End of the World Afterparty: Part Four

For End of the World Afterparty: Part One, click here.

For End of the World Afterparty: Part Three, click here.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN 

As the tone shifted and everyone made their way to the liquor cabinet, I understood all at once the bigger picture, the guns, the supplies, when previously I’d been too focused on the individual details. Jason hadn’t been bracing himself for a nightmare or preparing himself for the bitter end. He’d been hoping for it—manifesting it, if you bought into that sort of thing. The end of the world was supposed to be his playground, his promised land, and the apocalypse would be over when he said it was over. As for us? We were just set pieces. We were only there because he needed someone to worship him, and because maybe he couldn’t exist outside of someone else’s gaze. 

“Make yourself comfortable,” Jason said, brushing past me so roughly, his shoulder pushed me several steps back. None of us moved as we watched him climb the stairs to the door, where he lifted the heavy beam into place across the brackets, sealing us in. I told myself he was doing it to keep us safe, in case the zombies broke through while we were down here. 

We tell ourselves a lot of things. 

Next he crossed to a stereo system in the corner and plugged in his phone. EDM blared from the speakers, loud enough to attract every zombie in a several-mile radius. Had it been anyone but him, I would have turned off the sound at once and asked him what on earth he thought he was doing. But I had a pretty good idea of how ugly he might get if I interfered with his vision of a good time, if I ruined his end of the world afterparty. 

And besides, no one else was objecting. Whether or not they thought it was wise to get drunk with a real and present threat outdoors wasn’t the point. They were stressed beyond all acceptable limits. What they needed was something to take the edge off, something to help them forget, and then a little something extra on top of that, to give them a rest deep enough that nothing exterior could intrude. Okay, and yeah, maybe I did too, with my sweat-slicked palms gripping the mason jar and the room doing little dances around the edges of my vision. 

I sit here in retrospect, yelling at past Singh to stop being so boneheaded, but if I had to go back to that same moment, chances are nothing would change. I think it was Isaac Newton himself who had something to say about objects in motion and objects at rest. 

The beat dropped, and the drone of the synthesizers replaced my pounding heart. There was something contagious about Jason’s energy—that was another thing, even resisting it, I found myself becoming his mirror, settling into the orbit determined by his gravity. 

Soon, Gregory Viltch had stopped complaining about actors and stage makeup, telling us how advertising firms would stoop to anything these days. A few drinks later, he was wearing a tie around his forehead and announcing that, yes, in fact, he had stolen all those sheep, and did we want to know how? He was willing to teach us, these fine pupils here, these wonderful people he was so happy to have met. 

I tried to pace myself drinking, to maintain some level of alertness. But I was beginning to ache all over, the bruises on my legs from where Jason’s car hit me having blossomed like exotic flowers across my skin, and I was desperate for something to take my mind off the discomfort. Worse, I was dehydrated and hadn’t eaten since this morning, and so even the little moonshine I’d drunk thus far was going straight to my head. 

At some point I noticed Ann, huddled in a corner with an empty bottle clamped between her bare feet. When I approached her—wondering if she needed help, and not knowing what to do—she started mumbling under her breath as she counted on her fingers. Ten, then twenty, then thirty, and after that I lost track. 

There was no danger of her noticing me as I crept closer in hopes of catching what she was whispering. Her eyes were glassy and fixed on her hands. For her, the chaos of the room didn’t seem to exist. Most of what she said was unintelligible or meaningless, but then she whispered something that sounded an awful lot like, “Don’t know how I killed all those people. Was it really fifty? I don’t remember taking that many lives.” 

I checked to make sure she didn’t have any weapons on her, unless you counted the empty bottle, and then I retreated to the lounge area. Probably Ann was insane, I told myself, looking at her tiny frame and thinking it unlikely she could kill anyone, much less fifty people, but there was something about her eyes, that thousand-yard stare, that made my skin do the tango all over my body. It left just enough of a question in my mind. 

Somehow my mason jar was now almost half empty—I kept catching myself drinking from it absentmindedly. A wet patch spread across my cargo pants where I must have spilled. My mouth tasted like antiseptic. With some effort, I squinted at the label until the moving bugs on the paper rearranged themselves into something resembling words. 120 profo, the writing said. Peals drnk respronsibilty. 

Rats. 

I set the jar down and tried to lower myself onto the couch, but ended up misjudging the distance and landing on the floor instead. The music droned on, track after track, all of it techno, all of it blisteringly loud. The plus side to the sheer volume was that I could no longer hear the zombies. Or my own thoughts. Jason had set the LEDs to cycle through the entire rainbow, and he’d turned off the fluorescents for full effect. 

“Need some help there?” he said, and I looked up and up and up to find him standing over me. “Bit of a lightweight, huh? That’s good.” 

“Why’s that good?” I slurred, unease stirring in my stomach again; it felt a little like thrashing eels, though maybe that was just the alcohol asking to exit the way it entered. 

“While everyone’s distracted, we could slip into the bathroom together, just you and me. The door doesn’t lock, but that just adds to the excitement.” He nudged my foot with the toe of his work boots as he pointed with his chin at a door set under the stairwell, a hidden, shadowy section I hadn’t noticed before. “What do you say?” 

For a moment I just blinked at him, completely dumbfounded. All the individual words made sense on their own, but strung together, I couldn’t get them to form any cohesive meaning in my head. “I am not doing that,” I managed finally, struggling to my feet so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck all the way back just to look at him. “That is very ew—that is gross. No, no thank you. I am going home now.” 

Next thing I knew, I was at the top of the basement stairs, trying and failing to lift the bar from across the door. When he materialized next to me and put his arm around my shoulders, I tasted something sour in my mouth, and for a moment I lost my balance, even though the step was wide enough for the both of us. “Easy, there.” He laughed and gripped me tighter. “Might want to slow down a little. How exactly are you planning on leaving, anyway? Were you looking for these?” Suddenly there was a set of car keys dangling from his hand. When it moved, it looked like two sets, like pieces of chipped ice suspended in mid-air. They were about a mile away from my head, the distance growing farther the longer I looked. 

I snatched at them, but he held them out of my reach, mouth still twisted into that smile that only looked like a smile. “Uh uh uh. No drunk driving on my watch. Although maybe if you go in the bathroom with me, I’ll change my mind.” He was slurring his words now, but his eyes were too aware, and their sharpness sent a jolt of cold adrenaline through me. Without knowing why, I envisioned him grabbing a gun and picking us off one by one, hunting us like that man in the story I’d read in school that one time: The Most Dangerous Game. 

What I should have done was played it cool or at least pretended that I wasn’t on the verge of panic. But the alcohol had established a clear yet impenetrable barrier between my fear and my impulse control, and the more that stifled voice at the back of my brain screamed that I needed to pretend everything was fine because predators can sense fear, the more I scrambled to escape by any means necessary, trying again to lift the beam from the door even as he laughed at me, leaning in with the sharp sweet of alcohol on his breath to whisper, “It’s rude to leave before the main event.” 

Maybe it was the combined effect of Brandon vomiting in the middle of the floor and Mr. President standing on the back of the couch just under a window, trying to peek up the skirt of a nearby zombie. Maybe I was starting to realize that I really had been kidnapped after all, that from the moment Jason dropped me into his car, he’d never intended to let me leave. Or maybe it was just that this wasn’t how I wanted my life to end; dying surrounded by these people would be worse than dying alone. I understood, then, why an animal stuck in a trap might gnaw off its own limb to escape. 

I expected him to force me back downstairs. Something in his eyes rested like lead in my bones, something that told me I wasn’t safe even with so many witnesses around, that I should have jumped from his car when I had the chance, broken bones be damned. The slant of his body as he leaned toward me had me reaching for the sawed-off shotgun still strapped to my thigh. 

I don’t know what would have happened if Gregory Viltch hadn’t chosen that moment to push his way past us, bottle of Jack clutched in a death grip. As he did, I lost my balance, and Jason caught me, hands around my waist, fingers digging into my stomach. “Look at me, saving you again,” he murmured into my ear as Viltch tried and failed to lift the beam aside with his free hand. “I think I’ve earned more than a thank you at this point.” 

Again Viltch tried to shift the solid chunk of metal, his face growing red with the strain as he grunted like a powerlifter. “Refrigerators aren’t even that heavy,” he muttered angrily. “This is nothing.” 

“Huh, I kind of want to see how this ends,” Jason said, and then he pulled away from me and eased the beam off its brackets as if it were weightless. 

Viltch was so drunk, drool dripped down his chin as he flung open the door and staggered through the living room, huffing and puffing. His face was tomato red and swollen from the alcohol. 

“We can just leave, you know,” he insisted, past the roar of blood in my ears and the dense drone of the synthesizers below. Somehow his voice was the loudest thing. “Just walk out the front door. Why worry about cars and armor? It’s not like those people can hurt us.” 

“No,” I tried to protest, but I couldn’t seem to do more than whisper, like yelling in a nightmare. My vision was too blurry, and when Jason grabbed me, I couldn’t tell if he was holding me up or holding me back. “He’s going to get us all killed.” 

Everything was moving too fast for me, a movie played at four times speed. Already Gregory was almost at the door, bottle of Jack still in one hand, the other occupied with holding up his pants which had somehow come loose. I tried to push forward, but what was I planning to do? Tackle him? Throw myself between him and the door? He was short and out of shape, but I doubted I would be able to stop him for long—he was still bigger than me. 

Jason whispered, breath warm in my ear, “Just let it happen. I want to see how this goes.” 

Mr. President was laughing behind me, clapping his hands together in delight. As Gregory kicked the coffee table away from the door, I stomped down hard on Jason’s instep. His grip loosened for all of two seconds, but it was long enough for me to break free and take off, staggering across the room at a crazy, drunken tilt—knowing I wouldn’t get there in time and needing to try anyway. 

I could see the door rattling on its hinges. Over the pulsing beat from downstairs, I began to hear fingers scrabbling against the wood, their efforts intensifying, the throaty shrieks of the afflicted rising in chorus. They could hear us, I knew. Maybe they could even smell us, through the siding and the drywall, through the glass of the windows, through the floorboards and the damp earth beneath. The moment Viltch opened the door, they were going to come pouring in. 

For the time being, Viltch was hampered by the fact that he needed to keep his pants up. He could have let go of the bottle at any point, but he seemed to have forgotten he was still holding it, so he kept getting confused, his eyes turning to slits in his flushed face. After another few steps, he gave up on his pants, and they pooled around his ankles, revealing polka-dotted boxers two sizes too big. Whiskey sloshed down the front of his shirt as he opened the front door. 

He started to say something, what could have been, “Now listen here,” before a dozen hands grabbed him and dragged him outside. Immediately he started to backpedal, making weird, hiccuping screeches as teeth clamped down on his shoulders, his neck, his face. But his feet tangled up in his pants, and anyway, there was nowhere to go. None of us were going to let him back inside. 

Still, I pressed forward, locked in the grip of some meaningless instinct. An arm clamped around my throat, yanking me backward. Immediately my vision filled with black splotches. “Shh, stop struggling. You’re ruining my shot,” Jason said. 

I expected him to fire on Gregory then, to put him out of his misery, or else to mow down the undead that were trying to push past him, and so I felt a certain measure of hope, despite everything. But then I saw, through the narrowing scope of my focus, that he was holding a camera instead, that he was filming. 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gregory Viltch was still screaming when the zombies dragged him out of sight, leaving the door half open. Now there was nothing blocking the entrance. I could see movement, hands reaching in like feelers, tentative at first but gaining confidence. If Viltch had been able to swing the door wide, if the coffee table hadn’t been just enough in the way, we would probably have been overrun. 

I could hear chewing and the wet, horrible sound of tearing flesh, even past the ringing in my ears. Jason hadn’t loosened his grip on my neck, and I wasn’t sure if he meant to choke me all the way out, or if he was so caught up in the action and the footage he was capturing that he’d simply forgotten. 

Summoning the last of my strength, I reached backward and pressed my thumbs into his eyes. In reality, it was a pathetically weak strike—there was no way I did any damage. But it must have gotten his attention, because that’s when he released me. For a moment, all I could do was sink to the ground, gasping for air, with the whole world swimming around me. I remember vomiting and cursing myself for drinking and then vomiting again. 

A gray pair of hands gripped the doorframe, leaving streaks of blood behind. I drew the sawed-off shotgun, but with the way everything was swaying around me, I thought I’d be lucky if I got off a decent shot without hurting anyone. 

Ann had fainted. Mr. President was smiling widely, doing nothing to hide the small, suspicious bulge in his pants that couldn’t have been a gun. I considered shooting him and chalking it up to a drunken accident, but Jason was still filming with that Cheshire grin, and besides, I wasn’t a killer yet, no matter how much I needed to be. 

Sizing up Jason, I got the sense that he was drunk on something else altogether, so consumed and overwhelmed with his private euphoria that he might go right on filming as the zombies swarmed him and sank their teeth into his body, that he wouldn’t stop smiling even as he went down, making sure, in his final moments, to capture the best shot of his life. 

Murder or not, putting a bullet in his brain right then and there would have saved me a lot of grief. 

Instead, I took aim at the several pairs of arms reaching in through the doorway like the stalks of some strange anemone swaying in the windy current. For a moment, the zombies were at a loss how to proceed—too many of them had tried to press themselves through all at once, and now they were jammed together, none of them able to move in any direction. They stood their feeling for us, a many-armed entity, hands reaching out like they meant to bite, chew, swallow with their fingers alone. The mental image shook me out of my paralysis, and I fired off a shot, right at the hands. It blew off the tip of a zombie’s thumb, that was all. 

For a moment, several of the hands retracted as the entity shifted itself, becoming a cluster of individuals again. A face appeared, half of one cheek torn off, like Harvey Dent FX makeup. Its teeth grinned wide at me, its jawbone exposed and gleaming, bloody and threaded with gray filaments. I shrieked and fired again. Either by luck or by some miracle, the top of its head blew off and splattered the entryway like an abstract painting. As it toppled backwards onto the porch, the nearest zombies dove for it, drawn by the sudden, erratic movement. It was all the window I needed. I lunged forward and slammed the door shut, then bolted it for good measure, just in case. Just in case Gregory Viltch was still alive. 

…

…

Man, I hate telling this story. 

…

…

In reality, no more than thirty seconds must have passed since the moment Viltch opened the door, but time had dilated. I realized I was sobbing as I backed away, unable to block out the sounds coming from the porch. I thought maybe I could hear him screaming for help, but it might just as easily have been my conscience. 

The door had stopped shaking on its hinges. Still, I made sure to jam the coffee table back into place before storming downstairs to the ransacked ammunition cabinet, where I reloaded my gun and filled the spacious pockets of my cargo pants with more bullets. 

Then I stopped and forced myself to breathe, to take stock of my surroundings. At some point, I must have bitten my cheek; now it felt raw and swollen, and the taste of blood lingered in my mouth. The fear hit me then, an image so strong I almost couldn’t shake it. Had my mouth been open when I’d sprayed the zombie’s brains across the entryway? If any of the blood had gotten inside me, the fungus could even now be working its way through my body, overwhelming my defenses, and rewiring my neural pathways. Was I already acting out the last grim moments of my life? 

The sound of multiple feet on the stairway brought me back to my senses. Their steps were slow and shuffling, reluctant now that the fun was over. As they filed into the basement, I held my gun loosely, not aimed at anyone in particular, but ready to be aimed. The rising anger in my chest was impossible to ignore; I thrummed with it. When I studied their faces, I saw hints of fear and shame and something else, something uglier, all mixed together. They didn’t look like humans in that moment—they looked like poorly-rendered CGI. 

“What the hell was that?” I snapped. My words weren’t slurring as badly anymore. A cold sort of soberness had taken over, though I still wasn’t steady on my feet. “You all let him go outside. Any one of you could have stopped him. He didn’t have to die horribly—he didn’t have to die at all.” 

On some level, I was a little stunned by the depth of my hypocrisy. Earlier, hadn’t I been thinking about murdering Brandon and Viltch myself, and was this really any different? Logically, it was for the best that Viltch was dead this early in the game. There didn’t exist a single version of this set-up where he wasn’t a loose cannon. Traumatic as it had been, no one else had been harmed, and so there was a chance this was the cleanest possible way it could have played out. But still it was horrible, and accepting it felt impossibly cold. I couldn’t stand to wield this sharp-knifed logic against myself. There were scenarios, I had to admit, where it was for the best that I died first, too—I didn’t want to examine them. 

But I wasn’t getting hung up on the math—I had always hated math. What got me was how gleeful they’d been, all of them riding the wave of some strange euphoria that chilled my blood. There was a blissed-out, satisfied look on Mr. President’s face—I could tell he was listening to something else inside his head. Ann was counting on her fingers again, smiling that faraway smile. The others managed to act chagrined, but it fell too much on the side of sheepish to count as horror, and anyway, there was no rewriting their parts in what had just happened. Every last one of them had followed Viltch upstairs because they knew they were going to watch him die—I couldn’t really find another way to view the sequence of events, and I wasn’t feeling merciful. No one else had been even the least bit dismayed until they’d realized they were next. 

If I hadn’t still felt the ghost of Jason’s arm around my neck, I don’t know what I would have done. As he started sidling toward me, I thought about pulling the trigger, but I knew the others wouldn’t let me get away with it. Beneath the horror and the guilt, adulation still shone from Alana’s face as she watched him draw near. I saw it mirrored in Ian’s eyes, in the way Brandon leaned closer, lips parted. Everyone in this house had chosen Jason but me; I was the only one who wasn’t here on purpose. 

“Come on, Singh.” Jason put his hands on my shoulders. Anyone looking on might have thought he was trying to comfort me. “He was a dead man walking, only a matter of time before this happened. And it’s not like any of us made him open that door. He was an adult. It wasn’t our job to stop him, either.” I looked across the room and saw where he had propped up the camera, its red eye fixed on me. 

“You were the one who got him drunk,” I whispered, my voice trembling. 

“Please.” He snorted. “He would have done that sober, given time. Just…focus on the positives—no one else got hurt, and he’s no longer a liability. I consider this the best-case scenario.” He glanced at the others and leaned in so I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face as he spoke so low probably no one else could hear him over the still-throbbing music. “I know you were already thinking the same thing. You and I are so similar.” It’s possible I heard him wrong; there are versions of this scene, in my head, where he says something else instead. 

He was close enough to kiss me. Past his arm, I could see Alana glowering, Ann watching me with knives for eyes. He was doing this on purpose, to sow discord, to further widen the rift between me and everyone else. Worse, I could see that it was working. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks