John Dies at the End

by David Wong

  Then he turned and stepped past me into the hallway. He studied the wall, then raised the ax and swung it into the wall with a THOCK that sent plaster dust flying.

  He swung three more times, then thrust his hand into the hole he had created and pulled out a small object that fit in the palm of his hand. He glanced at it, wiped the dust on his shirt, then tossed it to me. I caught the small canister. Silver, the size of a pill bottle.

  Amy saw it and asked, “What’s that?”

  “You’ve never seen it before?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Big Jim had it at one time. We don’t know where he got it though.”

  I quickly relayed to her the story of the weather guy and the mall and how we came across the container.

  “So,” she said. “What’s in it?”

  CHAPTER 15

  D-Day

  “VERY SIMPLY,” I said to Amy, “the reason we can see things that you can’t is right there in that bottle. We don’t know where it came from or what exactly it does. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden. It’d be like if a doctor could walk around with microscopes strapped to his eyes all of the time, so he could just look and see the sickness crawling around inside us.”

  Amy pointed out, “Well, he’d still have to be able to see inside your blood vessels and lungs and all that. A microscope wouldn’t—”

  “These microscopes also have some kind of X-ray vision attachment.”

  She reached out and picked up the canister.

  “Ugh. It’s cold.”

  “The container is always cold,” I said. “It refrigerates the contents twenty- four hours a day. And we don’t know how. No batteries, no energy source. And it’s been working for years. The sauce, it has to be kept cool or it becomes, uh, unstable.”

  Unstable, in the way that a swarm of killer bees is “unstable.”

  “And you’re going to take it again?”

  “I don’t want to. But I think we have to. It’ll level the playing field, get us on the same frequency as the bad guys. It’s the reason we’re alive.”

  Oh, and everybody else who has ever tried it has wound up dead. The irony.

  I said, “When I ran across this bottle, it was empty, just like mine.”

  I opened the bottle and shook out the contents. Two capsules, black as licorice.

  “I bet you’re wondering where these two came from. We’re always wondering the same thing. The stuff seems to show up when it wants to.”

  She said, “You’re not going to let me take any, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But you’re not supposed to take it. If you were, there would be three capsules in here.”

  John said, “We better swallow these before they attack us.”

  We did. We waited.

  “Sooooo . . .” Amy asked, “how do you know when it’s working?”

  I said, “You just, uh, start noticing things. It’s hard to explain. Like bits of radio signal coming in through the static.”

  With that, a thought passed through my head, a flash like a shooting star. Pro wrestling was real. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was more real than reality. Then, I worked out pi to four thousand decimal places and realized that if anyone ever drew a truly perfect circle it would actually look like a straight line to our eyes. I looked at the silver pill canister and realized it was more than four thousand years old. Or less than four seconds.

  I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty- one feet farther than your shoes?”

  John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.”

  I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.

  To kill some time, I got up and hunted around the closet in my laundry room until I found my squirt gun. This was one of those huge modern guns, green and with a logo that said BIG GUSHER on the side. It had a separate two- gallon tank with hooks for a belt. The commercials bragged it could spray a soaking, quarter-inch- wide stream of water for fifty feet and that was pretty much true. The gun was sticky from when John filled it with beer last summer.

  I hunted around until I found a roll of duct tape and an extended disposable lighter, the kind people light grills with. I gathered three bottles of flammable chemicals that I would mix to form the fuel. I took my armload of items and dumped them on the table.

  Amy said, “So, you’re making a flamethrower?”

  “Amy, we gotta be prepared. We don’t know what we’ll find in that place, but for all we know it could be the Devil himself.”

  “David, what possible good is that thing gonna do?”

  “Oh, no, you didn’t hear me. I said it’s a flamethrower.” Girls.

  “But if something is from Hell why would you use a—”

  Amy stopped, apparently deciding against pursuing that question and instead asked, “What am I taking? When we go? Is there a weapon or something for me?”

  “Have you forgotten the woodchuck already?”

  I went to work on the squirt gun. The sound of rustling and growling emerged from the bathroom. Under that I could detect the low hum of my beard trimmer.

  Amy put her hand on mine, her other hand balled up in a fist on the table.

  “There was a sheep,” she said. “In Scotland, I think. And this sheep escaped from the ranch. And you know they shear sheep for their wool. Well, this thing stayed gone for seven years. Finally they found it, in a cave. And there was nobody to shear the sheep, so when they found it, its wool was gigantic. It was, like, a walking afro. And it wound up back on the ranch, just another sheep, but for the rest of its life it knew that for a while, it was free. It had that and nobody could take it away. Do you understand? I’m like you; I want to face this thing. Whatever it is. We’re like that sheep, taking our shot. If for no other reason than just to say we did.”

  “I do understand. Trust me, I do. And it takes a special kind of person to make up something so utterly bullshitty. You know their wool doesn’t just keep growing like that.”

  “That’s not even the point, David.”

  I went to take her other hand, saw my hand disappear into hers and realized that it was because she didn’t have another hand. But there it was, thin fingers wrapped in a tight ball.

  She looked down, curious, not sure what I was staring at. I said, “I think the sauce is working. Go put on the Scooby glasses. I want to try something.”

  She got up, found them on the counter, then sat down and I gestured to look at the spot where her hand shouldn’t be.

  “Now this time, really concentrate. I don’t know if—”

  No point in finishing the sentence. Her jaw hung open.

  “Oh! I can see it! How is that possible?”

  She tried it with and without the glasses, saw the hand appear and disappear. “Look! My fingernails! I had let them get long and I was meaning to cut them before I went in for the surgery. No wonder it hurts . . .”

  Then she lifted the clenched fist off the table and, very slowly, uncurled the fingers. She laid the hand flat on the table.

  “David. This is crazy.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s about the least crazy thing you’re gonna see today.”

  The bathroom door burst open, and Molly came trotting out. The left half of her body had been shaved almost down to the skin. The right half was as shaggy as before. John emerged after her, brushing a layer of dog hair off his clothes.

  John said, “Well, that’s done.”

  Before I could stop her, Amy asked, “Why did you—”

  “It w
as Molly’s idea. She wants to look like two different dogs when she’s coming and going. She thinks it will make it easier for her to steal food.”

  He turned to me.

  “That’s one complicated dog, Dave. Have you started on the bomb?”

  “The what?”

  SOCIETY IS DOOMED for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down. John and I had scavenged the house for bomb- making materials. Neither of us knew how to make a bomb prior to today, but we improvised one by analyzing the molecular makeup of the ingredients. My head was taking on a fiery soreness, cooking like an engine run too long and too hard. I wondered, not for the first time, if using the soy sauce would shave years off my life and I realized that it probably didn’t matter.

  So, using a packet of Jell- O and the innards of two smoke detectors and a pack of shredded playing cards and the refrigerant from my truck’s air conditioner and nine other ingredients, we fashioned a sticky explosive clay, mint green in color. We poured it into a tinfoil mold we made in the shape of a dog bone and stuck it in the freezer to solidify. The idea was to disguise it as something that would seem normal being in a dog owner’s front pocket, should we get caught and searched.

  I sat at the kitchen table, snapping brass bullets into the one spare magazine I had bought for the Smith.

  “Here’s what I think,” said John. “That facility, they’ve got to have some kind of intercom system. We sneak our way to the office where the mic is, and put the boom box in front of it. We go right for the fucking jugular: ‘November Rain,’ on a loop. While they’re all holdin’ their ears and begging for forgiveness, we go find this Korrok fucker and shove this bomb right up his ass. Or get him to eat it, if it turns out he’s a huge dog.”

  I nodded and stood. The real plan, the unspoken one that hid between John’s words, was that we would die. But, we would die in the middle of what Korrok’s people would remember as the single most retarded and baffling incident in their history. We would be their Guy Fawkes. They would create a holiday about us. If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.

  Me and John, I mean. Not Amy.

  I let out a long breath and put on my coat. I dropped in the gun and the spare magazine. John threw on his Army jacket and leaned over, unzipped the backpack and pulled out a chainsaw. He had tied a length of bungee strap to it so he could carry it slung over his shoulder. He then picked up the homemade flamethrower, not questioning for a moment what it was or what it did. He flicked on the lighter and a delicate tongue of flame licked out in front of the barrel. He nodded in approval and blew it out, then grabbed the battle- ax off the floor and handed it to Amy. She managed to hold it aloft in her one hand for exactly two seconds before she let the head clang to the floor. She let go of the handle, then dug some Chap-Stick from her jacket and smeared it on her lips.

  We were loading up the Bronco when John reminded me of the exploding dog bone. I ran inside, pulled it out of the aluminum- foil mold and walked into the yard with it in my hand.

  I probably should have seen this next part coming. Molly ran over, half shaved and half shaggy, and snatched the bone from my fingers.

  At John’s request I’ll skip over this next part, which involved us chasing the dog around the yard for a very long time and finally John tackling her, prying open her jaws and finding no remnant of exploding bone in there.

  I began to walk away from the situation in disgust when a snow- covered John, still on the ground with Molly, said, “Look!”

  He was holding up Molly’s front paw. I saw nothing unusual about it, but then realized the pi- like symbol we had seen on the carcass of exploded Molly was missing from this dog’s paw. Molly licked her nose and sneezed. John stood up; Molly flipped onto her feet and trotted away.

  I said, “What do you think it means?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. We need the bone bomb back. Take the chainsaw and cut open the dog.”

  Amy objected to this and came up with what I thought was a far more disgusting plan of trying to flush the bone from the other end of Molly. She went inside and dug out two convenience- store burritos from my freezer and heated them in the microwave until they were lukewarm.

  After feeding both burritos to Molly and seeing no immediate results, John said, “All right, let’s go. We’re gonna be late for our certain death.”

  WHITEOUT. THERE WAS more snow than air in the atmosphere. We went fifteen miles an hour through town, the whole place shut down under the storm. It was, I thought, an actual blizzard. I had never seen one. About halfway there, John squinted into his rearview mirror.

  “What the hell?”

  Red- and- blue lights swept across the frosted rear window. We all glanced at each other, figuring we could either pull over or plow through the snowstorm for the slowest police chase since O.J. I pulled over, two tires ramping up onto mounds of roadside snow. A blue, bear- like figure strode up to the driver’s-side door. I rolled down the window and felt freezing bits of snow land on my cheek. A face leaned down. I saw it and felt myself tense, my hand going right to the butt of the Smith.

  Oh, crap.

  It was Drake. But it was not Drake. His wide face sat there inches from mine, an inhuman blankness in the expression, like that of an embalmed body at a funeral. His eyes were pure black, no whites, no irises. I blinked, and his eyes looked human again. Human, but as lifeless as a doll’s.

  Drake’s mouth said, “OUT.” He flung the word at me like a punch. I smelled a puff of breath that was chemically sweet, like a little kid after drinking too much Kool- Aid. Drake yanked open the door and grabbed my jacket, pulling me out. He clamped on my shoulders and spun me around and pushed me toward the truck. I heard the other door open and there was John, standing there, looking at Drake and knowing what I knew. Drake was gone.

  The big cop pulled out a baton from a loop in his belt and smacked his palm with it.

  “SO,” he said, barking the sound so that it was barely an English word. “So. Big smart guy. Big guy. Dolls and jellyfish and the night comes to life and walks on Mulholland Drive.”

  He smacked his palm. His pudgy lips spread to reveal a shark’s grin. I wanted to grab for my gun but a swing with that club could break the bones in my wrist in half a second. I don’t know if I was poised to make my move or frozen in panic. At any second, the Drake thing could end this little adventure before it got started. I glanced at John, hoping he had some kind of plan. The look in his eyes said he was hoping the same from me. I looked back at Drake’s squad car and saw he hadn’t come alone. Riding with him was a muscular black cop who was climbing out of the passenger side of the car now, snow landing on his hat, grinning the grin of the freshly mad.

  Drake stepped around to the grille of my truck. He said, “MULHOLLAND DRIVE! SMART GUY! THE BLUE BOX! THE BLUE KEY! THE BLUE EYE!” He swung the stick and a headlight exploded with a crash. Drake smiled again, then bent his knees and leapt six feet into the air. He landed on my hood with a thud that rocked the whole truck on its suspension. I saw Amy jump in the backseat, eyes bouncing back and forth between me and John. Molly barked, but made no other effort to help.

  Drake looked down at me from his perch on my hood. He stuck the end of the baton into his pocket, unzipped his pants, and began pissing on my windshield. Urine splattered and yellowed the pile of snow bunched along my windshield wipers.

  “HA! KORROK WAITS IN THE ALLEY, SMART GUY!”

  Drake’s partner was disrobing. The black cop was flinging clothing into the road, mumbling to himself. He finally yanked off a pair of boxers, put his hands on his naked hips and screamed something like “tubesteak” over and over again to the snowy sky.

  Drake finished his pee, zipped up. He lifted one shoe, reached down and pulled it off. He peeled off his sock and raised the foot toward me.

  He stood that w
ay for a long moment, foot raised like a photo of a field- goal kicker caught in midkick. I glanced back and saw the other cop was packing handfuls of snow onto his groin.

  I looked back at Drake and finally I saw what he was showing me. On his big toe was a tiny tattoo. The pi symbol, just like the old Molly had.

  “THIS IS JUST A RECORDING, SMART GUY!”

  He lowered his foot and pulled out his baton again. He held it up and pointed at me with his other hand.

  “NOW BEND OVER! BEND OVER AND DROP YOUR PANTS, SMART GUY!”

  Simultaneously, John and I ducked back inside the Bronco. I threw it into gear and slammed on the gas, Drake still standing on the hood.

  The truck lurched forward and we barreled down the road, but Drake stayed planted, crouching like an oversized hood ornament. He bellowed at me over the wind, flinging aside his hat and tossing his hair.

  “WHERE YOU GOING? HA HA HA! LET’S GO INTO THE ALLEY! HE’S WAITING, SMART GUY!”

  He reared back with the baton, as if ready to smash the windshield. I slammed on the brakes, the truck spun out, Drake went flying.

  He vanished behind the miniature mountain range of piled snow along the road. I heard a faint scream that twisted into a howl, a high- pitched sound that human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate. I considered going to help him. The urge quickly passed. I threw the truck in reverse, stepped on the gas, threw it into gear and fishtailed down the road. I peered into my mirrors, looked nervously for him or his naked snow- crotched partner. Their car was nowhere to be seen. Molly stood and stared out the back window, shuddering and issuing a low, rumbling growl.

  Amy was asking something, asking what was wrong with him, was he dead, should we go back. Neither I nor John answered. I just drove. Gotta push on, don’t even look back.

  Something moved in my rearview mirror, a dark shape against the snow. I looked, thought I saw something, something moving fast. Not a person. Or maybe I didn’t see it.