen. I said, “Look, I gotta—”

  “Listen, man. Listen. They left the kid there. At Ma’s house. They come by to visit every now and then. My ma, she’s basically got stuck feedin’ and cleanin’ this thing now, every day, it’s her job. Full- time job. She can’t go to her bingo games or date or any of that shit because she’s got this thing to take care of, because she wanted to be a nice person. It’s like bein’ in prison.”

  Amy glared at him, like she really had something killer to say to him, then she got this look on her face, sour, like biting an apple and seeing half a worm. She spun and took two steps toward my truck, then put her hand over her mouth and leaned over.

  Tip: if you ever feel a puke coming on, do not, do not put your hand over your mouth to try to catch it. It’s reflex but it doesn’t work at all. Vomit kind of sprays everywhere. So Amy stood there in the snow, leaning over at the waist, her eyes clamped shut, her hand dripping, a puddle at her feet. It was an awkward moment. There were some comments from the crowd behind me. Somebody muttered something and somebody else chuckled.

  I walked to her and said, “Over here.” I guided Amy toward the truck and sat her in the open door.

  “Don’t move.”

  I ran back to the rear door of the Bronco, opened it, reached in and grabbed a red- and- white flip- top cooler. This is my emergency kit. It contained a roll of duct tape, a spare pair of pants, an envelope with two hundred dollars, two bags of dried fruit, two packages of beef jerky, three bottles of water, a roll of those thick shop towels you see mechanics use, a small metal pipe—just right for cracking a skull with—and a fake beard. Look, you never know.

  I pulled out a bottle of water and soaked a shop towel. I went to hand it to Amy, realized stupidly that she had no hand to take the towel with since she only had, you know, the puke hand and the nonexistent hand.

  “Here,” I said. I took her arm by the wrist and wiped vomit from her fingers. Amy wrinkled her nose in disgust at this, but to be honest I had never attended a party of John’s where someone didn’t either vomit on me or near me. I was kind of inured to it.

  As I worked I said, “When I was in seventh grade, I took Emily Parks to the Fall Festival. First time I had ever been anywhere with a girl. We wandered around and ate elephant ears and saltwater taffy and lemon shakeups, all of that festival stuff. We get on the Ferris wheel, and riiiiiight as the ride is about to end I lean over and puke in her lap. The ride slows to a stop, you know, so they can unload all of the riders. And we wind up at the very top. Waiting. She’s sitting up there, with a lap full of vomit, crying. And we’re up there for- ev- er.”

  Amy’s hand seemed pretty clean. I tossed the soiled rag in the snow and gave her a new one and the bottle of water. I stepped back and said, “I didn’t ask another girl out until I was a junior in high school. Seventeen years old before I even held a girl’s hand. All because somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew I would wind up puking on her.”

  Amy didn’t react. She drank some water and wiped splatters of vomit off her pants and her shoes, her fingers having to be frozen now doing wet work in this weather. I caught a glimpse of her face and saw that look, a familiar look, a sort of embarrassment that is almost numbing. Like she wanted to dig a hole, bury herself in it and let grass grow over the top.

  A warmth spread behind my eyes. Everything turned red in my brain, my skull suddenly filled with Tabasco sauce. There was a tingling in my gut, muscles tensing. I picked up the used towels and walked back toward a trash can in the parking lot, near where Tyler and the guys were standing. I tossed in the towels and Tyler leaned over, whispering, “You’re a nice guy, Dave. So all I’m sayin’ is watch, that’s all I’m sayin’. Watch out bein’ a nice guy because you can get fucked.”

  A blink. A searing pain in my hand. Blood.

  There were arms on me, grabbing my jacket, pulling me, and there was blood on my knuckles and blood in my mouth. My jaws were clenched, I had bitten my tongue and tasted warm copper. Tyler was on his hands and knees, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, grunting that they had better hold me back because I was a fucking psycho and that I had broken his fucking nose. Then John was there, in my face, saying okay, okay, back off, just go, get outta here. I looked down at my throbbing hands and saw the knuckles were split, like I had been punching concrete. John pushed me back from the group, looked over my shoulder and said, “Get him outta here.”

  A fat blond kid was standing over Tyler, looked like a bloated version of him and I realized this was Tyler’s brother or cousin or something. And the fat kid was saying see, see what happens when you run your fucking mouth, Tyler, that one day talking shit was gonna get him killed because he was gonna say the wrong thing and some nigger was gonna shoot him in the back. John turned and joined the group, and I was standing there in the parking lot by myself, lost, disoriented. Tyler outweighed me by seventy- five pounds and, where I spent my days shelving DVDs, he spent his days carrying roofs up ladders. But the strangest thing, the sickening thing, was the urge that flashed through my mind as I was standing over him—

  —the urge to BITE—

  —and I knew this was it again, that I had lost time, that I had lost myself. Then I felt a pull on my jacket and the unique sensation of a handless arm reaching around my midsection.

  “Come on. Come on, David.”

  Amy circled around, her hand on my sleeve.

  “Amy, I—”

  “Come on. It’s okay. Come on.”

  She started turning me back toward the truck and I felt everyone staring. She got behind me and started pushing me toward the Bronco.

  “Come on, David. Take deep breaths. You’re fine.”

  “Amy, don’t—”

  “Nope. Come on. Keep going. Vrrrooooommmm . . .”

  That last part was Amy making an engine sound as she steered me toward the truck, like she was driving me. She reached around me and opened the door, then pushed me into the seat like you see cops doing with handcuffed suspects. She slammed the door, circled around and sat in beside me. We sat that way for a moment; I glanced out my window and saw the whole group watching. I reached up with a shaking hand to twist the key and realized the engine was already running. I tried to slow my breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands still.

  Amy asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Just, give me a second.”

  “You kicked that guy’s ass.”

  “Amy . . .”

  “Come on, let’s go. Before he gets up and beats the crap out of you.”

  WE GOT BACK to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I’m not the world’s gr
eatest house keeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don’t normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn’t get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles.

  “Look,” Amy said, from behind me. “They threw laundry all over your floor in there.”

  “Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards.”

  “And what were they looking for again?”

  A pause. I was on the verge of revealing what was probably our biggest and most dangerous secret to someone whom I had known for all of a day. I let out a breath and looked right into her eyes. The irises were too green, that was the thing. Like grass after a week of spring rain. And there was a piercing, electric intelligence in those eyes that I was too stupid to notice before. Seeing right through me. And I suddenly had the very dismaying realization that I probably could not lie to this girl, for one very simple reason. She was smarter than me.

  I said, “They were looking for the soy sauce. I know they didn’t find it, though.”

  “The what?”

  I didn’t answer. I did a walk around the house, saw if anything was broken. It looked like they had taken the batteries out of my clock for some reason, and the glass fixture on my ceiling fan was cracked.

  Amy followed me around, pestering me with questions, suddenly desperately curious. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. After about the fifth time she turned the conversation to it, I held up a silencing hand, made a shushing sound, and put a single finger to her lips.

  “All will become apparent in good time, sweet Amy.”

  For a second, I seriously thought she was going to punch me. I went outside and did a walk- around of the house, glancing nervously at the toolshed and praying that the door wouldn’t be standing open.

  What are you talking about, dipshit? If they came and took the body off your hands that’d be a blessing.

  I noticed the flag was up on my mailbox. This was Sunday. I went over and opened it, found a palm- sized package inside. There was no name, no address, no postage. I stared at it with some trepidation, then peeled it open, thinking it might be the world’s tiniest mail bomb. Inside was a necklace, a little gold cross on a delicate chain. I had seen it before, though seeing it close I noticed that the cross was formed of two tiny nails, bound together by thread-like wire. There was a piece of paper inside, too, a folded piece of stationery bearing a cartoon puppy with a pencil in his mouth. The writing was in sparkly pink:

  Hi! I had a dream

  & an angel told me to

  give this to you!

  It’s always brought me

  luck!!

  God Bless!

  (Smiley face)

  —Krissy Lovelace

  All of the I’s were dotted with big, friendly loops. Everybody wants to help.

  When I went in, Amy was in the bathroom running water. She emerged, stuffing Altoids mints into her mouth from a tin. I went to the fridge and said, “You want something to drink? I have, uh, some fruity Leinenkugel’s beer and, uh, some kind of terrible plum- flavored liquor John’s friend from the Czech Republic sent him. It tastes like the juice from a single plum was squeezed into a fifty-five-gallon drum of paint thinner.”

  The cans of Leinenkugel’s had masking tape on them with JOHN’S printed in ink. Amy looked around me and said, “John is protective about his beer, isn’t he?”

  “I put that label on there. When company comes I want them to know the Leinie’s is his, not mine. Do you want it?”

  “Uh, no. I don’t drink,” she said, shaking her head and brushing the hair from her eyes for the four hundredth time since yesterday. “I mean, I drink liquids. Not alcohol. I couldn’t mix it with the pain pills. So who do we tell about the monsters?”

  “Uh, what?”

  “All this, everything we saw. Who do we talk to about this sort of thing?”

  “I think the government has an eight hundred number but you just get one of those automated answering things. No. John and I are going to, uh, look into it. Today. Before they have a chance to come for you again.”

  I closed the refrigerator and faced her, then told her an abbreviated and less retarded version of John’s story about the Drain Rooter site and the Mall of the Dead.

  She said, “Why don’t we just go? To another town, or state, or Canada. When’s the last time you’ve heard of somebody exploding in Canada?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  Because we’re under the eye, Amy.

  “There are things you still don’t know. The shadow people . . . they’ve spoken to me. They know my name. It’s . . . personal somehow. With them. I think trying to get away from that by leaving—even climbing into a rocket ship and leaving the fuckin’ planet—would be laughable. To them it’d be like watching a hamster trying to escape by running on his little wheel really fast. I picture the rest of my life, running scared, forever. No. I can’t. I won’t. We’re gonna go in there, where they live. And we’re gonna go armed.”

  “I wanna go.”

  “Amy—”

  “No, don’t even try. I want to see. I have a right to.”

  “Amy, we’re going into that place with the intention of leaving it as a smoking hole in the ground.”

  Praise be to Allah!

  “I know.”

  “No, you think this is cool, I can see it in your eyes. It’s not cool. We do not have this thing under control. Let me tell you a story. When I was little we had our sewer line back up. Toilet overflowing and all that. So they had to come and root it out, and what they pulled out of the sewer line was a woodchuck. There was a break in the pipe somewhere, two joints that had pulled apart, and this thing had gotten in. Okay? I mean to a woodchuck, this had to be the adventure of a lifetime. Hidden tunnel, seeming to go on for miles. So he’s crawling and exploring and waiting to see the hidden treasure at the end. And then, he gets drowned. In our poo.”

  Amy nodded and said, “Well, that’s sad.”

  “The saddest. John and I, we’re the woodchuck. See, I can read it on you, that you think you’re really a part of something now, that we’re gonna do something really great today and change the world. Well Amy, understand what I’m about to say. There’s something terribly wrong with us. John and me. Amy, there are days when I’m sure—sure—that I’m stone- cold raving batshit insane. That none of this is happening, that I’m raving about it from a padded room somewhere. And do you know how I respond to that, to that knowledge that I may be delusional and dangerous? I arm myself. With a gun.”

  “David, you’re not—”

  “Listen. The only reason I’m standing up to these guys now is because I’m in a corner. I don’t have a choice. You do. And if you make the wrong choice, there is an excellent chance that these are your last hours on Earth. All the things you wanted to do with your life, they may not happen. All the things you like to do, all the things you thought you might like to do in the future, all gone. And it’ll be because of me. Because I led you into my turd pipe.”

  She said, “Why do you, like, hate yourself?”

  “If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?”

  “Well, that’s just stupid.”

  I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I reached into my front pocket and pulled out the necklace and held it up.

  “Here. It’s good luck. Or something.”

  I went to Amy and reached around her neck, clasping the thin chain under her hair.

  I glanced out of the window, saw the snow was coming down again.

  Facing her, I said, “You deserved some kind of normal life, Amy. I can picture you, in college, a family back home. Maybe you’re working part-time at a music
store. Geeky guys coming in and flirting with you at the counter. And I could come in and make some kind of awkward conversation with you and you could keep making excuses not to go out with me and I would just keep coming back and back and then you would get a restraining order against me, and my dad would get it overturned. Finally you would agree and we could go to a picnic or bowling or whatever normal people do when they’re together. What do normal people do when they’re together?”

  “I have no idea.”

  It’s funny, pretending that it’s normal to have a conversation with somebody standing three inches away.

  She leaned in and—

  IT LOOKED LIKE the world outside my window had lost its signal and gone to static. Snowing like hell, wind whipping it around. I leaned against my window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, breaths fogging up a circular patch under my nose. There was a time when I would have found the idea of certain death a little comforting, like being on the last day of a job I hated. A weight lifted. Now, feeling the cold glass on my face and wet hair cooling my scalp and my mouth tasting vaguely like secondhand Altoids and knowing I would never see snow again, I felt a little like crying. But just a little.

  I saw the grille of a car emerge like a ghost, headlights faint in the whiteout. The big car swung into my driveway, John’s Caddie. Through the window I watched as John ducked out, wearing an Army- issue fatigue jacket. He circled around to his trunk, popped it and pulled out a canvas backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and then pulled out a large tool that was unmistakably a—

  “Is that a medieval battle- ax?” Amy asked from behind me, rubbing a towel through her hair.

  “With John, we’ll be fortunate if it turns out to be nothing stupider than that.”

  The ax was a leftover from high school, when we used to be big into Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, um, bear hunting. John burst in the door at that moment, dusted with snow, shouting, “We are gonna fuck that place up.”

  He tossed down his load with a force that shook the floor, then bent over and hefted the ax that I believe was one of several props he stole from that medieval-themed restaurant he worked at for a while. He paused to let his eyes flick to mine and Amy’s wet hair and presumably asked himself if our showers had overlapped in any way. He was too polite to ask.