John Dies at the End Australian Fan Fiction Competition Entry

This story is an entry to the John Dies at the End fan fiction competition. I was one of the winners.

An Excursion to Outback

I stood in the living room staring up at the ceiling. Molly barked, and I looked back down, level to the living room, and walked into the kitchen. When I reached the pantry, I grabbed a few steak-shaped dog treats before I walked back, again looked up at the ceiling, and held up my hand. The dog looked down at me (or up, if you're seeing the world through the dog's eyes) and nibbled the treats from the palm of my hand. When she finished lapping them up, she sneezed, winced, and licked my hair. I turned back into the kitchen and walked to the phone.

The phone rang twice before John picked up. "Dave, it's six in the morning. Is Amy dead?"

"It's six in the evening. No, she's at work. Molly's walking on the ceiling, just the same since you were here last Sunday. Are you sure she didn't get into the sauce?"

John made it clear he was annoyed. "You can't wait until a reasonable hour to discuss this, Dave? By my count, I believe I told you a million times that, no, I kept the can in the shed. Molly did not eat the sauce. Why don't you just take her to the vet?"

Right, take the anti-gravity canine to a vet concerning her lack of observing the laws of physics. I'm sure they have a shot for that. "Can you at least come over and help me strap the dog down before she tries to run outside again?"

"Can you afford my services?" John meant cigarettes.

"Yes." I lied, and I had no intention of going out to buy him a pack.

John sounded satisfied. "I'll be over after a power nap."

I agreed and hung up. Anytime between now and midnight, John's grey Volkswagen bus would churn along the street in a hacking cough, as the van lacked a muffler since he bought it from one of his band's original three bassists. (They had four now.)

Honestly, it was hard to tell these days whether or not anyone took the sauce, so I couldn't just count how much we had left. We only had one canister, but it could be full for an hour and then empty for weeks only to fill half up again. John retained the canister for a few months before I found out that he was taking advantage of the replenishing supply to forecast the weather so that his band, Three-Arm Sally, would always play in the rain, and so that John would always time his solos to start and end with thunderclaps. After a long argument and a seven-hour basketball shoot out later, I agreed to buy John a twelve-pack each week if we kept the canister in a locked freezer in my shed, along with all the other odds and ends unfit for this world.

----

John arrived around 8, when the sun began to set. Molly wagged her tail and yelped as he opened the door and stood in front of her, petting her for a second before walking into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, took out three beers, and set two down in front of himself and one in front of me. He then pulled a magazine and pen out of his jacket and set them down on the table before staring at me in the eyes and very solemnly spoke.

"Your dog is possessed. Read this." John circled an article headline on the opened page. I recognized the magazine as a recent paranormal tabloid that started up as a result of our excursion to Vegas a few years ago. They bothered us for articles for a solid year and a half until John convinced me to mail them an obscene letter written in ink that yelled out the letter's contents.

The article was brief and, honestly, retarded. It described an old couple in Florida with a dog that supposedly spoke to them curses in Latin and with only one witness, a Catholic priest notorious for his phony exorcisms, a girl whose dog exploded and came back to life a few days later, and an Australian man with a dog that walked on the ceiling but had no visual proof or witnesses. At the end of the article, the man claimed that his dog puked out a bunyip tusk and no longer had the inclination to walk on the ceiling. I already knew a part of this, since we received that same supposedly mythical animal tusk in the mail two weeks later. Except that this tusk delivered both John and I third degree burns when we tried to hold it, leaving Amy to take it out to the shed.

"See what we're looking at here? Molly has consumed some possessed article. I call this phenomenon Australian Demonosis Disincarnate. Perhaps it may not be another disembodied tusk, but it may just burn us again. Or dissolve a hole through the floor. Or open a void to a human detainment camp. But if we want her down, we have to be patient and deal with the devil in her accordingly. Got it, Dave? In the meantime, I'm being evicted, and I need a place to stay for a few days or whatever." John said as he finished his second beer.

The dog shat. I heard a wet splat on the coffee table followed by another, and finally, a trickle of urine. John looked at me, gesturing toward the table that it was my duty to clean up the mess that the dog made. I took some paper towels, Windex, and a trash bag out from under the kitchen sink and sat on the couch to wipe up the mess when John held out his hand and glared at me alarmingly.

"Wait, Dave."

Molly whimpered and shat again, this time into a spray across the wall, and a third stool landed with a wet thud onto the table before the dog swaggered above the sofa and fell from the ceiling into my lap.

I looked at John, saw him look down at the table, and turned my eyes down to the dog's shit. It spelled out "FAG". Then it blinked, formed into a Pillsbury Doughboy, and jumped down from the coffee table. It strutted across the carpet and kitchen linoleum, and pushed its way through the dog's flap door, presumably to terrorize the city of Undisclosed until a group of ghost hunters came after it.

After a moment, Molly barked at the door. John turned to me and said, "That, Dave, was a Pillsbury Shitboy."

----

An hour later, the shit stains were cleaned off the wall, the table and floor, and I had reclined on the couch watching a blend of static and local news on the TV. John, who was tasked to find and trap the walking shit dwarf, resigned after ten minutes to a Nintendo DS game. "I'm telling you, the tracks end at the driveway. It just vanished. Disappeared."

"You don't think some other dog got to it?" I suggested. "Then we'll get a call about it in a few days or so, and we can take care of explaining to some other dog owner as to why their dog is on the ceiling, and why we need to feed it plenty of laxatives."

John's cell phone twittered with an 8-bit rendition of Twisted Sister's I Wanna Rock. John answered it while blowing into the Nintendo's microphone. "Yeah, Drake, it's John. Do you still have the Queen pinball machine?" He listened for a moment before putting the game down and gesturing me over to him. "Alright. We can be there in 10 minutes. No problem." He hung up. " Good news. Our Pillsbury Shitboy was found."

----

After John took a moment at the shed, the both of us and the dog piled into John's bus and drove off towards the Undisclosed Mall, or rather, the Outback Steakhouse up the road from the abandoned mall. Most of the homes and businesses in the area suffered some odd paranormal activity or another, so the idea that the dogshit doughboy would wind up here did not surprise me. What I saw when we got to the Steakhouse surprised me.

If you've ever paid attention in grade school, you know about the Trojan horse. The big wooden horse that Greek soldiers used to sneak into and capture Troy. Well, I want you to imagine this giant horse, and now I want you to picture it as a cow. And instead of wood, imagine that it's made of.. Well, a cow. The innards of one. Are you with me? John, Molly, and I saw a giant, inside-out cow lording over the restaurant, legs along all sides and udder resting deformed over the roof. So, the fact that Drake called us about a 6-inch tall living turd didn't seem to fit the reality that we saw from a half-mile away.

John parked the car across the street from the Outback, and we walked across warily, aware of the intestinal cow god that had taken dominion of the place, but we weren't sure if the cow was aware of us. We kept out distance regardless, and pretended that the creature was nonexistent to our eyes. Drake welcomed John with a handshake and a cigarette.

"Good evening John, Dave. I'll cut right to the chase - we got a few reports a half hour ago about a walking shit character jumping up on tables and farting into people's plates. It's one of the weirdest things I've witnessed, since as soon as we get here, it molds into a bird and flies around the place. We tried to capture it, but it simply breaks up into smaller pieces and zips around the ceiling before recombining into the bird."

John nodded, appearing intent, and said, "Is the bird Australian?"

I turned to John and gave him what had to be the most dumbfounded look in the history of dumbfounded looks. He must have seen this coming, because as soon as I did that, he put his finger up without looking at me.

"No, listen to me, I'm certain that this has a connection to a case in Australia. The Pillsbury Shitboy clearly came, of all places, here to the Outback Steakhouse, an Australian franchise. And now it will not leave the restaurant, signifying that Australia is indeed connected to this monstrosity." John sucked down the rest of his cigarette and tossed it to the gutter. "And that leaves us with one question - why Australia? Dave, I'll leave you to field that question. I'm going back to the car to get the bunyip tusk."

I looked inside the restaurant and studied the place. No one but a few cops at the doors stood in the restaurant now. I couldn't see the flying shit-bird, but I could hear the music coming from inside. It was the jingle from the band that did the Outback commercials.. sort of. If "I'll eat your grandmother's soul, and make sure you hear her screams from hell" was part of the original lyrics, I couldn't know. Then the shit-bird came into view, and I ducked as it flew at the window.

It must have struck the window with the force similar to a jet engine, because I felt shards of glass scrape across my forearm as I held my head from beneath the window. The glass shards spilled across the parking lot, and the shit stained the lot in specks small enough to hardly be recognizable. I waited a few seconds before cautiously getting up to look into the restaurant, then back at John.

With the tusk in hand, John ran up to Drake, who suffered several small cuts across his face, arms, and uniform. After affirming that Drake seemed otherwise alright, John nodded at me with his stern "time to get serious" face, and kicked the door open into the restaurant. I followed after him, reluctantly.

John held the tusk like it was a gun, and I saw he probably sprinkled holy water on it while he was in the car, since the bottle stuck out of his shirt pocket. "You see anything off here, Dave? Anything particularly.. Aboriginal?" His idiotic pose aside, I didn't think he was capable of telling a joke that intelligent.

I turned to him and told him, "Look around that side of the Outback, I'll go over here. Check the kitchen while you're at it, I'll look into the restrooms."

After rummaging through every booth and turning over every table and chair in the restaurant and finding nothing out of place, I walked into the women's restroom. Nothing out of the ordinary here, until the door shut behind me and the lights went out. I felt surprisingly calm to see "KORROK" written in a dark red, glowing on every inch of wall, ceiling, and floor. Looking into the mirror, my face glowed and grinned at me.

My grin widened slightly with each step I took toward the mirror. Slowly, I reached out my palms to embrace the face of the pupil-less eyes that lured me into what grew into a lulling, green pasture.

The mirror displayed images of trees and mountains and streams. No hint of civilization existed, and no touch of man present. From the trees, I saw apples hanging from ropes, turning in the wind, and revealing a backwards K.

Backwards, of course, I'm looking into the mirror. I started to turn around, to look outside of the mirror.

The lights turned on, and I found myself in the bathroom once again. John popped in through the doorway and shouted that he found something I should see in the kitchen. I mumbled at him, and he left for the kitchen again. Turning back to the mirror, I found my palms held up to it and stared at my own face briefly before leaving the room.

John leaned up against a deep fryer and raised his eyebrows as Molly sat next to him, panting happily and licking the grease on the floor.

He pointed directly in front of us. "See what we're dealing with, Dave?"

In the center of the ceiling, there was a large ventilation duct that led up to the cow's udder. Immediately underneath it, on the floor, was a familiar void, one John and I were accustomed to seeing several years ago, but not so often lately. Seeing the void to another realm made knots in my gut.

John spoke audibly over the loud air vents, "I didn't think there would be another doorway like this so close to the mall. Of course, only you and I can see it right now. The cooks, Drake, no one knows about it."

I knew what John was thinking. "But we can't leave it opened, John. Already, this place is drawing unwanted attention. We need to close it."

John opened his mouth to reject but decided against it. He stood silently, sucked in his cheeks, and looked at the void, back at me, at the void, at the dog, and at me again. Without saying a word, he tossed the blessed bunyip tusk into the air at the hole and took a step back. Molly yelped and leapt after the tusk, snatching the thing in her jaws in mid-air. I pulled John back from grabbing Molly, and we saw the dog hurtle into the void.

Silence.. and nothing.

Then the roof imploded and the cow's udder came crashing into the kitchen. John and I scrambled like hell out of the back door of the restaurant and a blow of wind, strong as a hurricane, lifted us up and tossed us into the police cars along the side of the road.

I closed my eyes when I hit the car and laid there for what seemed no longer than a few seconds. More time must have passed because John soon lifted me up from the hood of one of the cars and pulled me to my feet. "Dave, the doorway's gone. So is the cow and most of the restaurant, but the important thing is that the doorway is shut."

I felt the back of my head, felt a moist, matted lump, and decided it wasn't bad enough to worry about at the moment. Molly barked from behind me, plopped aside me on the hood of the car, and licked my arm. John glanced at me with his "I don't know where the dog came from" look, which I recognize specifically for these very occasions.

Taking a few seconds to check that my body was still intact and most of the working parts still indeed worked, we walked toward Drake. He and John spoke for a few moments while I stood and interjected a few points that John exaggerated until Drake decided he would rather not file the report John was giving him. We left after making sure that no remnants of the doorway remained.

----

Amy arrived back at the house a bit past midnight, where she found the three of us playing hockey on the PS3. Well, the dog was chewing a rubber bone, but I was trailing behind john by 47 goals in a game in which each the 7 periods were 40 minutes long. Amy walked up behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders, massaging them gently before hugging me from behind.

"Did you miss me?" She squeezed and nudged my head to kiss me on the lips.

I paused the game. John went to the kitchen to grab another beer for himself and one for Amy. Then when Amy saw Molly, she ran over and picked her up.

"Hey! You got Molly down. How did you do it?"

Before I could say anything, John cut in. "Well, turned out your dog was possessed by the land down-under. As your paranormal specialist, I recommend not taking your dog into the Southern hemisphere, nor should you bring her in contact with any Australian birds or dough products."

Speechless, Amy took the beer offered by John, sat on my lap, and looked at me quizzically. I told her John was right and started the game again.