John Dies at the End (42 page)

My watch: 11:43
P.M.

I pounded up the stairs and burst into Amy’s room, terrifying her. She was on the bed with the laptop, legs crossed under her, a handful of what looked like Cheetos frozen halfway to her mouth.

I caught my breath and said, “How can you eat those and type on your computer? Don’t you get that orange shit everywhere?”

“Uh, I . . .”

“Come downstairs. If this thing’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. But I want to be on the ground floor and near an exit.”

“Why?”

In case we have to run screaming out of this place.

“And put some shoes on. Just in case.”

11:52
P.M.

The television was back to regularly scheduled programming, the basic cable package of somebody who doesn’t watch a lot of TV. No movie channels. I turned it off and turned to Amy, who was sitting stiffly on the stiff sofa, biting a thumbnail.

She said, “What are we waiting for?”

“Anything. And I do mean anything.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I stalked around the walls of the room, stopping to peer out of the big bay window. Not snowing, at least.

As long as you don’t bring up your brother . . .

“You said yesterday that, like, most of what people say about you guys is true. So—there are some things that I’ve read that, you know . . .”

“What do they say, Amy?”

“That you guys have, like, a cult or something. And that Jim died because of something you guys were into.”

“If that were true, would I admit it?” I glanced at my watch, something that was becoming a compulsion with me.

11:55
P.M.

“I don’t know. You were there, though, right? In Las Vegas?”

“Yeah.”

“And John says he didn’t die in an accident, the way the papers said.”

“What did John say?”

“He said a little monster that looked like a spider with a beak and a blond wig ate him.”

Awkward pause. “You believed him?”

“I thought I would ask you.”

“What are you willing to believe, Amy? Do you believe in ghosts and angels and demons and devils and gods, all that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So, if they exist, then to them we’d be like bacteria or viruses, right? Like way lower on the ladder. Now the trick is that a higher being can study and understand the things under it, but not vice versa. We put the virus under the microscope. A virus can’t do the same to us. So if there are things that exist above us humans, beings so radically different and big and complex that they can’t fit inside your brain, we’d be no more equipped to see them than the germs are equipped to see us. Right?”

11:58
P.M.

“Okay.”

“I mean, not without special tools.”

“Okay.”

“John and I have those tools. But just because we can see these things, these odd and weird and horrible things, it don’t mean we can actually understand them or do anything about them.”

“Ooooo- kay.”

“Now let me ask you something. Big Jim, he was into some things, he had unusual hobbies. He built model monsters. But he knew some people, too, didn’t he? Weird people? You know who I’m talking about, right? The black guy with the Jamaican accent?”

She said, “Yeah, I think we talked about that, didn’t we? He was homeless. They found that guy and I heard he, like, exploded. I always wondered about that. Do you think Jim was into something, too?”

There was no short answer to that, so I said nothing. Amy looked at the floor.

11:59
P.M.

Amy said, “So what are we expecting?”

“Anything. Beyond anything.”

She looked very pale. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, rocking slightly.

“What time is it?”

“Almost time.”

“I’m scared to death, David.”

“That’s good because there’s lots to be afraid of.”

I glanced at Badly Drawn Jesus, then pulled the gun from my pocket. On Judgment Day, I’d be able to proudly state that when I thought the hordes of Hell were coming for a local girl, I stood ready to shoot at them with a small- caliber pistol.

I said, “Keep talking.”

“Um, okay. Let’s see. Keep talking. Talking talking talking, doo doo doo doo doo. Uh, my name is Amy Sullivan and I’m twenty- one years old and, um, I’m really scared right now and I feel like I’m going to pee my pants and my back hurts but I don’t want to take a pill because I think I’ll just throw it back up and this couch is really uncomfortable and I don’t like ham and—this is hard. My mouth is going dry. What time is it now?”

I held my breath, my heart hammering. Anything. Ridiculous, the idea that anything can happen. Impossible. But we should have known from the start. The Big Bang. One moment there was nothing and then,
BAM!
Everything. What was impossible after that?

12:02
A.M.

I glanced back at Amy. Still there.

“Well,” I said. “They’re late.”

“Maybe they won’t come with you here.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe their clock isn’t the same as yours.”

Another good point.

She asked, “Are you scared?”

“Pretty much all the time, yeah.”

“Why? Because of what happened in Las Vegas?”

“Because I sort of looked into Hell, but I still don’t know if there’s a Heaven or not.”

That stopped her.

12:04
A.M.

She finally said, “You saw it?”

“Sort of. I felt it. Heard it, I guess. Screams, bleeding over into my head. And I knew, I knew right then what it would be like.” I took a breath and knew I was about to spill a giant load of stark- raving lunacy.

“It was just like the locker room,” I said. “That day at the high school. Not Pine View where we went to school together, but before that, before they shipped me off there. Billy Hitchcock and four friends. Their hands on me like animal jaws, twisting me, pushing me to the ground. So easy. So fucking easy, the way they overpowered me, and that look, that look of stupid joy on their faces because they knew, they knew that they could do whatever they wanted and they knew that I knew. And that fear, that total hopelessness when I realized I wasn’t going to kick my way out of it and the coach wasn’t gonna come in and break it up and nobody was going to come to my rescue. Whatever they wanted to do was going to happen and happen and happen until they got bored with it and they got
so high
off that power . . .”

I felt the Smith’s plastic grip digging into my palm, knew I was involuntarily squeezing it.

“Before that, Billy’s neighbor had this little yappy dog, expensive thing. One day the old lady comes home and finds the little yapping thing in her backyard, only it’s not yapping because Billy has taken a hot glue gun and glued its jaws shut. He decided to do the eyes, too, and—look, the point is I think that people live on, forever, outside of time somehow. And I think people like Billy, they never change. And I think they all wind up in the same place, and you and I can wind up right among them and they have forever, literally forever, to do what they want with us. In whatever way people live, maybe you don’t have a body they can cut or bruise or burn but the worst pain isn’t in the nerve endings, is it? Total fear and submission and torment and deprivation and hopelessness, that tidal wave of hopelessness. They never get tired, they never sleep, and you never, ever, ever die. They stay on top of you and they hold you down and down and down, forever.”

I let out a breath.

12:06
A.M.

She said, “Billy Hitchcock. He was the kid who di—”

Her words broke off and she let out an enormous snore, like she’d suddenly fallen into a deep sleep in midsentence.

I turned, and where Amy had been sitting there was now a human- shaped thing with jointed arms and gray rags for clothes, legs sticking stiffly out in front. Like a department store mannequin crafted by a blind man. The red hair looked to be made of copper wire. A hinged jaw clamped shut and the snoring sound was clipped immediately. Two seconds later the jaw yawned wide open again and the enormous snoring sound poured forth—a sound that was more mechanical than human. Artificial.

I got to hand it to them,
I thought.
I really wasn’t expecting that.

I heard a
clump
and realized the gun had fallen out of my limp hand. I also realized my jaw was hanging open. I tried to pull myself together, forced my legs to step forward. I reached out toward the thing—

The gun was back in my hand. Amy was back on the couch, sitting bolt upright, looking blankly into space. I immediately looked at my watch—

3:20
A.M.

SHIT.

Amy slowly turned her head, coming to. She saw me, saw the look on my face. Realization washed over her and her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes suddenly wide.

“Did it—did it happen? It happened, didn’t it?”

I said, “Go upstairs and pack as much stuff as you can carry. We’re getting outta here.”

SHE BOUNDED DOWN
the stairs seven minutes later, a satchel over her shoulder and the laptop under her arm.

We found Molly in the kitchen, standing on a chair and eating from a box of cookies that had been left open on the table. After some coaxing and threats we got her to follow us out to my truck. We loaded up, the engine growled to life. The windshield was a solid sheet of white.

Amy found the cardboard GhostVision glasses on the dashboard and examined them with a quizzical look. I found my ice scraper from under my seat and jumped out to scrape the ice from the windows. Outside I turned toward the house–

I stopped in my tracks.

I mumbled, “Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

There was a figure on the roof, silhouetted against the pearly moonlit clouds. Nothing but silhouette, a walking shadow. Two tiny, glowing eyes.

“What are you looking at?”

Amy, trying to follow my gaze.

“You can’t see it.”

She squinted. “No.”

“Get back in the truck!”

In a series of frantic bursts I managed to scrape a lookhole in the powdered-sugar crust of ice on the windshield, then jogged around to the back to do the same.

I heard Amy say, “Hey! What’s he doing up there?”

I leaned around the truck and saw Amy was wearing the
Scooby- Doo
ghost glasses and was staring right at the spot where Shadow Man was standing. She pulled off the glasses and looked at them in amazement, then looked through them again and said, “What
is
that thing? Look! What is it?”

“What—are you using the damned
Scooby
glasses?”

“I can see it! It’s a black shape and . . . it’s moving! Look!”

I did look, long enough to see the shape spout giant black wings. No . . . that wasn’t right. It
became
wings, two flapping wing shapes that didn’t quite meet in the middle. It flitted into the sky, a black slip against the clouds, higher and higher until it vanished.

I heard barking. Molly had gotten out of the truck, was at my knees.

Amy kept staring up, her mouth hanging open, steam jumping out in little puffs. She said, “David, what was it?”

“How should I know? They’re shadow people. They’re walking death. They take you and you’re gone and nobody knows you were ever there.”

“You’ve seen them before?”

“More and more. Let’s go, let’s go.”

We climbed in, called to Molly. She didn’t move, stood stiffly, trembling, growling at the sky. I called to her again, got out, picked her up and threw her inside.

I jumped in, floored it.

We fired down the road, fishtailing on the glaze of skating-rink-caliber black ice left over from the road graters. The house shrank in the rearview mirror. Beyond it, the low, flat Drain Rooter factory.

Amy twisted in her seat and peered back through the rear window, then did the same with those stupid ghost glasses. Molly was up and dancing behind us, bouncing around, probably thinking she’d be safer out on foot. Amy squealed, “Look! Look!”

I gave it a glance in the mirror, saw high headlights behind us, probably a Rooter truck leaving with a load. I did something they don’t teach you in driving class, which was to lean my head out into the blistering wind and look up, steering blind with one hand.

Black shapes were swirling overhead, winged things and long, whipping forms like serpents. Swirling, stopping, turning, like bits of debris in a tornado.

They were congregating around the factory.

Most of them were. Some of them were breaking off and following us, dark shapes flitting across the sky and into the shadowy trees and houses around us, vanishing from view. I pulled in my head and focused on the road.

Amy sat forward and strapped her seat belt on, screamed, “What do we do?”

“We’re doing it.”

Another glance into the mirror, headlights closer now. Trucker hauling ass, hauling drain cleaner.

A shadow flicked across the hood.

I stomped the brakes, the Bronco spun out, skidded, plowed ass-first into a bumper- high snowdrift alongside the road. Silence for a second, then the apocalyptic sound of eighteen wheels skidding on ice.

The semi jackknifed, the front end stopping and the heavier rear still pushing forward, toward us. A giant cartoon plumber, a red “X” through him, loomed in the windshield.

The trailer skidded to a stop about six feet from the bumper, then rocked threateningly back and forth, deciding whether or not it wanted to tip, clumps of snow spilling off the roof with each sway.

Silence, save for the tick of the engine and the rushing of the wind. Finally, Amy said, “Are you all right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

I was scanning the sky for shadows. I glanced at the red cab of the semi, could see somebody moving inside. An elbow.

A hand clamped on my arm. Amy whispered, “There. Over there.”

She was pointing, with her handless wrist, God bless her, at a black shape growing on the side of the semi, several shapes, molding together, forming something like a spider. Sitting there on the white wall of the trailer like a piece of black spray- painted gang graffiti.