If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

Looking too far ahead is dangerous, like trying to read a map while you’re driving. So we get locked into a loop where the best possible future is one that looks exactly like our present.

He was quite familiar with being confronted with behavior he didn’t remember, something said or done on a night when all memories had been deleted after hearing the phrase, “You have to try this. Ricky learned to brew it in prison!”

DAVE: . . . if they’re recruiting nerds, they surely have at least one pretty girl to draw in new members. AMY: This doesn’t look like a sex cult to me. DAVE: You think male recruits have to be offered sex? She just has to pay them a single compliment. Boys are so starved for compliments that if you give them just one, they’re your slave forever. In fifth grade, a cute girl told me I looked “tough,” and I still remember it to this day. AMY: That’s depressing. When I was in Japan, I told a guy I liked his dye job. He had this electric blue hair. Do you think he obsessed over that for the rest of the day? DAVE: I’m surprised you didn’t find him clinging to the bottom of your plane when you landed.

John was walking around in his childhood home, apoplectic because tomorrow was picture day at his elementary school, even though he was an adult and he had no pants to wear and all his teeth had fallen out.

“I have stuff to do. I don’t know if you were listening earlier, but we have to get to the bottom of this monster toy situation, and it’s gotten complicated. It sounds like we biffed it so hard last time that we had to reboot the whole universe.”

I stopped at the front counter, near a little glass warming bin full of the best soft pretzels in America and probably the world. I don’t know how they were made, but they tasted like they were deep-fried; they actually had kind of a crust on them, dusted with cinnamon and sugar. There’s nothing spooky or dramatic about them, so I suppose I could just skip this part, but you know what? Fuck it, I’m going to eat a giant pretzel, and you’re going to read about it.

“If you think that just because you’re a frail old wizard that I won’t beat your ass, you’re wrong. If anything, that just makes it funnier.”

Joy was nowhere in sight and was making no noises. John wondered if she hadn’t just evaporated completely. That was a thing she could do, if she wanted to avoid a conversation badly enough.

“God does not give us a tunnel; he gives us a shovel. Got to dig it ourselves. Goodbye.”

Amy emerged from the One Hour Vision door, saying, “All done. I made it through that thing where they blow the air into your eyeball without blinking, so I deserve a big knotted churro.”

“We were just so tired at that point,” said John. “I nodded off while I was wiring up the explosives. More than once. I was sure we were gonna die.”

“This is why I didn’t go with you to the fireworks last month. Remember I said I had to work? I actually just didn’t want to be seen in public with you.”

The toy didn’t have to be stopped. Bas had to be stopped. Stopped to death.

“If your complaint is that he’s just a kid, note that we started trying to kill Mr. Swallow from the second it was born.”

If he detoured to get gas or something, we’d have to play it by ear. I mean, sure, this town still bore the scars of our previous attempts to play things by ear, but you can’t get better without practice.

I’m not saying I have bad memories of high school, but I will say that I actively avoid driving past it whenever possible, as if the faculty might rush out and drag me back in, insisting I’m still four credits short.

I suddenly wondered if the Swallow’s true evil intention was to just put me back in high school again.

Cars were creeping between us, parents and teenagers peering out of the windows as they passed, either hoping for a glimpse of a monster or thinking they’d run across some grown-ups having some juicy domestic drama in public.

I got out of the car, walked over, and set the egg in the middle of the school parking lot, then ran over it with the Impala while the crowd of confused students watched. I backed up, ran over it again, then repeated this six more times. When I got out and examined the toy, I wasn’t surprised to find it actually looked better than before—not even black smudges from the tire rubber marred the surface. I picked it up and showed it to my audience. “Look at how haunted this toy is, you assholes! Look at it!”

Now, if you don’t mind, a nurse is giving me an angry look and holding a terrifying medical implement.

“It means my dream was dead-on. Dave can suck it.” John took a photo of the cars and texted it to David, presumably with an attached message telling him to suck it.

Amy said, “We have to pass through the pool people to get to the community center. I assume that means you can’t go striding through them with a giant flaming sword or whatever you’ve got back there.” “Yeah, all those little kids would be bugging me to let them hold it. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

and a “music gun” he had rigged up. It was a megaphone attached to an MP3 player that, at a moment’s notice, could trigger “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, set right before that drum part.

“The little floating bundle of eyeballs?” asked Pascal the Beat Cop. “No,” said John, “this is being done by something even more terrifying: motivated nerds.”

“If we see anything weird, stay vague on the radio. If the others down at the station think it’s monsters, they’ll all show up. Everybody wants to be the goddamned X-Files until they have to do the paperwork.”

“What kind of help? I’m not going to help you kill anybody.” “That’s the same as saying you’re not going to help at all!”

The two cops were on high alert now, trying to prepare themselves for something no cop had ever trained for, unless they’d learned under some rogue instructor who began every class by dropping a buttload of acid.

Keeping his voice low, John said, “This is hard to explain, but if one of these rooms contains a bunch of gingerbread men cookies, let me know, because that means there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”

John realized it was just a pile of puppets. Still, he went over and gave the pile a thorough kicking, then closed the door securely behind them when he left. John had never been attacked by a puppet, but it was for the same reason he’d never been bitten by a snake: He knew when to exercise caution.

Coiffure pointed his gun at John, even though Amy had been holding the suitcase that had just unleashed the hide. John felt like that was somewhat unfair; clearly this act had been performed by some kind of supernatural means. Wouldn’t a small woman be just as capable of that?

“Everybody be calm,” he said, despite knowing that the human nervous system does not respond to voice commands.

Pascal gritted his teeth and kicked the boy in the ribs like he was trying to punt him out of the city.

Coiffure opened the cover and actually held his gun up to the book, like he was ready to shoot whatever tiny human-flaying gnomes lived inside. He was visibly disappointed in what he found, which to his eyes was likely just a nearly unreadable book by and for nerds. He said, “How is it—” A brick flew out from the book and smashed him in the nose.

Coiffure’s posture was that of a man who knew the situation was insanity and was so pissed off by it that he was determined to find the cause and shoot it until the world returned to normal, even if it meant taking a break halfway through to go buy more bullets.

Detective Coiffure was focused on the fact that there were still some people in that world he hadn’t shot yet.

I reached for the shotgun and realized I hadn’t brought it up with me, because I’d been carrying the cake.

Whatever language or jargon Bas and the henchman were using, I now knew the phrase for, “Kill that fucking guy.”

“I hope you like your ribs BARBECUED, bitch!” is what I’d think to say later but didn’t at the time.

I reached for the first thing my hands could find: The door of the black cabinet next to the refrigerator. The one with the DO NOT OPEN sticker on it. I braced myself, then I yanked it open just as I heard Joy say, “No!” For a tense, silent moment, nothing happened. And then, the avalanche came. Out from the cabinet sprang hundreds of compressed, crumpled wads of plastic grocery store bags, years’ and years’ worth. John kept insisting he was going to recycle them someday, claiming you weren’t supposed to put them in the trash. The masked man was startled by the spray of bags falling and unspooling at his feet. He’d apparently never seen them before and was thus unsure of what the second stage of the assault would entail. It only took him a couple of seconds to realize there wasn’t one.

I grabbed the next appliance off the counter. The food processor. I yanked off the plastic bowl to expose the blade, punched the highest speed, and then lunged the spinning blade toward the prone man’s groin. The machine died in my hands. I had pulled its stupidly short power cord from the socket. “DAMN IT! Joy, find me an extension cord!”

As soon as we were inside, she slammed the door behind us, even though we both knew it wouldn’t delay him any more than a chalk line on the floor that declared the garage was outside of the Combat Area.

That went on for more than six hundred pages. It must be hard to write a good bible, because it seems like most of them badly need another editing pass.

Dense text in a book five inches thick. “What, do they have like two million commandments?”

John said, “But that means the apocalypse isn’t coming for another hundred years or so. Surely we’ll be able to figure out something by then.”

The Sauce, a.k.a. Shadow Jizz or Armus Sauce or whatever we were calling it now, is a drug in the same way that a land mine is a pedicurist. It creates a sensation of detachment from time and space by actually detaching you from time and space. If life is a video game, the Sauce is a hack that glitches you through all the levels and then causes a meteor to fall on your house.

“We have to rudely interrupt a summoning ritual,” said John, “and we either have to not attempt to kill Bas at all or we have to absolutely kill his ass all the way but nothing in between. The one thing that cannot happen is we try to kill him and fail, because that’s fulfilling a prophecy, I guess. And we still don’t know where he is or where the summoning will take place. You didn’t happen to have a vision about where this thing will happen tonight, did you?”

Instead of staying quiet, John said, “You said there are pictures in the back, right? Start there.” “Why?” “Because a picture is worth a thousand words, so that’s just more efficient, time-wise.”

Based on what John had packed into the van, we were ready for just about every possible scenario and at least a dozen impossible ones. That’s why it was a little discouraging when, even before we’d left the rural highway that would lead us to the wastewater treatment plant, Amy asked, “What did you bring to get through the fence?” and got only awkward silence as an answer.

Amy said, “It’s interesting that you see the cause of his firing being the camera catching him, rather than him doing it.”

John said, “That’s the call, then. Either they’ve been there already or they’re about to be there. I’m sure of it. He wouldn’t let his little sister die without ice cream. Let’s pack up the van.” Joy said, “In other words, we’re all going to get ice cream cones, which is exactly what I suggested one minute ago. I think I should be in charge.” I said, “We’re not getting ice cream. We’re staking out Chilly Whip for a wizard ambush.” “Oh, I’m getting a waffle cone one way or another. I don’t care what you guys do.”