David Wong - John Dies at the End

As she brushed grass clippings off her butt I felt the intense urge to reach over and help her. I managed to restrain myself.

Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like testosterone.

“I’m really, really sorry. You okay?”

“Yeah. Spilled my Zima a little, but…”

“What are you doin’ here?”

“Just, you know. Party.” She gestured vaguely with her hand at the crowd and music. “Well, good seein’ ya…”

She’s walking away! Say something!

“I’m, uh, here with the band,” I said, following her while using the most casual, non-following stride I had in my walking repertoire. She glanced up at the band, then back at me.

“You know they started playing without you, right?”

“No, I don’t, like, play an instrument or anything. I’m just… well, you saw me at the beginning there. I was the guy that fell down and died.”

“Well, I just got here.” She walked a little faster.

She’s getting away! Tackle her!

“Well,” I said after her, “I’ll see you around.”

She didn’t answer, and I watched her walk away. Intently.

She met up with some blond kid in droopy pants, a sideways ball cap and a band T-shirt. The whole sequence depressed me so much I didn’t think about the floating Jamaican again until…

THREE HOURS LATER ,John and the crew were packing their scratched equipment into a white van with the words FAT JACKSON’S FLAP WAGON spray-painted on the side. That was the name of the band before they changed it a few months ago.

“Dave!” said John. “Look! Can you believe how much sweat I have on this shirt?”

“That’s… somethin’,” I said.

“We’re all meeting at the One Ball. You comin’?”

That’s the One Ball Inn, a bar downtown. Don’t ask.

“No,” I said, “I gotta go to work in seven hours.” John had work, too. We both worked the same shift at the same video store. John had been through six jobs in three years, by the way. Some girl came up behind John and put her arms around him. I didn’t recognize her, but that was normal.

“Yeah, me, too,” he admitted. “But I gotta buy Robert a beer first.”

“Who?”

“Uh, the black guy.”

John gestured toward a group of five people, three girls and two dudes with their backs to me. One was a huge guy with red hair, next to him was the rainbow beret and dreadlocks of my voodoo priest.

“See him? He’s the one in the white tennis shoes.”

Not only did I see him, but he turned toward me. He made eye contact and shouted, “You owe me a beer, mon!”

“The man likes his beer,” said John. “Hey, I heard there was somebody from a record company out there tonight.”

“I don’t like the guy, John. He’s… there’s something not right about him.”

“You like so few people, Dave. He’s cool. He bet me a beer he could guess my weight. Got it on the first try. Amazing stuff.”

“Do you even know how much you weigh?”

“Not exactly. But he couldn’t have been off by more than a few pounds.”

“Okay, first of all-never mind. John, the guy does an accent. What kind of a person goes around like that? He’s phony. Also, I think he might be, uh, into somethin’. Come on.”

“ ‘Into something’? You are so quick to judge. Have you thought that maybe he was raised by his father, who was a fugitive from the law? And that, to conceal his identity, his father had to fake an accent? And that maybe young Robert learned how to talk from his dad and thus adopted that same fake accent?”

“Is that what he told you?”

“No.”

“Come on, John. My car is behind the trees back there. Come with me.”

“Are you goin’ to the One Ball?”

“No, obviously not.”

“Then I’m ridin’ with Head in the Flap Wagon. You’re still welcome to come if you want.”

I declined. They loaded up and left.

I felt a little abandoned. There wasn’t anybody else I really knew there, so I wandered around for a bit, hoping to run into Jennifer Lopez or at least that dog. I did find Jennifer, where she was sitting in a cherry-red ’65 Mustang making out with that blond kid. He looked barely old enough to drive. This made me furious for some reason and I sulked my way back to my underfed Japanese economy car, shoes kicking up little sprays of moisture from the tall grass as I went.

The dog was waiting for me.

Right there by my door, like it couldn’t understand what had taken me so long. I unlocked the door and “Molly” leapt into the passenger seat. I gawked, half expecting the dog to reach around with her teeth and pull down the seat belt. She didn’t. Just waited.

I flung myself down into the little Hyundai, feeling like a thousand questions were squirming around my gut. I dug into my pocket for my car keys. I pulled my hand out-and screamed.

Not a full-fledged female-victim-in-a-slasher-movie scream. Just a harsh, rasping “WHAH?!?” On the palm of my hand, etched into the skin, was the phrase, YOU OWE ME ONE BEER.

I sat there, in the dark, staring at my hand. I did this for several minutes, felt my stomach clench, then decided to lean out the door and vomit in the weeds. I spat and opened my eyes, saw movement in the puddle. Something long and black and wriggling.

So that’s where the centipede went…

I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back in my seat. In that moment I decided to go home and crawl into bed and pretend that none of this had ever, ever happened.

TELLING THE STORYnow, I’m tempted to say something like, “Who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?” I won’t say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow.

Once, in chemistry class, John “accidentally” made a Bunsen burner explode. I mean it actually shattered a window. He got suspended for ten days for that and if they could have proven it wasn’t an accident he’d have been expelled, as I was a year later.

He was kicked out of art class for submitting very, very detailed charcoal nudes of himself, only with about six inches added to his genitalia. He broke his wrist after a fall while trying to ride a friend’s van like a surfboard. He has burn scars on the back of his thighs from what he told me was a mishap with homemade fireworks, but what I believe was the result of his and some friends’ attempt to make a jet pack. He told me a year ago he wanted to go into politics some day, even though he didn’t have even one minute of college. A month ago he told me he wanted to go into the adult film industry instead.

DARKNESS AND WARMTH .And then, an all-beep rendition of “La Cucaracha.”

My cell phone. I peeled my eyes open. Bedroom. Nighttime. My floor looked like a Laundromat explosion. Magazines here and there, overflowing trash can. Just as I had left it.

Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-

My hand managed to knock over every single object on my nightstand before it found the cell phone. I squinted at my clock, now lying helpless on the floor. Quarter after 5 A.M. I had to be at work in less than two hours.

“Hello?”

“David? It’s John. Where are you?”

Voice scratchy, breathing heavier than he should be. Like a man just after a fistfight.

“I’m in bed. Where am I supposed to be?”

Long pause.

“Is this the first time I’ve called tonight?”

I sat straight up, fully awake now.

“John? What’s going on?”