John Dies at the End (62 page)

We hung in awkward silence for a moment, but then I had an idea. “Question,” I said. “That flying Shopvac earlier mentioned a quarantine. I presume they used old public buildings for this, such as hospitals and schools, right? So my question is, do any of these converted quarantines still have their gymnasiums intact? Or at least the part that had the basketball goals?”

“No, I’m afraid all of the educational institutions were razed with the first siege, right before the mass book burnings. Human ignorance has been their greatest weapon. But that is not the worst the dark ones have done. Often the . . .”

He droned on and on, and I instantly regretted asking the question. I looked at my watch, saw that it displayed 66:69 as the time. I began to accumulate a list of all of the ways this universe sucked.

“. . . therefore, only with your unique otherworldly genetic makeup can you resist the infection of the—”

“Yes, that’s very interesting,” said John. “But to perform this task you request we’ll need a number of items from our world. You must allow us to return there and come back to begin our quest.”

The man nodded. “It is good, then. We shall await your return.”

We picked up our ball and ducked back through the dimensional rift. We stepped from the black sphere and were glad to see the sunlight and netted goals. We weren’t so happy with the return of the oppressive heat, but decided to deal with it rather than return to that other crappy, dysfunctional universe.

We decided on one more game. Before we could inbound the ball, a gang of four strong-looking, attractive, twenty somethings walked up. Two boys, one black, one white. Two girls, one Asian, one a pretty blonde. They oozed curiosity upon seeing the portal and exchanged what sounded from a distance like witty comments. The white boy and girl seemed to dislike each other and bickered good-naturedly as they stepped through the portal, a sense of adventure in the air.

John rolled his eyes. We had an argument over who had the ball last, but John finally admitted he was wrong and gave it to me. We played for a bit, but fatigue had set in and we exchanged two missed shots each.

Then, suddenly, all four of the twenty somethings were ejected from the black sphere. They were covered in dirt and bruises and minor cuts.

“Look!” gushed the Asian girl. “It’s the same moment when we left! None of that time passed here!”

“She’s right!” said the black kid. “Yo, am I glad to see that sun! We saved the whole damn world, man!”

The white boy and girl kissed, apparently having fallen in love during their quest. The boy disengaged and looked at us with excited eyes. “Dude, you guys won’t believe what just happened to us!”

John turned to him.

“You bored a stranger with your stupid-ass story, and he pulled out his cock and whipped you with it like a stagecoach driver?”

The kid shut up, baffled. John picked up the ball and bounced a pass to me.

“Your ball.”

P
AGE 375
      S
CIENCE AND THE
B
EYOND
      D
R.
A
LBERT
M
ARCONI

was the last survivor of the plague.

As the team made its way through the abandoned village, the priest described the outbreak that had taken every single member of the tribe but him. Painful sores, blindness, madness, limbs that in the course of minutes seemed to rot and split like bad fruit. Horrors an old man should not have to see in his declining years (the priest had lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven).

The priest believed he had been spared by Koddock only to relay the tale to me, to warn me off. He bid me farewell, saying he intended to strike out into the jungle, to walk west until he touched the sun or until the land reclaimed him. I didn’t tell him that walking that direction meant he
might
wind up as part of a tour group out of Iquitos. I shook his hand and left Peru for good.

A week later I was back in New York, relaxing with Sharon after Dr. Haleine’s memorial service, enjoying cups of coffee laced with a great deal of brandy.

We stood on the balcony, looking over the city through clouds of my pipe smoke.

Sharon said, “Those poor people. Why did they have to die?”

I snorted a laugh around my pipe. “We all have to, dear.”

She didn’t smile. “You know what I mean. The way they died, sick and blind and screaming for their gods to save them, with no answer in return.”

She turned her eyes to me.

“The gods are cruel, aren’t they, Albie?”

I drew a deep breath and replied, “Every living being has but one need: power. Power over other living things. You need it to grow, to eat, to reproduce. And cruelty is the ultimate expression of power. To impose needless, extreme suffering and humiliation on another. It is the purest demonstration of strength. Toddlers learn it in the nursery.

“Therefore every organism, from the microbe up, wears its cruelty as a badge to mark its upward progress. Prey must be subdued, competition must be starved, enemies must be wiped out. One would thus assume that we find the same among the gods, only more so. That at each level of the heavens we find higher and higher levels of greed, brutality and mindless spite. How else could they have become gods?”

Sharon shivered, though it was not cold on the balcony.

In a barely audible voice she asked, “But is that really the way it is? The work you do—you would know better than anyone.”

I set my pipe aside and turned, to let her look into my eyes. I said,

Afterword

If you want to know when the next edition in the John and Dave series will appear on bookshelves or when the film adaptation will hit theaters, go to my permanent home on the Web at
JohnDiesattheEnd.com
. There you can keep up with the latest news and further explore the
John Dies at the End
universe. You can also find me at comedy megasite
Cracked.com
, where I serve as the editor and, as such, have somehow gained full-time employment writing poop jokes. Yes, it is a ridiculous universe we live in.

Speaking of which, it should be pointed out that the story behind this story, the tale of how
John Dies at the End
wound up in print at all, should be an inspiration to anyone who works in a cubicle and/or is really easily inspired.

Back in 2001 I was living a double life. During the day I was just a guy doing data entry at a law office, for single digits an hour. But at night, I would change out of those khakis and assume another identity: Guy Doing Data Entry at an Insurance Company. Fortunately the 75 hours a week I spent filling in columns of numbers on computer screens didn’t leave much time for the crushing depression.

Around Halloween of 2001, during the few hours of personal time between cubicles, I took to the Internet and shared a tale of me and my friend and a monster made of meat. On the first day, only six people read the story. The next day, the number grew to eight. Then ten. I had clearly stumbled onto a word-of-mouth phenomenon and after one year, the story had been read by nearly seventeen people.

Riding this buzz, I sat down again and relayed more of the tale and would do the same the following year. By 2005 the chronicles of our adventures had grown to 150,000 words. E-mails poured in from readers, fans telling me they stayed up all night reading the story, then called in sick to work the next morning to finish it. People were printing the whole tale, eating up a ream of paper and three ink cartridges in the process, then binding it with rubber bands and loaning it to friends.

I believed for the first time that I had tapped into something, and that something was the fact that lots of people are crazy and/or have lots of spare time on their hands.

At this point I was contacted by independent horror publisher Permuted Press, who asked me about doing a print run of the story as a trade paperback. I told them no, that no one would ever actually pay money to read it. Then the transmission went out on my car and I decided I couldn’t turn my nose up on whatever meager amount of money would come in. The resulting book, written by a data entry clerk with no previous publishing experience and not even an English degree to boast of, sold about five thousand copies through sheer word of mouth. When the print run ended, rare copies were selling on eBay for up to $120.

Next I got an e-mail from horror writer/director/producer Don Coscarelli (who made two of my favorite horror movies of all time,
Phantasm
and
Bubba Ho-Tep
), which I immediately deleted, assuming it was a hoax. But he was persistent and after convincing me on the phone that it wasn’t all an elaborate prank to get me up on a stage so he could pour a bucket of pig’s blood on me, we made the deal to turn
John Dies at the End
into a movie. After the ink was dry, more than half a dozen other offers for film rights would come in.

At that point it was pretty clear that the entire world was just fucking with me. Keep in mind I was still working at the insurance company, still sitting in a cubicle every day, eating those awful diagonally sliced sandwiches from the vending machine, and reading memos about the dress code.

Word of mouth. That’s all it was. No one “discovered” me, I didn’t get some big break out of the blue. It was a slow advance of strangers from around the world, passing around the link and loaning out those sad homemade copies. These are the zealots who would later buy copies, loan them to friends, then buy more copies when those never came back. Hundreds of passionate strangers whom I’ve still never met—they’re responsible for the edition you hold in your hands. I wish I could thank all of them by name. So, let me do that now. (Please turn the page.)