John Dies at the End (48 page)

“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.”

With that, a thought passed through my head, a flash like a shooting star. Pro wrestling was
real
. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was more real than reality. Then, I worked out pi to four thousand decimal places and realized that if anyone ever drew a truly perfect circle it would actually look like a straight line to our eyes. I looked at the silver pill canister and realized it was more than four thousand years old. Or less than four seconds.

I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty- one feet farther than your shoes?”

John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.”

I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.

To kill some time, I got up and hunted around the closet in my laundry room until I found my squirt gun. This was one of those huge modern guns, green and with a logo that said BIG GUSHER on the side. It had a separate two- gallon tank with hooks for a belt. The commercials bragged it could spray a soaking, quarter-inch- wide stream of water for fifty feet and that was pretty much true. The gun was sticky from when John filled it with beer last summer.

I hunted around until I found a roll of duct tape and an extended disposable lighter, the kind people light grills with. I gathered three bottles of flammable chemicals that I would mix to form the fuel. I took my armload of items and dumped them on the table.

Amy said, “So, you’re making a flamethrower?”

“Amy, we gotta be prepared. We don’t know what we’ll find in that place, but for all we know it could be the Devil himself.”

“David, what possible good is that thing gonna do?”

“Oh, no, you didn’t hear me. I said it’s
a flamethrower.
” Girls.

“But if something is from Hell why would you use a—”

Amy stopped, apparently deciding against pursuing that question and instead asked, “What am I taking? When we go? Is there a weapon or something for me?”

“Have you forgotten the woodchuck already?”

I went to work on the squirt gun. The sound of rustling and growling emerged from the bathroom. Under that I could detect the low hum of my beard trimmer.

Amy put her hand on mine, her other hand balled up in a fist on the table.

“There was a sheep,” she said. “In Scotland, I think. And this sheep escaped from the ranch. And you know they shear sheep for their wool. Well, this thing stayed gone for seven years. Finally they found it, in a cave. And there was nobody to shear the sheep, so when they found it, its wool was gigantic. It was, like, a walking afro. And it wound up back on the ranch, just another sheep, but for the rest of its life it knew that for a while, it was free. It had that and nobody could take it away. Do you understand? I’m like you; I want to face this thing. Whatever it is. We’re like that sheep, taking our shot. If for no other reason than just to say we did.”

“I do understand. Trust me, I do. And it takes a special kind of person to make up something so utterly bullshitty. You know their wool doesn’t just keep growing like that.”

“That’s not even the point, David.”

I went to take her other hand, saw my hand disappear into hers and realized that it was because she didn’t have another hand. But there it was, thin fingers wrapped in a tight ball.

She looked down, curious, not sure what I was staring at. I said, “I think the sauce is working. Go put on the
Scooby
glasses. I want to try something.”

She got up, found them on the counter, then sat down and I gestured to look at the spot where her hand shouldn’t be.

“Now this time, really concentrate. I don’t know if—”

No point in finishing the sentence. Her jaw hung open.

“Oh! I can see it! How is that possible?”

She tried it with and without the glasses, saw the hand appear and disappear. “Look! My fingernails! I had let them get long and I was meaning to cut them before I went in for the surgery. No wonder it hurts . . .”

Then she lifted the clenched fist off the table and, very slowly, uncurled the fingers. She laid the hand flat on the table.

“David. This is crazy.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s about the least crazy thing you’re gonna see today.”

The bathroom door burst open, and Molly came trotting out. The left half of her body had been shaved almost down to the skin. The right half was as shaggy as before. John emerged after her, brushing a layer of dog hair off his clothes.

John said, “Well, that’s done.”

Before I could stop her, Amy asked, “Why did you—”

“It was Molly’s idea. She wants to look like two different dogs when she’s coming and going. She thinks it will make it easier for her to steal food.”

He turned to me.

“That’s one complicated dog, Dave. Have you started on the bomb?”

“The what?”

SOCIETY IS DOOMED
for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down. John and I had scavenged the house for bomb- making materials. Neither of us knew how to make a bomb prior to today, but we improvised one by analyzing the molecular makeup of the ingredients. My head was taking on a fiery soreness, cooking like an engine run too long and too hard. I wondered, not for the first time, if using the soy sauce would shave years off my life and I realized that it probably didn’t matter.

So, using a packet of Jell- O and the innards of two smoke detectors and a pack of shredded playing cards and the refrigerant from my truck’s air conditioner and nine other ingredients, we fashioned a sticky explosive clay, mint green in color. We poured it into a tinfoil mold we made in the shape of a dog bone and stuck it in the freezer to solidify. The idea was to disguise it as something that would seem normal being in a dog owner’s front pocket, should we get caught and searched.

I sat at the kitchen table, snapping brass bullets into the one spare magazine I had bought for the Smith.

“Here’s what I think,” said John. “That facility, they’ve got to have some kind of intercom system. We sneak our way to the office where the mic is, and put the boom box in front of it. We go right for the fucking jugular: ‘November Rain,’ on a loop. While they’re all holdin’ their ears and begging for forgiveness, we go find this Korrok fucker and shove this bomb right up his ass. Or get him to eat it, if it turns out he’s a huge dog.”

I nodded and stood. The real plan, the unspoken one that hid between John’s words, was that we would die. But, we would die in the middle of what Korrok’s people would remember as the single most retarded and baffling incident in their history. We would be their Guy Fawkes. They would create a holiday about us. If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.

Me and John, I mean. Not Amy.

I let out a long breath and put on my coat. I dropped in the gun and the spare magazine. John threw on his Army jacket and leaned over, unzipped the backpack and pulled out a chainsaw. He had tied a length of bungee strap to it so he could carry it slung over his shoulder. He then picked up the homemade flamethrower, not questioning for a moment what it was or what it did. He flicked on the lighter and a delicate tongue of flame licked out in front of the barrel. He nodded in approval and blew it out, then grabbed the battle- ax off the floor and handed it to Amy. She managed to hold it aloft in her one hand for exactly two seconds before she let the head clang to the floor. She let go of the handle, then dug some Chap-Stick from her jacket and smeared it on her lips.

We were loading up the Bronco when John reminded me of the exploding dog bone. I ran inside, pulled it out of the aluminum- foil mold and walked into the yard with it in my hand.

I probably should have seen this next part coming. Molly ran over, half shaved and half shaggy, and snatched the bone from my fingers.

At John’s request I’ll skip over this next part, which involved us chasing the dog around the yard for a very long time and finally John tackling her, prying open her jaws and finding no remnant of exploding bone in there.

I began to walk away from the situation in disgust when a snow- covered John, still on the ground with Molly, said, “Look!”

He was holding up Molly’s front paw. I saw nothing unusual about it, but then realized the pi- like symbol we had seen on the carcass of exploded Molly was missing from this dog’s paw. Molly licked her nose and sneezed. John stood up; Molly flipped onto her feet and trotted away.

I said, “What do you think it means?”

“Hell, I don’t know. We need the bone bomb back. Take the chainsaw and cut open the dog.”

Amy objected to this and came up with what I thought was a far more disgusting plan of trying to flush the bone from the other end of Molly. She went inside and dug out two convenience- store burritos from my freezer and heated them in the microwave until they were lukewarm.

After feeding both burritos to Molly and seeing no immediate results, John said, “All right, let’s go. We’re gonna be late for our certain death.”