John Dies at the End (14 page)

My face and shirt were wet and sticky with blood. I felt the second intruder crawl across my tongue and down my throat, felt my stomach wrench with disgust. I heard footsteps just outside the door now, felt relieved, knew I would throw myself at Officer Freeman and beg him to take me to the emergency room, to pump my stomach, to bring in an exorcist, to call in the Air Force to bomb this whole town into radioactive dust and bury it under sixty feet of concrete.

And then, calm.

Almost Zen.

I again felt that sensation from the police station, the radiating energy pulsing from the chest out like that first swallow of hot, spiked coffee while standing outside in the dead of winter. The soy sauce high.

The doorknob began to turn. Morgan was coming. Hell, Morgan was
here
. I wanted to run, to duck, to act. Frustrating. The body is slow, so slow—

And just like that, I was outside my body.

Time stopped.

It was so easy for me, I almost laughed. Why hadn’t I caught on before? I had a full 1.78 seconds before the detective would step through the door. The only reason we would normally perceive that span as being a short amount of time is because the wet mechanism of our bodies simply can’t accomplish very much in that span. But a supercomputer can do over a trillion mathematical equations in one second. To that machine, one second is a lifetime, an eternity. Speed up how much thinking you can do in two seconds and two seconds becomes two minutes, or two hours or two trillion years.

1.74 seconds until confrontation time now, my body and the body of my nemesis frozen in the moment, on opposite sides of the door, he with his hand on the knob, me on hands and knees in suspended agony.

Okay. I needed a plan. I took a moment to mentally step back, to assess my situation.
Think.

You are standing on the thin, cool crust of a gigantic ball of molten rock hurtling through frozen space at 496,105 miles an hour. There are 62,284,523,196,522,717, 995,422,922,727,752,433,961,225,994,352,284,523,196,571,657,791,521,592, 192,954,221,592,175,243,396,122,599,435,291,541,293,739,852,734,657,229 subatomic particles in the universe, each set into outward motion at the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, whether or not you move your right arm now, or nod your head, or choose to eat Fruity Pebbles or Corn Flakes next Thursday morning, was all decided at the moment the universe crashed into existence seventeen billion years ago because of the motion and trajectory of those particles at the first millisecond of physical existence. Thus it is physically impossible for you to deviate—

I never finished this thought.

I was no longer in the trailer.

Sun. Sand. A desert.

Was I dead?

I looked around, saw nothing of interest except brown and brown and brown, spanning from horizon to horizon. God’s sandbox. What now? I thought of John’s ramblings his first hours on the sauce, saying he kept falling out of the time stream, everything overlapping.

I saw movement at my feet. A beetle, trundling along in the sand. I figured this might mean something, so I watched it, followed it as it inched along the desert floor. This went on for approximately two hours, the bug heading steadily in one direction. I had begun to form a theory that this beetle was some kind of Indian-vision spirit guide meant to lead me to my destiny—then it stopped. It stayed in one spot for about half an hour, then turned around and began crawling back the other direction.

In a blink, I was somewhere else.

A chain-link fence.

Brown, dead grass.

People around me, in rags like refugees.

This was getting ridiculous. I stood there for a moment, baffled. I remembered John again and was determined to keep my head, to hang on until the stuff wore off. I looked down and saw I was holding a fork, my hand stained with a gray dust, like ash.

A little girl approached me. She was deformed, filthy, a good chunk of her face missing. One eye. She studied me, then ran up, kneed me in the groin and wrenched the fork from my hand. She ran off with it, and when I looked up—

White walls.

Industrial sounds.

Machines.

I was in a large building, very clean, and a man stood in front of me wearing a blue uniform, watching a small computer screen on what had to be an assembly line. To my left I saw a massive red sign that said
NO SMOKING OR OPEN FLAME ON THE PRODUCTION FLOOR
, with a cartoon explosion underneath it.

I stepped forward, noticed the guy had one of those Far Side flip calendars next to him. It was badly out of date, the current page a couple of years old.

I had to stop this, somehow. I felt like I was a swimmer, getting tossed downstream by white-water rapids. I knew somehow that if I didn’t get ahold of myself, I would drift like this, forever.

Not expecting to get a response, I said, “Uh, hey.”

The guy stirred, turned. For just a moment I thought I saw his eyes meet mine, but then his gaze swept around the room, seeing nothing. The man apparently decided he had imagined it and turned back to his monitor.

The room was full of people at various machines. It was obvious no one could see me. I was here, but I was not
here
. I looked down and, sure enough, could not see my feet.

My feet, I knew, were still in a trailer in Undisclosed, on a Saturday afternoon. I focused all my concentration on getting back there, to that spot, to that time, to my body. And in a blink, I was back in the trailer, on the floor. Pain in my face, stench of shit on my pant legs.

I breathed a sigh of relief, tried to remember what I had been doing, when Morgan Freeman stepped through the door and stopped cold at the sight of me.

Damn. I suck at this.

I looked up, climbed awkwardly to my feet with my hand on my bloody face, my pants stinking of Robert Marley’s feces.

The detective looked me over.

He had two red plastic gasoline cans with him.

He’s gonna burn this place down,
I realized with perfect clarity.

And he’s gonna burn me with it.

Morgan sat the gas cans at his feet, then lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence for a moment, looking off into space as if he had suddenly forgotten I was there.

“So,” I began, figuring I would remind him, “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.”

He shook his head slightly. “Same as everybody. You’re trying to figure out what in the name of Elvis is going on. Everybody ’cept me. Me, I don’t even wanna know no more. I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing with these here gas cans.”

“I think I know. And I don’t think Robert’s landlord would approve at all.”

He studied my bleeding face, then reached into his pocket and handed me a handkerchief. I pressed it to my cheek.

“Thank you. I, uh, fell. On a . . . drill.”

“You believe in Hell, Mr. Wong?”

Five seconds of confused silence, then, “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you believe in Hell?”

“Because it’s the opposite of what I want to believe.”

He nodded slowly, as if this answer seemed to satisfy him. He picked up one gas can, unscrewed the cap, and started splashing the orange liquid around the living room.

I watched him for a moment, then took a tentative step toward the door. In a blur of movement Morgan turned, whipped his hand out of his jacket. A revolver was now aimed right at my face.

“You leavin’ already?”

My mind was still buzzing and suddenly I saw a flash from Morgan’s memory, something too bizarre to grasp. It was a scene from this morning, here at this very trailer. Blood.

And screaming. All that screaming. What the hell did you see here, Morgan?

Then I had another vision, of walls erupting in flame around me. I put my hands up in surrender and he nodded down toward the other gas can.

He said, “Help me.”

“I’ll be glad to. But first I want you to tell me what happened to John. You know, the other guy you were interrogating?”

“I figured he was with you.”

“Me? Didn’t he, you know, die?”

“Sure did. He was in the interview room and Mike Dunlow was askin’ him the same questions I was askin’ you. And your guy was muttering responses like he’s half asleep. He keeps sayin’ we gotta let you and him go, that you got to get to Vegas, else it’s the end of the world—”

Las Vegas again. What the fuck is in Vegas?

“—So finally Dunlow says to him, ‘Look, we got dead or missing kids here and we’re gonna find out what we need to know, so you’re stayin’ in this room until I’m satisfied or you die of old age.’ Your boy, when he hears that, he falls over dead. Just like that.”

“Yeah, that sounds like John.”

“And now he’s gone. Got a call from the hospital, it’s just an empty bed where he was. They figured he skipped out on payin’ the bill.”

“That also sounds like John.”

I picked up the gas can and removed the cap. Morgan put his gun away. I soaked the couch.

“You know a kid named Justin White, Mr. Wong? High school kid?”

“No. You asked me that back at the police station. He’s one of the missing, right?”

No, you know him. Think.

Morgan said, “Drives a cherry-red ’65 Mustang?”

Ah. I didn’t know the man but I knew the car. This was the baby-faced blond kid I saw Jennifer making out with at the party.

“I know what he looks like, that’s it.”

“He’s the guy who called in the—the whatever happened here. Now, this is how my day started. Just so you understand me, so you understand my state of mind. Okay? Kid calls nine-one-one in a panic, hysterical, talkin’ about a dead body. This was about four in the morning. I happened to be two blocks away at the time. So I race over and I’m the first one there and from outside I hear screamin’. And there’s people runnin’ away, kids peelin’ out in their cars. Party that went bad and all that.”

He stopped splashing the gasoline and sat the can on the ground. He stared off into space for a moment. He sucked some inspiration from his cigarette butt and spoke again.

“I go up to the door, I tell ’em it’s the cops. I go inside and I see—

—I WAS THERE.
Just like that.

I was still in the trailer, standing in the exact same spot. Only the pain in my cheek was gone, and horrible rap/reggae hammered my ears from a floor stereo across the room. The light was different and a glance toward a window told me it was night. I looked down and again couldn’t see my feet.

Here, but not here.

It was like somebody had hit
rewind
on the trailer, the playback from about twelve hours ago.

The room was full of people. I spotted the faces of Jennifer Lopez and Justin White in the crowd. I scanned the room for John, but there was no sign of him. But of course he would have been gone by now, back at his apartment having a rough night of his own.

The music thumped but nobody was moving, or talking. All were standing frozen, their eyes fixed on a spot to my right. Holy shit the song was bad. It was “Informer” by the white reggae rapper Snow. “Infooooormer, younosaydaddymesnowblahblahblay . . .”

I turned to see what was so compelling as to draw a room full of frozen stares.

Robert the pseudo-Jamaican’s body was curled up on the floor, twitching. He was saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay, mon! Just give me a minute now! I’m feelin’ better!”

His words would have been more reassuring if his head hadn’t been separated from his body, laying a good two feet away from the shredded pink stump of his neck.

The disembodied head kept offering reassurances, the head scooting around the floor slightly with each movement of his jaw. One of Robert’s arms came free at the shoulder, landing softly on the carpet. I realized with revulsion something was wriggling in the exposed guts, like worms.

Someone screamed.

The party turned into a stampede.

I jumped as some girl ran through me, passing through where my body should be. 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.

The music stopped abruptly. Somebody had knocked over the stereo.

I saw Justin in the corner, screaming into his cell phone. “I said he’s dead! And he’s talking! But he’s also dead! Just fucking get down here and you can see for yourself!”

I watched the partygoers spill out of the door, but never saw Jennifer pass me. I turned and saw the back of somebody heading the opposite way, down the hall. No door down there, dumbass.

But there is a basement under the bathroom.

There was a sound like a garbage bag of pudding dropped off a tall building onto a sidewalk.

Robert had erupted, chunks slapping off the walls in every direction.

Justin let the phone fall from his hand. His mouth hung open. The room had emptied, now just him and the pink pile of what was left of the Rastafarian drug dealer, together in total silence.

A single white insect appeared. It circled above the wet wreckage of Robert’s former body, a white streak, creating the faintest buzz in the silent room.

The insect was joined by another. Then two more.

The sound grew. A high-pitched noise somewhere between the chattering of angry squirrels and the screech of locusts.

Dozens now. Each time I blinked, the swarm doubled in size. The bugs were long, like worms, and flew horizontally. Too many to count now, a swirling cloud above the spilled flesh.

I wanted out of this room, out of this town, off this planet. I had no means to move. It was the nightmare we’ve had a thousand times, a horror we can’t run from because the horror has swallowed us whole.

The sound grew with the swarm, I could feel it, it had a gut-level power like the pulse of John’s music at the party last night.

Then, in unison, the white swarm flew toward Justin.

He screamed.

The door burst open—

_______

—I BLINKED, AND
saw Morgan in front of me. The stench of gasoline flooded