End of the World Afterparty: Part Two

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

 

CHAPTER THREE

It wasn’t long before Jason started live streaming, which, if you have a fortress at the end of the world, is a double-edged sword. I wouldn’t have done it myself. He led by informing his viewers that he had space, weapons, food, and water—enough to last for months if need be, maybe up to a year. Half of me remained focused on figuring out a way to get back to my house; the other half got hung up on how stupid it was to tell God-knows-how-many people where you live and how to find you. I’ve watched The Walking Dead. I know that humans are the most dangerous part of an apocalypse. He was going to get us both killed, and I wasn’t down for that. 

We needed to “stay woke,” he said, before launching into a rant about the second amendment being the reason we were going to survive, which led to a lengthy soliloquy on the failures of our lizard president (though he didn’t say the lizard part). Eventually he remembered his initial point and circled back to the open invitation for anyone who wants to “take cover in the last safe place.” Our door would be open until further notice. I knew he meant that last bit metaphorically—even now the door was shut and bolted—but it felt equally dangerous. 

As we waited for the inevitable, I tried again and again to convince him to let me use his phone, but every time he laughed and told me to sit tight, that I didn’t want to be outside right now, and that he was doing me a favor. When I finally got fed up and decided to leave on foot, zombies be damned, he headed me off at the pass. 

“At least stay here until this blows over,” he said, leaning against the door and folding his arms across his chest. It seemed like a casual enough gesture, but I knew what he was really trying to say, that I would have to force my way past him. “Once we’re sure the roads are safe, I promise I’ll drive you to the nearest hospital myself so you can get checked out—I’ll even pay for the bill. You hit your head pretty hard, and it would be irresponsible of me to let you wander around unattended while you’re confused.” He gave me a stern look, and I told myself that I was jumping at shadows, that this wasn’t what I thought it was. Soon enough I’d be home, laughing with my friends about how boorish and overbearing Jason Vanderbilt had proved to be. 

But I couldn’t shake the growing unease in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it was the amused smile creeping over his face, like he wanted me to try him, or maybe it was just the fact that I knew too much about him, that I’d heard rumors and read old police reports, and he was even bigger in person than I’d realized. 

I tried subtly to check my pockets for my canister of pepper spray, but of course it wasn’t on me. When I’d left the house for groceries, Mom had handed me cash, so I hadn’t bothered to run upstairs for my wallet and everything else I normally carried around. Figures the one time I forgot to bring it would be the one time I ended up needing it. 

“You look nervous,” Jason said, and there was something of the crocodile in his smile. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” He didn’t move, not so much as a muscle, but all of a sudden I got a terrible sense of vertigo, and I almost didn’t make it back to the couch before my knees gave out. 

There I sat, daydreaming about stealing the keys to his Porsche even though I knew that probably wouldn’t happen, not with him posted like a sentinel at the door, eyes following my every movement. But later, when he was distracted, my luck might change. I needed to leave my options open. Grand theft auto wasn’t exactly high on my bucket list, but I figured the police would understand, given the circumstances. 

When the first of his fans rang the bell, I sort of expected to be faced with a herd of prepubescent girls, all screaming his name in some infernal chorus. Instead there was only one, a native Hawaiian woman who introduced herself as Alana Hekekia and asked if she could crash here until, in her words, “the apocalypse blew over.” She made it sound like a thunderstorm, and it was close enough to what I might have said, had our positions been reversed, that I liked her immediately. 

Behind her, the forest was far from still. The wind had picked up, and now the trees were bending and swaying like something massive was trying to break through them. The rustling branches sounded like dry bones rattling. I still hoped that Jason was making this up, all of it, but I caught myself expecting hunched figures to shamble out of the greenery nonetheless, corneas gray, chins dripping blood, and I didn’t feel better until Jason had closed and bolted the door behind Alana. 

“You a Vanderbelt, too?” she asked. It took me a moment to figure out what she was saying, to catch the slight difference in pronunciation. I knew that was what Jason Vanderbilt’s stans were called, but it had never come up in casual conversation before. 

“No,” I said, loud enough for Jason to catch. “I’m here because he hit me with his car.” 

She blushed a little, then, and I liked her less. Her eyes darted to Jason and back to me as she leaned in close and whispered, “Lucky.” A feverish glow came over her, and I caught myself studying her for bite marks. 

Jason held out an arm, indicating the house. It wasn’t much. Past the narrow entryway, the space opened up into a living room with a gray rug and a navy couch that looked harmless enough, something you might find in a seaside cottage owned by retired snowbirds. Everything was surprisingly clean, given that it was Jason’s. If pressed to picture his life, I would have anticipated a mess: mounds of unwashed clothing and towers of dirty dishes. But in actuality, the place was clean and sparse, as if no one truly lived here, though a strange, earthy sort of funk hung in the air that made me queasy without knowing why. 

A large flat screen TV dominated one wall, with an array of video game consoles lined up neatly beneath. For whatever reason, it seemed like Jason preferred to keep most of his recording equipment in the kitchen, where it covered every square inch of the table. Aside from that, the kitchen was neat. No unwashed dishes filled the sink; no crusty frying pans sat discarded on the stovetop, left to grow fungal colonies. He had to have had a maid. Or else his mom spent every waking moment cleaning up his trail of carnage, like his lawyers did in the real world. The only way I could picture him cleaning was if he got high and stayed up all night, too strung out to sit still, but even that explanation felt like a stretch. Jason had the sort of personality drugs were made of, not the other way around. 

Alana had just taken a seat on the couch, bug-eyed and mooning, when the doorbell sounded again. By the time another hour had passed, there were six of us pressed together in the living room, fidgeting in the glow of the TV screen. It was three o’clock now, but the day had gone overcast, and I wondered if we were going to get a storm. “We should be doing something,” I said, and my voice sounded too loud in the quiet. It was eerie, how even Jason wasn’t talking. 

“I am doing something,” Jason said, glancing up from his computer screen. “I have security cameras around the property, and I’m monitoring what’s going on outside.” 

“That’s a step.” I hated acknowledging even that much. “But we need to board over the windows as well. And where are these weapons you’ve talked about at such great length?” 

Laughing, he turned to survey our small group. Alana sat perched on the arm of the couch, staring raptly at him. Something suspiciously like drool hung from the corner of her mouth. 

Next was Ian Holmes, an outdoor survivalist type who had introduced himself by telling us that he’d known this was going to happen, it was just a matter of time before one vaccine or another went wrong. He was embarrassingly good-looking and impossible not to recognize. Sometimes I’d watch his TV show—Clothed and Unafraid—on Youtube, if I was bored and it showed up on my feed, even though I was never sure I liked it. Usually it felt more like a hate watch, fun after a little too much wine. Seeing him in person verged on embarrassing. 

In the farthest corner sat a small, mousy woman, Ann Peletier, a self-published author who looked like she’d skipped her anti-anxiety meds a few too many days in a row. She kept clutching her chest and hyperventilating. Here’s the funny thing—I knew about her too, from online forums and random tweets. She wrote smut, the kind that won the Bad Sex Award three years in a row and had become the brunt of several hilarious memes, stuff that made books like Conquered by Clippy seem almost hinged. 

And then, of course, there was the man with the buzzcut and the camouflage jacket. He paced the room like a zoo animal, pausing often to stare out the windows, the whole time giggling in a high-pitched voice. When pressed, he explained it was an anxious tic, reflexive and impossible to stop, and I recognized the apology in his eyes even as his laughter reached a new and startling crescendo. Part of me wanted to feel bad for him, but the rest of me wanted to knock him unconscious. 

Jason seemed disappointed that more fans hadn’t arrived. Every now and then I caught him glancing up at the door with a frown between his eyebrows. 

“We can pull apart the couch,” I suggested, halfway thinking out loud, “and use the boards inside to cover the windows. It won’t be much, but it might keep the zombies from seeing us. At least it would be better than nothing.” 

Saying this stuff out loud, I had trouble taking myself seriously. In my head, it made sense. There really were zombies—most channels in Jason’s extensive Direct TV plan had canceled regularly-scheduled programming to relay a constant barrage of news about the developing crisis. A clip of the action at the juice shop, short but graphic, had aired almost fifty times in the two hours I’d been at Jason’s, and I’d started questioning my instincts about his motives for keeping me here. Additional reports showed that incidents of infection were occurring at an exponential rate in the surrounding areas, already as far as DC, possibly farther. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom, how I needed to get home to her and make sure she was safe. But when I acknowledged the crisis openly, I kept expecting someone to look up in confusion and say, “What zombies? What is she talking about?” I was terrified that this was all some solitary delusion, birthed from a previously unnoticed fault in my psyche or precipitated by the blow to my head, maybe both. 

“Not so fast, Gamer Girl,” Jason said. “No one’s tearing apart my couch. I paid, like, twenty grand for that thing.” 

Alana elbowed me and whispered, “When his mom features in his videos, she’s always sitting on that couch. Do you think she’d like me?” 

Everyone stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, while I sat wondering how he knew to call me Gamer Girl despite the fact that I hadn’t said a word about my streams. A chill skittered up and down my arms, and I found myself looking at my hands, studying them for obvious tells someone like Sherlock might notice and attribute to an Xbox controller, but they just looked like normal hands. And anyway, I would have been hard-pressed to believe Jason was Sherlock, or even Watson, for that matter. 

“Anyway,” Alana continued, oblivious, “she hasn’t been in your videos for months now. Where is she? Doesn’t she live here?” 

“She used to,” he said dismissively. “But back to the topic at hand, I have a shed outside filled with plywood I was going to build a set with. Hawaii 5-0, EL James, Laffy Taffy, and Bear Grylls, head on out to the shed and bring all the material inside. Try to be as fast as possible.” 

As everyone attempted to figure out their respective nicknames, I watched a mixture of irritation and appreciation play out across their faces. Personally, I thought I could have come up with a better name than Gamer Girl. The others weren’t too bad, though. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there, trying to think of something clever, how many nicknames he’d picked and then discarded before he’d finally settled on these ones. Or maybe they came to him in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that was his true talent, making people feel small without having to try. 

“There are tools in the shed, too, hammers and nails, all that crap. Bear Grylls can show you girls what to do with a hammer.” He winked, then looked at me. “You a good shot?” 

“Yeah, I’m good.” I kept my tone neutral, my eyebrows telling him how much I resented his presence. 

When I was younger and my dad was still around, he took me to several gun safety classes, taught me about the different kinds of guns and what bullets go with which, and I turned out to be a decent marksman. More recently, I’d had a boyfriend who wanted to go target shooting but threw a tantrum when I hit the bullseye more times than he did. (Ex-boyfriend, after that.) Still, I knew shooting a stationary object was a great deal easier than shooting a moving one, and I could only hope Call of Duty was good enough training for the real world. 

(As it turns out, I was right—it’s not that different. Aim, fire on the exhale. Picture yourself as the gun, attached to it, the bullet an extension of your reach. You want something to die, it dies. It’s easier when it’s not real, but you can tell yourself it’s not real, and that’s almost the same thing. At least in the moment.) 

“I want to go outside with the others,” I added, before he could give more orders. I could already see he was gearing up towards something, and I wanted to test the waters again. I wanted to know if this was all in my head. 

“Absolutely not,” he said firmly, stepping toward the entryway as if he expected me to make a break for it. “You’ve got dried blood all over you—zombies will smell that and come running. Not to mention, you kind of look like someone hit you with their car. You’re going to slow everyone down, maybe end up getting yourself killed for no reason. Better for you to do something easier and safer..” He pointed down the hallway. “Basement door’s that way. Bring up as many guns and as much ammunition as you can. And pick something nice for yourself.” 

He winked again. When it comes down to it, I think that wink might be the biggest reason I’m glad he’s dead. 

CHAPTER FOUR

I climbed down to the basement, half wondering if this was the point where he’d lock me up and leave me to starve, if everyone else was merely an accomplice in a dark and twisted game. His nickname for me kept circling in my mind, and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he’d watched my streams and figured out who I was. I didn’t like to think about the implications, the heavy load I was putting on blind chance bringing us together. But the fact that he wasn’t worrying about me handling weapons had me second-guessing the narrative I was spinning for myself, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought the presence of the others meant I was probably safe. What kind of kidnapper invites guests? Jason might have been overbearing and oblivious to boundaries, but I was still afraid that everyone would think I was crazy if I implied malicious intent. 

Like the rest of the house, the basement wasn’t what I would have expected. It was far too spacious, as if it extended beyond the foundations, and it was brighter than the upstairs in a clinical way. Sharp fluorescents lined the ceiling, rendering the sunlight streaming in from the narrow windows at the tops of the walls unnecessary. 

My legs started to shake as I took in the whole scene. The entire wall to my right was lined with guns, all carefully displayed behind wire-mesh doors. There were shotguns and pistols, assault rifles, antique revolvers. I saw a Desert Eagle and an AR-15. Two, actually. It was weird how many guns I recognized, how many I’d used in various video games, and now here they were in real life. 

Cabinets of ammunition squatted under the rack, their drawers labeled. I’d known that Jason was a gun nut, but this was taking it to a whole new level. There was something obsessively clean and organized about the set up. When I closed my eyes, I pictured him kneeling before them like a supplicant, caressing their smooth metal, taking them down and pressing his cheek to their textured grips. I hadn’t seen so many weapons since I’d gone to the gun store to buy a stun gun and left with pepper spray instead because I’d gotten intimidated. 

I felt like I was exiting my body; the distance between me and my feet became a yawning chasm. Or maybe I was an avatar on screen, something I could control from a safe distance. None of this was happening to me, because none of it was possible. Talking about it now gives me the shakes for reasons I still can’t fully quantify. 

Several minutes passed while I deliberated in front of the rack, but eventually I settled on a sawed-off shotgun with a thigh holster, mainly because it made me feel like Zoë from Firefly. And it’s only in retrospect that I understand how the simple fact of its presence would have told me a lot if I’d known how to listen. 

Several duffle bags sat empty in the corner. After filling one, I realized it was too heavy to lift, so I emptied half of it onto the floor and lugged what I could back up to the living room where Jason was monitoring the security feed. By the time I made it upstairs, the others had already brought in a load of wood and gone back for another. I caught myself peeking over Jason’s shoulder, searching the tree line for signs of movement, but everything looked unnaturally still. 

Likely it would be a while before anything found us, I figured. We were so far off the main drag, and at least twenty miles away from the juice shop. What reason would they even have to wander out this way, with better pickings elsewhere? The whole outbreak might blow over without us seeing any action. But I was scared regardless, down in the pit of my stomach where my instincts knew things my mind could not. 

After lining up the guns on the couch, because Jason threw a fit when I set them on the floor, I went downstairs for more, my hands shaking worse than ever. I was on my way back up when I heard shouting. Jason was still in front of his laptop, but now he was standing. “Give me one of those,” he said, without even looking at me. 

Then I saw it on the screen, a woman walking at a crazy tilt as if she was being blown sideways by an incredible gale, her arms swinging, nerveless, her mouth a gaping wound. Chills danced across my skin, and my palms grew so slick with sweat I almost dropped the Desert Eagle as I tried to hand it over. Jason loaded it and ran for the door, eyes gleaming. 

“Everybody look out,” he yelled, as Alana squeezed by him into the house. The others were still dragging the last of the boards inside, and the man in the camouflage jacket was laughing hysterically now. It would be impossible to describe how deeply it unsettled me, hearing him laugh and seeing his face frozen in terror, knowing it was something he couldn’t control. 

As Jason marched across the lawn, he took aim at the zombie, and her face exploded in a spray of red before the deafening roar of the shot even reached my ears. Already there were more zombies emerging from the woods. So far, they moved slowly—despite their slack mouths and expressionless faces, they seemed almost curious. Maybe it was the tilt to their heads, something you’d associate with an inquisitive puppy. I had expected them to come out sprinting like the zombies in World War Z (the book was sooo much better than the movie), but maybe they hadn’t caught our scent, or they were too new to the game to know exactly what was expected of them. Maybe the fungus hadn’t gotten a strong enough hold yet, and a few conscious parts of their brains still managed to mount some form of resistance for the time being. 

After inspecting his kill, Jason turned back to the house, seeming to disregard the other bodies pressing in close, but he hadn’t quite made it to the door when a man came bolting up the driveway, so fast he was almost a blur, arms pumping, with another man hot on his heels. I had my gun out of the holster and trained on the second man before I heard the nearly incoherent shouting—“Stop, why are you running away from me? I’m trying to help you!” 

“Let me in,” the man in front screamed. “He’s crazy. Don’t let him get me.” 

Before I could intervene, the man had run inside and slammed the door. I heard the deadbolt click into place and felt my blood ice over. Aside from the Desert Eagle and the sawed-off shotgun, we were unarmed. I didn’t know how many rounds we had to work with, just whatever was in our pockets, and suddenly I was scared I wouldn’t be able to hit anything. The second man came to a sudden stop and doubled over, hands on his knees, panting for air. 

“You let him get away,” he said. He was slightly overweight, and there were sweat stains under his arms, ruining his suit. His hair rose in a wooly gray cloud around his head. “He’s insane, and now he’s locked us outside. We’re going to get eaten alive by mosquitos.” 

His statement threw me off so much, for a second I forgot to be afraid. 

“He’s going to hurt himself,” the man continued, ignoring the ranks of encroaching zombies behind him. “He thinks those people are actually the undead. Myself, I don’t understand why a bunch of actors would put on sloppy stage makeup and run around terrorizing people, but I’m assuming it’s like that time people dressed up as clowns to celebrate It: Chapter One and chased people with chainsaws. All in good fun, of course.” He was breathing easier now, standing straighter. “Go away!” he yelled at the zombies in his sharp, high-pitched voice. In response, they only sped up their pace toward the farmhouse. “If you don’t leave now, I will be pressing charges for harassment. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” He turned back to us, a distracted look on his face. “Is there a zombie movie coming out soon?” 

“They’re, uh, remaking Night of the Living Dead,” I offered, because I couldn’t think of what else to say; this whole thing was so ludicrous. I felt the inexplicable urge to laugh, and with it, the sense that I needed to apologize to the nervous giggler inside the house. For half a second I even wondered if the man in the suit could be right, until my gaze fell on the dead woman. If these were actors, they would have broken character when the round pulped her face. One of them would already have been calling 911. But the zombies were still coming, their moans muffled as if their mouths were full of cotton. In retrospect, I’m guessing it was the fungus climbing their airways, reaching out like fingers. Every time they breathed, I could hear a phlegmy rattling. 

I banged on the door and yelled, “Let us in, dammit,” and then stepped back, unsure what would happen. I pictured everyone on the other side locked in a heated argument with the new arrival. But I couldn’t hear anything, so maybe instead they were frozen, held at gunpoint. 

“You think these are actors?” Jason asked, and the laughter in his voice told me he was having the time of his life. Almost without looking, he leveled his gun and shot a middle-aged man in a poorly-tailored suit. From this distance, I saw what looked like a coffee stain on his sailboat print tie as he dropped to the ground. It had been a perfect headshot. 

The stranger on the porch gasped and covered his mouth. “What the hell is wrong with you? Give me that thing before you hurt someone else.” Lunging forward, he grappled with Jason for the gun, but the YouTuber shook him off easily, upper lip curled in disdain as he eyed him like something stuck to his shoe. 

“Look.” Jason waved the gun at the other zombies, now yards away. All the noise was exciting them. Some had begun to feed on their dead friends with gusto. “They don’t care that I just shot one of their own. That makes two I’ve killed, and they’re still on task. If these are actors, they’re the best damn actors I’ve ever seen. Watch this.” 

He marched up to the closest zombie, a little girl no older than twelve. She didn’t even come up to his shoulder. When he grabbed her by the throat and held the gun to her forehead, her mouth snapped open and shut, open and shut, as she twisted and clawed at him, trying to bite his wrist. “She won’t break character, she’s so committed,” he said. “She won’t even beg for her life. God, I love it!” He yelled this last bit at the sky, and then he shot her. The entire back of her head blew off. “Best damned acting I’ve ever seen.” 

I was still throwing up when the door burst open and hands dragged me inside.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks