David Wong - John Dies at the End

A bearded man wandered over, looking dazed, and I recognized him as the husband of the woman we tried to save before she dismembered herself and everything went to Hell.

I said, “I’m sorry. About your wife. What was her name? Becky.”

He looked at me, confused, said, “No, I’m not married. What happened in here?”

I couldn’t answer. I lay back on the floor, my body shutting down even with shoes shuffling all around me. I hadn’t slept in forty hours, every muscle screamed in pain. I had flown off the cliff of a gargantuan adrenaline rush and was crashing fast.

Somebody said my name, asked if I was okay. I didn’t answer, the sound of the commotion dying around me as the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.

DARKNESS AND WARMTH ,and then the nasal EEEK EEEK EEEK of an alarm clock. I had a taste in my mouth, smoky, like I had licked an ashtray. I felt something itchy and thick around my mouth. I shot my eyes open. Where the hell was I?

I sat up in bed. Not my bedroom. I looked over at a watch on a nightstand. Not my watch. A nicer one.

I looked around the room, the alarm still screeching its complaints from the nightstand. I found a mirror. There was something dark on my face, and I slapped my hand up to it. Hair. I climbed out of bed and walked toward the mirror. I had a thick, full goatee.

What the hell?

I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Whose room was this? A voice from behind me said, “Are you going to get that?”

I fumbled around and found a button on the alarm. Jennifer Lopez was in the bed. And I mean the actress.

Oh, wait. No, she rolled over and it was just the local Jennifer Lopez. She got out of bed, wearing a tank top and underwear, and she sleepily walked off to what I guess was a bathroom. She had a faint, white scar at the top of her thigh. She farted softly as she closed the door.

I stood, found a cell phone among the stuff on a nearby chest of drawers, dialed John’s number.

Operator recording. “This number has been disconnected…”

I was in a slow-burn panic now. I glanced out a window, saw a tree in the front yard with leaves turning fall colors. I went back to the phone, scrolled through the quick-dial numbers. I found an entry for John-a different number than I knew-and dialed it.

I heard water running in the bathroom. I held my breath as the phone rang four, five, six times. Seven.

“Hello?” John, sounding sleepy.

“John? It’s me.”

“Yeah. What’s goin’ on?”

“Oh. Nothin’.”

After a moment, he said, “You don’t remember the last six months, do you?”

“You, too?”

“No, I’m okay. This will be the fourth time it’s happened to you, though. You lose everything since that night. Is Vegas the last thing you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s a side effect of the sauce. Come to my-well, you don’t know where my apartment is now, do you? Meet me at Dairy Queen.”

Jennifer came out and, much to my surprise, we kissed for several minutes. Ashtray .

I went out, took in the neat little white bungalow-style house and was a little relieved to find my familiar Hyundai in the drive.

I drove and found John sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, a brown DQ sack in his hand. I observed that he, too, had grown a thick goatee.

I said, “This sucks.”

“You say that every time.”

“Do I have to, like, work today? Where do I work?”

“Wally’s. You get Sundays off. This is Sunday, by the way. Come on.”

John walked me to a very nice motorcycle. He jumped on, slapped the seat behind him. I looked at it for a moment and then walked to my car, said, “I’ll follow you.”

As we walked down the hall to John’s new apartment he said, “It was a big deal, but not, you know, the real big deal. The story that came out was that five hundred people freaked out at a Marconi show, rushed the doors, one kid got killed in the stampede. That would be, you know, Jim.”

We stepped through the doors and I said, “One guy? What about the dozens of people who-”

I stopped, taken aback by John’s place. He had a brown leather couch, a matching armchair. He had a big-screen plasma TV sitting in the middle of the room; hooked to it were four video game systems, with game boxes littering the floor. A fairly nice DVD player, a one-hundred-disk CD changer in an entertainment center.

“John, are we crack dealers now?”

John opened a drawer on a writing desk and pulled out a big manila envelope. He extracted a bundle of papers, newspaper clippings, a couple of folded-up tabloids, a glossy magazine called Strange Days with a picture of a UFO on the front.

He said, “No. Nothing like that. Out in Vegas, we met a guy. He was a pimp. We made quite a bit of money as male whores. They used to call you Rocket Rimjob. You won the gold at the Greater Nevada Sodomy Olympics back in July, landed a bunch of endorsement deals. You own that house you and Jennifer live in. Paid cash, I think.”

He looked dead serious when he said this. I said, “Are you messing with me?”

“No. You really own that house. I made up the whoring thing, though. I like to add a little bit to it each time. Seriously, what happened is Molly won a bunch of money at the casinos.”

“John-”

He pulled out a newspaper, a color “Lifestyles” section from the Las Vegas Sun , headline blaring “Dog Wins Quarter Million Playing Slots!” There was a picture of John with Molly in his arms, struggling to get away from him. He had his right hand out, making the shape of a finger gun and pointing at Molly, his mouth wide open in a drunken “that’s my dog!” expression. Jen and I were visible in the deep background, trying to hide our faces.

“The thing with the Marconi show, the panic, there was a big investigation and everything,” he said. “Cops thought he had slipped acid to everybody, freaked ’em out with a light show or something. Everybody called him a fraud; it was kind of crappy the way they treated him. But he came out okay. The death hasn’t come out as anything but an accident and all of a sudden his book is a bestseller, people desperate to get to his shows. You’ve, uh, tried to contact him a couple of times, but he won’t take the calls.”

It was coming back to me as he told it. Everything was hazy, drunk memories. He handed me the UFO magazine, pointed to a little header in the bottom left:

Legend of Fred Chu:

Is this dead youth haunting his Midwestern hometown?

One local man says “ABSOLUTELY”

There was a noise above me.

I looked up

My heart skipped a beat.

It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands. The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head. It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.

“Uh, John-”

“Oh, now you see it.” He stood, grabbed the Dairy Queen sack, pulled out a sausage-and-egg biscuit and unwrapped it. He set the sandwich on the floor. The thing picked it up with two hands and bit into it.

“When you came in that night, that first night when I called you, it was standing on the wall. You walked in and of course you saw nothin’ at all. And, you know, when I told you not to move or make a sound? The thing was on your back . It had jumped on you and you just stood there like nothin’.”

The wig monster turned about five eyes up to me as it ate. It paused in its chewing, vanished. The sandwich fell softly to the floor.

I said, “Did I spook it? I mean, does it still, like, attack us or anything?”

“No, not since that night. It bit right through my shoe that night, though. I had been kicking it at the time so I call it even.”