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She fell on her ass, her face pinching into a girlish scowl that I still managed to find adorable.

“Hey!”

“Jeez, sorry,” I said as I reached to help her up, picking up her beer bottle in the process. “I was walking away from, uh, you know, voodoo. Thing. Flying voodoo man.”

She was in denim shorts and a tank top, hair in a pony tail. I guess I should point out that this was not the famous Jennifer Lopez, but rather a local girl I was fond of who happened to have that same name. I guess it would have made a better story if it turned out to be the singer/actress and if you want to picture J-Lo whenever I mention this girl, feel free, even though my Jennifer only looked like the famous one when she was walking away from you.

You know how to tell if you’ve been single too long? When you help a girl to her feet and get a rush of excitement for the two seconds you hold her hand on the way up. I wondered if she was also single these days, wondered if she was still dating that one guy. The white guy with the afro she was always with. She was on her feet now, brushing grass clippings off her butt. I felt the intense urge to reach over and help her but managed to restrain myself.

Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like Testosterone.

“I’m really, really sorry. You okay?”

“Yeah. Spilled my Zima a little, but...”

“What are you doin’ here?”

“Just, you know. Party.” She gestured vaguely with her hand at the crowd and music around us. “Well, good seein’ ya-“

She’s walking away! Say something!

“I’m, uh, here with the band,” I said, following her while using the most casual, non-following stride I had in my walking repertoire. She glanced up at the band, then back at me.

“You know they started playing without you, right?”

“No, I don’t, like, play an instrument or anything. I’m just... well, you saw me at the beginning there. I was the guy that fell down and died.”

“Well, I just got here.” She walked a little faster.

She’s getting away! Tackle her!

“Well,”  I said after her, “I’ll see you around.”

She didn’t answer. I saw a set of nearby picnic tables where some guys were selling cups of beer from a couple of kegs. I moved over there as if that’s where I had been going all along instead of stalking her. I spent the rest of the night inventing reasons to run into her, even made her laugh twice, once on purpose. I didn’t think about the floating Jamaican again until...

* * * * *

Three hours later, John and the crew were packing their scratched equipment into a white van with the words “Fat Jackson’s Flap Wagon” spray-painted on the side. That was the name of the band before they changed it a few months ago.

“Dave!” said John, “look! Can you believe how much sweat I have on this shirt?”

“That’s... somethin’,” I said.

“We’re all meeting at the One Ball. You comin’?”

That’s the One Ball Inn, a bar downtown. Don’t ask.

“No, I gotta go to work in seven hours,” I said, knowing that John had work, too. We both worked the same shift at the same video store. John had been through six jobs in three years, by the way. Some girl came up behind John and put her arms around him. I didn’t recognize her, but that was normal.

“Yeah, me too,” he admitted. “But I gotta buy Robert a beer first.”

“Who?”

“Uh, the black guy.”

John gestured toward a group of five girls and two guys and, sure enough, my voodoo priest was standing there among them, rainbow beret and dreadlocks, smoking a cigarette.

“See him? He’s the one in the white tennis shoes.”

Not only did I see him, but he saw me. He made eye contact and shouted, “You owe me a beer, mon!”

“The man likes his beer,” said John. “Hey, I heard there was somebody from a record company out there tonight.”

“I don’t like the guy, John. He’s... there’s something not right about him.”

“You like so few people, Dave. He’s cool. He bet me a beer he could guess my weight. Got it on the first try. Amazing stuff.”

“Do you even know how much you weigh?”

“Not exactly. But he couldn’t have been off by more than a few pounds.”

“Okay, first of all—nevermind. John, the guy does an accent. What kind of a guy goes around like that? He’s phony. Also, I think he might be, uh, into somethin’. Come on.”

“’Into something?’ You are so quick to judge. Have you thought that maybe he was raised by his father, who was a fugitive from the law? And that, to conceal his identity, his father had to himself fake an accent? And that maybe young Robert learned how to talk from his dad and thus adopted that same fake accent?”

“Is that what he told you?”

“No.”

“Come on, John. My car is over behind the trees back there. Come with me.”

“Are you goin’ to the One Ball?”

“No, obviously not.”

“Then I’m ridin’ with Head in the Flap Wagon. You’re still welcome to come if you want.”

I declined. They loaded up and left.

I felt a little abandoned. There wasn’t anybody else I really knew there, so I wandered around for a bit, hoping to run into Jennifer Lopez or at least that dog. I did find Jennifer, where she was sitting in a cherry-red ‘65 Mustang making out with some blonde kid that looked barely old enough to drive. This made me furious for some reason and I sulked my way back to my underfed Japanese economy car, shoes kicking up little sprays of moisture from the tall grass as I went.

The dog was waiting for me.

Right there by my door, like it couldn’t understand what had taken me so long. I unlocked the door and “Molly” leapt into the passenger seat. I gawked at this in dull amazement, half expecting the dog to reach around with her teeth and pull down the seatbelt. She didn’t. Just waited.

I flung myself down into the little Hyundai, thinking about how much less happy and more confused I was now than when the night began. I dug into my pocket for my car keys. I pulled my hand out, and screamed.

Not a full-fledged female-victim-in-a-slasher-movie scream. Just a harsh, rasping “WHAH?!?” On the palm of my hand, etched into the skin, was the phrase, “YOU OWE ME ONE BEER.”

I sat there, in the dark, staring at my hand. I did this for several minutes, felt my stomach clench, then decided to lean out the door and vomit in the weeds. I spat and opened my eyes, saw movement in the puddle. Something long and black and wriggling.

So that’s where the centipede went...

I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back in my seat. In that moment I decided to go home and crawl into bed and pretend that none of this had ever, ever happened.

* * * * *

Telling the story now, I’m tempted to say something like, “who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?” I won’t say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow. Once, in Chemistry class, John “accidentally” made a Bunsen burner explode. I mean it actually shattered a window. He got suspended for ten days for that and if they could have proven it wasn’t an accident he’d have been expelled, as I was a year later.

He was kicked out of art class for submitting very, very detailed charcoal nudes of himself, only with about six inches added to his genitalia. He broke his wrist after a fall from trying to ride a friend’s van like a surfboard. He has burn scars on the back of his thighs from what he told me was a mishap with homemade fireworks, but what I believe was the result of his and some friends’ attempt to make a jetpack. He told me a year ago he wanted to go into politics some day, even though he didn’t have even one minute of college. A month ago he told me he wanted to go into the adult film industry instead.

Darkness and warmth. And then, an all-beep rendition of La Cucuracha.

My cell phone. I peeled my eyes open. Bedroom. Night time. My floor looked like a Laundromat explosion. Magazines here and there, overflowing trash can. Just as I had left it.

Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-

My hand managed to knock over every single object on my night stand before it found the cell phone. I squinted at my clock, now laying helpless on the floor. Quarter after five AM. I had to be at work in less than two hours.

“Hello?”

“David? It’s John. Where are you?”

Voice scratchy, breathing heavier than he should be. Like a man just after a fistfight.

“I’m in bed. Where am I supposed to be?”

Long pause.

“Is this the first time I’ve called tonight?”

I sat straight up, fully awake now.

“John? What’s going on?”

“I can’t get out of my apartment, Dave.”

“What?”

“I’m scared, David. I mean it.”

“What are you scared of?”

“It can’t be real, Dave. It can’t. The way it moves, the way it’s made... this is not a product of any kind of evolution or anything. It’s not real. No. But it still managed to bite me.”

What?!?

“What?”

“Can you come over?”

One time, John wound up in the hospital after he blacked out behind the wheel of his car. He wasn’t moving at the time, thank God, but was in line at a Wendy’s drive-through. This was after five sleepless and foodless days of vodka and some combination of household chemicals he was using for speed. I didn’t know about it until a week later because he didn’t tell me, knowing I would have kicked his ass right there in the hospital.

But I told him if he ever got into that kind of trouble again without telling me I would not only kick his ass, but would in fact beat him until he died, then pursue him into the afterlife and beat his eternal soul. So John being spaced out on crank or crack or skank tonight wasn’t reason to declare a national holiday, but at least he came to me this time.

I said, “I’ll be there in twelve minutes.”

I hung up, pulled on some clothes I found draped over a chair, almost killed myself tripping over Molly the dog curled up in the doorway. I went out the front door with the dog in tow. It was raining again now, fat drops of April ice water that tingled down the back of my shirt as I ducked into my car. I was half way to his building when my phone sang again. John’s number popped up on the glowing display.

“Yeah, John. You okay?”

“Dave, I’m sorry to wake you up. I got a problem and I need you to listen-“

“John, I’m on my way over. You called me five minutes ago, remember?”

“What? No, David. Stay away. There’s somethin’ in here with me. I can’t explain it. I don’t think it’ll kill me, it seems to just want to keep me here. Now, I need you to go to Las Vegas. Contact a man named-“

“-John, just calm down. You’re not making sense. I want you to sit down somewhere, try to chill out. Nothin’ you’re seeing is real.”

A pause, then John asked, “How do I know this is really you?”

“You’ll know in just a few minutes. I’m comin’ up on your block now. Just chill, like I said. John?”

Nobody there. I sped up, rain drumming the windshield and boiling up into puddles on the passing pavement.

I was pounding on the door to John’s apartment seven minutes later, still pounding on it five minutes after that. I considered going down and waking up his landlord when I tried the knob and realized the door had been unlocked the whole time.

It was dark. No use looking for a switch, John’s only light was a floor lamp across the room and far be it from John to do something as rational as putting the light source where you could reach it from the door. Memory told me at least two pieces of furniture and probably twenty empty beer bottles stood between me and the lamp.

“John?”

Nothing. I tried a tentative step into his apartment, my shoe kicking over a stack of something or other, probably magazines. I tried to step over it, cracked something glass or porcelain on the other side.

“John? Can you hear me? I’m going to call the- OOOOMFFF!!!”

I was hammered by either a flying body tackle or an unnecessarily aggressive hug. My assailant and I landed hard on the carpet, pounding the breath from my lungs.

“IT ALMOST KILLED YOU!” screamed John, inches from my face. “You’re an idiot, you know that? You’re an idiot for coming here. We’re both gonna die now. You could have brought help but now we’re both gonna die in this room.”

He sat up off me and in the darkness I could detect his head whipping back and forth, as if searching for a sniper. He put one finger up to my face.

“Shhhhhh.  I don’t see it. When I say ‘go,’ we’re goin’ to the other side of the room as fast as physically possible. You can clear it in three steps, dive at the end. Move like the devil himself were after you. Ready?”

“John, listen to me.” I paused, forced air into my lungs and tried to think. “You can’t miss any more days at work. If you let me take you to the hospital, we’ll tell them you’ve been, poisoned or something. I don’t think they’ll go to the cops. We can get a note from the doctor there. If we’ve got a note I could talk Jeff into keeping you on.”

“GO!!!”

John pushed himself to his feet, sprinted across the room and flung himself over an overturned sofa next to the wall. He sailed over it, arms flopping about like a rag doll, smacking into the wall behind it with a heavy thud.

I calmly stood up, walked to my right and turned up the floor lamp. I looked over to see John peer over the overturned sofa. Next to it was an arm chair, on the other side a capsized coffee table. The man had built a furniture fort on that side of the room.

“John...”

He stood up, eyes wide. He put his hands out to me, fingers splayed.

“Dave, do not move.” He spoke flat, low and dead-serious.

“What?”

“I’m begging you,” he said, almost whispering now. “I know you don’t believe me. But when you turn around, you will. But do—not—scream. If you do, you’re dead. Now. Very slowly, turn around.”

Very slowly, as asked, I turned.

Nothing was there. I faced John again, my expression telling him I saw nothing more threatening than a very large and very naked poster of what appeared to be a female professional wrestler.

“It moved,” he said. “There.” He pointed to the corner, near the ceiling.

Very slowly, I turned and craned my neck, eyes following his pointed finger to the spot on the wall he so desperately needed me to see.

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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.