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There was a kid standing there, a teenager. Right in the middle of my living room, a space that had been proudly teenager-free for years. He had braces, sported a black Limp Bizkit T-shirt. Limp Bizkit is a band that was popular at the time. If you’re fortunate, you’ve never heard of them.

My eyes met the kid’s. He smiled.

I said, “Justin?”

He opened his mouth and emitted a rumbling sound, like something boiling up from his lungs. He closed it again, gathered himself and said brightly, “Dude. I need ya to come roll with me, yo. Know what I’m sayin’?”

I glanced at Molly, who was on the floor, happily drinking water from a Tupperware dish I had sat out for her last night. She finally turned, saw the Justin thing and barked at it.

“That’s a hella pretty dog, yo,” he said.

“Where uh, are we going, Justin?” I shifted my feet, felt the nudge of the gun against my lower back. I tried to remember which way the grip was pointing, realizing that accidentally dropping the thing on the floor in mid-draw would be the last funny thing I ever did.

“Why you frontin’ here, bro? You know what time it is. Stop callin’ me Justin like nothin’s changed, yo.”

“What should I call you, homey?”

“Just call me ‘Shitload.’ Because there’s a shitload of us in here. Now I know you strapped. But before you think about pullin’ that nine millimeter I think you better hear what I gots to-“

The left side of Justin’s scalp disappeared in a spray of pink brain matter. He was thrown backwards, my finger squeezing the trigger as fast as it could twitch, the sound shattering the air. I had drawn the gun in a mindless reflex, like slapping at a mosquito bite. Little sprays of blood flicked out from Justin’s chest and thighs and gut, shots landing and backing him across the room.

He stumbled and fell against a wall, but never went down. The gun clicked dry but I squeezed the trigger about twenty more times just to be sure there wasn’t another shot hiding in there somewhere. Justin righted himself, looked down at his wounds, sighed like a man who has dropped his pie in his lap. He said, “As I was sayin’ yo, 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 backwards once more. He brought a hand to his face.

“Son of a bitch. CUT THAT SHIT OUT. Listen to me.”

As he spoke, I looked around for something else to throw, found nothing.

“Okay. I’m listening, Shitload.”

“We’re takin’ a roadtrip, dude.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off of Shitload’s gaping head wound. I saw now that there was movement there, a crawling white fuzz over the exposed meat, like his innards were growing gray hair.

“Uh, I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” I said.

He rolled his eyes and moved toward me. I saw now that each of his wounds were being bound up by the white rods, forming a stitching like the back side of fiberglass.

I threw a flailing punch that missed by a foot. The Justinmonster fired out a low punch, the impact exploding in my groin. I doubled over and collapsed to the carpet, then quickly pushed myself back to my feet. I took another swing at him, missed again, he punched me again. In the crotch.

I fell backward, caught myself on a kitchen chair, then picked it up and swung it. I cracked the chair over his shoulder. He shrugged it off, grasped one leg and tossed it aside. He advanced and in a blur threw three more punches that each landed solidly on my balls. A heavy sickness bloomed in my gut, but I kept my feet. I awkwardly kicked at his chest. He caught the leg and delivered an expert crotchkick that finished me.

I went down and stayed down. He 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 awoke, 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.

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

Sitting on one stack was James “Big Jim Slade” Sullivan, the huge copper-haired kid from my high school class whose sister, Cucumber, I had spoken to that morning. He once won a fight with Zach Goldstein by picking him up and chucking him over a guardrail. Next to him was a very pale and shaky Jennifer Lopez, scratched and dirty, wearing the same outfit from the party. Laying across a row of green Heineken cases was a little, wiry man with shoulder-length hair and a goatee who I had never seen before and who, by process of elimination, had to be Fred Chu. He had his arms folded under his head and looked unharmed. Molly curled up on the floor under him, sleepily.

On sight of me, Fred Chu said, “Shit.” Jennifer buried her head in her hands and began weeping softly. Jim said, “Hey, you found my dog.”

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. This annoyed me, for some reason, to the point that 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. Fred lazily turned his head over to me and said, “Dude, I thought you were like, in jail or somethin’.”

“No. Where did you hear that?”

“You know, that thing with Billy Hitchcock back in school.”

“No, no. Give me a break.”

“Maybe I heard wrong. At the funeral everybody said-“

Big Jim jumped in, said, “-Look, it doesn’t matter. There’s five of us now. There’s one of him.” He looked at me. “Can he be killed?”

“Look, I don’t know-“

“-I mean, you gotta understand what’s happenin’ here,” said Fred Chu. “The guy who attacked you, he ain’t no man, okay? He’s been invaded by body snatchers.”

“Yeah, I pieced that together.” I stood, lost my balance, braced myself against the wall. “I know all about it. But I don’t know if he—if it—can be killed.”

“These guys, they didn’t believe me,” Fred said. “I been tryin’ to convince everybody. Even after they saw what happened with Shelby. I mean, the guy spat acid on her hand. The muscle and bone fell apart, just, like, dripped off like wax.”

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

I said, “Yeah, I saw the mess. In the Jamaican’s basement.”

“He’s from the devil, you know,” said Big Jim. “That’s what I think. We’ve encountered something evil and it’s changing him. Remaking his body.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said, dismissively. “We’re all on the same page. You don’t got to convince me.”

Big Jim hesitated, then said, “We’ve been praying, all of us, in a circle. These guys, 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.”

“Well,” I said, “I’d have to say the answer was ‘no.’”

Jim stared at me for a few seconds and I broke his gaze and shuffled back toward John. I asked Big Jim, “How long has he been like this? I mean, does he ever say anything?”

Jennifer answered for him, said, “He mumbles. But he hasn’t moved since he showed up.”

I turned toward John 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. I was getting sick of this. This was just like him, to check out and wait for somebody else to clean up his mess. I said, too loudly, “Look, you started this. NOW WAKE UP.”

“Hey.” A soft voice, from behind me. I turned and Jennifer Lopez’s wet eyes met mine. “Calm down, okay? You’re not helping.”

I watched as 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. Suddenly was on his feet, confused, looking at his hands like he was surprised to have them. His eyes passed across everyone in the room until he landed on me. He said, “Where are we?”

I sighed, leaned back against the vibrating wall of the truck.

“Well, the good news is we’re in a beer truck, headed to Las Vegas. The bad news is it’s being driven by some kind of physical manifestation of evil.”

“That’s right. What day is it?”

I slid down to the metal floor, put my head in my hands. “Who cares.”

“Man, I thought I was a dog. Did you say we were going to Vegas or that we were coming back?”

“Going. Sit down before you fall down.”

“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 to Fred and said, “Oh, Fred, you’re alive!”

We all looked at him for a long, awkward moment. He turned his eyes on me and said, “I mean, uh, I think I dreamt that. Okay, let’s start over. How many people do you see in here?”

“What?”

“Just humor me.”

“It’s me, you, Big Jim, Fred Chu and Jennifer Lopez. And the dog.”

He nodded.

“Good. I just wanted to be sure, make sure I wasn’t, uh, projecting them. You know what I’m saying, Dave?”

“Like the cop thing in the police station.” I briefly explained the adventure with the G. Gordon Liddy-looking cop who wasn’t there.

“Yeah, right,” John nodded. “I remember that. That’s odd, I remember it, but I wasn’t in the room, was I? Did the cop look like a stereotypical cop, like a, I guess like a generic, a standard-issue cop? Like an extra in a movie?”

I nodded.

“See, I think that’s a sign that you’re the only one seeing it. You know what I think it is, I think it’s your brain putting a body on something that doesn’t have a body. The Soy Sauce, I think it can do that.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s fascinating.” I closed my eyes again, tried to ignore the throbbing pain in my pelvis. I realized it was the first pain severe enough to take my attention away from the clotted rip in my cheek and the bullet-gouge in my sternum and the other 17 wounds on my body.

We rode in silence for a moment and then John said, “Isn’t it funny that people wake up at night and they see, what, those big-eyed alien abductors or a ghostly old woman. But it’s always something they saw in some movie, isn’t it?”

I didn’t speak and was hoping for some silence. Instead, Jennifer spoke up and said, “My Grandma, she was in the hospital for a month at the end. Cancer. She got real peaceful in the last few days, said she always saw an angel in the room with her at night. Bright white with long blonde hair and white wings and a harp, telling her everything was going to be okay. She said her voice was like a song, like, harmonic.”

Big Jim said, “Angels are always men in the Bible. And they don’t have no wings.”

No, but they have them in all the paintings and the movies, I thought, thinking that Big Jim didn’t have a mind for subtlety.

There was a pause of rattly road noise before Fred asked, “Why would the angel be playing the harmonica?”

Jennifer said, “What are you talking about?”

Big Jim spoke up. “My sister says her stuffed kangaroo used to move around on its own. She’d find it on the floor or across the room every morning and she always figured she knocked it off in the night. But one night she woke up and saw the thing floating three feet off the floor. That was when she was little but today she still swears it happened.”

Again, the “sister” he was talking about was Cucumber, the pale girl I had talked to through her door this morning when I tried to return Molly.

No one spoke and I started wondering how long this drive was going to be and how I was going to keep my sanity sealed up in this box with these people. Then Big Jim said, “We have a mouse problem in that house, they get in the cabinets, in the walls. I got poison set out all over the place for these things. 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.”

Pause. Jennifer said, “I don’t understand.”

“Well,” continued Big Jim, “she was feeding them. I was tryin’ to kill the things off and she was feeding them the whole time.”

Fred asked, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

Jim said, “Maybe you’d understand it better with my boot crammed into your large intestine?”

Jennifer snapped at him, John said something about the difference between real life mice and cartoon mice, everyone started talking at once.

I screamed at everybody to shut up. They did.

I said, “Look, I don’t give a shit any more. I don’t wanna hear 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?”

Big Jim said, “We were talking about that. Jen and I think he eats human flesh to survive. Fred thinks he’s making a suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”

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

Fred said, “This ain’t funny, man. You guys are gonna emerge unscathed but there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of me but my feet.”

I sighed, rubbed my forehead with both hands and 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, “How do you possibly know that?”

I said, “I pieced it together through inductive reasoning and information relayed to me by John whilst talking through Molly there.”

Fred nodded, as if this answer was proper and expected. “So, if we all die, that won’t necessarily be the worst case scenario, right?”

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

I thought for a moment and then asked John, “How much alcohol does liquor have to have in it before it will burn?”

“Anything over 80 proof,” said John without a moment’s hesitation. He gestured to three points around the truck, said, “Those two boxes over there and that white box in the corner will make nice firebombs. Fred’s flannel shirt should make good wicks.”

It was always like that with John and I. It was good to have him back.

Jennifer asked, “What have you got in mind?” She had this light in her eyes, like whatever came out of our mouths next was going to bring total enlightenment and salvation. I admit it gave me a charge at the time, but I have since grown to hate that look.

John said, “When that thing opens that door, we’re gonna set his bitch ass on fire. And we’re gonna keep burnin’ it until it’s an ash as fine as talcum. And then we’re gonna bury the ash.”

Big Jim uttered a protest and he was probably right to, naming several valid logical flaws in the plan. But he was out-voted and all five of us went to work.

We started rifling through the cases to find the most fragile-looking bottles, emptying them on the floor until we were all sliding around in alcohol and the place was thick with the stink of it. A Molotov Cocktail is useless if it doesn’t break on impact and Fred and John got in a long and stupid debate about whether brown glass was more fragile than clear. Eventually we decided to do half and half.

This killed a few hours, until we had a dozen full bottles lined up near the rear door, each with a bundle of wet cloth jutting six inches out of the opening. The next time the truck stopped, we’d light up and wait. And when the bastard opened the door, we’d light him up.

But the truck didn’t stop. For hours we rode in useless silence, each of us drinking the occasional beer and 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. We rode and we rode and we rode and we rode.

Next, we rode and we rode and we rode and we rode and rode and rode some more.

At around midnight I awoke to the sound of Molly barking at a moth fluttering around on the ceiling, but realized that even with concentration, it was still just a bark, no meaning behind it. The side effects of the Soy Sauce were, apparently, gone.

After that, we rode and rode and rode and rode. I wondered if I flung myself out of the rear hatch if I could roll to safety with only a few broken bones.

There was some additional driving, which I will not recount here. But then morning came, cool light pouring in through the slits and gaps in the cargo hold. Big Jim roused himself and said in a low, solemn voice, “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 my sister, 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.”

I kept wishing Big Jim would use her real name so that I could pretend I knew her as something other than Cucumber. Fred said nothing, as some people do in awkward moments like this. Then 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. A year before that he had a fat, orange cat that got ran over while John stood ten feet away, smoking. Yeah, Cucumber will be in good hands, Big Jim.

John said to me, “If I die, I want you to tell everybody I died in the coolest way possible. You can have my CD’s. 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 saying, “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.”

Next Fred piped up with, “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 Bigfoot, everybody claiming to have seen me here and there. Legend of Fred Chu. And then, like, once a year go out and mutilate some livestock. Tell everybody I did it, that you saw me flyin’ my UFO around that night it happened.”

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

I said, “Yeah. Avenge my death.”

* * * * *

Twenty-eight hours, nineteen minutes. That’s how long we were on the road. The Justin thing never slept or ate. He stopped for gas a few times, but each of our frantic attempts to get the rear door open was a spastic comedy of errors. 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.

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. We invented a game where we tried to form sentences made entirely from words on beer labels. It wasn’t fun.

In the evening, after some further driving, we eventually wound up in a dusty little town with lots of pickup trucks, called Mt. Charles or Charleston or something like that. We watched from our little vent as the truck roamed through the streets, into the outskirts of the town and then back the way we came again, like the Justin thing was looking for an address. Jennifer guessed—rightly, I think—that he was trying to find a place to ditch the truck. At one point he pulled alongside a big house that looked deserted, but then sped off when a curious old woman appeared at the door.

Eventually he found a spot outside of the town and, after several passes, swung the headlights onto an isolated little house that had clearly been abandoned long ago with boarded-up windows and the skeleton of a pickup truck in the yard.

“Okay,” John said, clapping his hands together. “It’s go time.”

John opened up the last of the Evian bottles and we poured them over our heads, soaked our clothes until we were all dripping like sponges.

“You’re gonna have to throw the bottles hard,” John said, “harder than you’ve ever thrown anything in your life. Really rear back and wing the things at him.”

We positioned ourselves in a circle in front of the door, each with a high-proof cocktail in each hand, each less and less sure the plan would work. I kept thinking of the splatter effect, how much of the burning liquid would be washed back on us. John and Jennifer, our two smokers, leaned around with their lighters and lit all the wicks with shaking hands. Would these bombs flare up in our hands if we had to wait too long? I studied the small orange and blue flame dancing on the bundle of wet cloth crammed into the bottle, wondered if these were the last moments of my life. My heart hammered.

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 squeezed the beer bottle in my right hand, almost afraid I would shatter it. I pictured the white backsplash of flame that would scorch at least some of us, wet or not. I imagined skin burning away in layers, flames peeling off eyelids and scorching the orbs behind them-

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.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.