David Wong - John Dies at the End

“There!” said John. Taillights way up ahead. Small and close together. It was my boy, all right. It was at this moment I realized we, again, had no plan for what to do once we caught up to it. The same thing apparently occurred to Krissy, who asked, “What do we do now?”

“Get up alongside,” said John. “And then ram it off the road.”

“I’m not doin’ that! Who’s gonna pay for the-”

She cut off her words with a scream. We were close now, close enough for her to see the driver. “What is that thing?”

“You don’t wanna know,” John said. “But don’t be afraid. Get up close again, I got a plan.”

She looked confused, but faced forward and pressed the Focus up to eighty. We ran up alongside the blue compact. “Keep us even,” John said as he rolled down the window. Roach man had his window down, too, one roachy elbow resting outside the window like a trucker. The occasional roach dripped off his arm like candle wax, flicking off into the wind.

John started to climb out of the window, wind whipping his hair around his face and I had the crazy idea that he was going to try to fling himself over to the other car like Bruce Willis. Instead he leaned his torso back against the car and braced his knees against the inside of the door. He unzipped his pants.

Roach man turned his roach head toward us just in time to take a windblown spray of urine to the face. The creature flailed and convulsed; the Hyundai wobbled in its lane. The little tires lost traction and the car went soaring off the side of the road. It plowed through weeds and tipped nose-down over an embankment, landing in a culvert with a white explosion of water.

Krissy pulled over and we all spilled out.

“What was that? Huh?” I screamed at John. “What the hell was that?”

“Hey, we stopped him.”

“The goal was to get the car back. My car. Intact. And not splattered with urine.”

“Look! Oh, man-”

A dark shape.

Floating up from the Hyundai.

A black plume of smoke.

With two glowing eyes.

I felt it. It was as if the shadow man had reached out to me, cold fingers running through my skull and down my spine.

Then, it was gone, slipping soundlessly off into the night. I heard a breathy sound from Krissy. She had slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

John said, “They’re here, Dave. They’re here. They’re here, they’re here, they’re here. Shit.”

I hissed, “What are they?”

“Don’t know. It’s probably in Marconi’s book but I can never finish it, it gets so slow after the first two chapters.”

To Krissy I said, “Don’t worry, it looks like it left. You saw it?”

She shook her head. “I felt it. It just ran through me, this sort of heavy feeling like-like there was nothing here. Like everything was nothing, everything everywhere. There’s like molecules and stuff but behind it, nothing. Just cold and dark…”

She fell into silence.

I said to John, “When it spoke to me, it mentioned Korrok. Just like Molly.”

“Was that thing Korrok?”

“No. I’m sure of that.”

Krissy wasn’t following this conversation at all, and instead focused her attention down toward the crashed Hyundai, two-thirds submerged in the standing water, its rear stuck into the air like the Titanic.

“Ew! What’s that?”

A layer of cockroaches two inches thick floated out from around the car like an oil slick, clumps here and there still holding the shape of limbs. A half dozen old fast-food bags floated up from the interior and hung nearby like buoys.

“Roaches,” I said. “You can see them?”

“Yeah. Where’d they come from?”

“My car was really dirty.” I turned to John. “What the shadow guy here did with the bugs? I think he did the same to Molly. Just reached out and took over.”

John said, “And Wexler, too, I guess. So. They can do that.”

“This is indescribably bad. What now?”

Krissy asked, “Are they, like, demons?”

“Well, they’re evil,” said John. “You just saw one of them steal a car.”

“Molly!”

Krissy, pointing down the road.

Sure enough, the dog that was standing about twenty yards away, it was either Molly or an exact replica.

To me John said, “Ghost?”

“Krissy can see her.”

“Zombie then. Well, she’s earthbound, that’s a positive sign.”

Molly barked, trotted off down the road, then turned and barked again.

John said to Krissy, “She wants us to follow her.” He said it to her, not to me. Leaving me out of the decision. Asshole.

I glanced at my watch. “Anybody want to go to Denny’s? Maybe this thing will sort itself out.”

They both went to the car. I started listing all of the things that were retarded about this plan, and by the time I reached the end we were all rolling down the street with the copper dog in our headlights.

After a few minutes, the dog, looking perfectly healthy despite having exploded in half earlier that evening, turned and bounded off the road. She streaked across an expanse of weeds, gravel and busted concrete.

We were at the Mall of the Dead.

That’s what we called the half finished and subsequently abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre. The city sank forty million dollars’ worth of tax breaks and infrastructure into getting the thing built before three of the five investors disappeared (I always imagined that all three simultaneously shot each other, like in the movie Reservoir Dogs ). Now, three years and thirty lawsuits later, raccoons nested in the one hundred and fifty empty store slots and rainwater puddled in the halls.

It lay there in the darkness, broken and rotting like a decomposing animal carcass that was slowly picked apart by scavengers.

Molly zipped off toward the building and was swallowed by the darkness.

Krissy said, “Do we follow her in there?”

The radio kicked on, mandolin plucking the intro to an early ’90s song by REM called “Losing My Religion.” John and I reacted, Krissy didn’t. It only took a few seconds for me to realize this was not the song as Michael Stipe had written it.

“Oooohhh, knife

plus nigger

Equals you, and Jews are dead meat…”

“I know people around here,” John said, “who would like the song better that way.”

“You can hear it?”

“Yeah.”

Krissy said, “Hear what?”

“Never mind. Look over by those Dumpsters,” John said. “Wexler’s car.”

5 SPRTS.

“Well,” I said. “Nothing to do now but wander the fuck into that abandoned building, totally unarmed.”

John opened the satchel and drew out a long, metal flashlight, clicked on the beam to confirm that it still worked. Then he pulled out a wadded-up hand towel and handed it to me.

I unwrapped it and found myself holding the stainless-steel automatic pistol I had stolen from the pickup during the Las Vegas thing. I had planned to ditch it, to throw it into the river or something. Not only was the weapon stolen, but for all I knew it had been used to hold up four liquor stores and shoot two policemen before I got hold of it.

“Why do you still have this? I thought you were gonna make it disappear.”

John shrugged. “Never got around to it. I keep it hidden. And I scratched off the serial numbers there. Should be safe.”

I ejected the magazine.

“What? Why is it loaded?”

“Oh, Head bought bullets for it. He borrowed it a month ago, I think he had to threaten a dude with it. Brought it right back though.”

Krissy said, “You’re not going to shoot Danny, are you? If he’s possessed or whatever, you know that’s not his fault.”