John Dies at the End

That’s the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck.

I realized the heat was gone. The sound was gone. Everything was gone. Just darkness.

That wasn’t right, darkness would have been something. This wasn’t even that. Was I dead?

It was the same detached sensation from before, the feeling of floating across worlds without my body. Only there was nothing to see here, nothing to feel. Only . . .

I was being watched. I knew it. I could sense it. There were eyes on me.

Not eyes. One eye. A single, reptilian, blue eye. I couldn’t see it, there was no seeing here. There was just the awareness of it. I was in the presence of something, an intelligence. I recognized it and it recognized me back. But not in the way a man sees and knows another man; it was the way a man sees a cell under a microscope. To this thing, I was the cell, insignificant under its vast, unfathomable perception.

I tried to sense the nature of it. Was it good? Evil? Indifferent? With my mind I reached out and—

RUN.

I ran. I had no legs, but I ran, I pushed myself away, willed myself to escape from this thing.

RUN.

I sensed heat. I was pushing myself toward an unimaginable heat but I welcomed it. I would throw myself into a lake of fire to escape that thing in the—

_______

—DARKNESS. REGULAR DARKNESS now, the familiar back side of my own eyelids. Heat all around me, heat so intense I could barely recognize the sensation.

A low sound. Wailing?

From outside. Getting louder. A car coming. A dog barking.

Get back. Get back!

Who said that?

A thunderous, terrible noise. Glass shattering, metal screaming, wood snapping. The kitchen was exploding around me. I was flung backward and suddenly a blast of fresh air washed over my body.

I was looking at the grille of a car, my car, the Hyundai “H” symbol a foot from my face.

The car reversed itself and wrenched free of the wreckage that had been the kitchen’s west wall. There was now a rupture near the floor, frayed with tufts of pink insulation and shredded aluminum siding. I rolled myself out of the hole, fell hard onto the cool grass outside. I coughed, coughed.

Coughed.

Passed out.

I woke up what felt like hours later.

Or maybe seconds.

The trailer was a fireball behind me. I was too wiped out to appreciate that I had avoided death twice within a few minutes, first by a fraction of an inch then by a few smoke-filled breaths.

I heard a bark.

David? You alive?

That voice again, from nowhere. I struggled to my feet, saw my car sitting about twenty feet away.

Molly the dog was sitting behind the wheel. I stared at this for a good solid minute. She barked, and again I heard words in the sound.

John’s voice.

I didn’t think it could get any stupider than the bratwurst thing, but I suspected I was about to find out otherwise. I climbed into the car, pushing Molly over to the passenger’s seat.

Molly looked at me, with concern. No, not Molly.

John looked back at me, with Molly’s big brown eyes. Molly barked, but I heard:

We’re in big fuckin’ trouble, Dave.

“No shit, fluffy. How did you work the pedals?”

“Woof!”

Listen. There are three people still alive from last night other than me. Big Jim Sullivan, Jennifer Lopez and Fred Chu. I don’t know a whole lot else because my own body ain’t workin’ so well. I know we’re all together and we’re on the move and once we get where we’re goin’, something bad, bad, bad is gonna happen.

“Wait, wait, wait. Why are you a dog again, John?”

“Arrr-oof!”

(Sneeze)

Justin White, or the thing that used to be Justin, he’s got me. My body, I mean. He stole a vehicle. When I’m in my body I can’t see nothin’, but I can hear. It’s somethin’ big enough to hold all of us, some kind of truck. Dave, you gotta find it.

“Is it an ambulance? The cop told me he stole an ambulance from the hospital. So there are actually four still alive from last night, if you count Justin.”

“Woo—”

No, no, no. I said there were three that were alive and I meant it. Justin White ain’t alive. He’s a walking . . . hive or whatever.

“Those things inside him, what are they?”

“Woof!”

Bitch!

This threw me, and I stared in dull confusion for a moment before I noticed the dog was looking past me. I turned and saw a little brown-and-white beagle tied up next to one of the trailers.

“John?”

“Woof!”

Sorry, Dave. My grandpa used to tell me, toward the end when he was going crazy, that talking through a dog ain’t like talking through a sausage. Molly is in here with me and I gotta compete for the barker.

“Where is Justin, or this Justin Thing, taking everybody?”

I already knew the answer as soon as the question left my mouth. I said it along with the dog’s bark: “Las Vegas.”

“So what’s in Las Vegas?”

“Woof! Arrrrr-oof!! Grrrr . . .”

You know that Bugs Bunny cartoon, where they spill the ink on the floor and then climb through it as if it was a hole? I think that’s what the soy sauce is like. It’s a hole, it opens you right up. Those worms, and the other shit in Robert’s basement, the sauce let that stuff come into our world, by turning people into holes. And I think if the sauce infects enough people, in one place, it can make one single big-ass hole.

“Shit. Is it worth asking what’s going to come through the hole?”

“Woof.”

I don’t know. But what comes through will have to feed.

I nodded. “Right. And Vegas has all those free buffets.”

Molly closed her eyes in frustration. I had never seen that expression on a dog before.

No. Listen. There’s a guy named Albert Marconi. He does these conferences on the occult, he’s having one there at the Luxor, that’s the big casino shaped like a black pyramid. We’re going to go there.

“Wait. How do you know this?”

Because it’s already happened.

“That doesn’t make any—”

“Woof!”

CAT! CAT! CAT! CAT!!!