by David Wong
“We’re all meeting at the One Ball. You comin’?”
That’s the One Ball Inn, a bar downtown. Don’t ask.
“No,” I said, “I gotta go to work in seven hours.” John had work, too. We both worked the same shift at the same video store. John had been through six jobs in three years, by the way. Some girl came up behind John and put her arms around him. I didn’t recognize her, but that was normal.
“Yeah, me, too,” he admitted. “But I gotta buy Robert a beer first.”
“Who?”
“Uh, the black guy.”
John gestured toward a group of five people, three girls and two dudes with their backs to me. One was a huge guy with red hair, next to him was the rainbow beret and dreadlocks of my voodoo priest.
“See him? He’s the one in the white tennis shoes.”
Not only did I see him, but he turned toward me. He made eye contact and shouted, “You owe me a beer, mon!”
“The man likes his beer,” said John. “Hey, I heard there was somebody from a record company out there tonight.”
“I don’t like the guy, John. He’s . . . there’s something not right about him.”
“You like so few people, Dave. He’s cool. He bet me a beer he could guess my weight. Got it on the first try. Amazing stuff.”
“Do you even know how much you weigh?”
“Not exactly. But he couldn’t have been off by more than a few pounds.”
“Okay, first of all—never mind. John, the guy does an accent. What kind of a person goes around like that? He’s phony. Also, I think he might be, uh, into somethin’. Come on.”
“ ‘Into something’? You are so quick to judge. Have you thought that maybe he was raised by his father, who was a fugitive from the law? And that, to conceal his identity, his father had to fake an accent? And that maybe young Robert learned how to talk from his dad and thus adopted that same fake accent?”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No.”
“Come on, John. My car is behind the trees back there. Come with me.”
“Are you goin’ to the One Ball?”
“No, obviously not.”
“Then I’m ridin’ with Head in the Flap Wagon. You’re still welcome to come if you want.”
I declined. They loaded up and left.
I felt a little abandoned. There wasn’t anybody else I really knew there, so I wandered around for a bit, hoping to run into Jennifer Lopez or at least that dog. I did find Jennifer, where she was sitting in a cherry-red ’65 Mustang making out with that blond kid. He looked barely old enough to drive. This made me furious for some reason and I sulked my way back to my underfed Japanese economy car, shoes kicking up little sprays of moisture from the tall grass as I went.
The dog was waiting for me.
Right there by my door, like it couldn’t understand what had taken me so long. I unlocked the door and “Molly” leapt into the passenger seat. I gawked, half expecting the dog to reach around with her teeth and pull down the seat belt. She didn’t. Just waited.
I flung myself down into the little Hyundai, feeling like a thousand questions were squirming around my gut. I dug into my pocket for my car keys. I pulled my hand out—and screamed.
Not a full-fledged female-victim-in-a-slasher-movie scream. Just a harsh, rasping “WHAH?!?” On the palm of my hand, etched into the skin, was the phrase, YOU OWE ME ONE BEER.
I sat there, in the dark, staring at my hand. I did this for several minutes, felt my stomach clench, then decided to lean out the door and vomit in the weeds. I spat and opened my eyes, saw movement in the puddle. Something long and black and wriggling.
So that’s where the centipede went . . .
I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back in my seat. In that moment I decided to go home and crawl into bed and pretend that none of this had ever, ever happened.
TELLING THE STORY now, I’m tempted to say something like, “Who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?” I won’t say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow.
Once, in chemistry class, John “accidentally” made a Bunsen burner explode. I mean it actually shattered a window. He got suspended for ten days for that and if they could have proven it wasn’t an accident he’d have been expelled, as I was a year later.
He was kicked out of art class for submitting very, very detailed charcoal nudes of himself, only with about six inches added to his genitalia. He broke his wrist after a fall while trying to ride a friend’s van like a surfboard. He has burn scars on the back of his thighs from what he told me was a mishap with homemade fireworks, but what I believe was the result of his and some friends’ attempt to make a jet pack. He told me a year ago he wanted to go into politics some day, even though he didn’t have even one minute of college. A month ago he told me he wanted to go into the adult film industry instead.
CHAPTER 2
The Thing in John’s Apartment
DARKNESS AND WARMTH. And then, an all-beep rendition of “La Cucaracha.”
My cell phone. I peeled my eyes open. Bedroom. Nighttime. My floor looked like a Laundromat explosion. Magazines here and there, overflowing trash can. Just as I had left it.
Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP—
My hand managed to knock over every single object on my nightstand before it found the cell phone. I squinted at my clock, now lying helpless on the floor. Quarter after 5 A.M. I had to be at work in less than two hours.
“Hello?”
“David? It’s John. Where are you?”
Voice scratchy, breathing heavier than he should be. Like a man just after a fistfight.
“I’m in bed. Where am I supposed to be?”
Long pause.
“Is this the first time I’ve called tonight?”
I sat straight up, fully awake now.
“John? What’s going on?”
“I can’t get out of my apartment, Dave.”
“What?”
“I’m scared, man. I mean it.”
“What are you scared of?”
“It can’t be real, Dave. It can’t. The way it moves, the way it’s made . . . this is not a product of any kind of evolution or anything. It’s not real. No. But it still managed to bite me.”
What?!?
“What?”
“Can you come over?”
One time, John wound up in the hospital after he blacked out behind the wheel of his car. He wasn’t moving at the time, thank God, but was in line at a Wendy’s drive-through. This was after five sleepless and foodless days of vodka and some combination of household chemicals he was using for speed. I didn’t know about it until a week later because he didn’t tell me, knowing I would have kicked his ass right there in the hospital.
But I told him if he ever got into that kind of trouble again without telling me I would not only kick his ass, but would in fact beat him until he died, then pursue him into the afterlife and beat his eternal soul. So John being spaced out on crank or crack or skank tonight wasn’t reason to declare a national holiday, but at least he came to me this time.
I said, “I’ll be there in twelve minutes.”
I hung up, pulled on some clothes I found draped over a chair, almost killed myself tripping over Molly the dog curled up in the doorway. I went out the front door with the dog in tow. It was raining again now, fat drops of April ice water that tingled down the back of my shirt as I ducked into my car. I was halfway to his building when my phone sang again. John’s number popped up on the glowing display.
“Yeah, John. You okay?”
“Dave, I’m sorry to wake you up. I got a problem and I need you to listen—”
“John, I’m on my way over. You called me five minutes ago, remember?”
“What? No, David. Stay away. There’s somethin’ in here with me. I can’t explain it. I don’t think it’ll kill me, it seems to jus
t want to keep me here. Now, I need you to go to Las Vegas. Contact a man named—”
“John, just calm down. You’re not making sense. I want you to sit down somewhere, try to chill out. Nothin’ you’re seeing is real.”
A pause, then John asked, “How do I know this is really you?”
“You’ll know in just a few minutes. I’m comin’ up on your block now. Just chill, like I said. John?”
Nobody there. I sped up, rain drumming the windshield and boiling up into puddles on the passing pavement.
I was pounding on the door to John’s apartment seven minutes later, still pounding on it five minutes after that. I considered going down and waking up his landlord when I tried the knob and realized the door had been unlocked the whole time.
It was dark. No use looking for a switch—John’s only light was a floor lamp across the room and far be it from John to do something as rational as putting the light source where you could reach it from the door. Memory told me at least two pieces of furniture and probably twenty empty beer bottles stood between me and the lamp.
“John?”
Nothing. I tried a tentative step into his apartment, my shoe kicking over a stack of magazines. I tried to step over them, cracked something glass or porcelain on the other side.
“John? Can you hear me? I’m going to call the—ooomfff!!!”
I was hammered by either a flying body tackle or an unnecessarily aggressive hug. My assailant and I landed hard on the carpet, pounding the breath from my lungs.
“It almost killed you!” John screamed, inches from my face. “You’re an idiot, you know that? You’re an idiot for coming here. We’re both gonna die now. You could have brought help but now we’re both gonna die in this room.”
He sat up off me and in the darkness I could detect his head whipping back and forth, as if searching for a sniper. He put one finger up to my face.
“Shhhhhh. I don’t see it. When I say ‘go,’ we’re goin’ to the other side of the room as fast as physically possible. You can clear it in three steps, dive at the end. Move like the Devil himself were after you. Ready?”
“John, listen to me.” I paused, forced air into my lungs and tried to think. “You can’t miss any more days at work. If you let me take you to the hospital, we’ll tell them you’ve been poisoned or something. I don’t think they’ll go to the cops. We can get a note from the doctor there. If we’ve got a note I could talk Jeff into keeping you on.”
“Go!”
John pushed himself to his feet, sprinted across the room and flung himself over an overturned sofa next to the wall. He sailed over it, arms flopping about like a rag doll, smacking into the wall behind it with a heavy thud.
I calmly stood up, walked to my right and turned up the floor lamp. I looked over to see John peer over the overturned sofa. Next to it was an armchair, on the other side a capsized coffee table. The man had built a furniture fort on that side of the room.
“John . . .”
He stood up, eyes wide. He put his hands out to me, fingers splayed.
“Dave, do not move.” He spoke flat, low and dead serious.
“What?”
“I’m begging you,” he said, almost whispering now. “I know you don’t believe me. But when you turn around, you will. But do—not—scream. If you do, you’re dead. Now. Very slowly, turn around.”
Very slowly, as asked, I turned.
For a split second I was sure I would see something. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, as if swept by a puff of warm breath.
There was nothing there. I sighed, pissed at myself for getting sucked into this.
I faced John again, my raised eyebrows telling him I saw nothing more threatening than a very large and very naked poster of what appeared to be a female professional wrestler.
“No, it moved,” he said. “There.” He pointed to the corner, near the ceiling.
Very slowly, I turned and craned my neck, eyes following his pointed finger to the spot on the wall he so desperately needed me to see.
Still nothing.
“John, you can either come with me to the hospital, or I’m calling an ambulance. But what I’m not going to do is—”
“The door! Go!”
John hurdled the sofa, then ran and threw himself through the open door. I stood watching as he tumbled onto the carpet and then smoothly unfolded into a dead run down the hall outside. I faintly heard him thump through the stairwell doors, shouting victoriously.
I sighed and looked around his apartment. I found and pocketed his keys, then poked around some more and found his jacket on his bed. I grabbed for it, then yanked my hand back in pain. Something jabbed my finger, left a dot of blood on it. I reached into the jacket’s front pocket . . .
A syringe.
It was one of those cheap disposable ones they sell to diabetics. There was residue inside and it was fucking black. Like used motor oil. I broke off the needle in the trash and stuck the rest of the syringe in my pants pocket. I had never done this before and I didn’t know if a doctor would need it or not, to examine the contents. If not, I was going to shove it up John’s ass.
I rooted around in his pockets for vials or pipes or anything else that would indicate what he had in his system. All I found was an empty pack of Chesterfields and a wadded-up FedEx receipt for something he sent to a Nevada address.
I stopped myself before I drifted into the area of what could be called “snooping” and locked up the apartment behind me. I went down and found John pacing back and forth in the parking lot, rain pelting him, fists clenched, ready for the dark god Cthulhu himself to come flopping out of the first-level doors. I tossed him his jacket, told him to get in my car. He opened the door, and froze in fear.
“What?” I barked. “What is it now?”
John was staring at Molly like she was the fluffy devil incarnate.
“John?”
“Uh . . . nothing. When did the dog find you?”
“You know this dog? It’s been following me around like a lost, uh, dog.”
“I dunno. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, before . . . something else follows us.” He glanced up at the apartment building.
I ducked into the car but didn’t start it.
John glanced up at the building once more, said, “Just tell me you could see it. At least that.”
“I didn’t see it. Tell me what this is.”
I held up the syringe. John rubbed his eyes, a man exhausted.
“You don’t wanna touch that. What time is it?”
“Just past five in the morning.”
“What day?”
“Friday night. I mean, Saturday morning. It feels like Friday night because I’ve barely slept yet. And we got work today, remember?”
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“You called me. You begged me.”
John leaned back, closed his eyes. For a second I thought he had dozed off. Finally, he mumbled: “I did? When?”
“Tell me what this stuff is, John. They’re gonna ask me, first thing. Tell me before you fall asleep.”
“I remember now. Calling you. It’s hard, everything’s running together. I called and called and called. Like a shotgun, firing in every direction hoping to hit somethin’. I bet I called you twenty times.”
“Twice. You called me twice. John, answer my question.”
“Really? You kept getting weird on me. You know what I think? I think you’ll be getting calls from me for the next eight or nine years. All from tonight. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t get oriented. Kept slipping out of the time . . . you’ve got a voice mail message three years from now that’s freaking hilarious.”
I jammed the syringe back into my pocket and started the car. John reached over, grabbed my wrist. His eyes were open and alarmed.
“Wait. Where are we gonna go? Where are we gonna be safe from this thing?”
“Emergency room, John. I’m not playing this game with you. I don’t know w
hat else to do and I don’t know how we’re gonna pay for it. You’re on a bad trip, or whatever they call it. Maybe it’s a big deal, maybe it’s not. Maybe you can just sleep shit like this off. I don’t know because I’m not a junkie and I’m not a doctor.”
“No. The hospital’s no good. We’ll go to your place, or somewhere. Anywhere but here.”
I can’t make myself recount the rest of this conversation. I’m too ashamed of it. The long and the short of it is that I let John talk me out of taking him to get treatment, that I worried more about him liking me than about whether he lived or died, that on that night, at that moment, I was the lowest, most selfish, worthless coward who ever lived.
So where was there to go? We were both scared for different reasons. He needed safety and I needed some kind of familiar comfort.
I’m not sure how we decided on Denny’s but that’s where we wound up. Well-lit, familiar, full of people. We sat in a booth and downed cup after cup of coffee in silence, John smoking his cigarettes and sneaking furtive glances out the window, me counting the seconds that passed without any psychotic ravings. I convinced myself with every passing peaceful moment that things were getting better, that the worst was over. In that, I was pants-shittingly wrong.
“Well?” I asked. “How are you doin’? Any better?”
“I saw things. Tonight. Both before and after I . . .” He trailed off, sucked on his cigarette instead.
“Okay,” I said. “Back up. You don’t know the name of the drug?”
“Robert called it ‘soy sauce.’ But I’m thinking now that was just a nickname and that it wasn’t, you know, actual soy sauce.”
Robert? Oh, of course. Robert, the Fake Magical Jamaican from the party. I would be finding Robert, I decided. I would be having a word with him.
“Robert?” I asked. “What’s his last name?”
“Marley.”
Of course.
“That’s the only name he gave you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to pry.”
“And he gave you the—”
My cell phone chirped. I ignored it. Who could possibly be calling at this hour? Tina, crying, wanting to get back together a sixth time because she’s at home and lonely? Jennifer Lopez, deciding she was wrong to have brushed me off at the party and wanting to play a game of Hide the Cocktail Wiener?