David Wong - John Dies at the End

“No.”

Amy craned her head around, looking in all directions again, then took off the cardboard glasses. I looked down at the Smith and realized something, probably several minutes too late. I grabbed the barrel and offered it to Amy, butt- first.

I whispered, “Take this.”

“What? No.”

“Amy, that thing, with the truck driver? You saw how they took him over, used his body? Well that same thing can happen to me.”

And don’t ask me how I know that, honey .

“No, David-”

“Amy, listen to me. If I start acting weird, if I make a move at you, you need to shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to-”

“It’s not complicated. The safety is off. Just squeeze. And don’t get cute and try to go for my arm or some shit like that. You’ll miss. Just aim for the middle of me, jam it into my ribs. Shoot and get out, run for it. Don’t, you know, keep shooting me. Please, take it.”

To my surprise, she did. She turned the pistol over, the gun looking huge in her little hand. She said, “Well, what if it happens to me? What if they take me instead?”

“I can overpower you if I have to, get the gun away. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Not with you.”

“Why?”

I leaned back, suddenly feeling lighter without the gun. I swear the things generate their own gravity.

“It’s just a theory I have.”

Amy pulled her feet up on the seat and scrunched against me, shivering. The gun was in her right hand, laying across her hip and pointing vaguely at my crotch. There would be some real symbolism there, I thought, if this turned out to be a dream.

I said, “Besides, I don’t need the gun.” I held up my hands and said, “They passed a law that said I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets. Do you know why? Because they would become concealed weapons. I can kill a man with these hands. Or just one of my feet.”

She snorted a dry, nervous laugh and said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll watch out for you then.”

I again gripped the steering wheel with both hands, tendons tensing across my forearms like cables. I sat like that, in silence, for an eternity of minutes. A whole bunch of words trapped behind clenched teeth.

Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Okay. Look. You need to understand something. About this situation, who you’re trapped in here with.”

“Oookaaaay…”

She twisted around to face me. Those eyes were so damned green. Like a cat. “Don’t, just-just listen. Do you know why I was in the special school, why I was in the BD class in Pine View?”

She said, “Sort of. The thing with Billy, right? The fight you got into with him? And then later when he-”

“Yes, that’s right. Listen. Men are animals. Get us together, take out the authority figures, and it’s Lord of the Flies . Billy and his gang, a couple of guys on the wrestling team, they used to make these videos. The kid, you know the Patterson kid, kind of fat? Anyway, they got him after school and tied him to a goalpost and shaved his head and all that, and it was hours before somebody found him, and by then, you know, the skin on his face was all blistered from the contact with the feces…”

Maybe you can cut back on the details a bit, hmmm?

“… and they have this party and they show the tape, show the tape of them torturing this fat kid and him just screaming . And they sat there with their beers and watched that tape over and over and over and that’s the way it is in high school. Shit that would get an adult put in a straightjacket is just brushed off. ‘Boys will be boys.’ ”

I hesitated, scanned the night for something, anything. I saw a lone bird on a power line, flapping its wings, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“Anyway, the Hitchcock guys, I had gym with them and they picked me outta the crowd. It became this daily thing. Little shit at first but they kept pushing it further and further and it took more and more to keep them entertained. And the coach there, he hated me, so he would make sure and not be there. I mean, I literally saw him turn his back and leave the room when they came after me one time, made sure I saw him do it. And one day they got on me and took me to this equipment room in back, this little storage area with shoulder pads and wrestling mats stacked all around and it’s hot as an oven and there’s this moldy smell of old sweat fermenting in foam padding. And things got crazy. Like, prison yard crazy. And eventually it ends and they leave me there and they’re walking out through the locker room and…”

Hmmmm… would she notice if I suddenly changed the subject?

“Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two- inch blade on my key chain. It was all I had. And I get this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice him, right up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine. It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor. And I got on him, sat on his chest and I started jabbing at his face, cutting, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and…”

I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way. I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open.

Filling in the silence, Amy asked, “What did they do to you?”

“Let’s put it this way. I’ll never, ever tell you.”

She had no answer, which either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well familiar. I pressed on.

“So, I wound up-”

– cutting out his eyes-

“-hurting him pretty bad, he lost his eyesight. I mean, like, legally blind. I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synonyms for aggravated assault. The school was talking a permanent expulsion. My dad-my adoptive dad-he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of meetings with the school and the prosecutor and it was a mess. They wound up testing me for mental illness, which I knew even at the time was a way to get me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy from me, should have diagnosed me, whatever. I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at inkblots and role- play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world…

… and I knew it was a scam, a lawyer trick, but I kept picturing Coach Wilson turning his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw them. The prosecutor, this bearded Jewish tough guy, didn’t want to push the charges. He said it was a five- on- one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvie justice system. The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada- boom, I wind up spending my final year at Pine View.”

A speck of crystal landed on the windshield. A lone snowflake. Another landed a few inches away.

“So,” I said, “four months later Billy is adjusting to life without eyes, saying good-bye to sports and driving and independence and knowing what his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup. He takes all of his pain pills at once. Demerol, I think. They find him dead the next day.”

Silence. Desperate to hear her say something, anything, I asked, “So how much of that story did you already know?”

“Most of it. There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his room and poisoned him or something stupid like that, with rat poison or something, which was stupid because the police would have noticed that.”