John Dies at the End

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.”

The man got to his feet and stumbled off. Around us, dozens or hundreds of the bald, faceless workers stood as still as the mannequins they resembled. Everything had come to a stop. Machines were being shut down.

I tried to catch my breath, felt like my bladder was going to let go. I said, “This is going well.”

There was a POCK sound and suddenly one of the blue barrels next to me sprung a leak. John and I looked at it curiously for a moment before we noticed about a dozen men in clean suits racing toward us from just about every direction, each armed, dodging the worker mannequins and toppling equipment.

I raised the rifle, no idea what to do, heard pops of gunfire that seemed faint in the cavernous room. I turned, pointed at the massive tanks of pink fluid and who knows what else, and pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded. Or seemed to; instead of the crack of a rifle shot it let out a thunderous boom that punched the butt of the rifle into my shoulder. The tanks erupted in a spray of glass. Fluid and flailing shapes poured out onto the floor, faceless workers sprinting off in every direction.

Madness ensued. Inhuman screams. Crashing glass, toppling tables. The things that spilled out of the tanks were writhing, thrashing limbs around, and I thought I saw a human face stuck on the body of a hairless baboon. But it was all a dark blur and John took off running. I followed.

We dodged people like running backs, the chaos passing around us. The scenery was a department-store hodgepodge of nonsense, something out of a dream. We ran past hundreds of the walking mannequins, past tables full of clothes and what looked like tailoring equipment and rolls of cloth. A shelf full of underwear. We ran past a section of men working on what looked like dentistry, drilling and crafting bridges and false teeth. We knocked over chairs and tables and filing cabinets. We saw a young woman strapped to a table, her legs missing. We saw racks of fat bags like we saw in Amy’s bathroom, imprinted with numbers. I saw a man chained to a wall who seemed to have snakes for arms, each hand replaced by snapping jaws and venomous fangs.

I saw Molly as a low, running copper streak up ahead and realized with horror that John was following her. I heard more shots and saw two of the mannequin men fall, ragged holes in their backs. My guts turned to liquid and my hands tightened around the bulky rifle, feeling sweat and sticky blood on the trigger. We reached a wall and I saw wide stairs leading to a double door made of brushed steel, like a bank vault. A closed bank vault.

I heard shouts and clanging and saw people on the catwalk overhead, saw white suits circling around us in the crowd and heard orders shouted from every direction. A booming voice emerged from a public address system, announcing things in a throaty language that sounded like Hebrew. I suddenly knew how that woodchuck felt.

I pulled up the rifle, found a little switch next to the handle and flipped it, hoping it would make the other barrel work. I raised it to my shoulder.

So freaking dark . . .

I tried to get a fix through the glowing green sights. I felt hands on me. I squeezed the trigger and the gun roared, fire erupting, the barrel jumping like a jackhammer. I lost control of it almost immediately, the gun pushing my shoulder back until I was shooting straight up. In three seconds I was clicking an empty gun, night-blinded, smelling gunpowder. I heard a thump-thump-thump and realized it was bodies falling off the catwalk above.

Hands on me again, the worker clones or what ever they were, grabbing my jacket and pulling my hair. The gun was ripped from my hands and I heard a whoosh, a sound suspiciously like a gun being swung through the air. A bomb went off in my skull. Lights flared in front of my eyes and I went down hard. I heard barking and growling, felt Molly thrashing around near me. I almost went out. I heard John’s voice, shouting in the bedlam.

“GENTLEMEN, I WOULD LIKE TO PROPOSE A TOAST!”

And then, the whole world was on fire.

Heat and light and horrible, inhuman shrieks. I got on my hands and knees and saw John hosing everything down, a fountain of orange light glaring in the darkness, a crowd of dark limbs flailing in a pool of flame. A hand grabbed me again from the crowd, its sleeve on fire—

A firearm!

—and I kicked at it, got free. From beside me, John frantically pumped the gun, and again flame poured forth with a sound like rushing wind. Suddenly I was being pulled up to my feet, pulled backward, pulled to the spot where the metal door had been. It was apparently open now because we kept going, into another space, a small area that felt like a corridor.

I heard the heavy clang of the door closing, and suddenly a light flickered on. It was John who had hold of me, a fist full of my jacket in his hand. He spun toward the door and we saw a thin man standing there, next to a metal box on the wall with a series of red buttons.

It was Robert North. He looked us over, then said, simply, “Incredible.”

We were alone in a hallway, an orchestra of sounds from the other side of the steel door. Molly looked that direction and growled. North stepped away from us and strode down the corridor. We followed. I put my hand to my aching skull, pulled away bloody fingers. John took his hand off me and said, “Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

North led us through one doorway, then another. We finally emerged into an enormous round chamber with steps that led down to a platform, the place set up not unlike a basketball stadium. At the heart of the room where center court would be, there were maybe a dozen tall arches arranged in two concentric circles. It reminded me of Stonehenge. Around the room were beds and examination tables, but nobody was on them. On the floor, on a small platform, sat the fat bag, the exact one from Amy’s bathroom (“44.42 kg” on the side), and not far from that sat the lifeless, copper-haired dummy I had seen appear on Amy’s couch. North led us out of the Stonehenge room, barely glancing at it, and out another door. We went down another hall and into another large, domed room. This one had a cylinder of black glass in the center that rose all the way up to the ceiling.

North closed the door behind us, another sliding double door with metal a foot thick. I saw there were no other exits from the room and what ever comfort I had felt from escaping the mob had vanished. This was the end of the line.

North said, “I have a thousand questions to ask but no time to ask them.”

I said, “We have to get back! To ground level, to the mall. Amy is . . .”

He turned, like he couldn’t hear me, and walked toward the cylinder. I glanced around and saw that the walls, like all of the walls here, seemed to be made of glass-smooth stone. The door and the controls for the door all seemed to have been added later, the wiring in metal conduits on the exterior of the wall. I wondered again where exactly this place was. Were we still on Earth?

I ran up behind North, said, “Get us outta here. Get us out and tell us where would be the best place to put a bomb.”

John said, “Yeah, the dog is rigged to blow.”

John shook the pink plastic tank of flamethrower fuel on his hip, found it empty. He blew out the lighter at the barrel of the toy, then dropped it all to the floor. I noticed the barrel had partially melted.

North said, “I do not think you fully appreciate what this is.”

I nodded toward North and said to John, “This is the guy, the one who I saw in my truck that night.”

John said, “Okay. Can he explain what the fuck this place is? And what they’re making out there?”

I waved my hand with impatience and said, “He can tell us all about that shit after we’re outta here and after we’ve gotten to Amy. And after we blow this place to Hell. But before those assholes come rushing through that door.”

North said, “I believe Amy is safe. And I assure you, the men outside cannot get in here. I know this facility very well.”

“How do you know about Amy?” I asked. “You’re a part of this? You work for these people?”

North said, “I was born here. And as for what they’re doing out there, well, they’re doing the same thing all thinking creatures do, from the moment they come to life. Trying to change the world as they see fit.”

He looked at the black column.

“What do you think you’re looking at there?”