John Dies at the End

Amy nodded and said, “Well, that’s sad.”

“The saddest. John and I, we’re the woodchuck. See, I can read it on you, that you think you’re really a part of something now, that we’re gonna do something really great today and change the world. Well Amy, understand what I’m about to say. There’s something terribly wrong with us. John and me. Amy, there are days when I’m sure—sure—that I’m stone- cold raving batshit insane. That none of this is happening, that I’m raving about it from a padded room somewhere. And do you know how I respond to that, to that knowledge that I may be delusional and dangerous? I arm myself. With a gun.”

“David, you’re not—”

“Listen. The only reason I’m standing up to these guys now is because I’m in a corner. I don’t have a choice. You do. And if you make the wrong choice, there is an excellent chance that these are your last hours on Earth. All the things you wanted to do with your life, they may not happen. All the things you like to do, all the things you thought you might like to do in the future, all gone. And it’ll be because of me. Because I led you into my turd pipe.”

She said, “Why do you, like, hate yourself?”

“If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I reached into my front pocket and pulled out the necklace and held it up.

“Here. It’s good luck. Or something.”

I went to Amy and reached around her neck, clasping the thin chain under her hair.

I glanced out of the window, saw the snow was coming down again.

Facing her, I said, “You deserved some kind of normal life, Amy. I can picture you, in college, a family back home. Maybe you’re working part-time at a music store. Geeky guys coming in and flirting with you at the counter. And I could come in and make some kind of awkward conversation with you and you could keep making excuses not to go out with me and I would just keep coming back and back and then you would get a restraining order against me, and my dad would get it overturned. Finally you would agree and we could go to a picnic or bowling or whatever normal people do when they’re together. What do normal people do when they’re together?”

“I have no idea.”

It’s funny, pretending that it’s normal to have a conversation with somebody standing three inches away.

She leaned in and—

IT LOOKED LIKE the world outside my window had lost its signal and gone to static. Snowing like hell, wind whipping it around. I leaned against my window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, breaths fogging up a circular patch under my nose. There was a time when I would have found the idea of certain death a little comforting, like being on the last day of a job I hated. A weight lifted. Now, feeling the cold glass on my face and wet hair cooling my scalp and my mouth tasting vaguely like secondhand Altoids and knowing I would never see snow again, I felt a little like crying. But just a little.

I saw the grille of a car emerge like a ghost, headlights faint in the whiteout. The big car swung into my driveway, John’s Caddie. Through the window I watched as John ducked out, wearing an Army- issue fatigue jacket. He circled around to his trunk, popped it and pulled out a canvas backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and then pulled out a large tool that was unmistakably a—

“Is that a medieval battle- ax?” Amy asked from behind me, rubbing a towel through her hair.

“With John, we’ll be fortunate if it turns out to be nothing stupider than that.”

The ax was a leftover from high school, when we used to be big into Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, um, bear hunting. John burst in the door at that moment, dusted with snow, shouting, “We are gonna fuck that place up.”

He tossed down his load with a force that shook the floor, then bent over and hefted the ax that I believe was one of several props he stole from that medieval-themed restaurant he worked at for a while. He paused to let his eyes flick to mine and Amy’s wet hair and presumably asked himself if our showers had overlapped in any way. He was too polite to ask.

Then he turned and stepped past me into the hallway. He studied the wall, then raised the ax and swung it into the wall with a THOCK that sent plaster dust flying.

He swung three more times, then thrust his hand into the hole he had created and pulled out a small object that fit in the palm of his hand. He glanced at it, wiped the dust on his shirt, then tossed it to me. I caught the small canister. Silver, the size of a pill bottle.

Amy saw it and asked, “What’s that?”

“You’ve never seen it before?”

“Why would I?”

“Big Jim had it at one time. We don’t know where he got it though.”

I quickly relayed to her the story of the weather guy and the mall and how we came across the container.

“So,” she said. “What’s in it?”

CHAPTER 15

D-Day

“VERY SIMPLY,” I said to Amy, “the reason we can see things that you can’t is right there in that bottle. We don’t know where it came from or what exactly it does. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden. It’d be like if a doctor could walk around with microscopes strapped to his eyes all of the time, so he could just look and see the sickness crawling around inside us.”

Amy pointed out, “Well, he’d still have to be able to see inside your blood vessels and lungs and all that. A microscope wouldn’t—”

“These microscopes also have some kind of X-ray vision attachment.”

She reached out and picked up the canister.

“Ugh. It’s cold.”

“The container is always cold,” I said. “It refrigerates the contents twenty- four hours a day. And we don’t know how. No batteries, no energy source. And it’s been working for years. The sauce, it has to be kept cool or it becomes, uh, unstable.”

Unstable, in the way that a swarm of killer bees is “unstable.”

“And you’re going to take it again?”

“I don’t want to. But I think we have to. It’ll level the playing field, get us on the same frequency as the bad guys. It’s the reason we’re alive.”

Oh, and everybody else who has ever tried it has wound up dead. The irony.

I said, “When I ran across this bottle, it was empty, just like mine.”

I opened the bottle and shook out the contents. Two capsules, black as licorice.

“I bet you’re wondering where these two came from. We’re always wondering the same thing. The stuff seems to show up when it wants to.”

She said, “You’re not going to let me take any, are you?”

“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But you’re not supposed to take it. If you were, there would be three capsules in here.”

John said, “We better swallow these before they attack us.”

We did. We waited.

“Sooooo . . .” Amy asked, “how do you know when it’s working?”

I said, “You just, uh, start noticing things. It’s hard to explain. Like bits of radio signal coming in through the static.”