John Dies at the End

There was a sound like a garbage bag of pudding dropped off a tall building onto a sidewalk.

Robert had erupted, chunks slapping off the walls in every direction.

Justin let the phone fall from his hand. His mouth hung open. The room had emptied, now just him and the pink pile of what was left of the Rastafarian drug dealer, together in total silence.

A single white insect appeared. It circled above the wet wreckage of Robert’s former body, a white streak, creating the faintest buzz in the silent room.

The insect was joined by another. Then two more.

The sound grew. A high-pitched noise somewhere between the chattering of angry squirrels and the screech of locusts.

Dozens now. Each time I blinked, the swarm doubled in size. The bugs were long, like worms, and flew horizontally. Too many to count now, a swirling cloud above the spilled flesh.

I wanted out of this room, out of this town, off this planet. I had no means to move. It was the nightmare we’ve had a thousand times, a horror we can’t run from because the horror has swallowed us whole.

The sound grew with the swarm, I could feel it, it had a gut-level power like the pulse of John’s music at the party last night.

Then, in unison, the white swarm flew toward Justin.

He screamed.

The door burst open—

_______

—I BLINKED, AND saw Morgan in front of me. The stench of gasoline flooded

my sinuses. Back again.

“I come through the door and this kid, Justin, he’s on his hands and knees and just wailing. And I think he’s been stabbed in the gut but I look closer and he’s got something on him. All over him, his arms and his face.”

Morgan left the cigarette in his mouth as he spoke, the paper burning away, leaving a quarter inch of ash dangling off the end. Gasoline dripped off the wallpaper around me.

“It looks like, like thick hairs. All over him,” he said. “White, maybe like pipe cleaners, or little twisted bits of fishing line. And they’re on his eyelids and ears and neck and arms and this guy is screamin’, on his hands and knees, just shrieking like a little kid. And I see these things in the air, too, buzzing around him.”

A half inch of ash hanging off his cigarette now. My eyes moved from it to the gasoline-soaked floor at his feet.

“And man, I am frozen there, in the doorway. I mean, I look over and on one side of the room I got a guy sprayed all over the walls like he stepped on a land mine and then there’s this, and I should go try to, try to render some assistance but I don’t wanna touch him. I don’t want whatever’s on him on me.”

Morgan’s words trailed off again. He looked down at his own hands, as if to make absolutely sure they were clean.

The long hunk of ash fell off of his cigarette, onto the wet carpet below.

It went out with a soft hiss.

Morgan said, “Then I did what I shouldn’t have done: I ran back out to my car and called for the ambulance. I mean, it’s already on the way and I shoulda stayed in and, I don’t know, found a can of bug spray or somethin’ or dragged the guy off into the shower and washed these things off him but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself because of the way the guy was screamin’. But not just that. Bugs, even biting bugs, I’ll handle if I got to. But I could . . .”

He paused, testing what he was about to say in his own head. “I could hear them. Inside me. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, but found myself unable to speak. He opened a closet, doused the contents with gas.

“So I go to the car and I call it in and I’m real vague about what’s goin’ on, okay? I got a can of Mace in the car and I grab it and I head back inside and I’m thinkin’ I should call a hazmat team, guys who could come in and, I don’t know, seal this place off, disinfect it. But I gotta try to help this guy first and I rush back inside, and . . . he’s fine. Just like that. He’s standing there fixin’ his hair and there’s no sign of these things nowhere, the bugs or whatever. And this kid, Justin, he starts talkin’ like normal, like I just got there.”

I went down to the bedroom, threw open the door and, without looking in, tossed in the half-full gas can. I shut the door behind me. Morgan saw me, smiled.

“Yeah, you saw that. That painting. That’s messed up, ain’t it? Ain’t no man who could do that. And I tell ya what, you stay in there long enough, that mural gets inside your head. The dude that was takin’ pictures of the crime scene, he went in there for half an hour. He had to be dragged out and he was cryin’. Like a little baby.”

I said nothing.

He went on. “So the ambulance gets here, and the kid says he’s fine but I put him in it anyway, told the guys the kid maybe had somethin’ in his blood that could kill him any second. I mean, I know this kid is . . . infested, I guess. And I wanna know what this stuff is, but I never found out because the kid never arrived at the hospital. That ambulance took off from here with sirens and lights and it’s goin’ to St. John’s, which is just ten minutes away. Ambulance crew shows up there forty-five minutes later, laughin’ and jokin’ and carryin’ fast-food cups, and the kid is nowhere in sight. They ask the two guys what happened and they got no idea what anybody’s talkin’ about. No memory of any of it. Nobody’s heard from the kid since and when they go back out to the garage they find the effing ambulance is gone. They still ain’t found it. So, do you understand the kind of day I’m havin’?”

I wiped my cheek with the handkerchief, now deep red and sticky. My hands stank of fuel. I tried to process all this, still studying the carpet, wondering if maybe there wasn’t a swarm of alien bugs zipping around under the subfloor.

“So,” I said, “can you, uh, hear anything? Right now? Like they’re still hanging around in here?”

“Not since I got back.”

“But you’re gonna burn the place down just to make sure?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re not gonna let me go.”

He was silent for a moment, then said, “Those things that were on the guy? I been describing them like they were bugs or worms or something, you know, something you’ve seen before. But when they flew, I had one fly right across my face, okay, and they didn’t have, like, wings or anything. They had this little row of bristles, spiraling down their length like a barbershop pole. They sort of twisted through the air like that, headlong. A corkscrew motion. And the ones that were on the guy, on his skin? That’s what they were doin’ I think, turnin’ and drillin’ themselves into him. You understand?”

“You don’t think they were from this world.”

“You said it, I didn’t. I said I heard them, it’s like a, like a chittering I guess. You hear it, you don’t hear it really but you just get the sound in the middle of your head, like an itch. It’s not so much like a swarm of bees but more like a crowd, a crowd at a concert because you can pick out words and, I say it out loud and it sounds insane, but you can hear them talking to each other, coordinating. And more than that, you can hear their hate. Okay? I want you to understand this. I want you to understand what I’m about to do.”

“I think I do.”

The survival part of my brain was scrambling for a plan to get the cop’s gun or at least get away from him, but in my current clarity of mind I realized the certainty of it all. The man was going to shoot me and leave me here, no matter what I did. I was just waiting for it now. An odd feeling.

“So,” he said, a kind of slow panic creeping into his eyes, “you understand my mood. You understand why I’m out committin’ felonies today. There are dark things happenin’ and I got the real lonely feeling like I’m the only one who knows, the only one who can do anything about it.”

Morgan moved toward the door, blocking my exit. He sat the gas can down, almost empty now, and gestured to it. “Pick it up, and toss it out the door, in the yard.”

I hesitated, the detective put his gun on me again. I did as he asked. He pulled out his lighter once more and, holding it in one hand and his revolver in the other, ignited it. The gasoline fumes burned my nose now and I was getting lightheaded.

Standing there, a little yellow flame flickering in his hand, he said, “You know, everybody’s got a ghost story. Or a UFO story or a Bigfoot story or an ESP story. Sit around a campfire late at night and you won’t find one janitor who ain’t seen a glowing old lady roamin’ the halls in the middle of the night or maybe a hunter who’s seen a pair of leathery wings flappin’ out of a tree, somethin’ way too big to be a bat. Or just somethin’ simple, like a little kid at the store who goes around the corner and disappears into thin air a second later. And nobody thinks it’s real because they figure nobody else saw it, but everybody’s got their story. Everybody.”

He gazed into the lighter flame as he spoke, as if mesmerized. His gun was pointed at the floor and with a soft double-click his thumb pulled back the hammer, as if on its own.

“Now what I think,” he said to his lighter, “I think all that stuff is both real and not real at the same time. And I think the people who see it and the people that don’t are both right. They’re just like two different radios, switched to different stations. Now I ain’t no Star Trek fan and I don’t know about other dimensions and all that. But I am an old Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain’t just rapists and murderers down there; I believe it’s demons and worms and vile things that wouldn’t make no sense to you if you saw them. It’s the grease trap of the universe. And I think somehow, through some chemistry or magic or some voodoo, that faux Jamaican S.O.B. opened the door into Hell itself. He became the door.”

I nodded, opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again.

“And me,” he said, nodding to himself. “I intend to close it.”

He raised his gun and shot me in the heart.

I WOKE UP in Hell. Darkness and pain, time standing still. No wailing, though. I was sure Hell would have wailing.

A creak, a floorboard. And then a FLUMPH sound, like a lit gas grill.

I blacked out.

I came back. How much time had passed? I smelled smoke, was sure I was in Hell this time. Or was I dreaming?

I forced my eyes open, my nose filled with an acidic itch. I was disappointed to find Hell had a cheap tiled ceiling, some browned with water damage.

My chest hurt. Stung. I was shocked to find I still had an arm and could move it. I felt a wet patch right in the middle of my shirt, winced with the pain. I was cold all over, and vaguely realized I was in shock. I thought of Frank Wambaugh.

Frank worked on the Worthington Munitions production line in Plano, Texas, for eleven years. The company manufactures over one hundred types of cartridges for hunting, sport shooting and law enforcement. A couple of years ago Frank was manning his station as a third-line inspector, the last step in a meticulous quality control process. Defective bullets at Worthington are measured in parts per billion, thanks to that three-tiered inspection system and to the fear of legal liability should one of their cartridges explode in a policeman’s face.

Nonetheless, there was a bad bullet among the half-million .38 caliber rounds produced that day at Worthington, thanks to a fly that crawled inside one of the casings as it passed from the machine that added its pinch of propellant. The defective fly bullet was the only one that day to pass by both of the first two inspection stations unnoticed. Frank would have spotted it, but at the exact moment the possible defect error displayed on his screen, Frank was distracted by a man behind him.

Or so he thought. He turned, and saw no one.

When he satisfied himself that he had imagined the spoken “hey” that, upon reflection, he heard more in his head than with his ears, he returned to his work and was none the wiser. The defective round thus passed unnoticed, was packaged, sold through a law enforcement catalogue eight months later and finally distributed to Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton six months after that.

A year later Freeman loaded said cartridge into his revolver and fired it into my chest. The projectile had only a fraction of the normal propellant and thus less than one tenth of its usual impact force. The bullet had punched through my skin, scratched the thick bone over my heart and bounced off.

I opened my eyes, didn’t remember blacking out again. So tired. Waiting for the flames now. I raised my head and saw the couch was a bonfire, black smoke rolling up to the ceiling. Fire licked the paneling and it bubbled and blackened under its touch. The carpet below the couch was saturated with high octane. The moment a spark fell it would—

I was moving, just like that, crawling on hands and knees. Damn, smoke filling in so fast now, like breathing wads of hot cigarette butts. Gotta get to the door, gotta get to the door. Can’t see shit. I saw something that looked like a door, reached out, touched smooth metal. Refrigerator.

I had crawled in the exact wrong direction. I turned, crawled. Felt along the wall. Carpet on fire now. Shit, hot as hell in here. I crawled. Crawled and crawled. Ah, here’s the door. Thank God. I reached out.

Refrigerator again.

My skin burned, pulled tight on my skull. The place was an oven, a blast furnace. Is that my hair burning? I squinted around. The living room was an orange blur behind me. Could I even make it through there now?

I felt this weird twitching in my chest and realized I was coughing. I lowered my head to the linoleum, hoping to find a few inches of fresh air down there. So tired. I closed my eyes.

PEOPLE DIE.

This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.

I was lucky. I learned this a long time ago, in a tiny, stifling room behind my high school gym. Most people don’t realize it until they’re laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever.

And no one cares. You kick and scream and cry out into the darkness, and no answer comes. You rage against the unfathomable injustice and two blocks away some guy watches a baseball game and scratches his balls.

Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don’t know what it is. Well I know. It’s apathy. 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!!!

Molly was up in the seat, jamming her head out the half-open passenger window.

“John . . .”

“WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOFWOOFWOOFWOOF!!!”

Cat!! Cat! Cat!!! Cat!!! CAT!! CAT!!!! CAAAATTT!!!

A filthy gray cat zipped across the trailer park, across the front of the car and off into the distance. Molly pulled her head inside and tromped over to the driver’s-side window, stomping on my crotch and shouting “CAT!!!” the whole way. It took ten minutes to get the dog calmed down, at which point she promptly curled up and went to sleep in the passenger seat.

“John?”

The dog farted. I got nothing else out of her the rest of the night.

CHAPTER 5

Riding with Shitload

I DROVE TO a convenience store and bought a road atlas. Back in my car I unfolded it in my lap and drew out the path to Las Vegas with an ink pen. Was I actually doing this?

I knew I would need cash for gas and to replace the several vital parts of the Hyundai’s drivetrain that would likely shatter over the course of the long drive. I had nothing in the bank. This seemed to be a rather major problem, but within a few seconds of watching the sunset in the convenience store’s parking lot, a plan popped into my head, fully formed and alien. I had learned to accept such things in the last few hours.

This wasn’t Dave thinking.

This was soy sauce thinking.

I drove downtown, scanning the alleys until I saw a rail-thin Mexican kid standing by a Dumpster wearing a St. Louis Rams jacket. The kid was wearing the jacket, not the Dumpster. I calmly stepped out of my Hyundai, smiled broadly at him.

I had never met him before.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Without hesitation, I heard myself say, “Yo. Mikey said you got a package for me.”

What the fuck.

The kid squinted at me, didn’t move. “Who the fuck are you?”

The kid moved slightly, the bottom of his Ram’s jacket sliding up his skeletal frame. The gun sticking out of the kid’s jeans was black and sleek, looking like something that could shoot lasers. The irony that he was able to afford a nicer gun than the Undisclosed Police Department gave Detective Freeman would have amused me if I wasn’t busy picturing the kid pumping six bullets into my forehead with it.

Again, I heard myself speaking. A single word that to me, had no meaning.

“Creech.”

My soy sauced brain had officially taken off without me. I was operating on autopilot, phrases and words scrolling up into my mind as if fed to me on a teleprompter.

The kid said nothing.

He reached into his jacket . . .

And pulled out an envelope.

He stepped up and gave me a hug, slipping the envelope to me in one smooth, practiced motion.

As the kid turned away, I slowly let out the breath I had been holding.

I would like to reiterate: what the fuck.

Back in the car, I pulled the envelope out, opened it, saw it was stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills. I had no idea what any of that was, only that speaking those words to that person would get me cash, like a complicated PIN at an ATM machine.

I counted six thousand dollars.

Alrighty.

Without knowing my destination, I drove directly to the Merry Nation Bar and Grill, six blocks away. I went to the parking lot and glanced around, still without any real idea of what I was looking for.

I went right to a cobalt-blue Dodge pickup that I had never seen in my life. I found it unlocked, reached in, felt around under the seat.

I pulled out a satin-finish steel automatic handgun.

Fully loaded.

God bless America.

I stuck the gun in the back of my pants, felt strangely comforted by its gouge into the small of my back as I sat back down in the Hyundai. Evening had set in now, on one of the longest, most retarded days of my life.

I was about to point the car west, then realized I didn’t want to drive for over 1,500 miles—

1,669

—in these shit-stained pants and bloodstained shirt.

I drove home to change, proving that even on the soy sauce, part of me was still a dumbass.

I THREW THE clothes in the trash and showered, paranoid the whole time,

thinking I was hearing opening doors and floor creaks and murderous things bumping around outside the shower curtain. It had been that kind of a day.

I dressed and put on Band-Aids, collected my toothbrush and a comb and contact lens fluid and dumped it into my leather duffel bag.

I flung myself down the hall—

I stopped cold.

My bag fell from my hand with a soft thud.

A teenager stood there. Right in the middle of my living room, a space that had been proudly teenager-free for years.

Braces.

Black Limp Bizkit T-shirt.

I said, “Justin?”

Standing there with a shit-eating grin on its face, the thing that had been Justin opened its mouth and emitted a rumbling sound, like something boiling up from his lungs. After a moment he closed it again.

He gathered himself and said brightly, “Why you frontin’ here? You know what time it is. Stop callin’ me Justin like nothin’s changed, yo.”

I pictured swarms of white worms twitching through his bloodstream and suddenly had to fight the impulse to run away screaming like a toddler.

I took a step back.

Justin took a step forward.

Buying time, I asked, “What should I call you?”

I shifted my feet, felt the nudge of the gun against my lower back. I had never fired a gun before, and certainly never fired one at a man. The thought brought cool sweat to my forehead and a hot, jittery anticipation. Not entirely unpleasant. I had felt it before.

Justin’s mouth opened again, struggling to speak words completely foreign to itself.

“Shitload. Know why? It’s because there’s a shitload of us in here. Now here’s what’s gonna happen—”

The left side of Justin’s scalp disappeared in a spray of pink brain matter. He was thrown backward, my finger squeezing the trigger as fast as it could twitch, the sound shattering the air. Little sprays of blood flicked out from Justin’s chest and thighs and gut, shots landing and backing him across the room.

Jesus, Dave.

I had drawn the gun in a mindless reflex, like slapping at a mosquito bite. I tasted blood where I had bit through my lip. I felt electricity inside, the buzz of the violence, sparks raining down inside my skull as if from a blown fuse.

Too familiar.

Shitload stumbled backward one last time and fell against a wall, but kept his feet.

I pulled the trigger again.

Click.

I squeezed the trigger about twenty more times just to be sure there wasn’t another shot hiding in there somewhere. Shitload righted himself, looked down at his wounds, sighed like a man who has dropped his pie in his lap.

Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me.

I saw now that the white rods were binding up each of his wounds, forming a stitching like the back side of fiberglass. I finally realized I wasn’t fighting this kid, I was fighting those things. The fear was like lead weights in my chest.

He said, “Man, your little nine is useless against—”

His words were cut off when the empty gun I hurled at him smacked off his cheek, knocking him backward once more. He brought a hand to his face.

“Stop that shit! Don’t you know we got the same plan?”

He took a step toward me. I looked across the room. The door. The window. I couldn’t make it to either without going through Shitload.

He said, “We both goin’ to Vegas, right? You all packed up and all.”

My hand at my side, I made a fist.

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

I realized once more that I was about to enter a fight and, again, had learned no fighting skills since the last one. Only this time there was a good chance the fight would end with me feeling the opponent’s teeth ripping out my eyeballs.

“Sure you is.”

He lunged. I threw a flailing punch that missed by a foot.

The Justin monster fired out a low punch, the impact exploding in my groin. I doubled over, struggled to keep my feet.

“The only difference is . . .”

He advanced and in a blur threw three more punches that each landed solidly on my balls. A heavy sickness bloomed in my gut and I fell back against a chair. I awkwardly kicked at his chest.

He caught the leg and delivered an expert crotch kick that finished me.

“. . . I’m doin’ the drivin’.”

Justin clasped both of his hands into one fist, raised it high above his head as if in victory and then with all his might brought it down on my groin.

I blacked out.

DARKNESS, BARKING AND footsteps. I felt Molly’s wet nose on my forehead, then felt her walking over me. All four paws managed to hit my aching crotch on the way over.

I felt the floor moving against me and realized I was being dragged. I was hefted over a shoulder like a sack of dog food and dropped onto a metal floor. A door clanged shut, a latch clicked into place.

In the haze I felt the presence of others around me, could sense terrified thoughts darting around their minds like flies. I could sense the sauce in them, the soy sauce, I could smell it on their thoughts like alcohol on a wino’s breath.

Vegas.

I had a hallucination, or a vision. It was the road atlas, spread before me, the red highways tangled like arteries across the country. Undisclosed on the right, Las Vegas a red dot on the left, the line of an ink pen scratched along the highways joining the two.

We were going there because he wanted us there. Not this Justin monster, either. Who?

The soy sauce? Again I felt the presence of it in this space. Pulsing. A will of its own. The soy sauce was alive, I knew that.

But beyond it, too, there was someone else. Something else. And every dark thing I had run into was working on its behalf.

In my vision, the map rustled. The red spot marking Las Vegas pulsed, as if something was pushing it from behind. Scratching. Like an animal trying to gnaw its way through.

My eyes snapped open.

I was expecting to find myself inside Justin’s stolen ambulance. Instead I saw cardboard boxes stacked around me, each bearing liquor logos. There was a sweet, spoiled smell of ancient spilt beer around me.

Sitting on one stack was Big Jim Sullivan, copper hair capping 275 pounds of bulk.

You should call home, Jim. Cucumber is worried about you.

Next to Jim was a very pale and shaky Jennifer Lopez, scratched and dirty, wearing the same outfit from the party.

Lying across a row of green Heineken cases was a little, wiry man with shoulder-length hair and a goatee, whom I had never seen before and who, by process of elimination, had to be Fred Chu. He had his tattooed arms folded under his head and looked unharmed. Molly went and sat down in the middle of them, bored.

On sight of me, Fred Chu said, “Shit.”

Jennifer buried her head in her hands and began weeping softly.

Jim said, “Hey, you found Molly.”

The engine started and we jolted into motion. I raised my head and looked around the dim cargo area. Among the crude beer-case furniture the passengers had stacked for themselves was a low, unoccupied seat of boxes in the corner, as if they had known I was coming.

For some reason this annoyed me so much I almost failed to notice that sitting in the corner, cross-legged and wearing hospital pajamas, was John. He stared intently at the wall, not blinking.

Big Jim said, “We’re moving again.” He reached down and stroked Molly.

I sat up. Big Jim turned his eyes on me, said, “We heard the shots. Are you the one who hurt him? I saw his head.”

“I was aiming for his heart but, yeah, I did get him.”

Jennifer sobbed the word, “Good.” An empty, flat, bitter sound. Jim turned toward the others and said, “Okay, we got one more hostage. We can still make it, guys. Just gotta believe, that’s all.”

I pretended not to hear this, concentrated on not puking from my ball trauma.

I asked Jen, “Are you okay?”

Jen nodded. “Where’s he taking us?”

“Las Vegas.”

That drew stares from around the room.

“No, seriously.”

Fred Chu said, “The rest of us are fine, by the way. But you gotta understand what’s happenin’ here. The guy who attacked you, he ain’t no fuckin’ man, okay? He’s been invaded by fuckin’ body snatchers or whatever.”

“Yeah, I—”

“—I mean if you saw what happened with Shelby. The Jamaican guy spat acid on her hand. The muscle and bone fell apart, just, like, dripped off like fuckin’ wax.”

I thought of the ache in my groin, realized I had gotten off easy.

Jim said, “Justin is—or those things inside Justin—are evil. And I mean that as a noun, not an adjective. They’re the kind of physical manifestation that could only have been spawned by the Devil himself.”

“I don’t . . . completely disagree with that.”

“Now, we’ve been praying,” continued Jim. “All of us, in a circle. Fred, Jen and me, even John, as best we could involve him. I had to threaten to beat them first but they joined in eventually. We prayed for someone to come along, to save us from whatever dark thing is up there behind the wheel. And then you showed up, like an answer. Now, you faced that thing. You stood up to it. You’ve been delivered to us, to be the voice to answer a question I have put to God over and over since this whole thing started: How do we kill it?”

“No, Jim, that’s not the question. The question is, can it be killed at all.”

I pictured the map, and the rabid thing trying to claw through. I realized the scale was all wrong. To this thing, whatever it was, the real Las Vegas, the whole Earth, all of mankind, was as insignificant as the red dot on the map. I pictured a blue, knowing eye, in the darkness.

But that’s still the wrong question, isn’t it? Maybe Justin can be killed. Maybe not. And maybe it doesn’t mean a fucking thing.

I looked toward John.

He should be the one doing the talking. He’s been waiting his whole life for something like this, just to prove the universe is as retarded as he’s always pictured it in his head. I needed John to be here, alive and unafraid. I needed him to be John.

I turned toward him and said, “Wake up.”

Nothing. I looked back at Molly, then nudged John with my foot. “Wake up. Wake up, asshole.”

More nothing. I felt eyes on me, resisted the urge to punch John right in his stupid catatonic face.

“Look, we fucking need you. Now wake up.”

“Hey.” A soft voice, from behind me. I turned and Jennifer Lopez’s wet eyes met mine. There was sympathy there, and I felt a tug from inside. Though that could have been one of my testicles detaching from the trauma. “Calm down, okay? You’re not helping.”

Molly stirred, looked around lazily and then trotted over to John’s frozen body. I stepped back as she nuzzled him, then flinched when I saw his hand reach over to pet her.

There was a jolt through John’s body, like an electrical shock, so fast that we could barely process the change in posture.

Suddenly he was on his feet, confused, looking at his hands like he was surprised to have them. Looking up, he seemed to see us for the first time and said to no one in particular, “I had a really vivid dream that I was a dog.”

IT TOOK JOHN a while to come around. He knew we were in a beer truck piloted by some kind of infested evil, but seemed to have trouble adjusting to actually existing inside his body, in one physical location.

“I’ve got such a headache.” He searched his pockets, said, “Anybody have any smokes I could borrow?”

No one did. John took the empty seat, then turned his eyes on me and said, “Let’s, uh, start over. How many people do you see in here?”

“What?”

“Just humor me.”

Jim said, “I know what he’s asking. They can make you see what they want you to see. John wants to make sure we can all trust our eyes. Right?”

Going around the room, I pointed out the four other residents of Undisclosed who had the misfortune of depending on John and me for their lives. Five if you counted Jennifer’s boobs separately, as I suddenly had the impulse to. Goddamned testosterone.

John nodded, seeming somewhat relieved. “Good. And yeah, like Jim said, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t, uh, projecting, I guess. You know what I’m saying, Dave? Like that cop in the police station, the one who wasn’t really there. I wasn’t in the room but I remember it anyway, and he looked like a stereotypical cop, like a generic. Standard issue. An extra in a movie.”

Jim nodded again and I wondered how much of this same shit he had been through himself. He said, “Hollywood raised us. Your mind processes the world through a filter formed by comic books and action movies on Cinemax. That’s why kids put on trench coats and take guns to school. The Devil knows how to control us.”

Jim seemed to be seizing on the opportunity to bring up Satan in a conversation where nobody could counter him with rationalism. Devils and angels seemed pretty plausible in this context and Jim intended to ride that horse hard.

John said, “People who wake up in the middle of the night and see those big-eyed alien abductors or a ghostly old woman . . . it’s always something they saw in some movie, isn’t it? Your mind puts a familiar face on something it can’t understand. Only here, somehow it becomes real. At least to you.”

We rode in silence, I think all of us wondering what was behind the flowery wallpaper our perceptions had always pasted on the unknown. All the things the mind won’t allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants.

Fred spoke first, breaking the silence.

“Well fuck ’em. That’s what I say.”

Jennifer said, “I took a cinema class at the community college last semester. Most of the films were in French and were about people making out in coffee shops, or in apartments over coffee shops. But I don’t even have a TV anymore, so that might help.”

I closed my eyes and sighed, wishing Jim would pray for longer attention spans. “Okay,” I said, “let’s set that aside because at the moment we’re not talking about ghost stories or vampires. That thing up there in the cockpit is real, real as any of us—”

Crotch-punchingly real!

“—and it can make us really dead. Now do you guys understand what it wants with us?”

Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”

“Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”

I sighed again, rubbed my forehead with both hands. There was a very real chance that the conversation had taken a turn that would allow John to talk about his dick, which was a subject it could take hours, if not the better part of days, to come back from. Nipping it in the bud, I said:

“Nooooo. It’s none of that. Look, you know the story of the Trojan horse? A few soldiers get inside the enemy camp riding in this big horse statue, then at night they sneak out of the horse and let the rest of their army in the front gates? Well, that drug the Jamaican was on, it let something through. He became the horse. And those things, the white flying wormy things, they came through. Now they’re in Justin and now he’s looking to open the gate and let their buddies in.”

This brought silence. I scanned the cartons around us, the vague outlines of a plan forming in my head.

Fred said, “Dude, how do you possibly know that?”

“I pieced it together through inductive reasoning and information relayed to me by John when he was talking to me through the dog. Long story.”

“Okay,” Fred said, accepting it readily. I sensed that I was in the presence of the king of the go-with-the-flow types. “But why us?”

“Because we were chosen,” Jim answered. “Called. And that’s all that matters.”

We were chosen all right, Jim. But not by God, unless God is a black liquid in a silver jar. Hell, maybe he is.

I locked eyes with Jim. I thought of his sister saying the Jamaican had showed up at their house. Jim, at the party, talking to Robert.

He was right there, from the beginning.

And he fucking knows more than he’s letting on.

Did he light the fuse on this whole situation somehow? Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they’re the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight.

Fred nodded and said, “So what you’re saying is, if we all die, that’s not even the worst-case scenario.”

John replied, “I’d still like to shoot a little higher than that, Freddy.”

I looked over his shoulder and scanned the cardboard boxes stacked up against the back wall of the truck. I thought for a moment and then asked John, “How much alcohol does liquor have to have in it before it will burn?”

A COUPLE OF hours later, we had a dozen full bottles lined up near the rear door, each with a bundle of wet cloth cut from Fred’s flannel shirt jutting six inches out of the opening. When the Justin monster finally stopped, we’d wait for him to open that door and light his ass up.

But the truck didn’t stop. For hours we rode in useless silence, slumped against the metal walls, drifting in and out of fitful sleep. John found a little vented slit in the side of the cargo hold and we took turns watching the world flow by outside.

The wait was Hell. Sunday morning turned to Sunday afternoon. We pissed in empty bottles, though I can’t remember exactly how Jennifer pulled that off. The view out of the little vent turned from cornfield to desert as hundreds and hundreds of miles of highway skimmed by under us.

Twenty-eight hours, nineteen minutes. That’s how long we were in the truck, all told. We found a case of Evian water at the back of the truck but our only source of calories came from warm beer, a diet for which John needed no adjustment at all.

Finally—finally—we slowed, taking multiple turns as if having entered a town.

Each of us sprang up, moving to the back of the truck. We started gathering up bottles.

The truck stopped. We all held our breath. But then it started off again, in a different direction.

We had our plan. Or, considering that the plan had come from me, we had given up and were waiting to die.

Big Jim glanced around at us and said in a low, solemn voice, “Listen, now. Because when that thing opens the door, some of us may die. And at that point, you may have a chance to run, to get away, to save yourself. But we have to stay and finish the job. Do you understand?”

We nodded. Again I was hit with the sense that he comprehended a danger far larger than the rest of us did. He continued, “I don’t think you do understand. But . . .”

He swallowed.

“. . . You guys know my sister, who’s back home at this moment. In that big, old house. Well we’ve always had a mouse problem. And, you know, we work hard to keep the place up, to keep it clean, since our parents passed away. But you can’t keep the mice away. They get everywhere. The cabinets, the walls. I got poison set out all over the place for these things.”

Fred pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it once to make sure it worked.

Jim stared at the floor and continued, “Then, one day I look under her bed and she’s got a little saucer there, with bread on it. The bread’s all chewed off at the corners. She put it there on purpose.”

The truck turned again. We heard the crackle of gravel under the tires now.

Jim looked up at us again, a kind of pleading in his eyes. “Do you understand? She was feeding them. The whole time I was trying to kill them, she was trying to keep them alive.”

I pictured her back there, small and alone in that cavernous house, and I did understand. Jim fucking knew something was coming, on its way to this world, through Las Vegas for whatever fucking reason. He knew what was at stake, while the whole world, vulnerable and unaware, went about its business behind us. I just wished he would use his sister’s damned name so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking of her as Cucumber.

“John, Fred. You guys, if one of you makes it out of this instead of me, I want you to promise me something. I want you to look in on her, make sure she’s—just make sure she’s taken care of, okay? She’s smart, you know. I don’t mean she’s—it’s just she ain’t never been on her own. I want you to promise me.”

The truck turned again. Slowing.

John said, “Of course, man.”

I thought of John’s last pet, a little terrier dog that jumped out of his third-floor apartment window and died while he played video games on the couch. Yeah, Cucumber will be in good hands, Big Jim.

John flicked his lighter. The truck turned for the last time, then slowed to a stop. I couldn’t breathe.

John peered through the vent, trying to see where we were. He said, “If I die, I want you to tell everybody I died in the coolest way possible. Dave, you can have my CDs. My brother will demand the PlayStation, since I borrowed it from him a year ago, so don’t fight him for it.”

Jennifer hesitated for a long moment before whispering, “Um, there’s a loose floorboard under my bed. I keep stuff down there. There’s some pot and a little notebook with like, some guys’ names in it, and—some other stuff. If I die I want one of you to go in my bedroom and get all that stuff out so my mom doesn’t find it.”

John reached over and lit the wicks on all three of the Molotov cocktails I held. His hand was steady, mine were not.

Fred whispered, “Okay. If I don’t come back, and say they don’t got my body, like if Justin eats me or somethin’, tell everybody you don’t know what happened. Make it mysterious. And then a year later spread rumors that you’ve seen me wanderin’ around town. That way I’ll be like fuckin’ Bigfoot, everybody claiming to have seen me here and there. Legend of Fred Chu.”

John nodded, as if he were committing this to memory. He lit his own firebombs, glanced up at me and asked, “You got any final requests, in case this don’t end well?”

“Yeah. Avenge my death.”

WE WERE POSITIONED in a circle by the front of the door, each with a high-proof cocktail in each hand. I studied the small orange-and-blue flame dancing on the bundle of wet cloth crammed into the bottle. My heart hammered. Molly whimpered behind me.

The moments oozed out like ketchup from a glass bottle. I could hear Jim breathing next to me, felt a trickle of sweat roll down my temple.

The latch clicked and scraped. Every muscle in my body tensed. I looked down and squeezed the beer bottle in my hand.

Jesus, we are going to die, we are actually going to die here.

The door slowly ground up in its tracks. A band of pale moonlight appeared at the floor, a stiff wind whistling in as the door slid upward. There he was, revealed from the shins up. Jeans and shirt and—

Oh, holy shit.

Justin looked mostly normal, skin pale under the moonlight, blond hair rustling in the stiff breeze, a pimple on his chin. Only now both of his eyes were protruding about six inches from his skull.

The pupils at the end of their new white-and-pink stalks twisted horribly in our direction, staring at us for a very long and terrible moment. We were so caught off guard by this that it killed our momentum, all of us frozen and expecting the person next to them to make the first move.

To Jennifer’s credit, she broke the paralysis by weakly tossing a flaming bottle at Justin. The Justin monster watched as it missed and bounced harmlessly to the ground, rolling to a stop. The wick flickered and went out. Shitload curled his twin optical skull-erections down and looked at the sad bottle draining its contents into the dirt. After a moment he turned back up to us and said, “Put that shit down and come with me, fools.”

He backed away from us, seeming to realize his eyes were dangling from his skull and in a series of sickening, jerky neck movements sucked them back in.

We stood there for a moment, looked at each other with a kind of deflated shame and defeat, then did what he said.

They were waiting for me, I realized, too late. They were waiting for me to push the attack, to lead them.

Welcome aboard the David Wong Disappointment Train, fuckers.

We weren’t in Vegas. A quick glance around showed we were squarely in the middle of rural nowhere. It was a windy night and in small-town Nevada that apparently means dust. Justin, the hybrid walking demon hive and Limp Bizkit fan, led us across a dusty yard onto a paint-peeled dusty porch where a pair of ancient and very dusty shoes sat mummifying in the dusty desert air.

The door was ajar and had only a perfectly round hole where the knob should have been.

Propped next to the door was a dust-covered but new FedEx box, which almost certainly was a delivery mistake since this place looked to be in its tenth year of vacancy.

Justin pushed in through the door, indifferently kicking the box inside as he passed.

As we moved inside I noticed for the first time that Justin had an old, mud-smeared glass jar in his hand and I vaguely remembered seeing it or one just like it in the Jamaican’s makeshift basement. He placed it on the floor and walked around to us one by one, arranging our bodies, seated, in a semicircle around it. I saw a speech coming and could only pray that I wouldn’t come out sounding like a white kid raised next to a cornfield trying to record interlude skits for a gang-sta rap album.

Shitload said, “This world is shit, yo.”

Oh, goddamnit.

“How do you people be gettin’ around in this, all in these bodies and shit? You act all scared that I’m gonna kill ya, when it’s the best thing I could do for you, yo. Deadworld, man, it’s alternate layers of rot and shit and rot and shit.”

I looked around the dim group, saw moonlight from the window cracks reflecting off of tears on Jennifer’s cheeks. Big Jim had his eyes closed, maybe in prayer. Fred Chu looked around as if uninterested, stroking his goatee with one hand and fidgeting with a strip of carpet foam with the other. John was staring vacantly at a spot on the other side of the room, already distracted into a dull stupor. Molly licked her crotch.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Undisclosed Hell-Conqueror Strike Force!

To at least feel like I was doing something, I said, “Deadworld? Is that where you’re from?”

“No, dude. That’s where you’re from. It’s where we are now. This place, it’s a horror show. If the guy next to you decides to knock you out of this world forever, he can do it with just a piece of metal or, hell, even his bare hand. You blobs, you sit there, chillin’ in this room and I can smell the rot of dead animals soaking in the acid of your guts. You suck the life from the innocent creatures of this world just so you can clock another day. You’re machines that run on the terror and pain and mutilation of other lives. You’ll scrape the world clean of every green and living thing until starvation goes one-eight-seven on every one of your sorry asses, your desperation to put off death leadin’ to the ultimate death of everybody and everything. Dude, I can’t believe you ain’t all paralyzed by the pure, naked horror of this place.”

After a long, long pause John said, “Uh, thank you.”

John’s eyes never moved as he spoke, and suddenly I saw a look there, a confidence. I followed his gaze, saw what he was seeing, and then quickly looked away again.

I glanced back at the Justin monster, wondering if he had caught on. But he was busy. He twisted the lid off the old pickle jar, and a small, shriveled thing, like a dried-up earthworm, dropped out and landed quietly on the floor.

Shitload went to the kitchen and I heard him messing around with the sink in there. No water. He came back, studied our faces, and pointed to Fred.

“Piss on it,” he commanded.

I was so baffled by this that I wasn’t even sure I had heard him right. But Fred, having perfected going with the flow to a degree that philosophers could study for centuries, shrugged and said, “Okay.”

He stood, unzipped, urinated on the floor, zipped up and sat back down. The little black dried-worm sliver sat in the middle of the bubbling puddle. Nothing for a long time, maybe a minute.

And then, the worm twitched.

Jennifer screamed, everybody jumped.

The shriveled nothing grew. And grew. And grew.

Just add water!

A hand formed. A human hand, pink and the size of a baby’s. Stretching out from behind it, instead of an arm, was something like an insect leg. It was a foot long, springing out to length before our eyes like a radio antenna. Something like a shell took shape. I saw an eye, red and clustered like a fly’s. Another eye, this one with a round pupil, like a mammal, grew in next to it. Then another eye, yellow with a black slit down the center. Reptilian.

The thing grew and grew some more. It grew to the size of a rabbit, then a small dog, then stopped when it was about a foot-and-a-half high and maybe three feet wide, probably the same overall mass as Molly.

The finished creature seemed to be assembled from spare parts. It had a tail like a scorpion curling up off its back. It walked on seven—yes, seven—legs, each ending in one of those small, pink infantile hands. It had a head that was sort of an inverted heart shape, a bank of mismatched eyes in an arc over a hooked, black beak, like a parrot’s. On its head, no kidding, it had a tuft of neatly groomed blond hair that I swear on my mother’s grave was a wig, held on with a rubber band chinstrap.

What was strange about it, or rather, what was stranger about it was that the two sections of its body—the hindquarters and the abdomen—were not connected. There was a good two inches of space between them and when it turned sideways you could see right through the thing. But it moved in unison, as if they were connected by invisible tissue.

The little monster stood twitching there on the floor like a newborn calf, still dripping with urine.

John said, “Huh.”

Fred said, “Guys, can you all see that fuckin’ thing, or is it just me?”

The beast moved in circles, looking around the room. Justin said to us, “Don’t move. If I ask it to, it’ll kill you, yo. You don’t know what that thing’s capable of. Shit, lookin’ at the thing, I don’t even think it knows. But that ain’t my goal, I coulda capped you all back home if that was the plan. It ain’t.”

The thing turned and turned, staring down each of us, its dozen eyes blinking at different intervals. It finally stopped, looking my direction. Molly stirred behind me, a low growl rising from her.

“All I need you to do is hold still, yo. In a minute ain’t none of you gonna remember why you got all worked up and shit.”

The creature crouched, then vanished in a blur. I threw myself back, expected the monster to suddenly be on me, but it wasn’t. I heard a horrible, high-pitched yelp behind me and turned to find the monster on Molly’s back, its legs wrapped around her body, dug into her fur like steel cables.

Jennifer screamed, everyone stirred. Justin shouted at us to stay down, stay down. I watched as the thing whipped back that scorpion tail (Did I say it was like a scorpion? The freaking tail had hair on it.) and with a flick, the end was buried in the dog’s hide. The length of the tail started pulsing and twitching. It was pumping something into her.

Molly whimpered.

And then it was over. The beast jumped off. Molly looked terrorized but kept her feet. I saw the tip of the monster’s scorpion tail and noticed a drip of thick, black fluid trickling out.

Soy sauce.

Wait. What? That’s where it comes from?

A burst of movement, behind me. Shuffling feet and shouts.

John was making his move, diving in the direction we had been looking earlier. He skidded on the floor and seized the white FedEx box.

Shitload was on him fast, Bruce Lee–fast. He delivered a kick to John’s gut that actually knocked him back a couple of feet. He then wrenched the box from John’s arms. Shitload looked baffled, moved to throw the box aside but stopped cold.

He looked at the label, then at John, then at me, then at the label again. I stood and moved slowly toward them.

Shitload stared at John and said, “What’s in here?”

John said nothing, looked like he wasn’t too sure himself. I moved closer still, not understanding. Shitload stiffened his arm toward John in a “Heil Hitler” motion. This confused us for a second—before a slit appeared in his palm and something like a mouth puckered there. A thin stream of thick, yellow liquid dripped onto the floor, gathering in a small, smoking puddle that quickly ate through the floorboards with a soft hiss.

“Tell me,” Justin demanded.

I looked down at the label on the box. The package was addressed to John’s real name, to this house in this Nevada town. It was dated yesterday, sent via overnight delivery, with John’s own small, neat handwriting.

“Tell me, or I’ll melt your face, yo. What is it, like, a bomb?”

John shrugged, said, “Why don’t you open it and we’ll both find out?”

Shitload sat the box on the floor, said, “Take it outside.”

“Okay.” John bent over to pick it up.

“Stop! Leave it where it is.”

“Okay.”

He pointed to the wig monster and said, “Open the box.”

The thing apparently understood, because it trundled over and started tearing at the flap with its beak. After several long, clumsy minutes of this, during which I tried to show it the little tear strip all FedEx boxes have, it finally stuck its snout inside and pulled out a sheet of wrinkled notebook paper.

Shitload picked it up, saw scrawled on it in big ink pen letters: “JOHN LOOK BY THE BUSH IN THE FRONT YARD.”

The Justin monster turned to John and said, “What’s out there? A weapon? You tryin’ to gank me?”

John didn’t answer. Shitload pointed to the wig beast and said, “If any of you try to move, that thing will rip off all of your limbs, leave you alive and plant five hundred eggs in your belly. You down with that?”

We were. Shitload tossed aside the note and strode out the front door.

We could indeed see a bush out there, shivering in the breeze. Had John, under the influence of the sauce, somehow planted something out there ahead of time? How? And what? A gun? A pipe bomb? A trained badger? Nothing would have surprised me.

The creature formerly known as Justin White walked out to the bush and looked down, kicking around at the base of it. I glanced over at John, who waited with the same anticipation, apparently having completely forgotten the plan once the sauce wore off. The wig monster prowled around between us and I wondered if we should all try sprinting out the back door.

Outside, Justin had found nothing. He turned to walk back—

And was blown off his feet.

A thunderous boom echoed in the desert air, followed by a faint mechanical ka-chunk of a pump shotgun. A second shot sounded, then a third.

The wig beast in front of us hissed, bearing its teeth (yes, it had both teeth and a beak), seeming to know that something was amiss and that we should all be ripped to shreds immediately. We were frozen by the thing, all of us desperate to jump up and watch our salvation, but any slight shift of a limb would cause the wig thing to spin in that direction.

A figure moved toward the open door out in the darkness. The creature spun toward it and when I saw who came through, I found myself rooting for the wig monster.

SAY WHAT YOU want about Shitload and his disjointed pet, but neither of them either tried to shoot me or set me on fire. The same cannot be said for Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton, who strode into the house loading shells into a pistol-grip riot gun.

His eyes caught the jumbled creature on the floor. He raised the gun.

The thing turned toward him and meowed like a cat. It crouched, leaned his direction and vanished right as John screamed, “MOVE!”

Morgan spun and ducked off to his right.

The wig monster appeared in midair in the spot where Morgan was standing a half second earlier, flailing its limbs in his direction. The thing tumbled to the carpet. Morgan lowered the shotgun.

A blast thundered in the room. Bits of monster flew.

Morgan racked the shotgun, ejecting a blue plastic shell. “There any more of ’em?”

Jim said, “No, but that guy out there ain’t dead.”

We all got to our feet, everyone relieved at their rescue.

Everyone but me.

I still had a puncture in the middle of my chest like a third nipple, where the good detective here had shot me before trying to roast me alive. I wondered if they noticed Morgan didn’t exactly read Justin his rights before blowing a hole in him. I mean, I did the same thing but that’s why society doesn’t let me carry a badge.

Morgan started to speak, maybe to say, “I blew a hole in his chest the size of a football, jackass, I’m pretty sure he’s freaking dead,” but then his eyes locked on mine, realizing the other guy he’d shot in the heart this weekend was now standing and breathing in front of him.

There was a moment, when my eyes met Morgan’s, when once more I got a flash of his thoughts. Nothing coherent, just fear and exhaustion and cold, deadly purpose.

In that two seconds we shared, I knew the detective’s mind was working full time to crush any remaining doubts about what he had to do. He had a mission, and had traveled across the country to carry it out. He was saving the world, and in his mind that meant that anyone dumb enough, unlucky enough, or crazy enough to take the sauce, to risk becoming a conduit for whatever otherworldly invasion was waiting to use them as a doormat, needed to die.

Morgan had a decision to make. He glanced over his shoulder, squinting into the darkness for Justin. But he didn’t turn, and he still had the shotgun pointing in our direction.

Six of us, maybe we were hostages and maybe we were hives. Maybe he had thought he’d burst in and we’d all be in Alien-style cocoons and he could just torch the place and declare it mission accomplished. But here we were, exhausted and filthy and wounded. To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

John leaned over and picked up the FedEx box. He peered inside, turned it over. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter slid out into his hand. He plucked one cigarette out, and lit it. He reached into the waistband of his hospital pants and pulled out a little bottle of some kind of brown liquor he had lifted from the truck, took a drink. I was surprised he hadn’t mailed himself a burrito, too.

I said to Morgan, “It’s a long fucking story but we’re on your side. John totally lured Justin out there for you, just now.”

Just don’t fucking ask me how.

Morgan turned, pushing back through the door, leading with the shotgun. I followed, careful not to step in the wig monster chunks scattered on the floor underfoot.

The cop was a lot more surprised than I was to see Shitload was no longer on the desert floor. He poised the gun in front of him, turning like a turret, then spun on the beer truck as it rumbled to life and rolled onto the road.

Morgan ran, ripped off three shots as the red taillights shrank into the distance. He stomped back toward us, said, “Shit!”

“I know where he’s going,” I said. “And I’ll tell you if you promise to take us with you. And not to shoot me again.”

He sucked in a breath, scanning the faces of our group. Finally he said, “Okay.”

“Luxor Hotel. Don’t ask me how I know.”

THIRTY SECONDS LATER we were all crammed into Morgan’s rental SUV like it was a clown car, pealing down the blacktop.

From the passenger seat I watched the headlights swallowing up the road and said, “There’s something like a massive séance planned. It’s a guy named Marconi. Apparently Shitload—er, Justin, has business there.”

All ten of Morgan’s fingers were clamped around the steering wheel as the speedometer crept upward.

“I know.”

“You do? How?”

Everyone in the truck lurched first right, then left as Morgan swerved to pass a car.

“Brock Wholesale reported the liquor truck missing yesterday. I happened to catch word of a gas station attendant in Missouri who said a beer-truck driver told him he needed directions to Las Vegas, then punched him in the balls and told him his daughters would be live meat cocoons for the leech pool. Man thought that was strange, phoned it in. I just followed the same directions he gave Justin, drove balls to the wall. Then I came up on this exit and just had a feelin’, you know, like an intuition.”

The mention of “intuition” gave me a cold feeling in my gut. I glanced back at John. It got his attention, too.

“I followed my gut and there was the truck, parked by that old house.”

Morgan scratched the side of his cheek, two-day stubble sounding like sandpaper. The engine growled, the scenery sprayed past my window.

I asked, “If this thing makes it to the Luxor, what happens?”

“Let’s just say I came a long way to make sure that don’t happen.”

From behind us, John said, “If you’ve been following us since we got kidnapped, you must have been up for more than two days.”

“More like fifty hours.”

We rode silently for a minute. Less than a minute actually, according to Morgan.

“Make that fifty hours and thirty-seven-point-two-three seconds. It’s the adrenaline, I guess. I ain’t really been tired. The thrill of the hunt.”

We drove in silence for a moment. Red taillights appeared up ahead. I reached out and gripped the dashboard.

Morgan said, “That, and those loud, piercing voices in my head.”

Morgan’s eyes exploded.

He shrieked as two sprays of blood flecked over the windshield. Jennifer screamed behind me, John and Fred bellowed “OH, FUCK,” simultaneously.

Little white rods poured down the cop’s face, swirled around inside the truck. He let go of the steering wheel. I reached over and grabbed it. We left the road.

We shook, rattled, bumped. The horizon and sky swapped places in the windshield and the roof of the car bashed me in the shoulder. Glass bits rained down in my eyes and ears and up my nose, the dashboard punched me in the forehead, the roof hammered me a second time, and Molly’s furry ass rolled over my face.

Finally, the vehicle banged to a stop.

Silence. Only a soft chittering over the desert breeze. And then came the voices.

CHAPTER 6

Meet Dr. Marconi

THAT SUCKED. I pried my eyes open, feeling scratchy little bits in there that could either be sand or glass. I worked the lids open and found myself staring at dirt. Everything was upside-down; I was hanging by my seat belt. I felt like every single joint in my body had been wrenched painfully out of socket. It was agony from head to toe, so dark now that it took me a moment to realize that the massive, spreading pool down on the ceiling was not motor oil, but blood.

I craned my neck over and saw hunks of meat flying off what had been Officer Freeman/Appleton in juicy ragged pink-and-yellow layers, bone and ribs and a spongy mass that must have been lungs. Out from the meaty shreds came rushing masses of the tiny white demon-rod things, swirling around the interior of the truck like rice in a blender.

That’s not what caused me to panic, not that or the faint wet, ripping sounds next to me. No, what got me moving, what sent me clutching at the seat belt clasp, was the sound of the swarm.

Oh, that sound. Not something coming through my ears at all but a kind of shrill electricity in my brain, a million sharp, spiky, poison thoughts ricocheting around my head.

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.

It blew every thought out of my head, tore my mind open. I was frantic, patting around for the clasp to the seat belt with hands shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. I could vaguely hear actual screams around me, right from the backseat, but they might as well have been a thousand miles away. These little white streaks were buzzing around my face now, past my ears, skipping over my skin.

I got my fingers around the little plastic box that held the seat belt but couldn’t find a button, couldn’t see it, pressed and pulled and finally just started clawing at the thing like a little kid in a tantrum. I felt this itching over my bare arms, and then little pricks like needles and I knew what it was, I fucking knew, and I started contorting my body to crawl free from the belt like an animal wrenching from a trap.

Movement, all around me in the darkness.

Glass shattering in the backseat.

Somebody getting dragged out.

Screaming.

I ran my hand over my forearm and a thousand of the rods scattered off into the air. I heard a resulting uproar in the voices, shrieks like teenage banshees at a boy band concert, except nothing like that at all. The sound—it was so massive and yet so compressed in my skull that it was a physical pressure against my temples. I thought I could feel wheezing, creaking fissures in the bone.

Then, hands were grabbing me, pulling at the seat belt. A hand came into view and with a flick there was suddenly a narrow blade there, a switchblade cutting at the strap. I fell free, crashed down. Four hands were dragging me out of the wreckage by the shirt and shoulders, my back scraping over a bed of glass bits.

It was Fred Chu and John, pulling me free. Everybody was yelling, freaking out. Molly was dancing around and barking—total panic at the sight of the little cloud of white insects blowing around me like pillow feathers.

The worms had settled on my arm again and were landing on my neck and face. I brushed them off, swatted at them in the air. John seized my arm by the wrist, dug out the brown bottle of alcohol from his pants and doused the arm with it.

This seemed to annoy the flying worm things more than anything, and my skin was on fire with their attempts to dig their way in. I sputtered, “That ain’t helping! The alcohol isn’t hurting th—”

John flicked his lighter and set my arm on fire.

I said before that my skin was “on fire” with the pain but being confronted so soon after that sentiment with the actual experience, I admit that other thing was nothing like my skin actually being on fire.

But even the white heat on my arm was nothing next to the pain that suddenly erupted inside my skull. Hundreds of the worms were burned alive and the psychic outcry was like shoving my head inside a 747 engine. It was a nuclear bomb of sound, earth-shattering, feeling like an explosion of razor blades in my cranium.

And then, silence. John was rolling my arm in the dust, patting out the flames. The skin was beet red and peeling in places.

I sat up, tried to focus my eyes, tried to get to my feet, fell back down on my ass. I saw John had blood running down his forehead and he was trying to wipe it from his eyes, the empty liquor bottle at his feet. He leaned over and puked. Jennifer was on her knees in the dirt, had a chunk missing from her upper thigh and her hair was matted to the side of her head with blood.

Big Jim was pointing and screaming. Molly was barking.

Fred.

Screaming.

Thrashing around as if on fire.

The swarm had found him.

The flying worms poured out of the wrecked SUV like a kicked hornet’s nest. All landed on Fred.

He was coughing, choking, the rods gushing into his wide-open mouth. In five seconds it was over.

Fred collapsed.

We all knew he wasn’t dead. Jim and John and Molly stared toward Fred in dull shock, a silence settling over the scene so heavy it was almost a solid thing.

Only Jennifer moved. She sprinted toward the dead SUV, a little squirt of blood jumping from her leg wound with each step. She crawled in, grabbed something, then backed out quickly.

Fred moved. He twitched, flopped onto his back, then clumsily got to his feet. Everybody flinched and took steps backward. I forced myself to my feet over the protest of my leg muscles. Fred—if it was still Fred—looked confused for a moment, then brushed himself off and said, “It’s okay, guys. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Jennifer ran up, and I saw what she had retrieved from the SUV. It was Morgan’s shotgun. The thing was gleaming in the moonlight with a layer of tacky blood. Without asking, Jim took it from her and checked the chamber to see if a shell was loaded. He laid it over his shoulder like he was suddenly the captain of this crew. He said, “We gotta get a car, guys. Somehow.”

Nobody moved. Jennifer looked at me expectantly. What was I supposed to do? I could barely keep my feet. I looked Fred dead in the eyes, searching them.

I said to Fred, “Go flag down a car.”

Jim nodded like this was a perfectly good plan and followed Fred as he walked toward the highway. Jennifer gave me an exasperated look, went up to Jim and tore the gun from his hands. He spun, asked her what the heck she was doing. She backed away from him and I half expected her to blow a hole through the infested Fred with the shotgun.

She didn’t.

Instead she went right to me and pushed the gun into my hands.

Very slowly and carefully Big Jim said to me, “What are you going to do with that, David?”

John, Jen and I stood side by side, facing Fred and Jim from about ten feet away.

Fred said, “Whoa, guys. Guys, we’re all shook up here. Okay?”

Jennifer said, “Jim, were you not paying attention to what just happened? That’s not Fred. Not anymore.”

“We don’t know what happened,” snapped Jim, glancing over at Fred. “Does anybody here understand this? Really? Screw you if you think you do.”

Fred said, “Guys, look, I don’t know what you think you saw but I’m still Fred in here. Ask me anything, I’m me. I mean, we were all in that car when the cop exploded. Any of us could be . . . infected or whatever, but we gotta hang together. We’re like, the fuckin’ good guys here. Right?”

Everyone looked at me. I was the armed one. I looked down, as if deferring to the shotgun. It was cold, heavy and sticky with Morgan’s blood.

A breeze blew past us. From my right, Molly let out a low growl.

I closed my eyes, let out a long breath and said, “Go flag down a car.” Big Jim and Fred turned once more and took a step toward the highway. I let out a breath, took two steps forward.

I raised the shotgun and blew Fred’s head off his shoulders.

Blood flew. I saw it mist in the moonlight, for a split second frozen in the air like a snapshot. There was that feeling again, the sparks in my head, the old violence high, the electricity of it shivering through me.

Fred’s body slumped to its knees, then fell flat on its chest.

Blood.

Screaming.

Panic.

The old familiar sights and sounds.

I had been here before.

Big Jim recoiled, splattered with Fred’s blood, yelling something I couldn’t hear. Everything was dull, slow. I craned my head to see John and he had an expression I had seen there a few times before, something like fear, and pity. I wanted to put the butt of the shotgun through his face. I loathed that look. It said, “You are what you are, Dave, and that’s that.”

I caught a glimpse of Jen, her hands clasped over her mouth. This seemed like such a fucking good idea ten seconds ago, didn’t it?

There was movement out the corner of my eye and it was Big Jim, stomping toward me, rage lighting up his face. That was a familiar look for him, too, seen in a dozen high school fights, his fists about to come loose like fighting dogs tearing out of their cages.

Yeah, Jim, you can quote the Bible to me but you and I got the same sickness.

I aimed the shotgun right at his face.

Jim looked into the barrel, took two more steps, then raised his eyes to meet mine.

He stopped.

His eyes never moving from mine. He said, “The day after the Hitchcock thing, back in school. I saw you, you and your buddies, laughing. Laughing in the hallway. Not twelve hours after Billy died. I know all about you, Dave. You got the Devil in—”

I pumped the shotgun.

“This is not a conversation, Jim.”

Every muscle was tensed. We faced off that way, seemingly forever, the trigger pressing into the skin of my finger.

Shoot him. Shoot everybody.

John broke the moment. He sprinted up toward Fred’s prone body, grabbing and dragging it. “Get him to the truck!” Jennifer went to help him, but the two of them were making slow, halting progress pulling the deadweight through the sand.

John said, “Dave! These things are starting to come out of him!”

Jim stared me down a moment longer and then turned and walked toward them. John muttered something to him but Big Jim knocked both him and Jen aside. He dragged Fred’s body back to the wreckage of the SUV and laid him against the rear door. A familiar fuzzy cloud was emerging from the ragged stump that had been Fred Chu’s head.

Jim stomped toward me and, with a quick, impossibly strong motion, easily ripped the shotgun from my hands. He turned and aimed at the gas tank of the SUV.

I flinched from the expected explosion, had the sudden crazy urge for a ball of fire to spew out and reduce all of us to ash.

Nothing. Instead there was a patch of little holes in the metal, a heavy rain of gasoline splattering down the rear and onto the prone body of Fred Chu. John stepped up to his corpse, flicked open his lighter and tossed it down.

Fred Chu went up in a ball of flames. The fire licked up the trunk of the SUV, reached the gas tank and ignited the contents with a heavy, metallic THONK, sending us flopping to the ground, little bits of metal plunking softly into the sand around us.

Jim got to his feet and walked toward me again, the shotgun pointed at the ground. The adrenaline was draining from me so fast I thought I’d be sitting in a puddle of it soon. So tired. So tired.

Two feet away, Jim raised the gun.

Man, just do it. Just do it and let me sleep out here in the sand until the sun goes supernova and turns the whole world into a charred memory.

He threw the shotgun in my gut, and walked away. The barrel was warm. We all got to our feet and watched thousands of the little particles swarm out of Fred, burning like sparks over a stirred campfire. In my head, the concert of damned voices faded and died.

John said, “Do you think that’s all of them? The worms, whatever they are? Do you think we got all of ’em?”

I didn’t answer.

“Because I got a feeling that if just a few of them get away, hell, if just one of them gets out and gets into a body, they’ll multiply. Lay eggs and do what they do.”

Nobody answered. What was there to say?

It took us fifteen minutes to flag down a car. I convinced Jennifer to stand out by the road alone, shivering and mussed and looking victimized, one shapely leg coated in crimson. Soon a shiny new SUV pulled over, driven by a young guy and his wife, on their honeymoon or whatever.

As soon as their passenger door was open I sprinted out and put the gun in their face, forced them out while Jim apologized profusely, swearing we would bring it back. The five of us and the dog piled in and we drove into the night.

“I DON’T LIKE it,” said Jennifer softly, as if afraid the looming, dark thing on the horizon could hear us.

She was looking at the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, a pyramid jutting into the night sky, big and black and geometric, like something from the year 3000. We were parked in the lot of a massive neon-lined steakhouse maybe a quarter mile away, all of us beaten and stinking of smoke and looking like war refugees.

We had ducked into a truck stop restroom just outside of the city and washed as much blood off ourselves as we could. Jim spat out two teeth. John was pretty sure he had a concussion and would still be vomiting if he had anything in his stomach. I had double vision in one eye, and in general I felt like I had been run through a wood chipper. We bought four first-aid kits and fixed ourselves up as best we could; Jennifer patched her thigh with a roll of Ace bandages and a tampon. We bought armloads of convenience-store food and sat eating as we drove around looking for the Luxor. This parking lot was as far as we got before somebody asked what the plan was.

“The Justin thing is in there. Right now,” Jim said, nodding toward the Luxor. “So what are we waitin’ for? This whole thing, it could be going down right this minute for all we know and we’re out here doing nothing.”

John said, “If he summoned Satan, we’d see it from here, right?”

This was the most any of us had spoken since the accident and the ensuing clusterfuck.

I said, “First problem is we got to get into this thing. Guy like Marconi, probably attracts a lot of nutjobs. Got to think the doors will be guarded and I don’t particularly feel like shooting my way in there.”

Jim said, “Think, David. The séance or whatever it is is happening inside a casino. You won’t get five feet inside the door with a gun before nine guys in suits tackle you.”

“And shove your head in a vise,” John added, helpfully.

I said, “Well, I don’t like our chances without the gun. Unless Jim wants to try to quote Bible verses at it.”

Jennifer put up her hands, said, “Guys, let’s not make this a dick-measuring contest, okay?”

There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.”

Silence again.

“That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.”

I sighed and said, “John, I don’t think anyone in this vehicle is in the mood to—”

“John, let me make one thing clear,” Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. “Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then I heard Jen start laughing so hard I thought she would choke.

“Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”

Jim tried to suppress his laugher, and failed. One more victim, sucked in by John. You get in the room with him and you just fall into a warm pool of beer and video games and penis jokes, staring out at the universe with him and saying, “Do you believe this shit?”

I thought, not for the first time, that John could start a pretty fucking successful cult.

I looked down at the shotgun in my lap, a heavy, cold, hateful thing still coated in grit and blood. I noticed something else, a broad lump in my pants pocket. I dug into it and pulled out the folded envelope of cash I had gotten from the alley guy yesterday. I wondered if I wound up not using it if I should go find the guy and give it back to him. From behind me, Molly barked.

John was looking off across the parking lot now where a massive, customized RV sat like a beached whale. Behind it was an eighteen-wheeler, painted white with neon outlines, some kind of logo airbrushed on the side. He asked, “I wonder what’s in there.”

Big Jim said, “Shipment of fags probably.”

The asshole’s a comedian all of a sudden.

This seemed to anger Molly, who stared out the windshield and went into a barking frenzy. I reached back and, for the first time in my life, smacked a dog across the nose with an envelope full of cash. Jennifer said, “Thank you.”

John said, “There might be some clothes in that RV. We could change, look normal. Get Dave an overcoat to conceal the gun. Then charge into the Luxor, find Justin and open a can of kill-ass.”

“We can’t break into somebody’s RV,” I said.

John squinted at the logo on the side of the truck.

“That RV doesn’t belong to a person. It belongs to Elton John. You know, the band.”

Jen said, “Seriously?”

Molly retreated to the rear and started biting at the luggage the newlyweds had stacked in it. They probably had packed some sausages in there or something.

John said, “Yeah, look at the sign. I bet the truck is their concert stuff.”

Jim said, “Elton John is a guy, not a band.”

“Please, don’t get him started,” I said. “There was that one video where he was in different outfits and—”

“For the last time, those were all different guys, Dave. I looked it up. They’re brothers.”

“Oh, Jesus, forget it. Who cares.” I gripped the shotgun and considered shooting myself in the head.

A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows.

“Dave, I have a plan.”

IF THE ALIENS who helped the Egyptians build the pyramids returned to Earth and opened a casino, it would look like the Luxor Las Vegas. The thing was a massive, gleaming, black glass pyramid with a line of white lights that pulsed up its four corners.

We had just pulled into the Luxor parking lot and were watching two cop cars and a tow truck messing with Justin’s abandoned beer hauler, which had been carelessly run up onto the curb. The cops and tow guy all looked a little confused by the scene.

I said, “Let’s go.”

We filed out of the SUV and strode toward the front entrance, giving the cops a wide berth. Jennifer looked up at it and whispered to me, “I don’t like this place.”

“You already said that.”

“It looks like—like the end of the world. Somehow. Like those huge, scary future buildings in Blade Runner, black with the fire coming out the tops and all that.”

Big Jim said, “Yeah, yeah, and those gigantic big screens with huge Asian women on them. I watched that movie when I was a kid and I started cryin’.” Big Jim adjusted his cape.

The entrance was ahead, opened wide like a maw, the guts inside showing gleaming solid gold.

“You know what else scared me?” Jen said, reaching up to scratch where a bundle of black feathers was tickling her neck. “In de pen dence Day. That alien invasion movie. The first part, where the aliens come and they look up between the buildings and the sky is gone and, like, all they see is metal. Just as far as you can see, that steel ship looming up there. I remember thinking, that’s what the end of the world will look like. It won’t be wars or a meteor. It’ll be something we never could have thought of . . .”

Awe choked off her voice. We all had entered the lobby and stopped in our tracks. The cavernous inner chamber of the Luxor was gold upon gold, gold floors, gold walls, gold ceiling. The place was a temple, and there was no question who God was.

The lobby was a pulsing crowd of people and we were pushed ahead by the current. Everyone stared at us as they passed, eyes flicking from me to Jen to John’s naked ass. I nervously adjusted the guitar strap around my neck.

The shotgun was at my side, concealed under my coat. We probably drew the eyes of a dozen security guys working the floor. But at the sight of us, not a single one of them was thinking, “gun.” They were thinking “retards,” sure, but not “gun.”

John said, “Over there.”

He had found an entrance labeled EGYPTIAN BALLROOM, outside of which were two huge stand-up posters featuring a smiling fifty something man who must have been Dr. Marconi, since his name was boldly displayed under the picture.

A lady sat at a table with a laptop PC and stacks of programs and brochures fanned out on a table. There were two guys in suits with thin cell phone headsets on, guarding the door.

We strode toward them. My heart skipped a beat. This is as far as we had planned.

As we neared I glanced through the partially opened door to see if anything was happening in there, such as Lucifer crashing up through the floor. He wasn’t.

What I could see was that the ballroom was huge, a floor like half a football field. In the center was an enormous ice sculpture that had to have been fifteen feet high. It was an angel with its wings spread, hands upstretched to the ceiling. It must have had water pumping up through it because a rain of liquid rolled off its crystalline wings like a waterfall, splashing into a pool at its feet. The crowd sat in rows of folding chairs around it. Every seat was taken. Each member of the audience had their eyes closed.

The amplified voice of Dr. Marconi drifted into the lobby:

“Okay, everyone. Settle down. I know this is frightening for some of you but what we’re dealing with is real, real as the person sitting next to you. But I need all of you, all of your concentration, all of that power, that openness of the mind for this to work. Now we’ve just heard from Betty, who says her husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances last year. His name is Harold Alexander. Let’s all concentrate on Harold Alexander. Now clear your minds. Each of you picture, in your head, an apple . . .”

I had left the six thousand dollars from my envelope with a ponytailed roadie who gave us fifteen minutes alone with the concert truck while he went off to smoke. The guitar slung over my back was made entirely of a crystal-clear glass or polymer. I was wearing a white leather overcoat trimmed in long, luxuriant green fur and an enormous white sombrero edged in a pattern of fiber-optic lights.

Jennifer had donned a tailed white tuxedo/ringmaster coat over her T-shirt and shorts, the coat long enough to leave only bare legs emerging from the hem. A black feather boa gave her an outfit that sort of looked intentional. Big Jim was wearing an incredibly tight roadie jumpsuit with a flashy Elton John logo on the back. He had a huge Casio keyboard under his arm and pulled a dolly behind him loaded down with two black boxes the size of footlockers.

John wore a black jockstrap, a pair of white chaps and a small purple Robin Hood cap that covered his groin. He was naked from the waist up save for a tight leather vest and a bundle of gold chains. We all wore sunglasses.

As we arrived at the table, Marconi’s voice boomed, “Now, now, everyone be calm. Who’s next? Does anyone else have someone they’d like to contact?”

The guards and check-in lady stared at us in confused amusement as we approached. The lady at the table, trying to suppress a smile, finally said, “Uh, do you have tickets?”

John said, “No. We’re Elton John.”

“We’re, uh, the band,” I said, cutting him off quickly. “We’re playing in there after the séance. Show us the back entrance and we’ll—”

“Dave!” shouted John. “Look!”

It was Shitload. He was at the far end of the ballroom, shuffling between seats, moving toward the stage. He wore an ill-fitting suit jacket, jeans and a cowboy hat that we knew covered a lumpy head wound.

“Yo, I gots an old homey I’d like you to contact for me, fool,” he said as he approached Marconi.

Dr. Marconi’s smile faltered at the sight of Shitload, limping with joints bent at odd angles, his body puffy and stretched as if ready to burst. The jacket didn’t completely conceal the gaping shotgun wound in his midsection.

Shitload said, “His name is Korrok the Slavemaster from the eighth plane, also known in some realms as Baa’aaa’aaa’aab and in others as the Lord Zanthk All-Bzzki’l Shadd’uuul’l L’luuu’ddahs L’ikzzb-lla Khtnaz.”

The guards and the door lady all turned their attention to him, not sure if this was part of the show but sensing something was about to go way, way wrong.

I stepped up to the door and ran my hand along my side, felt the long, rigid shotgun hidden behind my overcoat. I was about to tell Door Lady that we were in the midst of an emergency that only rock and roll could solve and thus had to be let in at once.

“GUN!”

It was the guard to my left. I looked down, realized six inches of shotgun barrel was exposed where my coat had folded back.

Quickly, I whipped it out and pointed it at his face, freezing him in mid-lunge.

John said, “It’s not a gun! It’s part of our act!” at the exact same moment I said, “I’m a cop! I’m undercover!”

Then, over the loudspeaker:

“AGGGHHH!! MY BALLS!!!”

I spun and saw Dr. Marconi fall to the floor, grabbing his punched groin.

Shitload loomed over him.

Gasps rippled across the audience.

I sprinted into the ballroom. Guards muscled past me, rushing the stage.

Shitload punched the first guard in the groin so hard it flung his body back five feet. The other retreated.

I raised the shotgun, leveling it at Shitload.

“FREEZE!” I shouted, for some reason. A lady screamed at the sight of the gun. Shitload turned his back to us and leaned forward. His pants split. A fleshy, puckering protrusion formed and pushed its way through the slit, looking like the end of a flesh trumpet.

FOONT!!

With a bassy thump and a smell like burnt sulfur, Shitload farted himself far into the air.

The crowd went wild, chairs clanging down all around us. I tracked Shitload with the barrel of the shotgun as he climbed a hazy contrail of shimmery methane. He landed atop the giant ice angel. Shitload crouched on one wing, raised his arms in a “touchdown” motion and said something at the top of his voice that was probably very profound and ominous but was drowned out by the absolute bedlam in the crowd below.

I fired. Shitload exploded.

Hey! That was easy!

An eruption of blood and hamburger stained the wings of the angel red and pink. I felt a momentary euphoria of victory, ready to be carried off on shoulders. I should have known better.

Out of Justin’s guts poured, not the white buzzing worms, but a shower of black specks that could have been coffee beans. They bounced and flecked off the wings of the angel and plinked into the water below.

I edged up to the pool with the shotgun. Dark shapes started writhing and splashing below the surface.

Oh shit.

A soft hand landed on my shoulder and I turned to see the sharp, brown eyes of Albert Marconi.

“Son, I think we need to get the people out of here.”

Big Jim was behind him, still toting the keyboard. Marconi said, patiently, “Don’t you think? We haven’t much time.”

I turned, ran, fired the shotgun into the air and shouted, “Bomb! There’s a bomb in the fountain! Everybody run for your lives! Please don’t not panic!”

The words were completely lost in the stampede caused by my shotgun blast. I bumped into John in the crowd.

“Where’s the bomb?”

“There’s no bomb, there’s something in the—”

“Guys!”

It was Jen. She was yelling and pointing at the fountain. I turned just as one of the seven-legged wig monsters flung itself out of the pool, in a spray of water.

The beast landed on the carpet on its little baby-like hands, looked around, meowed, then disappeared. In a blink it was clinging to the back of an elderly black woman, scorpion tail buried down into the base of her spine.

Another of the little black beasts emerged. Another. Then three more. They crawled, leapt, clamped themselves onto victims. A fat guy went flailing past me with one of the things on his chest; a bearded man was trying to shake one off his leg.

One of the wig monsters ran and jumped at Jim. He swatted it like a baseball with his Elton John keyboard, then bashed the heavy Casio in half over its prone body in a spray of white and black keys.

Jen was on the other side of the fountain, kicking one of the beasts to death. I ran toward her, blew a wig monster in half, worked the pump and realized I had no more shots. I flung the gun at another one of the monsters, missed, hit an elderly man in a wheelchair instead, toppling him over.

I was kicking through the sea of blue chairs, closing on Jen. Two of the wig beasts were bearing down on me. No, three. One of them crouched and launched itself at me—

THONK

The beast was batted away by a folding chair, wielded by John.

He screamed “YEAH!” in a dead-on impersonation of pro wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage, grasping the folded chair by two legs. He swung again and flattened another of the beasts, screaming, “Have a seat, bitch!”

There were at least a hundred of the wig monsters bouncing around the ballroom now. Victims littered the floor by the dozen.

I flinched at the sound of a sharp gunshot, spun to see a middle-aged lady holding a little chrome pistol. She shot one of the things, killed it, took shots at another, missed. The beasts ganged up on her, three stinging her simultaneously. I heard someone shout, “Becky!” from behind me. A tall guy with a heavy brown beard pushed through the chairs. “BECKY! HONEEEEY!”

He punted two of the creatures off his wife with several furious kicks, then John ran in and chaired the last one off, screaming, “You’ve been sentenced to get the chair, motherfucker!”

The man helped his wife to her feet and said to me, “Those things! They’re blocking the exits!”

I spun around, saw black clumps surrounding the doors we came in.

“Shit!”

The woman looked dazed. The man asked her if she was okay. She nodded, then calmly reached over with her left arm and tore the right arm out of its socket. It made a slimy sucking sound, like tearing the leg off a Thanksgiving turkey. There was no blood. The wound was instantly sealed by a thin, black layer of the soy sauce.

She calmly walked back toward the fountain, casually carrying her arm like an umbrella. Her husband stood in dumbfounded silence. I heard John land two more blows with the chair.

Another bite victim lay nearby, a young man writhing as if in a seizure. Eventually his legs kicked themselves free from the rest of his body. The limbs thumped along the floor on their own like two giant polyester snakes with shoes for heads. Right behind them was a loose head stuck to a single arm, furiously biting and clawing the carpet.

I felt like we might not be in control of this situation any longer.

I heard a scream that I had come to recognize as Jennifer’s. She was on her knees with Fred’s switchblade, surrounded by five dead wig monsters all bearing ragged stab wounds. I sprinted that way.

I heard a metallic thump from behind me and heard John yell, “You wants the committee, asshole, then you best meet with the chair!” I pulled Jen to her feet.

Around us, the disembodied human limbs were piling up, forming a circle around the fountain, fusing themselves to each other like Satan’s LEGO set. A wet, pink disembodied spine slithered past us like a snake.

Dr. Marconi jogging toward us, shouting some instruction I couldn’t hear in the pandemonium. All around us the wig monsters were closing in, their dark shapes rolling in toward the fountain like oil down a drain.

One of them jumped onto Jen’s back. I flung myself at it, grabbed it in a bear hug and ripped it off her. One of its little fists came around and started punching me in the face.

I carried it to the fountain, stepping over a squishy pile of body parts. I shoved the monster into the water, held it under, screamed “Die!” or something to that effect. After a few seconds it stopped moving and black sauce oozed out of it like an oil slick.

Dr. Marconi got close enough so I could finally hear him. He said, “They’re trying to get into the water! Don’t let them!”

I looked back down at the spreading black pool, heard a splash as another of the beasts jumped in, followed by another, the creatures returning to the pool from which they had sprung.

Nothing good could come from that.

Marconi said, “Follow me.”

We sprinted toward a set of doors behind the stage, John smacking creatures with chairs as we went. Marconi unlocked the doors and we filed in. John stopped and spun in front of the open doorway. He faced at least half a dozen of the wig monsters, circling in on him. He whipped the chair around and actually split one of the things in half with the impact, spilling a spray of blood that was reflective, like mercury. John bellowed, “Anybody else want to donate blood to chair-ity?”

He ducked into the door, stopped, thought for a moment, then flung the door open again. He swung the chair and bashed one monster right in the wig, screaming, “There’s some dessert! With a chair-y on top!”

He came back in again, breathing heavily, slamming the door just as something thumped against it.

I said, “How about we just stay in here until they all leave?”

Dr. Marconi took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief.

John said, “What’s happening to them out there? The bite victims?” He looked at Marconi. “We’ve got friends who took the soy sauce, the, uh, the venom those things out there spit out. Almost all of them died but not like—”

“Out there you have a room full of true believers,” Marconi said, sadly. “There’s a shift that goes on, you see, physically and mentally and spiritually. They were ripe for this.”

Something hammered against the door and one hinge popped out in a burst of plaster dust. Big Jim and John leaned against the door to brace it.

I said, “Wait, you know what’s going on here?”

He gave me a dismissive look. “I’ll send you home with a copy of my book.”

Big Jim said, “He’s trying to break through, isn’t he?”

Marconi nodded. “He or his lackeys, yes.”

“Goddammit!” I screamed. “Did everybody else know this was gonna happen but me?”

“I most certainly did not know this was going to happen,” Marconi said, “or I would have canceled and issued full refunds. But when I became aware of the ‘sauce’ as you call it, I knew that it had only one purpose.”

There was a scratching from the opposite side of the door that I suspected was the sound of the beasts trying to bite through it.

“And that purpose is?”

“I offer people a window into the spiritual. Someone wishes to turn it into a door.”

A blue eye, in the darkness.

Jim whispered, “The Devil.”

Marconi said, “Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”

I held up a hand in a “halt” motion and said, “How. Do. We. Get. Out. Of. This?”

Marconi placed his glasses back on his nose and said, “We’re like one German soldier alone on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, holding a sharp stick. I assure you, son, if any of us were capable of destroying such evil, the world would have killed us long before now. The world turns, son. And now it turns into the darkness.”

I said, “So, what do you suggest?”

“I am a retired priest. Did you know that?”

John asked, “Are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now.”

“No,” he said. “But I can bless water to make it holy. The ice statue, I mean.”

John’s face brightened and he said, “That’s perfect!” He thrust his index finger into the air. “We bless the ice, then we just have to somehow get all hundred or so of those monsters to go lick the statue!”

I stared hard into the face of the older man, said, “Okay, there is no possible combination of English words that would form a dumber plan than that.”

“We’ll need to buy time, of course,” he said, undeterred. “But if I’m right, if they’re doing what I think they’re doing, it’s most likely the only hope we’ve got. The travelers out there, the beasts I mean, they do have a weakness.”

John said, “We know. Chairs.”

“Uh, not exactly. They’re natural discordians. It’s a product of where they’re from, you see. When you live in a world of black noise, melody is like a blade to the ears. Angels and their harps and all that.”

I asked, “What does that have to do with—”

A hole exploded from the center of the door. A little pink fist and a segmented leg curled through, reaching around between John and Big Jim. John grabbed it by the wrist and Jennifer severed the arm with the switchblade. There was a feline shriek from the other side. John held the detached arm in his hand for a moment, then shoved it back through the ragged hole.

Marconi said, “I see you have your instruments. Can any of you sing? The old spirituals work best.”

John said, “I can sing.”

I said, “No, you can’t, John.”

“Well, I play the guitar.”

“So can I,” said Big Jim. “We have two guitars.”

I said, “This could not be any stupider.”

John said, “Dave, you remember the words to ‘Camel Holocaust’?”

“Ah, once again, you prove me wrong, John.”

Marconi looked down at the two carts stacked with amps and cables and said, “How long is it? I’ll need several minutes.”

John stepped around and lifted the guitar off my back, said, “ ‘Camel Holocaust’ is as long as you want it to be, my friend. I’m lead, Jim is rhythm, Jen sings backup. Jen, just repeat everything Dave sings, only like one second behind. The sound system will be on the stage. We duck out there and plug in and wail. Okay? Guys, this is just retarded enough to work.”

We set up, then faced the banging door. John said, “You know, I’m surprised the door stopped them, since they can teleport around like that. You’d think they could just blink right through it.”

There was sudden silence from beyond the door, a muttering like the creatures had just realized something. From behind me, Jim screamed.

One of the beasts was on his back. A second appeared on his chest, and in a blurred motion it snatched at his throat.

Jim collapsed on his guitar, the white instrument turning instantly crimson.

Jennifer lunged with the switchblade and stabbed one beast to death. She was good with that thing.

I said, “Jim? Are you—”

He rolled over, his throat laying open in shreds and flaps, as if it had been hit with a shotgun blast. His eyes were wide, his mouth working. Then, he was gone.

I opened my mouth to say something when suddenly my vision was obstructed by blackness. There were little pinches on my chest and belly, like something grabbing hold. My vision focused and I saw a dozen mismatched eyes staring back at me.

I fell backward, hit the ground, the wig monster riding on my chest. Its beak opened and I saw a pink, human tongue lolling around inside.

An electric shriek emerged from the ballroom. A guitar.

The creature closed its beak and turned toward the open door where John played, a look of intense annoyance on its face. It trotted away, two tiny hands over its ears.

Marconi said, “Good! Go!”

I stood and pushed through the open door. John played his ax with his legs spread apart, holding the guitar low to the ground. I sprinted around him, grabbed the mic off of the stage. For a moment, I was speechless.

The base of the fountain was now hidden behind a seven-foot-high circle of stacked body parts, the ice angel rising from the center. The remaining wig monsters gathered around the perimeter, facing inward, as if waiting.

There is no possible way this is actually happening.

Well, might as well go with it. I clenched my throat, filled my lungs until my diaphragm pushed out against the gold-plated belt I was wearing, and screeched:“I knew a manNo, I made that part upHair! Hair! Haaairrr!Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

The creatures spun our way, donned some very disappointed frowns, backed away.

“Brilliant!” shouted Marconi. “You’re really annoying them! Let’s move!”

We pushed forward toward the fountain, the sound of the music thundering through the room, scattering the beasts before us like a leaf blower. One of the wig monsters spat at me.“My melon soulCrushed by your Gallagher of apathySledgehammer! Hammerrrrr!Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

We reached the length of our cables, still some distance from the fountain. Marconi went forward with Jennifer in tow. They got within blessing distance of the angel and Marconi said, “Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament. At the very dawn of creation . . .”“There’s a wolf behind youNo, wait, it’s just a dogOh, shit! Badger! Baaaadgeeeerrr!Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

We hit the first solo, John ripped into it. Several of the wig monsters were now chewing on John’s guitar wire.

The sound died into faint, pathetic guitar pluckings.

The monsters lurched toward us en masse. John, thinking quickly, ran over and snatched the microphone from my hands. He began making guitar sounds with his mouth.

“WAAAAHHHH wah-wah-wah-wah-wah, weet woo weet weet woo—”

I didn’t think that would work. I spun on Dr. Marconi, saw him stepping up over the human-parts wall toward the fountain itself. I followed him, climbed up, stepped on a face, a bundle of six hands, an ass.

The pool was black now. Not black like oil, but black like a cave, so that you couldn’t see any reflection or ripples in the surface, not even when Dr. Marconi waded out into it. A black rain fell off the angel’s wings above us.

John mounted the pile behind us, screamed, “WAH, DO-DO-DO-DOOOO-DO, DEE DOO DOO—”

Marconi, knee-deep in black oil, reached out and touched the icy surface of the statue. He said, “We ask you, Father, with your Son . . .”

John had reached the end of his solo, was now making up a third verse to the song.“My hat smells likelubricant, I don’t wanna touch itWait, this isn’t mine! And it’s not a hat!Camel Holo—”

John’s mic cable was cut. The sound died.

“—on the waters of this font. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Marconi stepped back.

Nothing.

John turned to the waves of approaching monsters and said, “NOW LICK THE STATUE!”

The blackness in the pool suddenly rose, covering the feet of the statue, spilling over the edges of the fountain. I leaned over and pulled at Marconi’s jacket, pulling him back, not sure what was happening but certain we didn’t want to be standing in the middle of it when it did. He waded over to the edge of the pool. He raised one leg out of the blackness and we saw, with horror, that he had no leg. Everything that had been submerged was gone, his pants ending in a neat line with only empty space beneath—

—and then it was back, whole again. Like a trick of the light. The doctor suddenly sprang out of the pool with renewed motivation. I glanced nervously at my white patent leather shoes disappearing under the rising black tide.

John and Jennifer helped us clamber up the wall of human limbs, then we ran our asses off across the ballroom floor. There was a whistling sound, like wind howling through tree branches. I saw a couple of chairs scooting along the floor toward the fountain, suddenly felt a pull like I was running from an electromagnet with a gut full of iron pellets.

One of the wig monsters skittered toward us, but was suddenly lifted out of the air and sucked back to what I was fairly certain was a portal to Hell. The howling sound was loud now, deafening, the sound of a jetliner. Folding chairs were flying through the air as if propelled by dozens of invisible Bobby Knights. The five of us pushed our way forward, somebody screaming around me but the sound lost in the rushing noise. John grabbed my shirt and pointed me toward the small space behind the stage, room to crouch back there. Jennifer screamed something I couldn’t hear, something that sounded like “Todd!”

Sparks blew out from the ceiling lights, and we were cast into darkness.

A few small banks of emergency lights clicked on, faintly glinting off the wings of the ice angel in the center of the room. We stumbled back behind the stage, huddled down like tornado victims. We waited.

Silence. I risked a peek back at the dark well. From the blackness, there was movement. Dark shapes rose up out of the portal. They were like freestanding shadows, vaguely human, long and lean figures, eight or ten feet tall each. Their only features were a pair of tiny, glowing eyes like two lit cigarettes.

One by one they slipped out and into the dark room, a crowd of them, shoulder to shoulder, flowing out of the portal. They shambled out like a spreading pool of spilt oil, perfectly silent, filling the room, a constellation of little red flickering eyes.

They were around us now, closing in just feet away, making their advance in perfect stillness.

And then, the silence was broken. There was a low, screeching sound, like steam escaping. Plumes of smoke or steam rose from the base of the ice angel, a bright, white light down there like it was a rocket about to take off.

The sound grew and grew and grew, became animal, a scream of pain.

In the dim light of the emergency lamps, the holy water angel sank, descending into the black hole.

There was a thunderclap, so loud I thought it would split me in half. I clenched my eyes shut, covered my head with my hands, begged God to forgive me for accidentally bringing an end to all of creation.

There was a jolt, then a bodiless, weightless feeling like drifting out of a dream.

A hand touched my shoulder. I flinched as if gouged with a branding iron. Things were quiet again. How much time had passed? I felt like a man waking after a nap to complete darkness, confused about the time of day.

I opened my eyes and it was Jennifer, with John and Marconi standing behind her. Lights were on. She helped me up and I turned to the center of the floor.

Nothing there but empty, red carpet. No fountain, no bodies, no black hole. The room was completely vacant except for us and a few random toppled chairs still scattered about. I sat down on the floor, suddenly exhausted. John and I looked hard at the spot where the fountain had been. We each extended a hand toward it, and gave it the finger.

The doors burst open. Suits and cop uniforms poured in.

Molly the dog came bounding in with them, a bundle of chewed-up papers in her mouth. She dropped the stuff in front of me, barking her head off. I looked down at two tickets to the Marconi show, which she had presumably gotten out of the young couple’s luggage. I nudged the tickets aside, saw a CD labeled: Amazing Grace: The Brooklyn Choir Sings the Gospel.

A bearded man wandered over, looking dazed, and I recognized him as the husband of the woman we tried to save before she dismembered herself and everything went to Hell.

I said, “I’m sorry. About your wife. What was her name? Becky.”

He looked at me, confused, said, “No, I’m not married. What happened in here?”

I couldn’t answer. I lay back on the floor, my body shutting down even with shoes shuffling all around me. I hadn’t slept in forty hours, every muscle screamed in pain. I had flown off the cliff of a gargantuan adrenaline rush and was crashing fast.

Somebody said my name, asked if I was okay. I didn’t answer, the sound of the commotion dying around me as the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.

DARKNESS AND WARMTH, and then the nasal EEEK EEEK EEEK of an alarm clock. I had a taste in my mouth, smoky, like I had licked an ashtray. I felt something itchy and thick around my mouth. I shot my eyes open. Where the hell was I?

I sat up in bed. Not my bedroom. I looked over at a watch on a nightstand. Not my watch. A nicer one.

I looked around the room, the alarm still screeching its complaints from the nightstand. I found a mirror. There was something dark on my face, and I slapped my hand up to it. Hair. I climbed out of bed and walked toward the mirror. I had a thick, full goatee.

What the hell?

I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Whose room was this? A voice from behind me said, “Are you going to get that?”

I fumbled around and found a button on the alarm. Jennifer Lopez was in the bed. And I mean the actress.

Oh, wait. No, she rolled over and it was just the local Jennifer Lopez. She got out of bed, wearing a tank top and underwear, and she sleepily walked off to what I guess was a bathroom. She had a faint, white scar at the top of her thigh. She farted softly as she closed the door.

I stood, found a cell phone among the stuff on a nearby chest of drawers, dialed John’s number.

Operator recording. “This number has been disconnected . . .”

I was in a slow-burn panic now. I glanced out a window, saw a tree in the front yard with leaves turning fall colors. I went back to the phone, scrolled through the quick-dial numbers. I found an entry for John—a different number than I knew—and dialed it.

I heard water running in the bathroom. I held my breath as the phone rang four, five, six times. Seven.

“Hello?” John, sounding sleepy.

“John? It’s me.”

“Yeah. What’s goin’ on?”

“Oh. Nothin’.”

After a moment, he said, “You don’t remember the last six months, do you?”

“You, too?”

“No, I’m okay. This will be the fourth time it’s happened to you, though. You lose everything since that night. Is Vegas the last thing you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s a side effect of the sauce. Come to my—well, you don’t know where my apartment is now, do you? Meet me at Dairy Queen.”

Jennifer came out and, much to my surprise, we kissed for several minutes. Ashtray.

I went out, took in the neat little white bungalow-style house and was a little relieved to find my familiar Hyundai in the drive.

I drove and found John sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, a brown DQ sack in his hand. I observed that he, too, had grown a thick goatee.

I said, “This sucks.”

“You say that every time.”

“Do I have to, like, work today? Where do I work?”

“Wally’s. You get Sundays off. This is Sunday, by the way. Come on.”

John walked me to a very nice motorcycle. He jumped on, slapped the seat behind him. I looked at it for a moment and then walked to my car, said, “I’ll follow you.”

As we walked down the hall to John’s new apartment he said, “It was a big deal, but not, you know, the real big deal. The story that came out was that five hundred people freaked out at a Marconi show, rushed the doors, one kid got killed in the stampede. That would be, you know, Jim.”

We stepped through the doors and I said, “One guy? What about the dozens of people who—”

I stopped, taken aback by John’s place. He had a brown leather couch, a matching armchair. He had a big-screen plasma TV sitting in the middle of the room; hooked to it were four video game systems, with game boxes littering the floor. A fairly nice DVD player, a one-hundred-disk CD changer in an entertainment center.

“John, are we crack dealers now?”

John opened a drawer on a writing desk and pulled out a big manila envelope. He extracted a bundle of papers, newspaper clippings, a couple of folded-up tabloids, a glossy magazine called Strange Days with a picture of a UFO on the front.

He said, “No. Nothing like that. Out in Vegas, we met a guy. He was a pimp. We made quite a bit of money as male whores. They used to call you Rocket Rimjob. You won the gold at the Greater Nevada Sodomy Olympics back in July, landed a bunch of endorsement deals. You own that house you and Jennifer live in. Paid cash, I think.”

He looked dead serious when he said this. I said, “Are you messing with me?”

“No. You really own that house. I made up the whoring thing, though. I like to add a little bit to it each time. Seriously, what happened is Molly won a bunch of money at the casinos.”

“John—”

He pulled out a newspaper, a color “Lifestyles” section from the Las Vegas Sun, headline blaring “Dog Wins Quarter Million Playing Slots!” There was a picture of John with Molly in his arms, struggling to get away from him. He had his right hand out, making the shape of a finger gun and pointing at Molly, his mouth wide open in a drunken “that’s my dog!” expression. Jen and I were visible in the deep background, trying to hide our faces.

“The thing with the Marconi show, the panic, there was a big investigation and everything,” he said. “Cops thought he had slipped acid to everybody, freaked ’em out with a light show or something. Everybody called him a fraud; it was kind of crappy the way they treated him. But he came out okay. The death hasn’t come out as anything but an accident and all of a sudden his book is a bestseller, people desperate to get to his shows. You’ve, uh, tried to contact him a couple of times, but he won’t take the calls.”

It was coming back to me as he told it. Everything was hazy, drunk memories. He handed me the UFO magazine, pointed to a little header in the bottom left:Legend of Fred Chu:Is this dead youth haunting his Midwestern hometown?One local man says “ABSOLUTELY”

There was a noise above me.

I looked up

My heart skipped a beat.

It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands. The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head. It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.

“Uh, John—”

“Oh, now you see it.” He stood, grabbed the Dairy Queen sack, pulled out a sausage-and-egg biscuit and unwrapped it. He set the sandwich on the floor. The thing picked it up with two hands and bit into it.

“When you came in that night, that first night when I called you, it was standing on the wall. You walked in and of course you saw nothin’ at all. And, you know, when I told you not to move or make a sound? The thing was on your back. It had jumped on you and you just stood there like nothin’.”

The wig monster turned about five eyes up to me as it ate. It paused in its chewing, vanished. The sandwich fell softly to the floor.

I said, “Did I spook it? I mean, does it still, like, attack us or anything?”

“No, not since that night. It bit right through my shoe that night, though. I had been kicking it at the time so I call it even.”

The beast reappeared, one arm wrapped around a thirty-two-ounce Coke. It had a wrapped straw in its beak. John pulled out the straw, unwrapped it and poked it into the cup lid for it. The wig monster sucked on the straw and picked up its sandwich again.

“So, can anybody else see it?”

“No. My mom came by last month and it was right in the middle of the floor. She didn’t acknowledge it at all. But get this: a week later she left her cat here because she was going on vacation and the cat could see it. It hissed at the thing the whole time. The monster would pick up wads of paper and stuff and throw it at him. The cat died the next day but it was unrelated.”

I said, “So the paper said we won a quarter-million dollars. What did I do with my share? I bought that house? Did I save any?”

“I dunno. We really don’t see each other that much now. This is actually the first time we’ve talked since, oh, probably August. You and Jennifer, you uh, don’t leave the house a whole lot.”

“Oh. I’m . . . sorry, I guess.”

“No. Trust me, you’re not.” He gestured toward the television. “Wanna play hockey?”

CHAPTER 7

Arnie Thinks David Is Full of Shit

I STOPPED TALKING, only to notice Arnie Blondestone was staring at me in wide-eyed, silent horror. Not the kind of horror you feel when you find out the universe is full of real monsters, but the kind you feel when you realize someone else’s idiocy has just wasted your entire day. I glanced down at the tape recorder, saw that it had stopped long ago. Arnie rubbed his hands over his face like he was washing without water.

“What?”

He looked at me and made a polite effort to hide his deep, pure disdain, but didn’t respond.

“Do you, uh, want something to eat? I’ll buy.”

“No thanks,” he said, twisting his face into a pained fake smile. “Let’s just wrap this up and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Now, just to clear a few things up, if you don’t mind. First of all, let’s confirm that that’s the little pill bottle there?”

“Oh. Yeah. It’s empty now.”

“Because you took the last of the, uh, the soy sauce before you came today.”

“That’s right.”

“So you don’t have any left to show me. Let me see the stuff crawl around on the table and all that.”

“Oh. No. I guess I should have saved some.”

“No problem. I mean, that would have been physical evidence to back up your whole story, but we won’t worry about that sort of thing.”

Asshole. I should cut that smirk off your face with my butter knife.

“And I guess you forgot to tell me that you took the pill bottle with you when you left the trailer? Because you have it now, but in your story you left it behind. You know, when your dog drove by in your car and picked you up. Hey, that would have been something else to show me, the car-driving dog.”

“I went back to Robert’s place afterward, found the pill bottle among the debris. Completely unburnt.”

“Of course.”

“I can show you where the trailer was, by the way. I mean, there’s another trailer there now but if you look at the ground you can sort of see where something might have burned there once. We can drive out there.”

“Uh-huh. And what about the dozens of deaths from the dismembered fans at the Marconi thing? I’m surprised that wasn’t bigger news, a crowd of people disappearing like that.”

“There’s actually a very good reason for—”

“And you told me Jim hauled in a dolly of sound equipment to the Luxor, but later on there were two carts of equipment there.”

“Of everything that I told you, that’s the part you have trouble believing?”

“And in your story you kept losing track of how many people were with you. At some point you said something like, ‘The five of us and the dog piled into the car’ when it was only four of you at that point, by my count. You, your friend John, Big Jim and the girl, Lopez. But you probably got mixed up.”

“It’s hard to exp—”

“You were probably forgetting you had killed Fred already. Meaning Fred Chu, the guy whose head you blew off with a shotgun.”

I didn’t answer.

“So there really is a guy named Fred Chu and he’s really dead? I could look him up?”

“He’s missing. Officially.”

“Okay. So is there more story, or should I pack up? Do you have any documents you’d like to copy me on, like your tax returns from the year your dog won all the money at the casino? Which form does the IRS have you fill out for that?”

I took a deep breath, said, “Look, not every little single thing in the story is true, but the meat of it is. I swear it. I admit I get silly when—when the truth is hard to explain. It’s my way. But those people in the Luxor, they did disappear, Arnie. And I mean they totally disappeared. That guy with the beard who lost his wife? He came back later and said he had no wife and, you know what? He didn’t. He didn’t have a wife named ‘Becky’ and there was no ‘Becky’ at the show. They went down the guest list; everybody is accounted for.”

“So she was never there. Okay.”

“Would you please stop doing that? Patronizing me? You saw the wig monster out there in my truck, in the cage. That’s what it was, you saw it.”

“I saw something. I saw what you wanted me to see. Some people are manipulators, I know that much. Oh, hey, you said those monsters, they ooze the soy sauce, right? So you can go out there and get some?”

“You seriously want to go try?”

“No, I don’t. Let me ask you, did they do any psychological testing on you when you had your incident in school? The one that got you sent away? And the report they wrote, did it have the word ‘sociopath’ on it?”

I groaned.

“Don’t make this about me. The people in Vegas, the ones who vanished? They never existed, Arnie. No, listen. This is hard to understand, but the moment they were sucked into that hole, or whatever it was, they didn’t just stop existing in the here and now. They were erased from the past, too. That’s why there’s no report of them being gone. At that moment, they were never born. If I had fallen in there, you’d be able to go back and see that my mom never had a male child and she never named him ‘David’ and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

“Assuming this is true, which, incidentally, I’m not drunk enough to do, how can you possibly prove that?”

I took a breath.

Here goes . . .

“I have dreams, Arnie. And in my dreams the whole thing from the Luxor plays out, only we’re with another guy. And I know his name. Todd Brinkmeyer. A year older than me. Long blond hair. In the dream he’s with us, he’s toting the second dolly of sound stuff, he’s with us in the SUV. He’s carrying the second guitar—”

“Okay, okay, back up—”

“I heard her say his name, Arnie. I heard Jennifer shout ‘Todd’ plain as day. I think that was him getting sucked into the hole, the vortex thing. And as of that moment, he was gone, he got sucked in and he was zapped out of the past, present and future, out of our memories. They have that power somehow. But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn’t happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it’s like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there’s places, holes where I know Todd should be. He was there and he helped us, Arnie. He fought with us. And I’m not even allowed to remember him, to mourn his death. At least Jim got a funeral. But Todd, I can’t find his picture in the yearbook. Can you even imagine what that’s like?”

Arnie sighed and for a quick moment looked genuinely sympathetic that someone could dream up something this elaborately sad. He said, “We both got places to go tomorrow. Is there any more?”

You act bored, Arnie, you act like you’re miles above it all. But you’re still sitting here, aren’t you? You’re still listening. I know you got reasons but I don’t know what they are yet. God knows I would have split by now if I were in your shoes.

I said, “You gotta understand . . . Vegas was just the beginning.”

A yellow legal pad was found during an inventory of the items inside the Chevy Tahoe belonging to James “Big Jim” Sullivan after his disappearance. The following was handwritten on the first page. It appears to be part of an unfinished novel titled Jameson and the Invasion from X’all’th’thu’”thuuu. No other pages from this work have been discovered.

she held the blade before him and in the torchlight Jameson could see it was incredibly sharp and haunted with the ghosts blood of countless slain Terrans. Jameson stared into the wicked beauty of the woman before him, the one blue eye that was not hidden behind an eyepatch shined like a shiny blue jewel.

“Xorox,” said Jameson. “I should have known it was you. I could smell your evil before you came in the door!”

“You should not talk so, when it is I that hold this incredibly sharp blade!” And it is you who are She slid the slender razor-sharp blade lightly up Jameson’s bare thigh. Jameson strained against the chains that bound him to the wall and gritted his teeth in rage.

“The mighty Captain Jameson,” said Xorox, “bound in my dungeon while my mighty army amasses for the invasion of Earth!”

With a flick of her delicate wrist, she cut Jameson’s loincloth, which fell to the floor. Her eyes grew at the sight magnificence of Jameson’s exposed naked body, his exposed manhood a thunderclap of flesh.

“Mighty army?” said Jameson with a sneer. “I have slain larger armies on my way to battle!”

“Insolent dog!” She held the blade at Jameson’s scrot groin. “If I did not require your seed to infiltrate Earth, I would cut off your manhood and mount it like a trophy over my throne!”

“My seed?”

“Ha ha ha! You still do not get it, dog! With the seed of your manhood in my womb, we shall breed a race of Terran and Reptillian hybrids that cannot be detected by even your most sensitive R-Meters! They will walk among the earthlings as my agents, and not even they will know that their true loyalty is to me! Until the day when they strike! Now you will make love to me, or die!”

“No!” “Never!”

Jameson gathered his strength and pulled free of his chains. He seized Xorox’s wrist in the iron grip of his right hand and tore it free of her body as blood spurted like a fountain. He then stabbed Xorox in the belly with her own hand.

[insert Jameson one-liner here]

CHAPTER 8

The Carpet Stain

MY MEMORY OF the next few months after Vegas is spotty. I know John went to jail for a couple of weeks that winter. It was because of a fight over a girl or something, no big deal. Jennifer moved out of my place and then moved back in because of a fight we had over something or other. My roof started leaking and I learned about the joys of home ownership when a bill for four thousand dollars showed up in my mailbox after I got it repaired. On my birthday I went and visited my adoptive parents and it was a little awkward, as always. But they’re good people. My birthday gift from John was an envelope full of baked beans.

Jen and I didn’t talk about Vegas. We didn’t talk about Big Jim and all the things we saw and did over those two strange days. That’s why she never got along with John, I think, because John loved to talk about it, loved to read about ghosts and dimensions and demonic conspiracies. He was soaking this stuff up from the ’net and telling us all about it over empty beer bottles and greasy pizza boxes. He’d talk and she’d fidget, change the subject. I usually took her side.

But I still made a habit of watching, looking for alien white insects zipping around outdoors, studying the shadows for the dark figures we saw float out from that portal to who-knows-where. I kept a lookout for, well, anything. And I saw things from time to time. Or maybe I didn’t. A dark shape slipping around a corner, a pair of lit eyes like burning coals, floating through the night. Always out the corner of my eye or in the reflection of a window. Or in the paralyzed state between deep sleep and wakefulness in those dim morning hours. Nothing you could trust, nothing you could admit to seeing.

John got me alone one night, I guess it would have been that next spring after Vegas, and asked me straight up if I ever saw anything strange. Because he did, he said. All the time, he said. He got a job working as a janitor in the Undisclosed Courthouse and he said he saw an old man walking around the basement, a ghost, semitransparent but very real and “There, man. Just there, there as a brick wall. I mean, he was just, so incredibly there.” John rattled off more stories, told me he watched a baseball game on TV and the announcers made some comment about how the stands were half empty, how the team was having trouble selling tickets. “But man, the stands were full, Dave. I’m tellin’ ya, to my eyes every seat was filled and I think it was the undead, I think I was seeing thousands of walking souls that nobody else could see, watching the game. Isn’t that bizarre?”

I told him the truth, sort of. I said I didn’t see spirits or demons or walking shadows or anything that couldn’t be written off as a trick of the eyes. I told him I thought the soy sauce made us see all that and it had been months since we’d ingested it and no matter what the stuff was or where it was from, surely it had worked itself out of our systems by now. An awkward silence followed, John letting the implication of that statement hang in the air. Without coming out and saying it, I had just told him I thought he was either full of shit or losing his mind.

A week later I was in John’s apartment, flipping through a magazine while he sat on the couch playing some game or another. I glanced at the TV and it looked like one of those first-person shooting games where you wander around hallways looking over the barrel of your gun, tearing bad guys in half with splashes of digital blood. I was never that into them.

“You still got that pill bottle?” John said, trying to sound offhand while he hammered a control pad with his thumbs. “You said you went back and found it at Robert’s old trailer, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And was there still sauce in there?”

“No. It had two—capsules, or whatever they were—in it originally and I had taken them both.”

“Oh.”

On the screen, John shot and killed some kind of demon creature and a little box fell out of him. The screen displayed, YOU’VE GOT A BOX OF SHOTGUN SHELLS.

It wasn’t until later that I realized, with amazement and disgust, what John was saying: he would have taken the fucking soy sauce again if I had any left.

I started avoiding John after that.

JOHN DOESN’T MAKE avoiding him easy, though. He kept showing up at my house with a video game console curled under one arm, kept calling me to come play basketball, kept asking me if I was avoiding him. He was “let go” from his janitor job and he asked me if I could get him back on at Wally’s. I did and then I saw him every day whether I liked it or not. But when he tried to bring up anything vaguely spooky, I did what Jen did: I changed the subject.

And then, one day at Taco Bell there was this old woman sitting two tables away from John, Jen and me. The old woman isn’t eating. Just sitting there, both hands holding her purse in her lap.

A group of four college kids come in, frat guys, and they sat right at the old lady’s table like she wasn’t there, one guy sitting right on her. Through her. He’s sucking on this Burrito Supreme with this old woman’s elbows sticking out of his torso the whole time. Finally she just sits up out of him and daintily walks out through—literally through—one of the glass doors.

All three of our heads were fixed right on her, even Jen’s. There was no pretending we didn’t see it, we were all staring. It was the pink elephant in the room, the thunderous fart in the elevator. Denial would have been ridiculous. We finished our food and walked out and piled in my car, then Jen put her face in her hands and cried. John had this satisfied look that I wanted to punch off his face. He knew better than to say anything.

I decided right there that I could outlast it, ignore stuff like that for the rest of my life if I had to.

I was wrong, of course.

In the summer John read on a Web site about a lady in a neighboring state who claimed she had bloodstains that kept coming back and back in this one spot in her carpet. She had it steam-cleaned back to bleach white, but a week later, there was the stain again. Then they replaced the carpet. The stain came back. They had video and everything.

John told me about it and I blew him off. Then he got me drunk and told me about it again and suddenly I was fascinated. We called the lady, told her we were experts in new carpet-cleaning techniques and asked if we could come up to take a look. So based on one moment of drunken curiosity, we wound up burning up a whole Saturday making the seven-hour drive to go check out the magical carpet stain.

We heard screams from inside the house as soon as we pulled into the driveway. We banged on the door and were greeted by a six-year-old girl holding one of those sippy cups. We walked in and saw the parents watching some award show on TV while in the center of the room lay a screaming man, a flow of crimson running from his groin and staining the carpet underneath. The mother, a pleasant, heavy woman in her forties, pointed to the shrieking man and said, “That’s the stain.”

We told her we had to get some supplies from my car, then drove away. We did a search at their local library—that is, John did a search while I curled up in a chair and went to sleep—and found a story from a few years before where a man had died after getting his penis caught in a spring-loaded mole trap he was working on. He bled to death. We went back to the house the next day, asked the family to leave the room and tried talking to the bleeding guy.

We told him it wasn’t his house any longer, that his wife had sold it, that he was staining the carpet from beyond the grave. He didn’t react to us, just kept screeching and thrashing around and clutching his groin. But after about an hour of us badgering him, he vanished. Off to wherever they go. No more stain.

The carpet family was so impressed they apparently told everybody they knew about it. They knew it wasn’t some magical detergent, either.

After that we got about a dozen calls and e-mails asking us to come check out some situation or other. We thought only one was worth checking out because it mentioned “shadow people,” but it turned out to be bullshit, a college kid with a budding case of schizophrenia. In fact, of the contacts we got over the next three months, exactly one of them turned out to be a real haunting-type thing and that was Frank Campo, the guy with the spidery car. We fixed him just by telling him that he wasn’t crazy, that the horrors he was seeing were real. He seemed oddly comforted by that. He was a lawyer.

But the rest were nothing, scared and lonely old ladies and attention seekers who thought it was better to be crazy than unnoticed.

But John and I saw things. Oh yes. By then, just walking around and going about our lives, we saw things. There seemed to be a knack to it, a tuning of the eyes. Like focusing on the dirt on your windshield instead of the road outside.

I woke up one morning to find four pairs of huge eyes peering over my bedspread, inches from my face. Short little dwarf people, standing along the side of the bed with eyeballs three times bigger than a person’s should be. I blinked. They were gone. I didn’t tell Jennifer. I didn’t tell her about any of it. I told myself it was just one more thing to adjust to. That’s what life is. Adjustment.

Then, in the fall, everything went to hell.

CHAPTER 9

The Bratwurst Prophecy

IT WAS RONALD McDonald’s eyes that haunted me.

I had gotten hungry for bratwurst and had been walking toward the entrance of one of the four McDonald’s franchises in Undisclosed (if you think it’s weird getting a bratwurst from a McDonald’s, then you’re not from the Midwest). I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let out a scream.

Just a little scream, and a manly one. But I still frightened one little girl on the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too.

I couldn’t help it. It was one of those clear plastic static signs, pressed to the inside of the glass with the cartoon image filling most of that pane. The cloud of red hair, the size sixty red shoes, the yellow suit, and the, well . . .

I reached out and brushed my fingers over the glass.

The image is so perfectly drawn, I thought. So vivid.

Other late-night customers brushed past me and cast quick, stealthy glances my way, looking at the crazy man with the beard stubble and the ruffled dark hair. But they didn’t see what I saw, I was sure of that.

No, they saw the happy clown with his arms spread wide, one leg cocked at a forty-five-degree angle with one red floppy clown shoe tipped up into the air, big smile spread across his red-and-white face, welcoming paying customers into his burger factory. I remembered it from the last hundred times I had been here.

What I saw at the moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly open, as if cut with a dull utility razor. He was—how can I put this delicately? In this perfectly rendered and shaded cartoon he was using his own white-gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth.

Detailed. Yes. It was very, very detailed.

But it was those eyes that got me. His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a terror about to boil over into madness. Tears streaked his face, sweat beaded his forehead. Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed to be put out of his misery. Those eyes told a story, not just of a man eating himself, but of a man being forced to eat himself.

And only I saw it.

I closed my eyes, looked again. Still there. Not shimmering like a mirage in the desert or some blur out the corner of your eye. It just clung to the window in its brazen thereness, real right down to the little plastic corners peeling up from the glass.

I turned away, tried to clear my head, to concentrate. Then I spun back at the image. There. For just a split second, I saw the normal logo, the way everybody else saw it. Happy corporate clown. Then it blurred back to the corrupted version again. This time there was text.

The usual MCDONALD’S—I’M LOVIN’ IT! slogan was replaced by a jumble of crazed red letters saying,

MCWONGALD’S—SHIT LUNCH TURDWOMAN

Some would have doubted their sanity at this point, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had melted from overuse. I went back to my car and just drove around town for several hours, my appetite gone.

It had my fucking name in it. McWongald’s. What the fuck.

They haunt minds.

Someone was talking to me, from that other side. I pictured floating black figures and eyes like cigarette embers. I pictured a single blue eye in the darkness. I felt sick.

My orbit around the town finally degraded and I crash-landed at John’s apartment. I told him the McWongald’s story, hoping he’d say something like, “That’s some weird shit” and start untangling two controllers from one of his many game consoles. Instead, he said, “Get up.”

I stood and realized I had been sitting on a stack of three cardboard boxes. He opened the flaps on one to reveal that it was full of hardback books.

“Wait, what’s all that?”

“Dr. Marconi’s book.”

“You have a hundred and fifty copies of it?”

“Oh, right. You don’t remember. In Vegas, we were walking out the back and Marconi makes some comment about how we should read his book. You were all ‘fuck you old man’ and I said sure. Then I grabbed a dolly and wheeled out a whole stack. Just staring at him coldly the whole time I was wheeling them backward out the door. Daring that fucker to stop me.”

“Why?”

“They were free, Dave. Anyway, he says something in here . . .” John flipped pages. “It’s around the beginning somewhere. I don’t see it right now—maybe it was in a different book—but anyway he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages.”

“What, like his Bible was possessed? Holy shit, he must have been the worst priest ever.”

“No. He says when you’re dealing with any kind of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they’re real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he’s being read about and that you’re somebody he may have to deal with. And I’m thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.”

“What ‘I’ did? What about us? We were both there.”

“Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”

I closed my eyes and collapsed onto John’s futon. I said, “The thing. The wig monster. Does it still come around?”

“No, haven’t seen it in months. Except about three weeks ago I was eating a corn dog, the thing appeared, snatched it out of my hand, and disappeared again. Never saw it after that.”

“No more of this. Okay? It’s over. No more chasing after this stuff. They’ve set up camp inside my head, John. It’s gone too far.”

John’s mouth said, “Okay” but his eyes said, What makes you think you can just walk away?

“Let’s order a pizza.”

THE PIZZA TASTED like rotten eggs. Just to me, not to John. The rest of that week, every meal smelled like formaldehyde or paint thinner. I decided it was them, messing with me. Punching random buttons in my brain. When they got bored with that, they switched senses. I would hear my name as I drifted off to sleep, as if spoken six inches from my ear. Over and over again.

Molly started to get agitated, growling at things in the darkness, prowling around our bed at all hours of the night as if keeping watch. Early one morning she woke me up, pressing her wet nose against my elbow. I went to let her outside, and she went sprinting down the street. She didn’t look back.

Not long after that, they—whoever “they” were—tried something new. The radio. I would hear entire songs changed, twisted. I got dancey and lighthearted beats under lyrics about prison rape or incest and, once, a version of “Stairway to Heaven” with my name edited in throughout. This new version that blared over the speakers of a busy shopping mall (though only I heard it, of course) was a list of all my chronic sins and vices, a musical rundown of all the reasons I, David Wong, was destined for Hell. It got to me, I admit. Even if their version of “Stairway” barely rhymed. What rhymes with masturbation?

I slowly came to the realization that these shadowy beings had the crude sense of humor of fourteen-year-olds.

That’s when things started to disintegrate between me and Jen. Our entire relationship had been a process of slow disintegration, I think. She knew something was up, mainly because there were so many more ’80s power ballads around the house than usual. She pestered me until I came clean and told her what was going on.

She nodded and said she understood, then left to go to her friend Amber’s house, ostensibly to help out with Amber’s new baby. She seemed to have taken all of her clothes with her, though, and didn’t come back that night. I sat there, depressed, thinking about coming home to the silent house night after night. Without even Molly for company.

On an evening a few weeks later, I was driving home from work with one thought cycling through my brain: I would go to the grocery store, buy a pie, and just eat the whole thing. In one sitting. A whole pie.

My radio was playing a supernaturally reworked version of an ’80s song by some Duran Duran soundalike band. It was the one with the word “Africa” in the chorus, and this version had been twisted into some kind of a racist diatribe against blacks. I tried to block it out, turning my attention to the call. Toto, that was the band’s name.

My cell phone rang.

Shocked, as always, that I had actually left it on, I fished around inside my jacket for the chirping thing. Caller ID showed John’s number. I punched the button and said:

“No.”

“Dave, glad I caught you. I just got a call from my uncle. He’s asked us to come in on a case. Like consultants.”

“Your uncle? The exotic dancer? Exactly what kind of ‘consulting’ would we be doing?”

“No, no, Uncle Drake. The cop. They got weirdness and they want us to come look at it. The crime scene is at Eight-eighteen West Twenty-third Street. By the mall.”

This stopped me. The cops called us? What, they got a ghost they want us to check out? Like we’re fucking Scooby-Doo?

“No. We talked about this. I’m going home to eat a pie.”

“I think they found Molly.”

“What?”

Molly? What, did she steal another car?

“Come get me. See you in a few.”

“I’m not going, John. I—”

I was talking to a dead phone.

I cursed and rubbed my forehead. The radio sang its bigotry in perfect ’80s pop harmony.

Let’s send ’em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica . . .

I reached down to the knob, to find the radio was already off.

Here we fucking go.

I PICKED UP John at his building, since it turned out his supernatural powers couldn’t stop the bank from repossessing his motorcycle.

We turned onto 23rd Street, a lineup of perfect new houses with trendy coffee-cream-colored siding and a shiny SUV in each driveway. Finding the house was easy—it was the one with the swirling red-and-blue cop lights out front, the collected cop cars making it look like the ship from Close Encounters had landed there.

One guy tells us to turn back, and we go, I thought as we pulled up a block away from the commotion. Any one of those guys says “boo” and we turn around and never come back here.

We passed a blue Jeep in the driveway, license plate STRMQQ 1. John studied it, frowning a little. Four cops stood out on the front lawn, looking unsure, like they all needed each other’s armed company right now. Eight eyes landed on us.

“Don’t worry,” John said to them. “We’re here.”

Each cop was individually pissed off by that, I could see, and it was only the arrival of John’s uncle Drake that spared us the confrontation with these guys who clearly had no idea who we were. Drake was a big guy, with a uniform that stretched and bulged around the middle. He sported an uneven mustache that I think he grew to cover a scar on his upper lip.

“Hey, Johnny. I really appreciate you comin’ by like this.”

He gave John a hard, manly handshake.

“So what’s goin’ on?”

“Do you, uh, know whose house this is?”

“Strom Cuzewon?” John offered.

A moment of confused silence from Drake.

“Um, no. It’s Ken Phillipe, the Channel Five weather guy.”

“Oh,” said John, seeming unsatisfied. I glanced back at the plates, STRMQQ 1.

“The Qs are supposed to look like a pair of eyes,” I informed John. “The license plate means ‘Storm Watcher.’ ”

John looked at the plates, then back at me, then at the plates again. I noticed for the first time that the big bay window into the living room of the house had been bashed in, the curtains behind it rustling in the breeze. Finally John said, “So somebody killed the weather guy?”

Drake grunted. “Sorta. Damnedest thing you ever saw.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“We ain’t been inside the house yet. There’s this, dog.” To me he said, “John here said he thought it sounded like yours.”

I couldn’t see around the bay window curtains, so I walked up to the front door and peered into the decorative little window, into the living room. A girl sat on an overstuffed leather couch, maybe a few years younger than me, silken auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. Little wisps of bangs drifted down over her smooth forehead, just above her gorgeous almond eyes. She wore cutoff sweatshorts and had the most perfect pair of tanned thighs I have ever seen. I felt my hand instinctively go up to straighten my hair and I was suddenly horribly aware of every physical flaw on my body. Every ounce of fat, the little scar on my cheek.

If I looked like that, I would wear shorts in October, too. I’d quit my job and spend all day at home, gently caressing myself. Did I shave today?

On the floor next to the couch was a bloody dead person.

“That’s the weather guy?” I asked.

“Yeah,” confirmed Drake.

“Do you see the girl sitting on the couch?”

“Look, buddy, I told ya we’ve tried to get to her in there, but the dog . . .”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I just wanted to know if you could see her.”

“That’s Krissy Lovelace, their neighbor. She’s been sitting like that since we got here, frozen. We even tried to signal to her but she won’t respond. Like she’s just blanked out.”

“So she killed him?”

“No, his throat was torn out. By the dog. It’s still in there. That’s the problem. Every time we try to get in, it—”

“Damn,” I interrupted. “It’s too bad this city doesn’t have a special department to, you know, control animals. Oh, wait. We do. It’s called Animal Control. Do you want their number?”

“Wait a second,” said John. “You’re saying Molly did that?” He turned to me. “Dave, we sat there and poked at Molly with a stick for exactly twenty-three minutes that one time before she even growled. She couldn’t do that to a man.”

“No,” Drake said. “You still don’t understand. My guys won’t even go in and I don’t blame ’em. It’s somethin’ . . . unnatural.”

I peered in again. “Well, I don’t see a dog. And I’m not seeing why we can’t just—”

Molly came into view. It was her all right, the rusty coat of an Irish retriever or whatever she was, now shampooed and combed to perfection. Her new owner apparently groomed her more than I had. This combination of girl and dog could make a good living as models in the dog-supply industry.

The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor.

Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track and hung by invisible threads. When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”

Molly continued to float around the room like a shaggy little blimp.

Here. We. Go. Again.

I TURNED FROM the door. John had this look on his face like this was all routine. Ah, yes, a floating-dog scenario. We have the parts in the truck.

Drake said, “A neighbor saw it, said Krissy was just walking the dog along the street out there and all of a sudden the thing takes off. The damned thing breaks its leash and races across the lawn like it was fired from a cannon. It then jumps through the plate-glass window. She said the dog jumped into the air and tore out Phillipe’s throat in half a second. I guess Ms. Lovelace ran inside after it, started bawling and then she just shut down. Too much for her. I kinda feel like doing that myself. Not the bawling part, mind you.”

I said, “Wait. Did you hear what the dog said just now?”

“Said? She barked . . .”

“Ah. Okay. And when you look at the dog right now, she’s . . .”

“Floatin’ a few feet off the floor.”

You’d think the fact that other people could witness the weirdness would have comforted me. It didn’t. It meant the rules had changed already.

“John and I need to have a word about this. We’ll, uh, be right back.”

On the way back to my car, I said, “We’re driving away as fast as we can. Right to the bakery counter at the grocery store.”

“Dave, those guys could see her. All the cops. They saw her floatin’ around and doing supernatural shit. That’s new.”

“That’s new? Why is she floating at all, John?”

“Gotta be the sauce, right? She got more of it than any of us. I was always amazed she survived. Maybe, you know, they got to her finally.”

“After all this time? None of this makes sense.”

“Did you hear what she said?”

“She said, ‘I serve none but Korrok.’”

Speaking that meaningless word made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, though I couldn’t pin down why. My mind almost made a connection, then abruptly steered clear of it nearly hard enough to make the train of thought go flying out of my ear.

“You sure?” said John. “I thought she said, ‘I serve none but to rock.’ I was about to agree with her.”

“Whatever, John.”

“So who’s Korrok?”

“Don’t know.”

And keeping it that way is making my brain’s denial gland work overtime.

“You still got the mints in your car?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

John dug around in the glove compartment and pulled out a little roll of candies somebody had mailed to me a while back. Crazy people mail me things. Most of it I throw on a shelf in my toolshed and forget.

We went back to the front door of the house, and I shook one of the candies out into my palm. I very slowly turned the knob and pushed the door in, just enough to lean my head and my right arm through.

Molly the Hoverdog was about ten feet away, behind the couch and her incredibly hot new owner. I held out the candy, which immediately caught Molly’s attention.

I tossed the candy on the floor and quickly ducked back out. Molly floated over to it, tilted in midair until her snout was just over the white morsel. She lapped it up.

For a moment, nothing. John was about to supply the “it’s not working” when, with a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children.

A couple of cops behind us cheered. Drake walked up. “What the hell was that?”

John answered for me. “It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but . . .” John shrugged, businesslike. These things happen sometimes.

Drake said, “Fine. Now let’s get one thing clear. I don’t want to hear any more about this after tonight. This gets written up as a dog attack. Somebody’ll be here later to clean up the scene and there’ll be a funeral and all of these here men will go home to their wives and try to act like the world ain’t gone crazy.”

I said, “Yeah that’s probably for the best—”

Drake’s head snapped toward me.

“Shut up. I ain’t done.”

Back to John he said, “Between you and me, I need to know some things. That was your dog, right?”

“Well, Dave’s dog. But she’s belonged to several people . . .”

“Hey. Look in there. He’s dead. You understand me? Now, you and I both know, things . . . happen around here. In this town. Always have. My daddy wore this uniform before me, he told me stories. But I ain’t never seen anything like that.”

John put up his hands defensively and said, “Neither have we.”

“But the last time things got weird, you were there. With the party and all those kids that died, the detective that left and never came back. Don’t be playin’ games with me. If you know somethin’, tell me. Tell me so I can prepare for it.”

John said, “We don’t know the situation. Not yet.”

On the word “yet” I had the urge to punch John in the kidneys.

“But let us take a shot at the girl.” We all glanced toward Krissy, still frozen on the sofa. “Before the psychiatrist gets here or whoever you bring in to reboot people like her.”

Drake stared John down, then decided to roll the dice. “You got two minutes.”

“Great.” John ducked through the front door. Drake reached out and grabbed his elbow.

“Hey.”

“Yeah.”

“This the end of the world?”

He said it in the earnest, stiff-jawed manner of a middle-aged man asking the doc if it’s cancer. It scared the fuck out of me.

John said, “We’ll give you a call if we find out.”

John went to the couch, but I couldn’t resist stopping by the red, six-foot circle of dog mush.

I found Molly’s collar near her head. The bloodstained tag:I’m Molly.Please return me to . . .

“Good-bye, Molly,” I muttered. “Of all the dogs I’ve known in my life, I’ve never seen a better driver.”

Just before I turned away, I noticed something else. Out of the pile of dog salsa stuck one of the paws, straight up into the air. On the foot, on the pad where the palm would be on a human hand, was a marking, like a tattoo.

It was a little black symbol, something like the mathematical symbol for pi. I pointed this out to John, who suggested I take the severed paw home for further study. I decided it wasn’t that important. Maybe something the breeder put on there, I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed it before but how often do you look at a dog’s feet?

Krissy Lovelace wouldn’t make eye contact with us and she wouldn’t respond to our voices, but we did get her to her feet and led her outside. We took her to the backyard, saying generic, soothing words to her the whole way.

Once we were out of sight of the cops, John put his hands on Krissy’s shoulders and turned her to face him. He held up his smoldering cigarette.

“Miss? You see this? You start talkin’ or I’m gonna burn you with it.”

No response.

“Ma’am,” I offered. “I’d do what he says. I’m a good guy, a reasonable guy, but my friend here? He’s a wild man. And once he gets goin’ I can’t stop him. Now wouldn’t you rather talk to me?”

Nothing.

John jammed the lit cigarette into the back of her hand with a pssssst sound.

She yelped and yanked her hand back, shaking it madly. “What the heck are you doing?” she screeched.

“Ma’am, we got a serious situation here,” John said, in a voice devoid of sympathy. “We got a dead guy and maybe a lot worse on the horizon if you can’t help us. Now I’m real sorry you saw what you saw but we ain’t got time for you to curl up into some psychological shell. Help us and you can just repress the memory later.”

She looked around for a moment, bewildered. Then:

“Molly!” she gasped. “Molly attacked Ken!”

“Yes, we know,” I said. “But we don’t get why—”

“And you say he died?”

“It’s—yes, he died. It’s a strange thing and we need you to tell us—”

“I’m gonna puke.” She leaned over. “Can I go to jail for this? Because it was my dog? Can they charge me with murder?”

“No. I—look, I don’t know. But we need to—”

“Miss,” John interrupted. “We have reason to believe your dog was possessed by some kind of Hell demon. Has Molly ever spoken to you before?”

Pause.

“Who are you guys?”

“Just answer the question. Please,” John said. “Has there ever been any levitation?”

“What? No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog was dabbling in the occult while you had her it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”

“What? No, no. I’ve only had her for a few weeks, she showed up at my house and I went to return her to the address on her tag but the owner was this weird girl and she told me to keep her. I was just walking her and we ran into Danny Wexler.”

She said that name like we should know it, like it was a mutual friend or something. She saw the look of nonrecognition on our faces and said, “The Channel Five sports guy. I . . . know him. He goes to my church. He pulled up alongside the road, like he was gonna stop at Ken Phillipe’s house because, you know, they work together. He gets out and he pets Molly and then he drives off. Just like that.”

I glanced at John, then turned to her.

“Ma’am—”

“Please stop calling me that. You sound like a cop when you do it. Call me Krissy.”

“Krissy,” I said, “tell me exactly what Wexler said to you. Word for word.”

“I don’t think he said much of anything. Just, ‘pretty dog you got there.’ Then he drove away. A second later Molly went nuts.”

“After he touched her?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just to pet her, though.”

I flashed back to the beer truck, John touching Molly and waking up with a jolt, his soul jumping from her to him like a spark of static electricity.

“And he didn’t say anything else?” I asked. “Didn’t use the word ‘Korrok’ or anything like that?”

“Um, no, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”

“Okay.” I turned to walk away.

“Wait!” said Krissy. “There’s something else. When Danny drove up, he was wearing a mask. Or it looked like it, all black. But he must have taken it off because when he pulled up it was off. But I know I saw it. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Could you see any of his face? When he had the mask on?”

“No, but . . . it was dark. Why would he do that? Is Molly okay? Do you think they’ll take her to the pound?”

“Uh, if you go around and talk to the police, they’ll explain everything.”

As I walked away, John thanked Krissy for her cooperation and let her know that we would contact her if any more leads developed. He hurried to catch up with me and said, “Fuck! Dave! The shadow people. She saw a fucking shadow people . . . person.”

“The what people?”

“You know goddamned well. Those things, the men made of shadow we saw in Vegas. They’re here. Or at least one of them is. I’ve seen them, Dave. I’ve seen them around.”

“No, they’re not and no, you haven’t.”

When our butts landed in my car a minute later, John lit up another cigarette and asked, “Okay, what now?”

THE THING ABOUT video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. So say you’re playing against the computer team, you’re down by one and let’s say you take a last-second shot to win the game. It’s the same program you’re playing against that decides whether or not the digital ball goes through the digital hoop on that final shot. So it can arbitrarily make you lose or arbitrarily let you win. The whole thing is bullshit.

But we were playing anyway, on my sofa. John was Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and I was the Chicago Bulls, led by Pierre Manslapper (you can name your own players if you want). It was an hour after the thing with Molly and the dead weather guy.

“So,” John said, glancing at his watch. “You think the cops talked to Wexler?”

“Who?”

“Danny Wexler, the sports guy? Because of the thing with the weather guy getting killed?”

“The weather guy was killed by Molly. That’s how it’ll go down, dog attack. Case closed. And Molly is dead so . . .”

“You’re being stupid, you know that? You think we should call Marconi?”

I shrugged. “You do what you want. Hey, did you know that the number-one all-time rated show in Korea was the premiere of that ’80s show Joanie Loves Chachi? It turns out that in Korean, ‘chachi’ means ‘penis.’”

John paused the game.

“It’s after ten. I wanna flip over, see if the news has got anything about it.”

He did, before I could object, and I was immediately reminded of why I hated local newscasts. We sat through a lengthy tribute to the departed Ken Phillipe, showing old video clips of the idiot standing knee-deep in rushing floodwater while wind pummeled his microphone, another shot of a shaky camera trying to track a tornado on the horizon while Ken shouted his report.

They transitioned from that to a scandal at a local nursing home where dishwashers rinsed bedpans and dinner plates in the same load, then to a house fire that wouldn’t have made the newscast at all had their crew not arrived in time to get video of the pretty flames. Then they got to sports and I admit, that part was . . . different.

The first thing that was strange was when they cut to the two-shot of Danny Wexler and the anchor, Danny’s face was black. I saw immediately why Krissy thought he was wearing a mask earlier. At first glance it would look like he had on a black ski mask, one without the eyeholes.

But when they cut to the closer one-shot of his head, you could see the effect went way beyond that; Danny Wexler appeared to be a statue carved from solid shadow. Only John and I saw this, of course, because the other anchors didn’t react in horror. Or at least, not until Danny Wexler opened his mouth:

“I’m Danny Wexler and this is Channel Five sports! The [Undisclosed] football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did. Here’s Hornets quarterback Mikey Wolford, flopping that right arm around like a retard while he tries to pass to a teammate that apparently only he can see. Aaaaand, it’s intercepted. Nice pass, ’tard! Now here’s Spartans fullback Derrick Simpson, pumping those nigger thighs down the field like pistons on a machine designed for cotton picking. Ooh, nice tackle attempt there, Freddy Mason! I bet you could tackle that fullback if he was made of dick, couldn’t you, Freddy? But, he’s not, so final score, forty-one to seventeen. May every Spartan die with a turd on his lips. All hail Korrok.”

Danny didn’t get to read any more highlights, as the newscast abruptly switched back to a visibly shaken anchorwoman, who announced they would be right back. Commercial.

John clicked off the TV and I let out a long, resigned sigh. Without a word, we put on our jackets and walked out the door. We stopped by my toolshed.

THE MORBIDLY OBESE security guard at the Channel 5 building told us Wexler had left early. We almost gave up at that point, but got a huge break in the case when John thought to look up Wexler’s home address in the phone book.

After getting lost, briefly, we pulled into the lot of Wexler’s building and found a Buick with the license plate 5 SPRTS, which, after some debate, we decided must stand for Channel 5 sports and that it must be his.

“You still got the mints?” John asked as we strode up to the four-story apartment building. “You knock on the door and when Wexler answers, you cram some mints down his throat.”

“If he’s acting normal, we don’t do anything. Just find out what he knows. About Molly and, you know, everything else that’s happening. If it’s something we can fix with a mint then fine. If not, then we leave Dr. Marconi a voice mail and drive until we find a town that doesn’t keep showing up in books with titles like True Tales of the Bizarre. Marconi can come down and do a whole show on it for all I care. Write another book.”

I had my old-school ghetto blaster; John was carrying a satchel containing several items he collected from my toolshed. We didn’t have any holy water. Where do you even get it? Off the Internet?

We positioned ourselves on either side of the door to Wexler’s third-floor apartment. I set down the stereo, facing its speakers toward the closed door. John unzipped the satchel and pulled out a weapon he had made, a Bible wrapped around the end of a baseball bat with electrician’s tape. He brought it up to the ready. I pushed “play.”

The smooth-yet-screechy sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til it’s Gone” filled the hall.

We let it play for the duration of the song, one guy down the hall poking his head out of a door in confusion and then closing it quickly at the sight of John and his bat. Wexler’s door remained closed.

We shut off the stereo, listened. Nothing from the other side of the door. I tried the knob. Unlocked. I gestured to John and he ducked inside, Bible bat at the ready. My gesture had meant, “Wait, we should reconsider this.”

I followed John in, reluctantly. I left the door open behind me.

Wide open.

Lights on, but nobody home. The television was on and I jumped when I saw it was me and John on the screen. Then I noticed a tripod and camcorder facing us from across the room, aimed at the sofa in front of us. It was apparently positioned to tape whoever was sitting there, the TV set to show the live feed. The sofa was empty now.

We split up and quickly searched all five rooms of the small apartment, but the place had an empty feeling to it and my heart had slowed down by the time I peered in the last doorway. Nobody here.

The place was neat but cramped. Furniture too close to the TV, a kitchen table that would have to be pulled away from the wall if you wanted to seat more than two people. Movie posters in the bedroom. Bachelor pad.

“DAVE! IN HERE!”

I ran. I found John lying prone on the floor of the bedroom.

“JOHN! WHAT—”

At the sight of me he sat up and thrust both hands out. In one hand he held a large, folded envelope, ragged where it had been torn open. In the other hand he held a small, silver canister.

Just like mine.

He said, “Under the bed.”

I let out a long breath and said, “Oh holy mother of fuck.”

“Yeah.”

I sat on the bed. I shook my head slowly and said, “Man, we can’t go through this again.”

“Look.”

He gave me the envelope. I flattened it out, saw the address was written in an aggressive jagged scrawl that had to be a man’s.

“ATTN: KATHY BORTZ, REPORTER

CHANNEL 5 NEWSROOM”

. . . and then the P.O. Box number of the TV station.

John said he remembered her from the newscast earlier, said she was the lead reporter who did the nursing home story. So if you were a citizen and had something big to share with the world, such as a vial of a black, oily goo from Planet X, you’d mail it to a Kathy Bortz. Or, at least, that’s what James “Big Jim” Sullivan would do.

I can say that because his name was scrawled in the return address corner, followed by an address I had seen many times and had long memorized, always following the words, “I’m Molly. Please return me to . . .”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth, tried to think through it. I said, “Jim had the soy sauce.”

John shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?”

“For the same reason you haven’t told anybody else. That night, I was surprised Jim hung around as long as he did, even after the needle came out. But, maybe he was there because he did know what it was. Trying to control the situation. And he did try to tell somebody, you know. He mailed it to the damned TV station.”

“Before he died.”

A shrug. “Probably.”

“Son of a bitch. I knew he knew more than he was letting on. We should have sweated him down and got some answers. So he got it from the Jamaican?”

“I guess.”

“Where’d the Jamaican get it from?”

“The wig monsters, right?”

“What, you think Robert Marley had a ranch full of them somewhere? No, I think saying soy sauce comes from those monsters is like saying Pringles come from Pringles tubes. The sauce has a mind of its own, those things are just carriers. And these little silver vials that keep turning up, you don’t buy these at the hardware store. No, somebody was supplying Robert.”

I found myself about to suggest calling Drake the Cop, but I stopped that in midthought. I pictured all sorts of questions about the Las Vegas trip, and the missing detective, and so on. Then I thought again about calling Marconi, but that felt hopeless. John had looked up a number for his office but it wasn’t like that was a red phone that rang at his bedside. We’d get some voice mail tree asking if we wanted to order a copy of his DVD.

I wandered into the living room and sat on the couch, seeing myself do it on the TV screen at the same time. I waved to myself. I looked depressed, rumpled and tired enough to sleep on a sidewalk. People would stop and put change in a cup for me.

John went and did something in the kitchen, banging around plates and opening drawers. A minute later he sat down beside me, carrying a sandwich and a soda.

I noticed a VCR atop the TV was recording the camera’s feed. I hit “stop” on the VCR and then “rewind.”

John reached over to an answering machine on the end table. He skipped through eleven worthless messages before we heard the unmistakable voice of Action Weather Watcher Ken Phillipe:

Beep.“Danny? It’s Ken. Call me, buddy. What you saw, I don’t want you to misunderstand. Krissy and I, we been neighbors a long time, I knew her mom from way back—look, I want you to know that she and I were talking but we were talkin’ about you, Danny. You got her scared, the way you’ve been acting. Anyway. Give me a call, Danny, and I’ll be over with a six-pack and we’ll shoot the shit. I hope you’re well, buddy.”

Beep.

I started the VCR from the beginning of the tape. Empty sofa. Then Danny Wexler leaned into the frame, glancing over at the feed on the TV. He sat down, looking worn and beaten and drained, in a sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans. The door we had just entered through was visible over his shoulder. He said:“Hi, honey. Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”I looked at John. “Was he talking to somebody behind the camera?” John didn’t answer, just squinted quizzically as Wexler continued.“Come on. It’s okay.”A pause, Wexler staring into the camera in silence for a few seconds.“Just say hello.”

[Another pause.]

“I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something. Something you can’t imagine.”

“That’s bizarre,” said John. “It’s like listening to one half of a phone conversation.”“If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t,” he said. “But you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”

He broke down into sobs.

Wexler babbled on, those long pauses here and there.

I said, “So, he was on the sauce, right?”

“At some point, yeah. Maybe he thought it would improve his sportscast. And now that I think about it, it sort of did.”

“Or maybe he didn’t take it. Maybe it took him. The same way it happened to me. The reporter lady gets the envelope, she glances at it and assumes it’s from a crazy person, she tosses it in the trash . . .”

John picked it up. “. . . Then Wexler’s dumb ass wanders along, gets curious and says, ‘What’s this?’ and fishes it out. Horror ensues.”

“Fast-forward toward the end of the tape. See if he mentions where he’s going before he leaves.”

John never got the chance. On the screen, Wexler flinched and looked up. The sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til it’s Gone” filled the room.

Wexler jumped off the couch and walked out of the frame. A couple of minutes later we watched ourselves burst through the door.

John and I leapt up from the couch as if our asses were spring-loaded.

“We just missed him!” John screamed. “We just missed him! Shit!”

On the TV, John and I walked passed the camera, then headed off to search the apartment.

On-screen, a shape appeared above us.

Some kind of creature, clinging to the ceiling.

Wexler.

On the screen, he scrambled upside down to the doorway, clutching the top of the door frame and pushing himself into the hall. Weightless. Moving fast as a salamander, an inhuman blur.

John hoisted the ghetto blaster, punched “play.” “Sweet Child O’ Mine” blasted. He held the stereo over his head like John Cusack in Say Anything and charged into the hall.

We pounded down the stairs, power ballad in our wake, stupidly hoping Wexler had hung around the building.

In the parking lot, a minute later, John spun with the ghetto blaster, warding off the night. No sign of Wexler.

The parking spot was empty. The song ended and we stood there like idiots, chests heaving, chilled air frosting the sweat on my face.

John said, “Maybe he went back to the TV station?”

I shrugged. “Or to Ken’s house. Or Krissy’s house. Or to the hospital. Or that twenty-four-hour tattoo place. Or the airport where he has a flight waiting to take him to Thailand. You know where I think we should check first? The nearest all-night bakery.”

We trudged around the building and back through the row of hedges that separated the visitor’s lot from the reserved spaces. Black as pitch out here. I glanced up and noticed the lights were off in the lot—

—of course they are—

—and there was no moon. Dark as hell. It was chilly, that wet-autumn-night kind of cold, but I knew part of the cold I was feeling was coming from inside. Fear was creeping up on me, working from the guts out.

Just go back, man. Go back home, to the warmth and the light. You did your best. Now it’s over. You won’t find him. And dark like this, true dark, belongs to bats and rapists. You did what you could.

I walked on, feeling already like this was wrong, totally wrong, my car keys clutched in my hand like a rosary, our shoes crunching dead leaves with each step.