John Dies at the End

by David Wong

  WE FOUND THE inlet road in the snow, turned in and crept through the mall parking lot. We watched for other parked vehicles, saw none. Our light was fading fast.

  We filed out and loaded up and marched across the lot, Molly in the lead, our heads on swivels. Visibility didn’t even extend to the edge of the parking lot, where a white curtain of snow hid the rest of the world. I had the gun in my hand, didn’t even remember pulling it out. A snowflake flew right up my nose. Just before we reached the door I saw John spin around, like he had seen something in the swirling mass of white. I squinted, could see nothing, and we both dismissed it as adrenaline. We should have known better.

  We filed inside, using the same entrance John had used earlier that morning. Snow was pouring in through the skylight now, piling an inch high on the floor, drafts of chilled air flowing down from the gap. Once inside and out of the wind, John flicked the lighter that served as the pilot light for the toy flamethrower.

  John said, “Drake’s foot. What was the deal with that? I thought he was trying to kick your head and he just missed.”

  “He had that symbol, the little pi. Like Molly.”

  “What do you think, it’s like a mark of some kind?”

  “Of what?”

  “Evil?”

  Amy asked, “Wouldn’t it make it harder to do evil if they had to carry around a mark?”

  John shrugged. “Once they’re barefoot and kicking you, it’s already too late. Follow me.”

  We went into the maintenance room. To John and me, the big, decorative doorway stood in the center of the wall to our right, plain as day and as out of place as the face on Mars. Amy saw only a wall. Until, of course, she tried viewing it through the Scooby glasses. I let the little maintenance door close behind me. John looked at Amy and nodded his head toward the other door and said, “Ghost door.”

  I said, “Please don’t call it that.”

  Molly trotted past me and went right to the door and sniffed at it. Interesting. John said, “I feel like we should look for a save point.”

  I saw a long, curved handle on the door. I let out a long breath and raised the gun. John raised the fire gusher. I reached out for the handle and watched as my hand passed right through.

  “Shit,” said John. “It’s a ghost knob.”

  I sighed and looked at John, was about to suggest heading back home and curling up in front of the fireplace. But then Amy stepped forward, the wet and wrinkled cardboard glasses askew on her face.

  She reached out with her left arm, the arm that, in reality, didn’t have a hand. But with the hand that I could see, the ghost of a hand that was no longer there, she reached out and grabbed the door handle that was also not really there. The handle turned.

  With a rumbling not unlike the sound in your head when you crunch ice, a vertical slit formed in the wall and then tore open, widening. John and I both crouched into a fighting stance and I felt my bladder loosen a little. The wall melted and peeled back like a curtain until there was a door- sized opening before us with a bunched seam around the edge, rolls of plaster and jutting splinters of wood. Beyond it was a tiny, round room that I somehow sensed was an elevator.

  John stepped through the door and looked to his right. He pointed out a number on the wall, in black, that said “10.” After a few seconds, it switched to “9.”

  I felt Molly brush past my legs and trot into the open doorway. I turned, put my hands on Amy’s shoulders.

  “Go.”

  “What? No.”

  “You’ve got money, from the insurance? When your parents—”

  “Yeah, so—”

  “Wait for us, wait someplace light. Give us an hour. Then if we’re not back take my truck and—”

  “David, I can’t even drive.”

  I dug in my pocket and pressed my cell phone into her hand.

  “Then call a cab. I’m dead serious. If we’re not back in an hour, fly. Take the cab straight to the airport and fly away, get on a plane, go to Alaska. Stay far away from this place forever and ever and forget you ever knew me.”

  “Alaska? Why—”

  “Because it’s always daytime there.”

  “No it’s not!”

  “Actually, Dave,” John said from behind me, “I think it’s always nighttime there.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” squealed Amy, “because I’m not going anyw—”

  “Amy, please. This is insane. When that door opened the only thought that went through my mind was that I would be damned for letting you die at the hands of whatever came through it. We’ve gone this far and you’re still okay and I want to do this one good thing while I’ve got the chance. For no other reason than because when I die—and I’m pretty damned sure now that I will within the hour—I want to be able to say I did this one last thing, this one unselfish thing before I went.”

  I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my pocket and went to put it in her other hand, realized she didn’t have another hand, then shoved it into her coat pocket instead. Amy started to say something, but was interrupted when the metal door exploded.

  The little maintenance door flew across the room and bounced off the opposite wall. We all ducked, and in a cloud of dust I saw something the size of a man but shaped all wrong, backward joints jutting into the air, a tiny brainless head, skin of notched alligator hide. There was a second of brain paralysis when I couldn’t register what I was seeing. But I had seen the thing before, in Jim’s basement. Only this one was moving, crouching low like a predator, turning to look at us.

  Amy was on her knees and had opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, a column of flame poured past her face.

  “DOWN!” screamed John, about a half second later than I would have preferred. Orange fire licked the creature and the floor and the wall behind it. I thought I smelled my own hair burning. The beast writhed and thrashed about, but apparently its skin wasn’t that flammable because when John let off there were only small tongues of flame licking at its shoulders.

  It looked pissed.

  John worked the shotgun- like pump on the squirt gun to build up the pressure and fire again. I flung my body aside and plunged my hand into my pocket to get the Smith—then remembered I had given it to Amy ten seconds ago. I pulled out my car keys instead and flung them at the beast; they bounced off its chest with a jingle.

  The monster advanced on me, racing past Amy with quick, blurry little steps, moving like it was on fast- forward. I tried to stand but suddenly there were claws around my neck, and a second after that I was flying. A wall pounded my back and suddenly I was in the little round elevator looking up at John; the beast had thrown me like a child’s toy. I scrambled to my feet and this thing was on me again, filling the doorway, blocking us into the little round room. Molly was standing there next to me, sniffing at the monster’s foot and deciding it would be unpleasant to eat.

  John was screaming something but then this thing had its claws in my shoulder, pain spilling down the whole side of my body. I leaned my head around the beast and screamed, “AAAAAMMMMMYYYYYY!!!!!! RUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!!”

  She stood there behind the beast, petrified for a long moment. The beast was doing something with its other hand, rearing back, probably half a second from ripping my face off. I felt John’s hands clumsily prying at the monster’s claws, trying to get them off me. The beast’s face was two inches from mine, its little eyes twitching, and I could smell the thing and it smelled like Old Spice somehow. From the corner of my eye I saw that the number on the wall said, “2.”

  Amy turned to go and suddenly I had a new mission, to keep the beast here, to make it take as long as possible to eat us.

  A second beast appeared.

  In the ruins of the maintenance doorway, another monster just like this one. As it advanced on Amy I had the crazy thought that the thing had clumps of snow stuck to its crotch.

  The number on the wall vanished. The ghost door closed.

  Everything stopped. The wal
l had melted back into place as if it had always been as solid as a, uh, wall.

  Suddenly I was looking at the head and shoulders and claws of the monster emerging from the solid wall, as if it were a mounted hunter’s trophy. The ghost door had closed right on the bastard, half on this side and half on the other. After a second, the severed chunks clumped to the floor, leaving red stains behind on the wall. The clawed hand was still embedded in my shoulder, the severed arm hanging off and dripping red on the floor.

  John muttered, “What the—I wonder how many employees they lose that way?”

  “Amy!!” I screamed into the wall, tearing off the shorn limb and flinging it to the ground with disgust. The claws were still twitching on their own when it landed. Molly was at my feet, barking, yelping. I heard nothing from the other side. I pounded the wall with my palms, then felt the surface sliding under my fingers.

  “AMY!!! AAAAMMMMYYYYY!!!”

  I punched the wall and thought I broke my hand. I felt motion and knew that we were moving upward, which was impossible because the mall did not have a second floor. I cursed again, put my hands on my knees, realized that every life that touched mine ended in utter horror.

  Molly whimpered at my feet. John said something, something about reaching the top and being ready and I got the idea. I stood upright and took the chainsaw from John, trembling all over. I looked over the chainsaw, figuring out how to work it. Could I have gotten caught in this situation with a dumber weapon?

  I glanced around and realized the boom box hadn’t made it into the elevator. Man, did any of it matter at this point?

  Up and up and up we went. Was the elevator climbing in midair? John held the fire gusher at the ready. He was saying something about how there was nothing we could do and we just had to get in and out fast enough and that we had all the more reason to survive and blah, blah, blah. What ever.

  The trip up took twenty damned minutes. Hundreds of feet. Finally we jolted to a stop and an opening appeared in the wall. We were looking at a long corridor, rounded at the top and made seemingly of smooth stone, like marble or polished granite. It was lit with fluorescent lights and decorated with warning signs about contamination and ID badges.

  I wrapped my fingers tight around the plastic handle of the chainsaw and stepped into the hall, Molly following a step behind. We went maybe the length of four or five city blocks, John with the little pi lot flame dancing at the end of his flamethrowing toy, me wondering how much noise the chainsaw would make when I pulled the rope thing. Or if it even had gas in it.

  We reached a door. Just a regular metal door with a knob. We readied ourselves. John flung it open and we ducked inside.

  The floor turned into a metal grate and we realized we had emerged onto a catwalk. I looked over the rail and saw we were suspended over an expanse the size of an airplane hangar, but dimly lit. The floor was populated with people in white, bustling around like a marketplace, swarming around tables and equipment. It was noisy as hell. Machines and grinding and rustling of feet, people working in the dark.

  We took a few steps forward and realized we weren’t alone. A man, wearing a white jumpsuit with a hood and a glass faceplate that reminded me of the contamination-free “clean suits” you see people wearing in labs, stood on the catwalk about ten feet away. He had a Subway sandwich bag in one gloved hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He stared at us for a long moment, eyes bouncing from Molly to my chainsaw to the finger of flame dancing from a tool that the man probably couldn’t help but think was a flame throwing squirt gun.

  John said, “We’re from the fire department.”

  The man spun on his heels and sprinted the other direction, feet clanging on the grated metal floor. We gave chase. He passed through a doorway. We followed and found ourselves on a spiral stairwell going down, John shouting at the man all the way, asking to see his flammability permit.

  The man hit bottom and threw himself out of another doorway. We followed and found ourselves at ground level on the factory floor, or what ever it was, surrounded by people in white jumpsuits who were doing an excellent job of ignoring us. These men did not wear the face masks and seemed, to a man, to be completely bald.

  Dark, dark, dark. Little red lights here and there on pieces of machinery that I couldn’t identify, but no overhead lights and no lamps and nothing but little glowing patches that cast upside-down shadows. The man we were chasing disappeared into the crowded darkness and we didn’t follow.

  To my left were blue plastic barrels, rows and rows of them, hundreds. At the edge were two without lids, full of a deep crimson fluid that indeed looked like transmission fluid. Two men were standing over one of the open barrels, dipping into it and collecting samples in vials. One of the men turned to face me, and I saw that he did not have a face.

  Or, I should say he had half a face. The forehead curled down over where the eyes should be, joining the cheeks. The nostrils were wide and flat, African. He had a thin, lipless mouth and huge ears. The guy next to him was the same. The four guys down the row as well. Those guys were hefting huge translucent plastic bags, vacuum-packed and shrunk around what looked like sides of beef.

  I gawked around like a little tourist kid. Along my left were long glass tanks as tall as houses, something you’d see at a city aquarium. The liquid inside was a cloudy pink. Floating inside were pale blurred shapes that might have been people and other things, smaller lumps that held the shape of small animals, dogs and things like squirrels. I walked down the row, dazed. I blinked, trying desperately to adjust to the semidarkness, trying to take everything in. I had the crazy thought that no wonder they didn’t pay to light the place. Most of the people here didn’t have eyes. No need to pay the extra electric bill.

  No matter where you go, management is always a bunch of cheap bastards.

  I heard John make a breathy sound behind me, shock or disgust or both. I followed his gaze and saw a wire cage twenty or so feet away, containing a thin, young boy. Maybe ten years old. He stood there, looking terrified, fingers hooked through the wire mesh, staring at me with wide blue eyes. There was a device next to the cage, round and maybe five feet tall. It had a red light glowing on the side. The light flipped to green, an electronic sound emitted. The boy screamed.

  The boy’s skin bubbled and wrinkled. One of his eyes deflated and ran down his cheek as a white goo, not unlike semen. Muscle liquefied and fell off his bones. He folded into the ground, left as a quivering lump. The lump bubbled and twitched and took on shape. Two stumpy feet emerged. A cloven hoof. Two more feet, a round body. I heard whimpering behind me, Molly watching along with me. In five seconds, I was looking through the cage at a pink, well-fed pig.

  “Mother. Fucker.”

  That was John, behind me. The pig trotted calmly over to the wires of the cage, sniffing at me. It put its front hooves on the wire cage and I thought, but wasn’t sure, I saw the same imprinted pi tattoo Molly once had and Drake had and—what the fuck did it all mean? I yanked the pull string on the chainsaw so hard I thought I’d rip it out. The saw roared to life.

  John looked down at Molly and said, “You better poop that bomb because we’re blowing this place to Hell.”

  “PUT IT DOWN!”

  John and I spun to see a man in one of the “clean” suits, maybe thirty feet away, pointing an enormous rifle at us that seemed to have too many barrels. His voice was filtered through a small speaker on the side of the hood and he was shouldering his way past the white-suited workers.

  John did not put the flamethrower down. What he did instead was point the flaming end of the thing at the man and say, “You put yours down, asshole.”

  I said, “I’d do it, sir. We’re pissed.”

  “YOU HAVE ONE SECOND TO DROP THAT CHAINSAW AND THAT . . . THING.”

  At this point, John flung himself to the ground and screamed, “YOU SHOT ME! AAARRRRGHHH!”

  Not a shot had been fired. I rushed to John’s side. “You shot him! He has four kids! Or
should I say, four orphans.”

  The man stepped over, the gun trained on John. The weapon seemed to be from the year 2050, smooth sides and a thin electronic sight that glowed green. There was a small barrel on the bottom and a cavernous one on top that looked like it fired cannon shells.

  “YOU. STEP AWAY AND GET ON THE FLOOR OVER THERE.”

  I said, “You shot him, you son of a bitch!”

  “DO IT AND DO IT NOW.”

  I stood and backed away. The man loomed over John and aimed the rifle right at his head.

  “YOU’RE NOT SHOT. GET UP.”

  Two urges rushed through me at the same moment. There was the urge to surrender, to put an end to the tension and fear and accept my fate. And then there was the urge to do violence.

  I don’t remember making the choice. All I know is that my muscles caught fire with adrenaline and I suddenly felt the fear and rage that is the most intense high the human animal can feel. In that split second I knew I was overmatched but I also knew that if I was going to die, this was how I wanted to do it. I wanted to give this asshole a scar with an interesting story behind it.

  I flung myself at the man, swinging the chainsaw like a baseball bat. I was aiming high, trying to chop his arm off at the shoulder. I missed by two feet and hit his hand.

  It was the hand holding the grip of the rifle. The spinning chain bounced off the gun and the impact made me drop it. The chainsaw fell to the floor, rattling on the ground with the vibration of the motor.

  Smooth.

  But the man screeched in pain and, to my horror, two of his fingers dropped to the ground in a red splatter. The rifle clattered down to the concrete. I dove for the gun and grabbed it by a handle that was slick with blood. I found the trigger to be where it is on most guns. I aimed it at the man’s chest and climbed to my feet. John stood, looking at the man’s fingerless stumps with disgust.

  I said, “Sir, you need to get that looked at.”

  The man didn’t move. My heart hammered. I realized I had crippled this man for the rest of his life. John said, “This is the part where you run away and find a first-aid kit, dipshit.”