John Dies at the End

the shotgun and raised it.

“Sister Christian,” by Night Ranger, slowed, garbled, ground to silence. The last of the juice in the ghetto blaster’s batteries.

Scratching claws.

Approaching fast.

Two gray blurs.

They were coyotes, muscular, with matted fur and red eyes. They both skidded to a stop at the sight of us, took in deep breaths, and breathed plumes of fire.

The three of us dove behind the crate. John leaned over with the shotgun, fired and tore a fist-sized chunk out of the first coyote head. He fired at the second one, missed.

Pumped.

Fired.

Missed again.

The beast lunged at me, knocking me over like a linebacker. It stood on my chest, its breath smelling like burnt electrical wires. It sucked in a huge breath that I knew would take the flesh off my skull.

A hand shot out.

Punching into the coyote’s side.

Krissy hit the Taser.

Blue sparks flew.

The coyote’s abdomen, swollen with flammable breath, exploded like the Hindenburg. Furry chunks hit me in the face, a beautiful orange fireball rolling up toward the glass ceiling.

I scrambled to my feet, my face hot and tight, brushing slimy red chunks of animal off me and cursing. I wasn’t sure if it was coyote blood or my own piss on my pants.

Something heavy bounced off my shoe. John shone the flashlight, revealing a box of bullets.

Laying next to it was a key with the number “1” etched into it.

“A key,” said John, clicking shells into his shotgun. “Good. Now, if I know what’s going on here, and I think I do, we’ll have to wander around looking for that door. Behind it we’ll meet a series of monsters or, more likely, a whole bunch of the same one. We’ll kill them, get another key, and then it’ll open a really big door. Now right before that we’ll probably get nicer guns. It may require us to backtrack some and it might get really tedious and annoying.”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “I’m staying here.” I sat on the ground, pulled open the box of bullets and tried to put one in the pistol. It fit. Hey, why the hell not. I started pushing rounds into the pistol magazine one at a time. “You go find the door.”

A metallic thunder filled the hall.

We all flew into action, bullets spilling off my lap and rolling in every direction.

Ahead of us something huge dropped from the ceiling, blocking our view. The clanking roar finally ended in a crash that made all three of us jump.

We advanced, guns drawn. It was one of those enormous drop-down gates that malls use to button up at closing time.

“Well,” Krissy said, “I guess this is the big door. There’s a keyhole at the bottom, near the latch.”

“All right,” said John, nodding. “All right. Big door. Sooner than I expected, but whatever. Now, that means there’s a boss behind there. A huge bad guy.”

He focused on Krissy. “I want you to be prepared for this. This evil that has Wexler, it’s impossible for us to imagine what form it’s taken with him. Expect tentacles. And a whole bunch of eyes. Or just one eye. I don’t know what exactly to expect but I know it’ll be a way bigger asshole than we faced out here—”

“Krissy!”

From behind us. We spun on the voice and I involuntarily squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked. I hadn’t chambered a round.

It was Wexler, trudging up in the shadows behind us. He looked pale but perfectly human. I posed casually with the gun, so as not to be too blatant about the fact that I had almost killed him with it just now.

Krissy moved toward him.

“Don’t,” he said. “Stay away from me. He’ll be back. Any second now, he’ll be back.”

He bent over and broke down in a coughing fit. Blood splattered the floor.

“Dude,” said John, “let’s get you to a hospital, we’ll protect you and—”

“No. Listen. I’m falling apart. I’m falling apart inside. When he comes back, I won’t hold up. Now, how much do you know about this place?”

“If you’re talking about this town in general,” John said, “don’t even get us started. We’re the experts.”

“No. No. I’m talking about the doors. This building—”

Coughing fit.

“—the doors, under it, or somewhere. I don’t know where. Hidden. This building and others, I think.”

“We can go over all that later,” I said. “Where’s the shadow man? The, you know, the thing, the one who’s possessing you? Where is he now? Is he behind that gate?”

“He’ll come back here. Let him. Let him enter me. Then kill me—”

Krissy screamed, “No! Danny!”

“—Kill me and burn my body. Then burn this place down on top of me. Find the other doors if there are more, and burn them down, too. In fact, just burn the whole town. Just to be safe.”

“Doors? I don’t get—”

Danny coughed, spat, then coughed and coughed some more, hacking until he finally passed out.

Krissy ran to him, but couldn’t get him to respond. He was still breathing, though, so we dragged him over to the wall, leaning him against it.

John and I trained our guns on him, and waited.

Krissy looked back and forth at us and said, “What are you guys doing?”

John and I glanced at each other.

“Well . . . you know,” I said meekly. “We’re waiting for the thing to come back into him so we can, uh . . .”

“We are not doing that.”

To me the guy looked to be on his last legs anyway, so this really did seem like a more reasonable plan than getting eaten by whatever monstrosity waited behind that gate. Shouldn’t we honor his final wishes?

We were unable to convince Krissy of this. She took the key and started working at the lock of the huge gate.

I sighed and went to her, the pistol clasped in both hands. John nudged her aside and knelt with his hand on the gate handle.

Krissy pulled the Taser from her pocket.

John looked up at us and said, “We stay together. Look for a weak spot, like an eye or something. If there are crates around the room, cover me and I’ll open them, see if there’s a rocket launcher or something in one of them. If either of you find a big, green, polka-dotted mushroom, set it aside. We may need it later.”

The blood, pounding through my ears again, my skull sounding like the inside of a seashell. I blinked hard to try to clear the spots pulsing in front of my eyes.

I knew this was the thing to do, but every fiber screamed to retreat and try again some other day, when we had more on our side, when I wasn’t so tired, or so nervous, or so fat. I struggled for something to cling to, the way soldiers in foxholes picture their families, or a flag.

My car, I thought crazily. This fucker crashed the Wongmobile. And for that, he must taste death.

It would have to do. I reminded myself to breathe. John pulled up the gate, rolling it up on its tracks with a sound like tank treads.

We entered a huge octagon of a room, more storefront blanks where food counters were to go. There was some broken glass and dead leaves on the ground, where one of the panes in the overhead skylight had broken out.