John Dies at the End

by David Wong

“Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”

“I am a retired priest. Did you know that?” John asked, “Are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now.” “No,” he said.

John said, “I can sing.” I said, “No, you can’t, John.”

There was a thunderclap, so loud I thought it would split me in half. I clenched my eyes shut, covered my head with my hands, begged God to forgive me for accidentally bringing an end to all of creation.

“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.”

I STOPPED TALKING, only to notice Arnie Blondestone was staring at me in wide-eyed, silent horror. Not the kind of horror you feel when you find out the universe is full of real monsters, but the kind you feel when you realize someone else’s idiocy has just wasted your entire day.

My birthday gift from John was an envelope full of baked beans.

I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let out a scream. Just a little scream, and a manly one. But I still frightened one little girl on the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too.

Some would have doubted their sanity at this point, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had melted from overuse.

“What ‘I’ did? What about us? We were both there.” “Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”

My mind almost made a connection, then abruptly steered clear of it nearly hard enough to make the train of thought go flying out of my ear.

John said, “We don’t know the situation. Not yet.” On the word “yet” I had the urge to punch John in the kidneys.

“This the end of the world?” He said it in the earnest, stiff-jawed manner of a middle-aged man asking the doc if it’s cancer. It scared the fuck out of me. John said, “We’ll give you a call if we find out.”

“Good-bye, Molly,” I muttered. “Of all the dogs I’ve known in my life, I’ve never seen a better driver.”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog was dabbling in the occult while you had her it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”

John unzipped the satchel and pulled out a weapon he had made, a Bible wrapped around the end of a baseball bat with electrician’s tape.

“A cockroach has no soul. Yet it runs and eats and shits and fucks and breeds. It has no soul, yet it lives a full life. Just like you.”

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

We spun on the voice and I involuntarily squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked. I hadn’t chambered a round. It was Wexler, trudging up in the shadows behind us. He looked pale but perfectly human. I posed casually with the gun, so as not to be too blatant about the fact that I had almost killed him with it just now.

I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag. My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.

Again, I suppose most people would have feared a mental illness at that point. By now, though, mental illness would just mean some tests and a prescription. Big deal. No, my fear was of somebody actually watching me through my fucking television.

I put my head down and plowed through a one-thousand-minute, dead-quiet, customer-free battle against exhaustion and my urge to beat my coworkers to death.

I keep the gun in a hollowed-out copy of the Koran that John got me for Christmas. And there the big book was, tossed on the bed, open and gunless. Nothing else disturbed. They actually checked my Koran to see if there was a gun inside. I knew I was dealing with a sick son of a bitch.

You got off at eleven. You came straight home. It’s a twelve-minute drive, figure maybe twenty for the weather. You came right in. So where did the other half hour go, Dave? Did you maybe take a detour and shoot your boss? No, if I’d shot Wally’s manager Jeff Wolflake, I wouldn’t have deprived myself by repressing the memory, would I?

I picked up the phone and dialed John on his cell. One ring, and then— “I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!” “John?” “Oh, Dave. Sorry. I had been having a heated argument here on my phone and then I hung up in disgust. Then when the phone rang I just assumed, without checking, that it was the person I was having an argument with, so I just blindly shouted insults into the phone. How embarrassing.” “I’m getting sick of that one, John.”

“Oh. You mean Cucumber.” “Do you not feel the need to learn people’s real names, Dave?”

I disconnected and did what I usually do after hanging up with John: sat in dumbfounded silence and contemplated all of the poor choices in my life.

“Wong,” he said, with a lack of enthusiasm usually reserved for door-to-door Mormons.

John tipped a finger at him and said, “Yep. Thanks for calling us, Drake. You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.

“We’re talking about a tentacled flying lamp fucker, Dave. What are you prepared to call unlikely?”

I could tell them it was an accident. Yeah. You can make it work. You can march people up to testify about the time you severed an artery in your arm trying to carve a pumpkin. You can pull the emergency room records from the time Jennifer had to rush you to get half a cup of candle wax scraped off of your scrotum. There was the hot glue-gun incident. People would believe it, would see that you’re not a murderer but are merely an incredible dumb-ass.

“Wait! Hey!” I said, screaming and pounding on the door while wielding a handgun, in exactly the way an armed rapist would. “It’s me!”

Drake and I stared that way long enough for him to establish that he would indeed leave but that his dick was still well bigger than mine.

Jim, you crazy fucker. I’m starting to think we could have been friends.

A spider. Huge, a body the size of a chicken egg. Black legs with yellow stripes. It looked to have been bred for war.

The thing with Jen ended with a pregnancy scare. She had seen my world and didn’t want to bring a baby into it. This led to some violent arguments during which I pointed out, loudly and in sprays of spittle, that if she got an abortion the fucking unborn fucking fetus would likely fucking haunt us—I mean literally haunt our home—until the day we died and possibly beyond. It turned out that was the wrong thing to say.

Being a cop in Undisclosed is not a path to long-term mental or physical health, Drake. Check the suicide rate. And I’ll tell you something else, too. The look I saw in the eyes of that guy before he went off the edge is the same look I see in yours now.

“And watch out for Molly. See if she does anything unusual. There’s something I don’t trust about the way she exploded and then came back from the dead like that.”

If this had been an action movie, John thought, he would have rammed through it. Unlike a movie prop car, however, John was depending on the Cadillac to get him to work the next morning, and a punctured radiator would cost a week’s pay.

The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.

“Let me tell you everything you need to know about John. The reason I was surprised by your hand was because John never once described you as, ‘the girl with the missing hand.’”

For the second time that day John ducked casually across some DO NOT DUCK CASUALLY ACROSS THIS TAPE tape

I glanced back into the truck and saw Molly fast asleep in the back, paws twitching as she dreamed of clawing somebody to death, probably me.

“I’m burning out, John. Seriously. I don’t know if I’m up for this. I feel stretched out, like too little butter scraped over too much waffle. And then it all falls down into one of the waffle holes and there’s none left for the rest of the waffle and you sort of have to tilt it to make it run out.”

This is my emergency kit. It contained a roll of duct tape, a spare pair of pants, an envelope with two hundred dollars, two bags of dried fruit, two packages of beef jerky, three bottles of water, a roll of those thick shop towels you see mechanics use, a small metal pipe—just right for cracking a skull with—and a fake beard. Look, you never know.

The ax was a leftover from high school, when we used to be big into Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, um, bear hunting.

Amy said, “So, you’re making a flamethrower?” “Amy, we gotta be prepared. We don’t know what we’ll find in that place, but for all we know it could be the Devil himself.” “David, what possible good is that thing gonna do?” “Oh, no, you didn’t hear me. I said it’s a flamethrower.” Girls.

SOCIETY IS DOOMED for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down.

The real plan, the unspoken one that hid between John’s words, was that we would die. But, we would die in the middle of what Korrok’s people would remember as the single most retarded and baffling incident in their history. We would be their Guy Fawkes. They would create a holiday about us. If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.