John Dies at the End (John Dies at the End, #1)

by David Wong

John nodded, as if to say, “Checkmate.” He pushed the “play” button. Sound filled the room, a crystal melody that could lift any human heart and turn away any devil. It was “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake.

Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like testosterone.

“Well, they never know they’re ill, do they? You can’t diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can’t see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.”

We all can tell by the look in somebody’s eyes that they don’t think our joke is funny or that they don’t like what they’re eating or whatever. It was just like that. The information was there, presented in the subtle play of facial muscles from microsecond to microsecond.

um no

I pushed away the plate of chicken, rice and snow peas that was the Flaming Shrimp Reunion. I had been picking through it for the last half hour, leaving the chicken. That bird, I knew, had lived a very sad life and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It also had spent its days covered head to toe in bits of other birds’ crap.

looking a little less shocked than what I would have expected, having had somebody just drop dead in their police station. Apparently he wouldn’t have to fill out the paperwork.

Static again. Then: “It’s wearing off. Don’t talk, just listen. Go inside and—” Static. “—and as long as you absolutely remember not to do that, you’ll be fine. Good luck.”

It knew. And what is it you’re doing, exactly? For all you know, this stuff oozed out of a crashed meteor. You’ve found it in the home of a dead man, after following a trail of dead bodies to get here. So go ahead, put it right in your mouth, dipshit.

Everybody was circling around Robert, trying to get to the door while avoiding the infested, oozing mess and—holy shit is this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds.

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.

All the things the mind won’t allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants.

The moments oozed out like ketchup from a glass bottle.

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard.

“Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”

A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows. “Dave, I have a plan.”

“It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but…

There’s that feeling again, that fluttery feeling of mental weightlessness, like the times when you wake up in the dark, on the hood of a car, a bottle in your hand, no idea what day it is, some girl shouting at you in Arabic.

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

I heard another door open, then close. Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don’

“Have you ever heard of spontaneous combustion?” “Yeah.” “I have a friend, Dana, who was in the grocery store one day, and her arm, like, bursts into flame. Just like that. Just her arm. And she’s screaming and waving her arm around and around, flames shooting everywhere. Finally the cops showed up and arrested her.” “Arrested her? Why did—” “Possession of an unlicensed firearm.”

“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.”

Welcome, said the alien voice in my head. It sounded like a toddler. Your wiener is even smaller in person. It giggled. I thought, Is this Korrok?

He’s sitting there operating a damned murder simulator and his mom comes in and tells him to say hi, that his uncle Arnie is visiting and she glances at the TV like it’s nothin’, like it’s perfectly normal for a kid to do somethin’ that used to make new recruits puke back in the war. To look at a human shape—and the people on the screen looked like they were real as you and me—to look at a human shape and pull that trigger and watch it go down and not even flinch, to not feel that instinctual twinge at causing a death…