John Dies at the End

  “And the other kid that died, Big Jim—”

  “He’s really dead, too. You can look it up.”

  “I already did. But Big Jim, he would have gone to the cops about Fred, wouldn’t he? That you shot Fred? He didn’t seem too happy about it.”

  “I—I don’t know. We’ll never know.”

  “Worked out pretty good for you that Big Jim died then, didn’t it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t you see? You got all this ridiculous shit swirling around in your story, Wong, but then you got the parts that are real, the parts that can be verified. And they’re all felonies. A dead kid. A missing kid. A missing cop. So why don’t I do both of us a favor and pretend we never talked? Because I’m not sure I wanna hear the rest of it.”

  He unlocked the door to a white Cavalier and ducked inside.

  “Wait!”

  I jogged up to the car and circled around to the passenger side. I gently smacked the window with my palm. Arnie hesitated, then reached over and unlocked it. I leaned in.

  “Can I sit down?”

  He paused once more, not wanting to prolong this but not quite sure how to get rid of me. Maybe he was afraid I was dangerous, liable to fly into crazy-man violence if turned away. He used both hands to scoop up a bundle of notebooks and folders from the passenger seat. I ducked in and arranged my feet around a pile of recording equipment and cassettes on the floorboard.

  “Here,” I said. “Look.” I pulled a single folded sheet of paper from my pocket. “It’s been in my pants all day so it’s kind of wrinkled and, uh, moist, but read it. I copied that from Dr. Marconi’s book.”

  PAGE 192 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

  leaving it looking like a jar of pickled eggs that had been eaten and then vomited by a gorilla.

  The strange ritual was done in service to a deity who to my ears sounded like “Koddock” (the tribe had no written language). I was told that each member bore the mark of this god and I was allowed to witness the branding ceremony each member undertakes at the age of manhood.

  The young man was forced to lay facedown on a mat, naked. The priest then brought out a clay jar containing the writhing maggots of bot flies. The larvae were placed on the back of the young man, arranged in the shape of Koddock’s symbol. The maggots then chewed through the top layer of skin, digging holes a half-inch deep. I was told the larvae would, according to ceremony, be allowed to remain in their warm, wet tunnels in the young man’s back for seven days. If the young man succumbed to the itch and scratched the spot, he would fail the test of manhood and would have to wait a year before attempting it again.

  On the seventh day the larvae are extracted by the priest and the wound treated. What remains will be the trails of scar tissue, following the paths eaten by the worms. These scars would form the “brand” of Koddock. The priest showed me the finished symbol and the pipe literally fell from my mouth.

  Once more, it was like the symbol for pi, only rotated ninety degrees to the left. The same symbol I had seen a Manchester toddler draw in his trance state months before.

  As soon as I got back to Lima, I phoned Dr. Haleine, the Egyptologist. Shouting to each other over a poor connection, he described for me again the hieroglyph he had discovered in his dig, nearly 7,500 miles from where I stood.

  I was so stunned by what he told me that I could not keep my feet. Sitting on the floor of my hotel, I pondered the enormity of the revelation and sought out my flask.

  Haleine explained that there was an Egyptian god named Kuk, who was already known to Egyptologists (in the Ogdoad cosmogony, Kuk

  PAGE 193 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

  was a frog-like god who represented darkness and chaos). Haleine, however, believed he had stumbled upon a cult that worshipped his rash and destructive son, Kor’rok. This god was represented symbolically by a man punctured by two spears, one in the mouth and one in the groin, the twin centers of desire for mankind.

  In the cult’s mythology, Kor’rok was a reckless and cruel slavemaster, who used men’s bodily desires to lure them to their destruction for his own amusement.

  Dr. Haleine’s hieroglyph and the symbol of “Koddock” I had copied in my note pad, when laid over one another, were nearly identical in shape. Here we had now three peoples, living on opposite corners of the planet, separated by oceans of water and time, independently identifying the same deity.

  It was the single best piece of evidence for the supernatural ever discovered by science.

  Another day of travel took me back to the village. I arrived in such a state of excitement that the priest had me restrained by several strong men and forced me to drink a potion to “cool the embers in my head.” After some time I got alone with the priest and asked him about Koddock and the symbol.

  The symbol, he told me, was a representation of the god Koddock himself. Koddock was a young god, he told me, hotheaded and prone to fits of rage if not pleased. The vertical line was his body. The top horizontal line was a stream of vomit, the second horizontal line was a stream of urine. For, you see, the tribe believed Koddock liked to drink to excess, and when he was intoxicated he interfered with the affairs of man and caused great destruction. This was the tribe’s explanation for all suffering and misfortune in the world.

  Arnie skimmed over it, then let out a long sigh.

  “See? That’s Korrok. That symbol, that’s what was on Molly’s foot, it’s what’s on . . . look, you’re a journalist, these are independent sources here confirming the same thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy, this is evidence, right?”

  “What am I supposed to say, Wong? What do you want from me?”

  “I need somebody to know about this. I have to get this out. Before . . .” I shook my head. I ran out of words.

  “Before what? A monster catches you in an alley and eats you?”

  Tell him about Amy.

  “No. It’s nothing like that. Well, I mean, that’s a possibility, but it’s bigger than that.”

  Arnie let out a sigh.

  “Just listen,” I said, begging a little. “Just listen a little bit longer and then everything will be clear. You’ll understand how much is at stake here. Seriously.”

  Arnie sighed and looked off across the parking lot. “I ain’t got much time, Wong. It’s getting late.”

  “I know. Just . . . I need you to drive somewhere. We go there and I can show you. Everything will be clear, you’ll know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  “Where?”

  “The mall. The mall.”

  He gave me a long, hard look. He was probably sizing up his ability to take me down if I went nuts on him and tried to bite through his neck. He apparently judged his physical prowess to be superior because he twisted the key and revved the engine to life.

  “Turn right out of the parking lot here.”

  THE SKITTERING FOOTSTEPS grew louder in the mall’s cavernous hallway. John pumped the shotgun and raised it.

  “Sister Christian,” by Night Ranger, slowed, garbled, ground to silence. The last of the juice in the ghetto blaster’s batteries.

  Scratching claws.

  Approaching fast.

  Two gray blurs.

  They were coyotes, muscular, with matted fur and red eyes. They both skidded to a stop at the sight of us, took in deep breaths, and breathed plumes of fire.

  The three of us dove behind the crate. John leaned over with the shotgun, fired and tore a fist-sized chunk out of the first coyote head. He fired at the second one, missed.

  Pumped.

  Fired.

  Missed again.

  The beast lunged at me, knocking me over like a linebacker. It stood on my chest, its breath smelling like burnt electrical wires. It sucked in a huge breath that I knew would take the flesh off my skull.

  A hand shot out.

  Punching into the coyote’s side.

  Krissy hit the Taser.

  Blue sparks flew.

&
nbsp; The coyote’s abdomen, swollen with flammable breath, exploded like the Hindenburg. Furry chunks hit me in the face, a beautiful orange fireball rolling up toward the glass ceiling.

  I scrambled to my feet, my face hot and tight, brushing slimy red chunks of animal off me and cursing. I wasn’t sure if it was coyote blood or my own piss on my pants.

  Something heavy bounced off my shoe. John shone the flashlight, revealing a box of bullets.

  Laying next to it was a key with the number “1” etched into it.

  “A key,” said John, clicking shells into his shotgun. “Good. Now, if I know what’s going on here, and I think I do, we’ll have to wander around looking for that door. Behind it we’ll meet a series of monsters or, more likely, a whole bunch of the same one. We’ll kill them, get another key, and then it’ll open a really big door. Now right before that we’ll probably get nicer guns. It may require us to backtrack some and it might get really tedious and annoying.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” I said. “I’m staying here.” I sat on the ground, pulled open the box of bullets and tried to put one in the pistol. It fit. Hey, why the hell not. I started pushing rounds into the pistol magazine one at a time. “You go find the door.”

  A metallic thunder filled the hall.

  We all flew into action, bullets spilling off my lap and rolling in every direction.

  Ahead of us something huge dropped from the ceiling, blocking our view. The clanking roar finally ended in a crash that made all three of us jump.

  We advanced, guns drawn. It was one of those enormous drop-down gates that malls use to button up at closing time.

  “Well,” Krissy said, “I guess this is the big door. There’s a keyhole at the bottom, near the latch.”

  “All right,” said John, nodding. “All right. Big door. Sooner than I expected, but whatever. Now, that means there’s a boss behind there. A huge bad guy.”

  He focused on Krissy. “I want you to be prepared for this. This evil that has Wexler, it’s impossible for us to imagine what form it’s taken with him. Expect tentacles. And a whole bunch of eyes. Or just one eye. I don’t know what exactly to expect but I know it’ll be a way bigger asshole than we faced out here—”

  “Krissy!”

  From behind us. We spun on the voice and I involuntarily squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked. I hadn’t chambered a round.

  It was Wexler, trudging up in the shadows behind us. He looked pale but perfectly human. I posed casually with the gun, so as not to be too blatant about the fact that I had almost killed him with it just now.

  Krissy moved toward him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Stay away from me. He’ll be back. Any second now, he’ll be back.”

  He bent over and broke down in a coughing fit. Blood splattered the floor.

  “Dude,” said John, “let’s get you to a hospital, we’ll protect you and—”

  “No. Listen. I’m falling apart. I’m falling apart inside. When he comes back, I won’t hold up. Now, how much do you know about this place?”

  “If you’re talking about this town in general,” John said, “don’t even get us started. We’re the experts.”

  “No. No. I’m talking about the doors. This building—”

  Coughing fit.

  “—the doors, under it, or somewhere. I don’t know where. Hidden. This building and others, I think.”

  “We can go over all that later,” I said. “Where’s the shadow man? The, you know, the thing, the one who’s possessing you? Where is he now? Is he behind that gate?”

  “He’ll come back here. Let him. Let him enter me. Then kill me—”

  Krissy screamed, “No! Danny!”

  “—Kill me and burn my body. Then burn this place down on top of me. Find the other doors if there are more, and burn them down, too. In fact, just burn the whole town. Just to be safe.”

  “Doors? I don’t get—”

  Danny coughed, spat, then coughed and coughed some more, hacking until he finally passed out.

  Krissy ran to him, but couldn’t get him to respond. He was still breathing, though, so we dragged him over to the wall, leaning him against it.

  John and I trained our guns on him, and waited.

  Krissy looked back and forth at us and said, “What are you guys doing?”

  John and I glanced at each other.

  “Well . . . you know,” I said meekly. “We’re waiting for the thing to come back into him so we can, uh . . .”

  “We are not doing that.”

  To me the guy looked to be on his last legs anyway, so this really did seem like a more reasonable plan than getting eaten by whatever monstrosity waited behind that gate. Shouldn’t we honor his final wishes?

  We were unable to convince Krissy of this. She took the key and started working at the lock of the huge gate.

  I sighed and went to her, the pistol clasped in both hands. John nudged her aside and knelt with his hand on the gate handle.

  Krissy pulled the Taser from her pocket.

  John looked up at us and said, “We stay together. Look for a weak spot, like an eye or something. If there are crates around the room, cover me and I’ll open them, see if there’s a rocket launcher or something in one of them. If either of you find a big, green, polka-dotted mushroom, set it aside. We may need it later.”

  The blood, pounding through my ears again, my skull sounding like the inside of a seashell. I blinked hard to try to clear the spots pulsing in front of my eyes.

  I knew this was the thing to do, but every fiber screamed to retreat and try again some other day, when we had more on our side, when I wasn’t so tired, or so nervous, or so fat. I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag.

  My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.

  It would have to do. I reminded myself to breathe. John pulled up the gate, rolling it up on its tracks with a sound like tank treads.

  We entered a huge octagon of a room, more storefront blanks where food counters were to go. There was some broken glass and dead leaves on the ground, where one of the panes in the overhead skylight had broken out.

  Nothing else.

  John gestured to our left and said, “Check it out.”

  It wasn’t a monster. But still I stopped in my tracks, let out a long breath and said, “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

  There was a painting on one wall to our left. On the wall, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the two-by-fours stacked next to the wall. I recognized the style.

  The painting was abstract, yet strangely realistic. It was a three-dimensional picture of a ring intersecting another ring in a way that seemed to shift as you looked at it. Like the landscape I saw in Robert Marley’s bedroom, it seemed to draw you in, to take on complexity as you stared.

  It’s a picture of time.

  I tore my eyes off it and said to John, “I think your Jamaican friend was here.”

  “I think he was actually living here.”

  He nodded toward a nearby nest made up of an ancient sleeping bag and about half a dozen plastic milk crates. The surrounding floor looked like the aftermath of a bloody battle between empty Captain Morgan bottles and faded candy bar wrappers.

  I thought about Wexler, ranting about hidden doors. Now here was where our guy, our Patient Zero, had set up camp all those months ago. I felt like there were dots that I was intentionally not connecting. I wanted to go somewhere warm and bright to think about all this. Or, even better, not.

  I wandered out to the center of the floor, crunching glass and leaves underfoot. John lit up a cigarette and said, “Man, if you could flood this place in the winter and let it freeze up, you’d have a kick-ass place to play hock—”

  A shriek, from behind me. Krissy, screeching my name.

  A shotgun blast split the air.

  I spun, scanning the room through the sights of the automatic.

  John screamed my n
ame, bellowing instructions I couldn’t make out. Then I saw it, the black shape zipping through the air, like a Hefty bag blown around in a hurricane. I spotted it, lost it, caught it again, then—

  It vanished. I spun around. No sign of it. John and Krissy were staring at me, horrified.

  “It’s okay! I’m okay! Where did it go?”

  I was okay, now that I thought about it. Felt great, in fact. The adrenaline must have been working because all the fear evaporated in an instant.

  A veil lifted from over my thoughts.

  John and Krissy. Two of six billion humans on the planet. One American, I heard, consumes enough calories to keep forty African children alive.

  John routinely burned half a gallon of gasoline to get a pack of cigarettes. The girl bought special shampoo for her dog while Somali children starved. She warded off her guilt with a gold symbol around her neck, the intersecting strips of gold the last thing millions saw before their limbs were ripped from their bodies in medieval torture machines. Two locusts, standing before me, blazing through resources by the ton.

  I had been such a fucking fool.

  “Uh . . . Dave?”

  John dragged me here for one reason: his attention span demanded new and loud experiences, links to add to his chain of distractions until the day he would finally drink himself to death.

  And the girl, I could save her life a dozen times over in this room and she would still climb into bed with the guy with the great eyes and the promising TV career. She could never contaminate her precious genetic material with mine.

  When was I going to stop letting the world bleed me dry?

  “Dave, can you hear me?”

  Without a word, I took a step toward the pair. I kicked something metal. It was a rusty utility knife, an inch of blade protruding from the end. I stuffed it in my pocket, thinking I would need it later.

  The gun aimed nonthreateningly at the floor at my side, I strode toward the girl and was pleased to see a look of crippling fear ooze into her eyes, an expression that broke those sculpted porcelain features like a hammer.

  Have you ever been truly scared of anything, princess?