This Is the End (15 page)

After I come out of the bathroom Kel decides to take a shower and I show her where the towels and things are. I even show her where some of Janet’s leftover hair and make up supplies are.

I walk over to the bar and pour a glass of Bushmill’s and then flop down on the couch next to Scott. I watch as Simon Belmont moves in to slay Frankenstein’s Monster and after the whiskey makes me feel brave I decide to ask Scott about Kel.
“So, you and Kel—” I say before he gets out a no.

I look at him and then back to the screen. “No, what? No, you guys aren’t together or no, I shouldn’t ask?”

“Both,” he says back without looking at me.

I start to apologize, “Okay, I was just—”

“Dude, I know what you were ‘just’ and the answer is no to both. Kel’s not my type and I’m not hers. We went through basic together, she lost someone in the outbreak and so did I. leave it at that,” he says.

“I wasn’t asking because…” I begin to say but he pauses the game and turns towards me.

“Yeah, you were. I wasn’t as high up as Kel, but I was spec ops, even if I was just a weekend warrior. I’m also a dude; I know what you’re doing, the way you’re looking at her now. Like now that you know she’s an ace with a computer, she’s not beneath you. I’m not retarded, man, I just don’t talk much. Just drop it.”

I turn back to the television to avoid looking at him. He turns back and un-pauses the game.

“So, what are we gonna do about that outside?” I ask trying to change the subject.

“No clue,” he says as he shrugs his shoulders. “But if you don’t stop talking, I’m going to punch you in the face. You did all right by me today in the garage, but I’m still not convinced you’re not a monster.”

I take a sip from my glass, stare into it and then get up and move towards my desk. I pull up the vid-feeds from outside, sit down in my chair fumble with my pack and pull out a cigarette. The sun has already gone down, fires on the horizon are back to being the only illumination outside the building besides starlight. The cameras have infrared and I can see the massive group of bodies ebbing and flowing around the building and, even at night, more and more are arriving. I stare into the screens and then up at Scott. The water in the bathroom stops and after a few minutes Kel comes out. I don’t bother looking up when she comes around the corner from the doorway.

Scott gives a whistle and then says, “You clean up real good, Kel.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” she says back and then comes over to the desk and leans in to look at what’s on the screen.

“You two really fucked shit up today, didn’t you?” she asks me. I don’t bother to answer the question.

I begin to say something, but when I look up she’s staring at me, her eyes like shimmering cobalt, her wet hair smells like a mix of woman and my shampoo so I stop, close my mouth and turn back to the screens.

“That’s a first,” she says pulling her hair into a tight ponytail.

“Consider it the last. Anyway, what the fuck are we going to do about this?” I say and point to the screen. The ever-increasing numbers of bodies continue to collide into each other and bounce around the street like pinballs.

“I think you’ll want to play the video from McMillan,” she says and brings the screen with his paused faced on it to life.

Scott lets out a monumental “Yee-haw” as Simon Belmont finally destroys Frankenstein’s monster. It begins to explode from the inside; swirls of yellow and orange explode from its body. Its legs drop off and explode, followed by its arms, and then finally its head explodes.

I take a deep breath and look into Robert McMillan’s beady and evil eyes, and then tap the screen to continue playing the video. Robert McMillan sputters into life and begins.

“
My fellow Americans, if you can hear me, or are seeing this message via global satellite, then I am Robert McMillan, the new President of the United States of America
.”

Whiskey and food begin to pile up in the back of my throat and I have to take another drink just to keep everything I ate from coming out.

“
As you all know, many of the states and cities and communities that you are currently in have come under attack by what we believe to be a chemical and biological agent that is causing those infected to quickly die and then come back to life with only one apparent goal: to spread the disease
.”

I want to stop the video, grab the screen and toss it out the fucking window. I want to find a way to time travel back to the day that he came to visit me and, even if he had an army of roided-out suited ape-men, shoot him in the face. I turn away and look back towards the lumbering and violent mass of bodies trying to get into the building.

“
But I have good news. After many months of planning and fighting, we’ve established several safe zones around the country
.”

I quickly turn back to the screen; Scott pauses his game to get up and walk over.

“
The following is a list of safe and secure locations that, if you are listening to or watching this, I pray you are able to make it to
.”

I watch as he signs off with a teary-eyed “
May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America
.” The screen fades to black and scrolls the list of secure zones.

I pause the screen when I see the location that is closest to Cleveland:
Camp Perry: Port Clinton, Ohio.

PART THREE

1.

“So, we’re going then?” asks Kel.

I can’t say that I blame her for being skeptical.

“I’m going. You two can come along if you want,” I say back to her as I start to pack a messenger bag full of underwear and toiletries. I figure it’s roughly eighty miles or so to Port Clinton; I have it mapped out on a piece of copy paper. We’ve been having this conversation since Kel and I figured out that the messages weren’t automatically sent. Someone must have seen us power up and log on to whatever was left of the satellite networks.

Scott is still trying to finish out the last level on
Castlevania
, but every once in a while he pauses the game and interjects. “Dude, you don’t even know if that base is still operational,” he says trying to get up the steps on the screen so he can finally face Dracula one-on-one.

“Look,” I say, “we don’t have enough food or water to last us a lifetime here.” I put my toothbrush away in the bag and then decide against packing it up just yet. I can always grab it in the morning before I leave.

“Yeah, but we have enough for right now,” Kel starts to say but I don’t let her finish.

“We can’t stay here. You guys can’t stay here, and I can’t stay here. We don’t even know how much power—here—has left,” I say. It’s a blunt enough statement to make Scott get up and look at me like I just told him his dog, his mother and his fiancé just died.

“What the fuck do you mean? The other day you said—”

“The other day I said we have enough and the other day you were both holding guns to my head, so, you know, I may have lied.”

I inspect a stick of unopened deodorant and then start to put it away in the bag when Scott rushes towards me. I look up to see a massive wall of anger coming straight at me and I barely have enough time to try and raise my arms and brace for the tackle. He slams into me and we hit the floor and both bounce. Pain shoots up and down my spine; he flies over me and rolls out a few inches away.

Kel starts yelling something, but before she can reach out to stop him, he grabs hold of my shirt collar and pulls me back down to the floor.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, man? Are you seriously the biggest asshole in the world?” he yells at my face. Little flecks of spit hit my mouth and I move to try and wipe them away. Skinny Scott pushes my hands down at my sides, but Kel grabs him before he can hit me.

“Scott, get off him,” she tries to say, but he snaps at her.

“No, Kel, he needs to learn that he isn’t the fucking world anymore,” he says and shakes her off.

I watch as he pulls his fist back and my mind instantly jumps to the replay of him slamming his hand through the head of one of the monster men in the garage. This is going to suck, tremendously.

“He never was,” she says as she slaps him across the head with her hand.

We both look up and say, “What?” then he pivots his waist around and looks at her like a confused child. Scott gets up and I shimmy out and pull myself up.

“Thanks, but what the fuck are you talking about?” I say back to Kel, but she just stares back at me for a while.

“You’re welcome,” she says finally, and then ads, “You might want to sit back down now.”

I look around and then pull my chair from behind the desk and sit. After a few long seconds of staring, Scott moves his way back towards the couch. He sits back down, lights another cigarette and un-pauses the game.

“You’re right: you’re not a monster. You’re a patsy,” she says.

She looks at me as if she’s about to tell me something massive. I hold up my hand, move to the bar and fix myself another four fingers of Bushmill’s, then move back and sit down in the chair light a cigarette and say, “Proceed.”

She frowns for a second and then says, “You’re not a monster; you’re just someone they could use. Jeff, you never even had cancer. McMillan was supplying you pills that kept giving you bronchial infections to make you think you were dying. He was just using you. He had you spotted and pinned ever since you started the company.”

I feel my eyes bulging out of my head; I feel my blood pressure go up; I feel the rock glass slip through my hands, see it fall to the floor and then hear it break. My cigarette is hanging limp on my lips. I move to pull it away so I can ask for an explanation, but it pulls away a small piece of flesh and the raw spot burns for a second so I say nothing.

“Your whole company, all your money, your marriage…everything was a lie. Robert McMillan planned everything out, the funding for your app, your business decisions, your contracts. Your whole life, Jeff, was a complete lie. And when you started to get too big for your own good, do things that they couldn’t control or predict, they wanted to get you out of the way, so they told you that you had cancer because they figured you would do something stupid.”

I’m listening but I’m not. I hear what Kel has to say but I don’t. I’m staring at her, watching her small lips move, her hair as it shakes slightly with her head. The hurt and pity in her eyes as they gleam out at me like emotional tractor beams, trying to reel me in and tell me she’s sorry. But I don’t actually listen, or hear, or see anything except my life flashing in front of my eyes.

Living and starving in my first apartment with Janet and talking to her father about the app, him introducing me to potential investors. The puppet companies for McMillan, the funds they miraculously raised for me to develop the app. I’m watching the shaking hands, the broad, knowing smiles pointed like knives at my face. I’m seeing the wedding reception; McMillan was there, too, literally. He showed up and put a check into the money well we had made shaped like a tablet computer. 20,000 dollars’ worth of a gift, signed
For a better future
.

I see the company on the cover of
Wired
,
Time
,
Newsweek
and
Rolling Stone
. I see Phil coming to represent me; the carnivorous eyes of the dead on the screen to my left were nothing compared to Phil and Janet and McMillan. My doctor’s initial tests and the diagnosis, the idea of cryogenics, the immortality they promised me. But it wasn’t the immortality I wanted. I’m the man who ended the world. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, and McMillan gets to stand like the risen fucking Christ. I slump forward a little and bring the cigarette up to my mouth and stare at the glass on the floor, then over to the deodorant.

“Jeff, I’m so sorry,” she starts to say but I hold up my hand and stop her. I think about what she said while I pick the deodorant up off the ground and then get up and start packing again.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m leaving,” I say back, but my voice is hollow and far away.

“But what Scott said earlier is right; we don’t know what the state of that base actually is. We just know that someone is there.”

I stop packing and look up at her; the vacancy signs in my eyes make her take a step away from me, as if she’s afraid.

“I’m going to leave, find McMillan, and then I’m going to kill him,” I say.

Kel takes another step back. I know she thinks I’ve lost it, that I’ve snapped, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life, ever.

“And what if he’s not—what if he’s already dead?” she asks.

“I’m pretty sure he’s alive,” I say and point at the screen that still has the Port Clinton location pulled up on it.

“You have no idea—”

“But we know someone is there, so they should know where he is and, like I said, I have no idea how long the power is gonna hold. Besides, look at it outside. You said it yourself: we fucked up.”

We both look at the screen we dedicated to the cameras since Scott and I rammed my Focus into the main garage door. The massive tidal waves of bodies are still surrounding the building, smashing into the doors and windows with their hands. Every once in a while a large section of the group will turn their faces towards the sky or the cameras, and look right at us, though I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. From what I can tell, they have no idea what’s going on outside of the new instinct to spread whatever it is that they are supposed to spread.