This Is the End

by Eric Pollarine

  “Yeah, they just keep coming—trick is to take headshots, or at least destroy the brain.”

  There are what appear to be eight still moving, with one on the ground trying to crawl towards the back of the car as I pull the hood towards the door to the stairs.

  “Time to shoot,” says Scott as he throws open his door. I shut down the car and do the same.

  “Remember, aim for their heads,” he says back to me as he’s sighting down the one closest to us. I see him inhale, hold his breath and then squeeze the trigger. The sound from his gun is massive in the open space of the garage. The bullet slams into the head of his target and explodes shell fragments, bone and brain backwards. The monster goes down in seconds.

  I pull my pistol out, sight down the next one and pull the trigger. The shot lands low, ripping open the thing’s abdomen and allowing more black liquid and blood to spill out onto the garage floor. It staggers backwards for a few seconds, then rights itself and continues forward. I adjust my aim and pull the trigger again, this time the bullet hits the middle of its face and sends large pieces of eye and jawbone out behind it. It goes down like the other a few seconds later.

  Scott takes down two more with controlled shots. Each one a perfect headshot, each neat entry wound accompanied by an equally messy explosion of brain and blood and tissue. He moves towards the hatchback of the Focus and I follow. The next one I aim for is hopelessly crooked, like the first one that I encountered in the lobby of my office. He’s wearing torn black jeans and a tattered T-shirt that has the name of some obscure band on it. I hold my breath, pull the trigger and watch him fall.

  I hear Scott scream and I look over before I have the chance to congratulate myself on the kill. His neck is stretched tight and veins are protruding; his face is red and he begins to fire wildly at the last three.

  “Come on, fuckers! COME ON! COME GET SOME,” he yells and moves towards the shambling husks.

  I try to follow behind him and shoot but I can’t get a clear shot off without actually aiming at him. His shots hit bone and body and arms and legs. The monsters go down but they quickly resume their pursuit. The gun in his hand clicks empty and he keeps pulling the trigger. Tears are streaming down his face and he’s still walking towards the three bloodied and tattered remains on two legs.

  He reaches the first and lands a square punch to its face, sending his fist smashing through its flesh and skull. The monster goes down and I take a step back at his absolute lack of control. I’ve never seen anyone actually punch through someone’s face before, but I blink away the surprise as another monster comes into my peripheral vision. I spin and pull the gun up and squeeze the trigger, the muzzle is point-blank with the monster’s forehead and, after the noise, the top of its head becomes nonexistent.

  Scott pulls his hand out of the hole and flicks carnage onto the ground. He lines up with the next one but I push him out of the way and to the ground before he has time to swing again. I shove the barrel of the gun into the last one’s eye and pull the trigger, sending it flying back a good two feet. It folds onto itself and doesn’t move.

  He gets up, flashes me a look that makes me want to pee my pants and runs over to the one that’s still crawling on the ground. It’s one of the monsters I hit with the car and its legs took the brunt of the assault. It reaches up towards him and he slaps its hand away and begins to stomp its skull with his boots. A few seconds later its head splits open like a ripe melon. Scott doesn’t notice and continues on. Tears stream down his face; his breathing is labored and frantic. He’s muttering a mixture of curses and grunts with every stomp; he doesn’t stop until he slips in the gore and slams into the concrete floor.

  He lays there on the garage floor, amid the gore and pieces of bone and flesh, the car’s bloody tire tracks and the dirt. He closes his eyes and starts laughing. I walk over and nudge him with the tip of my shoe and he opens his eyes again and continues to laugh.

  “What?” he asks.

  I hold out my hand for him and he grabs ahold of it and pulls himself up. I look out to where the car crashed. He turns his head and surveys the damage.

  “We fucked that all up to hell, didn’t we?” he asks and I nod back.

  We can already see the passing shadows of more and more monsters coming to inspect the damaged door.

  “Well, they know we’re here now, don’t they?” I ask him.

  He stares back at me and then spits on the ground. “Yep.”

  “Who’s gonna tell Kel?” I ask.

  He turns back to me, smiles and says, “It was your plan. I was just along for the ride.”

  “I knew you would say something stupid,” I say back to him. We move around the front of the car and I have to practically stand on the hood of the car to open the door. Before we make it into the stairwell, we hear something hit the door. It sounds like a fist.

  10.

  “What the fuck did you two do?” asks Kel as she gets up from behind the desk.

  Scott instantly flops down on the couch and begins to put his password into the screen from the night before. I look down at him and then join him on the couch. Scott turns to me and smiles.

  “What do you mean?” I turn back to her and ask.

  “What the fuck do you think I mean? I mean what the fuck did you two think you were doing?” she says making her way over towards us. She looks like a mother who just found her kids carving dirty words into their neighbor’s car.

  “We had a little run in,” I say back. Scott snorts and then tries to stifle a laugh. Kel moves in front of the screen, turns around and turns off the game.

  Scott and I both say, “Hey,” and then realize that we shouldn’t have said anything.

  “Hey-fucking-nothing. I watched your little adventure in the garage on the vid-feed.” She walks over and taps the screen and a still-frame of two headlights comes up on the television. Damn, she’s good.

  “Let me jog your memory,” she says and then taps the screen twice and the headlights shoot forward and then swerve into the door. She taps the screen once more and the image of the Focus rammed into the steel roll down door is frozen on the screen. “You couldn’t have just shot them?” she asks.

  Scott looks over to me and then back up to her. “We freaked. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, no shit you freaked. You ran a car into one of the only things that is holding a city full of fucking monsters from getting into the building.”

  I hold my hand up to interrupt and she moves from staring daggers at Scott to staring huge swords at me.

  “What, asshole?”

  “If you saw everything go down, why didn’t you help us and turn on the lights so we could see?” I ask.

  She brings her arms up as if she’s going to strangle me and then crosses them over her chest and says, “Because by the time I found the command for the lights, you two were already done alerting everything inside and outside the building that we’re here.”

  “We panicked, Kel. Yeah, we messed up, okay? But the car works and the door is still holding, right?” says Scott. He’s holding the controller to the Nintendo in his hands as if he can use it to advance the conversation forward.

  “Yeah, well let’s just fast forward to when you two assholes left the garage, shall we?” she says and then drags her index finger across the screen. I watch as muzzle flashes and violence erupt like live concert footage. I watch the two of us clamber over the hood and get through the door. She stops at a point that’s just about five minutes past when we’ve left and points to the garage door.

  “Here, look.” She taps the screen again and the vid-feed keeps rolling. Through the slivers of what appears to be pure white rimming the door, we see shadows begin to multiply. Then the door begins to shake. At first it looks like someone outside threw something against the door.

  It shakes violently once, then twice and then as more seconds and minutes go by, the door begins to look more and more like it’s footage from an earthquake. The roll steel ripples like water f
rom the continual abuse it’s under.

  “Now, look outside,” she adds. Scott and I reluctantly get up from the couch and make our way towards the windows and look down.

  Below us is an undulating sea of crooked monster bodies. All of them are trying their hand at slamming into the garage door. I look further up the avenues that surround the building and out towards Public Square. For whole city blocks, almost as far as the eye can see, there are bodies approaching. Like an army of hungry ants or a rotten tributary of filth, they filter down and through the streets towards the increasing noise of the already incredible amount of bodies outside of the building.

  “It’s not just on the door side either,” she says and then spins the garage footage across the screen and taps out another command to bring up the building’s exterior security cameras. Along the entire base of the building, the army of monsters is advancing and growing, with more and more of the new arrivals adding layers to the hordes.

  “What are we supposed to do about that?” she asks.

  Scott leans his head into the window, closes his eyes and whispers, “Shit.”

  I stand up straight and look out towards the horizon. The fires seem to have died down a bit. Maybe they are running out of fuel. Though that’s impossible, there are still enough abandoned buildings and homes and new construction to fuel a thousand more fires. Maybe this is just the eye of the storm? I turn around and make my way towards my desk, sit down, pull my cigarettes out and light up.

  “Did you find anything in here?” I ask her as I motion for the screens to come alive again. The security feeds are up and running and I tap them away and restore control of the television to a blank channel for Scott to use.

  Kel shakes her head in frustration and then moves back towards the desk and says, “Yes.”

  She leans over my shoulder, careful not to touch me, but something in her body language tells me that she’s come to terms with the fact that what I said before might be true. I’m hoping she found something on the servers that confirms my theory. She pulls up a blank white command prompt and taps out a couple of commands. She smells better and better the more I’m around her.

  “Here, I found a couple of different things that might actually make me believe you were half-right,” she says. Then she flicks her thumb and index finger open on the screen which magnifies the PDF file the commands brought up.

  “What is it?” I ask her and she leans away from me.

  “What, you can’t read?” she replies.

  “You already read it, so just tell me,” I say back.

  “Fine. It’s a report that was still on a ghost server somewhere in your R and D department. It has some very nasty looking chemical formulas on it.

  “This one here…” she says and then moves around to the other side so that she doesn’t have to lean over me. “This one is actually a cache of emails that McMillan and your lawyer sent to each other about a ‘Project Mobile’ being scrubbed. They’re pretty nondescript, but if you put what your little theory is all about into the mix, they make a little more sense.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Like the fact that, because you blew the doors off of Project Mobile at that press conference, they started working double-time on those formulas, which seem to be some new kind of biological weapon made from something called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.”

  “English,” I say back to her and she looks at me as if I’ve just tested her last nerve.

  “From what I could find on your archives of the internet, it’s some kind of parasitic fungus that’s like 48 million years old that, to quote the article…” She pulls up a static page with an old highlighted article from some of my scientists. “ ‘…evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behavior. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens onto leaves nearer the ground. Scientists are not clear how the fungus controls the ants it infects, but know that the parasite releases alkaloid chemicals into the insect as it consumes it from the inside.’ ”

  Scott stops inputting the password and looks over at us. “See? I told you, fucking zombies.”

  Kel and I look back at him and then to each other and back to the screen.

  “That would explain the black goo stuff; it’s fungal,” I say bringing up the vid-feeds from outside and the garage again.

  “Yeah, and it also explains why they attack; they’re trying to spread the bacteria or fungus or whatever,” she says while fumbling for her own pack of cigarettes.

  She lights one up and then moves into the kitchen and grabs a cup of cold coffee.

  “Question is,” she says from the kitchen, “where the fuck are we going to go from here?”

  * * *

  We eat another meal of green beans, corn, rice and canned chicken. I don’t eat as much as I did the night before, mostly because of what happened in the garage and partly because I had breakfast. Scott shoves mouthfuls of food into his face and goes back for seconds. I don’t know why he cried today, or why he went on his berserker rampage, or how he can even eat after punching what used to be a man’s head in, but I think that he’s actually becoming someone I trust. Kel too.

  I take the time after dinner to shower, shave and put on a fresh suit and brush my teeth. I look into the mirror after rinsing my mouth out and stare into my face. It’s incredibly pale and my eyes are still fairly deeply set in my head. The bags under my eyes look more blue than purple and my bald head is starting to grow little 200-grit sandpaper-fine protrusions.

  My hand trembles as I touch my cheeks and where some of the old acne scars are actually all healed up. Before I was frozen I didn’t have the best skin, but it was actually getting better. I still had acne at thirty, but it was something that I was dealing with. Now I have a seamless and nearly smooth set of cheekbones. I haven’t coughed in a while and though I really don’t know if the treatment for the cancer worked or not, I don’t feel like shit. Okay, I do, but it’s a different kind of shit. There are no more little crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes; there aren’t any frown lines running down the sides of my mouth and if I haven’t found the cure for cancer, then I think I found the fountain of youth.

  After I come out of the bathroom Kel decides to take a shower and I show her where the towels and things are. I even show her where some of Janet’s leftover hair and make up supplies are.

  I walk over to the bar and pour a glass of Bushmill’s and then flop down on the couch next to Scott. I watch as Simon Belmont moves in to slay Frankenstein’s Monster and after the whiskey makes me feel brave I decide to ask Scott about Kel.

  “So, you and Kel—” I say before he gets out a no.

  I look at him and then back to the screen. “No, what? No, you guys aren’t together or no, I shouldn’t ask?”

  “Both,” he says back without looking at me.

  I start to apologize, “Okay, I was just—”

  “Dude, I know what you were ‘just’ and the answer is no to both. Kel’s not my type and I’m not hers. We went through basic together, she lost someone in the outbreak and so did I. leave it at that,” he says.

  “I wasn’t asking because…” I begin to say but he pauses the game and turns towards me.

  “Yeah, you were. I wasn’t as high up as Kel, but I was spec ops, even if I was just a weekend warrior. I’m also a dude; I know what you’re doing, the way you’re looking at her now. Like now that you know she’s an ace with a computer, she’s not beneath you. I’m not retarded, man, I just don’t talk much. Just drop it.”

  I turn back to the television to avoid looking at him. He turns back and un-pauses the game.

  “So, what are we gonna do about that outside?” I ask trying to change the subject.

  “No clue,” he says as he shrugs his shoulders. “But if you don’t stop talking, I�
�m going to punch you in the face. You did all right by me today in the garage, but I’m still not convinced you’re not a monster.”

  I take a sip from my glass, stare into it and then get up and move towards my desk. I pull up the vid-feeds from outside, sit down in my chair fumble with my pack and pull out a cigarette. The sun has already gone down, fires on the horizon are back to being the only illumination outside the building besides starlight. The cameras have infrared and I can see the massive group of bodies ebbing and flowing around the building and, even at night, more and more are arriving. I stare into the screens and then up at Scott. The water in the bathroom stops and after a few minutes Kel comes out. I don’t bother looking up when she comes around the corner from the doorway.

  Scott gives a whistle and then says, “You clean up real good, Kel.”

  “Fuck you, asshole,” she says back and then comes over to the desk and leans in to look at what’s on the screen.

  “You two really fucked shit up today, didn’t you?” she asks me. I don’t bother to answer the question.

  I begin to say something, but when I look up she’s staring at me, her eyes like shimmering cobalt, her wet hair smells like a mix of woman and my shampoo so I stop, close my mouth and turn back to the screens.

  “That’s a first,” she says pulling her hair into a tight ponytail.

  “Consider it the last. Anyway, what the fuck are we going to do about this?” I say and point to the screen. The ever-increasing numbers of bodies continue to collide into each other and bounce around the street like pinballs.

  “I think you’ll want to play the video from McMillan,” she says and brings the screen with his paused faced on it to life.

  Scott lets out a monumental “Yee-haw” as Simon Belmont finally destroys Frankenstein’s monster. It begins to explode from the inside; swirls of yellow and orange explode from its body. Its legs drop off and explode, followed by its arms, and then finally its head explodes.