David Wong - John Dies at the End

A thread of smoke drifting up from the barrel.

EVERYTHING INSIDE MYhead turned black as deep space. I just sat there, shirt and arms flecked with red, just looking at her, at her slack face, her mouth hanging half open. And suddenly her body was being pulled from my arms and North was pulling her, dragging Amy by her feet like a rag doll. John just stood there, he just fucking stood there while all this happened and I found I had no strength to stand.

North wrestled with Amy’s body and threw the legs into the doorway, then came around and lifted the shoulders and pushed them through. The crowd in the other world, in the toad room, seemed completely confused by this, a dead body forcing its own way through the portal. But Largeman got it and he screamed. He screamed so loud I could hear it on the other side and soon the people around him understood it and bedlam ensued.

It was too late. Amy’s body ruptured, spilling out a cloud of the swirling white insects. The flying parasites saw a room full of hosts and poured forth into the naked crowd. A stampede ensued. The rest of Amy’s body exploded, bits of blood and bone flying back into the hallway. I heard a metallic tinkling sound like a coin hitting the floor, just as North slammed the door shut. He opened it again and saw only the Undisclosed night sky and a downpour of snow.

I started to stand but North spun and put the pistol on me.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said.

“And you are wrong.”

He started to say something else but at that moment John came up behind him and punched him in the kidneys. North arched his back and suddenly I saw the metallic object I had heard hit the floor. It was a shiny, curved bit of steel, flecked with red. Something a surgeon would use to brace a broken spine.

I picked up the piece of metal and jabbed it into the wrist of North’s gun hand. I felt it go in, punching through skin and popping between the two bones of his forearm. North shrieked and the gun clattered to the floor.

I grabbed the gun, pointed it at North’s heart, and watched him melt. Literally. He fell into a puddle of goo and, from it, emerged a creature not unlike a jellyfish.

A man-of-war, actually…

It floated up, just as we had seen it do a couple of days ago. I squeezed the trigger and sent shot after shot at the thing, chips of wood flecking off the walls. The jellyfish barely noticed. It floated downstairs and Molly ran barking after it.

We never saw it again.

There was a puddle of marbled goo on the floor that seemed to be steaming, dissolving. North’s leftovers.

I took a step forward and yanked open the door, just as North had. A blast of cold air and a dusting of snow blew in; the Sullivans’ backyard lay ten feet below. I was amazed that there was still light outside. The whole thing had only taken an hour or so. I sat down on the hardwood floor, sticky dots of blood drying on my face, snowflakes melting on my knees. I couldn’t think of a single reason to ever stand up again.

WE WENT OUTto my truck, then remembered that my truck was not at this house but was at the mall about a mile away. I also had lost my keys at some point but couldn’t remember when. We set out wading through the storm, not sure if a person could walk that far in ankle-deep snow without getting frostbite. We didn’t care. We plowed through it, not talking. The afternoon was fast fading to evening and what would happen after darkness fell and the shadows grew, we didn’t know. A few minutes into our trip, during which we made depressingly little progress and lost feeling in all twenty of our toes, a pickup came grinding up behind us, pulling over just ahead. The driver leaned out, a young guy with a red baseball cap.

“Yo!” he said, looking over the dusting of snow on our coats. “What’s up? Want a ride?”

We did.

The guy had bucket seats so John climbed into the bed and rode it out back there. I asked the guy if he was going by the old mall, he said he wasn’t, I asked him if he was going south close to my neighborhood, he said he was. I looked around for Molly, saw she hadn’t followed us, and climbed in. We drove.

“This be some snowy shit, yo!” he said. He had a little triangle of hair under his bottom lip. A soul patch, they call it. I said, “Yep.”

“It’s been hella slick drivin’ in this shit. I’m swervin’ and gettin’ stuck here and there. All the other drivers be hatin’ on me.”

I stared at the man.

“Are you Fred Durst ? Of the band Limp Bizkit ?”

He smirked and concentrated on the road.

Eventually he said, “Gettin’ hella dark out here. I’m thinkin’ you two don’t wanna be around when it gets fully dark, yo. Things be movin’ and suckin’ and hatin’ on everything. But you know that, am I right?”

I said, “And you’re saying that you’re not one of them?” I glanced in the rearview mirror at John, huddled against the wind in the truck bed. I gauged whether or not I could get the wheel away from this guy and shove him out if he should try to eat me or whatever.

Fred Durst said, “Well, I ain’t Fred Durst. You’ll see what you wanna see. If John were in here, he’d see somebody else. But the point is there’s darkness, yeah, but there’s light and it all balances out. Like them yin and yang fishes, forever bitin’ each other’s tails. You know how it be.”

I studied his blue eyes, said, “Why don’t you tell me who you really are before I punch you in the face?”

“Yo, I told you. You just didn’t listen. But I’m on your side. I been watching you. In fact, you could say that I’ve been ‘dogging’ you the whole time.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about and I’m in no mood to be riddled. Talk straight or shut the fuck up. Are you the good witch? Some kind of angel? Are you Jesus, Fred Durst?”

“It don’t matter. You had a job to do and you did it, even if you didn’t know you had a job to do or that you were doin’ it. The blade that cuts out the colon cancer’s got an ugly job, right? I guess it’s gotta have faith in the surgeon to get it through while its head’s bein’ sliced through blood and impacted shit.”

“You know what? Fuck you. All this, this whole thing, is bullshit from top to bottom. I don’t even know what I believe but I know we killed some ugliness back there. And Amy’s dead because of it and she never hurt anybody. She’s born and she gets shit on for twenty years and then she dies for no reason and I’m still alive and I should have been killed a long time ago. Hell, I’ve considered killing me several times, as a favor to the world.”

Fred Durst said, “Yo, I know it’s hard. You know there was that boxer, back in the nineties, Evander Holyfield. You know he got to be champion and then he had that heart disease. Ended his career, was gonna end his life. He goes to this televangelist, one of those hairspray-and-polyester dudes. Dude prays and dances over him and Evander goes back to the doctor. Doctor says he didn’t have heart disease no more. Holyfield says it’s a miracle but it turned out they had diagnosed him wrong.”

“That could not have anything less to do with this conversation. You know what you people are like, Fred? You’re like the genie from the bottle in those stories. You get a wish and you wish for a million dollars and then it turns out the million is from an insurance settlement because your best friend died.”

“Yep,” said Fred, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “He neeeever had the heart problem. Ain’t that somethin’? Turned out it was a smudge on his X-rays or some shit. Do you wish you had died instead of Amy? Like, if you could do it over again?”

“Fuck off.”