End of the World Afterparty: Part Ten

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

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

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

What I witnessed of Ian’s death was only the aftermath. One moment, I was wondering if I would ever summon the courage to fight Jason, and the next, Ian’s body lay twitching and spasming on the floor as Ann crouched over him like some predator guarding her kill, whale-eyed and terrifying. 

Going back over the footage, I had to break down the clip into its constituent frames before I could get any idea of what actually happened. And even then, with the limited quality of the hidden cameras that caught the scene from several angles, I still couldn’t quite reconcile the images with the reality I’d witnessed. It’s like that experiment my teacher did where he held up a book and asked his class what color it was, only it was blue on the side facing the class, and red on the other, but they didn’t know that, so when they yelled out the truth with their whole chests, they were still as wrong as they were right. 

Here’s the gist of it, though. In the first frame, Ian is leaning over Ann’s shoulder with a mug of steaming coffee held too close to her head, disrespectful all the way to his core. Maybe he thought he was being smooth, invading her personal space like that. Maybe he thought she would be more receptive to his approaches than the baristas at Starbucks were when he mistook their customer service for flirting, or whatever it was he did with his spare time. His mouth is open; there’s such a casual look of disdain on his face, I can’t work up any sympathy for what happened to him. 

Next frame, he’s still talking. 

And the next frame. 

And the next. 

You get the idea. 

Then you start to see Ann’s expression as the meaning of his words begins to dawn on her. And the funny thing is, she doesn’t get angry. At least, her face doesn’t show it in any way you could measure by any metric that would make sense. It just sort of closes off. I don’t know how else to describe it. Something about her eyes, turning inward. Something about the corners of her mouth, how if you look at one individual frame for long enough, they seem to curl up. Not a sneer, not a smile, nothing carried to term. Possibly nothing more than an optical illusion created by the fatigued rods and cones in my eyes. 

If I had to guess, Ian never had the opportunity to register how his insult landed before the rest of his life flashed before his eyes. Because he’s still smiling by the time she starts moving, flying out of her seat with all the force of a missile locked onto its target. 

There’s a pen in her hand. No matter how much I slow down the footage, I can’t determine the moment she picks it up. She’s typing, and then she isn’t, and then there’s a pen in her hand. That’s really all I can tell you, officer, I swear. 

For about half a second the pen exists as a certainty in her tiny, little fist. Hell, she wasn’t much bigger than my mom. Ian was easily twice her size. 

And then, bam! Next thing you know, her hand is empty again, and Ian’s mug is tumbling to the ground, splashing hot coffee everywhere as he holds his throat in the universal sign for choking. Blood spurts from between his fingers with astonishing force. 

(You know what this guy needs? Flex tape.) 

(Haters will say the footage is reversed.) 

The look on his face is almost comical. If I were only slightly more deranged than I am now, I would print it out and wear it on a T-shirt. It’s this priceless mix of confusion and righteous indignation, like, if he could just find the right words, he’d tell her off for not knowing how to take a joke, only he can’t quite figure out why his carotid has sprung a leak or why everyone in the hospital suddenly wants to know what his blood type is. 

For a while, he doesn’t seem to catch on to the fact that he’s dead; he just sort of staggers around drunkenly, making sure to get blood all over Jason’s expensive recording equipment. And if you think that’s bad, remember that you can’t really appreciate the level of damage from the footage alone. There’s something sterile and clinical about the camera angle, the amount of distance it puts between you and the scene. It makes everything seem miniaturized and impotent. 

In person, its was like stepping into an abattoir. Blood so dark it couldn’t possibly be real, so much of it no one could ever fit that volume inside a person, not even inside a meat suit that big. It’s only when you see the body in real life, the pen jammed so far into his throat that the point protrudes out the back of his neck, missing his spinal column by a bare half-centimeter, that you appreciate the full effect of what she did. 

What I’m thinking is, they should have put that footage on Clothed and Unafraid for his show’s grand finale. 

So there I was, trapped in my fear on the couch with Jason. And there was Ian, gurgling wetly as he wasted the last few moments of his existence trying to make a point he could never articulate. No one rushed to his aid. For a moment his eyes fixed on me, and they seemed to scream, “This is your fault, you did this,” but I only caught that on the footage long after the fact, so his great outrage went unmarked as the final seconds of his life drained away. He managed to wander in a series of confused circles like a rabid animal before eventually crumpling to the ground, legs pumping the air. The wheel was spinning, but the hamster was missing. 

I guess I should be grateful that, in effect, he gave his life to save me from Jason’s amorous advances. So thank you for your service, Ian. The world needs more men like you. 

When Jason was finally done staring slack-jawed at the carnage, he leaned in to whisper, “Don’t worry, we’ll get back to this,” before vaulting over the couch, yelling about the blood all over his set up, and I couldn’t tell if he was outraged or thrilled. 

For a moment longer I sat there, taking in the spectacle one detail at a time, trying to piece it together into something cohesive. But by the point I realized Jason intended to drag the body out through the back door, my panic gave way to useful urgency. This was probably going to be my only shot, and if I wasted it, there would be no chance afterward, not anything I could count on. Still, I almost couldn’t get my legs to respond as I rounded the couch, moving slowly so as not to attract his attention. 

As he opened the door and shot the several zombies waiting on the other side, he had to turn his back to me. Even as strong as he was, he seemed to struggle a little with Ian’s weight; dragging a corpse that size requires the use of both hands, so he had to keep setting down the body to pull out his gun and kill another of the infected as the more opportunistic ones pushed their way inside. All told, there weren’t that many zombies close to the garage—at most, ten or twelve. With no fresh meat for several hours, they had begun to lose interest and wander away in search of better prospects, though now with the new sounds and smells drawing them, more would be arriving. But there were enough in the immediate vicinity that Jason’s juggling act quickly threw him off balance. 

Maybe he got angry, or maybe he forgot to be afraid. But finally he just wrapped his arms around Ian’s chest, hoisted him up to waist height, and used his momentum to propel the both of them over the threshold, body-slamming the last few zombies out of the way as if their teeth meant nothing to him. And that was my moment, my singular opportunity. Before he could free himself from the discarded corpse and the hands already reaching for him, I slammed the door shut and locked it. 

Then I snatched up the car key from the edge of the desk and sprinted to the wall of guns, calling over my shoulder for Ann to join me—I was still thinking about saving her. But when I spared her a fleeting glance, I saw she was glassy-eyed, still crouched over the blood on the floor, mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like, “Now I gotta take care of the witnesses,” and I realized I was too afraid to approach her. 

Beyond the door, I heard Jason laughing as he shot the zombies, and I told myself that I was in a video game, preparing to fight the main boss, and on the screen was a timer counting down the seconds I had left to prepare myself for battle. After beating this level, I could turn off the stream and go have dinner with my mom, because none of this was real; it was all just supposed to be fun. 

At this, some of my courage returned, but my heart was still racing so badly I almost gave up several times as I fumbled a 9mm down from the rack and loaded the clip. By then I could hear Jason trying to get back inside. I paused, momentarily frozen as his muffled voice made its way past the ringing in my ears. “Let me in, Singh. Open up, before I break the door down.” 

If he couldn’t get back in, I thought, eventually he would run out of bullets and the zombies would eat him. This could be over that quickly. But of course, as I oscillated between running for the G Wagon and waiting to see what would happen, the door began to shudder violently, its hinges groaning in a way that told me they wouldn’t hold long. 

“Just you wait until I get my hands on you,” he called in a singsong voice, and I wasted no more time. 

I didn’t even bother to open the main bay door first. If he broke through, I’d have only seconds before he chased me down, so I just had to hope the Wagon was powerful enough to sledgehammer its way out, and if I happened to run Jason over while I was at it, so much the better. 

Sure enough, as I reached the car, the back door of the garage flew off its hinges and landed with a terrible crash, and I looked up to see Jason, face smeared with gore, grinning at me like a mad man. Behind him, the silhouettes of several zombies crowded near, but he seemed oblivious to them, indestructible. For several seconds, all he did was stand there, watching me try and fail to unlock the car door as my hands turned numb with panic, the sudden, uneasy silence punctuated by the clatter of the key as it slipped from my grip. 

At this, his smile widened, a triumphant, hungry look. “Ready or not, here I come,” he called out, and then he sprinted toward me like a linebacker while I dove for the key. 

One second. 

All I could hear was the sound of his breathing, the rapid pace of his footsteps. 

Two seconds. 

Mercifully the key slid into the lock. 

Three seconds. 

I yanked the door open and scrambled inside, almost losing the key again in my desperation. 

Four seconds. 

He slammed into the G Wagon with enough force to rock the whole vehicle, just as my finger pushed down on the lock, and I fell back in my seat with a sob of relief. All I could think was that I’d actually done it, that I was getting out of there. It was the only thing that mattered. 

So, of course, that was the moment my luck ran out. Because the Wagon didn’t start. No matter how many times I turned the key in the ignition, the engine did nothing. It didn’t even make a sound. 

Knock, knock, guess who’s home? Nobody, that’s right. 

Zombies were beginning to slip in through the open back door, and I watched, numb with shock, as Ann threw herself at them, shouting something that sounded like, “Don’t you call my writing shit! I’ll show you shit!” Her arms flailed out wildly, striking and grabbing, but it took only seconds for one of the infected to tear her throat out, and then it was over. Outside, others devoured Ian’s remains in a frenzy of limbs and teeth. There would be no more closing the door against them, not with the hinges torn off the wall. Whatever grim armistice we’d been observing was officially over. 

And then, past the ringing in my ears, I heard Jason’s laughter like the howling of coyotes. “I unplugged the starter relay,” he said. There he was, pressed up against the window on the driver’s side, his muffled voice inescapable in the confines of the Wagon, my prison. “That’s two times, Singh. I cannot believe you’ve fallen for the same trap twice.” 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I looked over at the passenger side and saw that, sure enough, the panel under the glove box was open, screws spilled in a loose jumble on the floor. Of course I knew he wasn’t lying, but I ducked down to check the fuse box anyway, and when I sat back up, Jason was tapping the missing relay against the window. Thud. Thud. Thud. I stared over at him, listless and vague, trying to come up with another plan even as the channel in my mind changed to white noise and static. 

“If you come out now,” he said, loud enough there could be no missing his words, “I’ll go easy on you. Make me wait, and that’s going to change.” 

I knew my odds as well as he did. If I stayed in the Wagon, I would die of thirst before I even starved to death, sitting in my own waste as he watched, if he chose to let it get that far. More than likely, he’d break the window and drag me out before then. That was assuming the garage wasn’t first overrun by zombies. Anything could happen now that our defenses were breached, although I had an increasingly difficult time picturing Jason succumbing. It seemed, if anything, like they would recognize him as one of their own, a soulless, flesh-eating monster, and so they would set their sights on me and Alana; we would die, and he would remain as he ever was. 

Some distant part of me insisted that I needed to get my head together, that I needed to face him and the zombies, now, while I had the opportunity to decide how I wanted to do it, before the choice got taken away from me. But the thought of stepping out willingly was unbearable—I could no sooner lower myself into a swarm of feeding sharks. 

Then I remembered the gun in my hand, and I thought about shooting him. I thought about shooting myself. And I watched him watch me do the math. 

At this point, there weren’t that many ways out. It was either him, or me. But I’d used up all my strength, and my adrenaline was starting to fade. If I thought I could step out of the SUV and shoot him point blank, I was kidding myself. The minute I opened that door, he was going to take the gun away from me. I could already feel my fingers going numb at the thought of it, my muscles becoming more and more sluggish. No matter how I spun the situation in my head, he was guaranteed to be faster than me. 

“Hold that thought,” he said, and I realized he had been talking, his voice drowned out by my racing heartbeat. At first I didn’t understand what he was doing when he crossed to the weapons rack and grabbed a semi-automatic, smiling at me as he loaded it. My initial thought was that he was just going to gun me down, G Wagon be damned. There wasn’t any chance the metal would stop the rounds from shredding my body, so maybe he thought that was one way of flushing me out. 

But his focus had shifted to the zombies. “I think Mr. President needs friends,” he called over his shoulder, as if this was nothing more than a game, as if the creatures gnawing on what remained of Ann were not the most terrible thing anyone could ever meet. Mostly the ones inside were fixated on the readily-available food—whatever threat they posed for him was currently postponed. But more zombies were shuffling inside—we probably had a decent party of twenty in the garage by now. Even indestructible as Jason seemed, the odds worsened by the minute. 

First, he propped the deformed door up against the jamb and dragged the desk over to it. Against a steady crush of bodyweight, I doubted it would hold for long. Anything you could move by yourself wasn’t going to keep out a mob of flesh eaters hell-bent on feasting. But at the very least it might slow them down. 

Then he turned to the zombies communing over Ann—they had finally started to climb to their feet, so when he unleashed a spray of gunfire, he took most of them out at the knee. Now, if they wanted him, they were going to have to crawl. 

“Just kill him, Singh,” my brain screamed at me. “For the love of God, just kill him. He dies, and this is over. How many times are you going to waste an opportunity like this?” I didn’t know how that could be true, how there was any chance for freedom now, not with my plans dead in the water. Everything had hinged on being able to drive to safety, and now I was convinced that was never going to happen. Faced with the gruesome reality of the zombies and their sheer numbers, even out here, supposedly so far away from civilization, the thought of leaving on foot wasn’t viable. 

For a moment, I let my eyes slide shut, and when I opened them again, several minutes or maybe a year later, he was back, face just on the other side of the window. “Singh, I am being very patient,” he said, and I could hear the danger in his voice, barely disguised beneath his tone. “You lost me one of the women—that’s a big, fucking deal for me. So I am going to start counting down from ten.” 

Here we go; this is it; this is really happening. 

“Ten.” 

I was tired and concussed and my thoughts were starting to run together like water now that the adrenaline had left my system. What were my options? I remembered there were two alternatives, both grim, one more final than the other, but my brain couldn’t seem to latch on to any specifics. 

“Nine.” 

Why was he counting? I wanted to shut him up so I could think my way out of this. Across the room, the zombies were crawling for him, but the pool was in the way, and instead of going around, they just splashed into it and sank to the bottom where I could no longer see them. So fascinating to watch. 

“Eight. Singh, are you even listening to me?” 

The gun felt impossibly warm in my hand, like a living thing, like a snake that had slithered into my lap and made its home there. It stared at me with its great, baleful eyes, whispering the one purpose it had left, and I tried to be brave enough to accept its message, but I felt so small and helpless when viewed through that scope. 

“Seven.” 

Everything had begun to take on a dreamlike quality. Not even my fear seemed capable of sustaining me; I still couldn’t bring myself to move; I just wanted this to be over.

“Six. If you make me pull you out of there myself, you are going to regret it. I cannot stress that enough. There is still time to rethink this, Singh. I am giving you so many chances here.” 

I remember reading about microsleeps once, something that happens when you’re so tired your body physically cannot sustain a state of consciousness anymore. You start to drift off in snatches, here and there, a second or two at a time, and mostly you don’t even know it’s happening. 

“Five.” 

So it can be especially dangerous when you’re driving, unaware of the moments you’re giving over to sleep at the wheel. It’s a little bit like the effect of a strobe light, where everything seems to move faster than it’s supposed to because you’re losing slices of vision in the spaces between, while your brain tries to stitch them together into a continuous whole. 

“Four. Singh, are you even awake? This can be over. Just let it be over. Just open the door. I know that you’re scared of me, but the Jason a few seconds from now is a lot scarier.” 

The strobe effect was happening in my brain. I could hear him talking, but I knew I wasn’t getting more than half of the information, that my mind was cutting out the rest of it, whether willfully or otherwise. 

“Three. Singh, I have a second set of keys in my top drawer in the other room and I will go get them right now.” 

There was something odd about his intonation. For a moment my brain latched onto it, and then it slipped loose and drifted off again, aimless and untethered. Maybe I could just fall asleep, let everything else fade away, let whatever happened happen. 

“Two.” 

No, there was something I was supposed to do. If I just focused hard enough, I could almost start to remember what it was. It was something to do with the snake in my lap. 

No, not a snake, a gun. 

“One. Time’s up, Eun-Mi.” 

I put the gun to my head. 

Did I have the strength to do it? Looking into his eyes, I could tell he doubted me, but he had the decency to at least try to look nervous. 

“Okay,” he said, holding his hands up, his voice calm but firm. “Okay, Eun-Mi, let’s talk this through. You don’t have to do anything stupid. We can work this out. Just—just drop the gun and climb down from the Wagon, and we’ll put this behind us. Can you do that for me?” 

“Don’t call me Eun-Mi.” 

“Singh, okay, I’m sorry. Singh. Can you get out of the car for me? I am not going to hurt you.” 

My head tilted to the side, less as a question, and more because my neck suddenly felt too weak to support its weight. “I’ll ruin your upholstery,” I whispered, which was all I could think to say for some reason, pitiful in its earnest attempt to appeal to the only vaguely human part of him I could find. 

Somehow he heard me. “You know I’m not worried about the upholstery, Singh,” he said, but I could tell he was at least a little worried, the way his eyes kept darting back and forth between me and the seat beside me. “Just come out, and we can talk, okay? I’ll stay back—you have my word.” 

Again his gaze moved to the upholstery behind me and stuck for a moment before returning. He licked his lips, a nervous tick. 

“There’s no point in talking,” I told him, my voice strangely level. “I know what you’re going to do the moment I let down my guard. I just want to leave, one way or another.” Holding the gun to my head was becoming difficult. My hand was trembling, and sweat was forming on my palm, making the grip slippery. Worse, my vision was starting to turn dark around the edges. 

“Shit, Singh, I’m not an ogre. It was just a misunderstanding, okay? I thought you were into me. You’re being dramatic over nothing.” 

“I will do it. I will end this,” I whispered, too quietly for him to hear me. But he seemed to read my lips all the same. 

And he kept looking at the upholstery. 

I really thought he was looking at the upholstery. 

“Okay, okay, Singh, I am sorry. You come out, and I won’t lay a hand on you ever again unless you want me to. Just—just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Look, I’ll even help you find your mom. We can bring her here where she’ll be safe.” He cast a quick glance at the makeshift barricade, holding for now, but not for long, “Or—or we can find some other place for her.” 

“Do you promise?” I asked, as if I thought for even a moment that I could believe a single word coming from his mouth. It was the part of me that didn’t want to die, still trying to buy itself time. 

“I swear on my mother’s grave,” he said, and crossed himself. 

“But your mother isn’t dead,” I murmured. 

That’s when I heard something on my right and looked over to see Alana standing on the other side of the car, her face an awful, bloated mess, eyelids drooping as if she wasn’t quite awake. Her arm was raised, mid-throw, and my split second of distraction was all Jason needed. By the time I realized she’d tossed him the spare key, it was over. 

I looked back to where he’d been standing, but he was already inside the car with me, leaning in to pry the gun from my fingers. “Should have surrendered when you had the chance,” he said, right before he dragged me out of the Wagon and wrestled me to the ground so roughly my shoulder popped back out of joint. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks