THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary
Dedication
To my wife and children
Epigraph
I was standing staring at the world. And I still can’t see it.
—Mastodon, 2009
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
THE END SPECIALIST
A Note About The Text From The Department Of Containment, United North American Territories
I - Prohibition: June 2019
“Immortality Will Kill Us All”
“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”
“I’m Always Gonna Get My Period”
“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”
The Woman In The Elevator
“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”
“The Conservative Case For Legalizing The Cure”
“They’re All Getting Divorced”
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
At The Protests
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or A Lot Later On”
“How Could You Be So Dumb?”
DC Apparently Stands For “Don’t Come”
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
The Worst Since Kent State
“One Infinite Generation”
“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”
II - Spread: June 2029 (Ten Years Later)
Photo No. 3,650
“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”
I Seek The Grail
Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth
A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll
Afternoon Link Roundup
“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”
The Truth About China
The Back Of The Ambulance
Afternoon Link Roundup
Confessions Of A Nonstockpiler
What Do We Do With Baby Emilia?
“He Looks Just Like You”
The Man Who Will Live Everywhere
“Warmest Greetings From The Church Of Man!”
“We’ll See You Again”
XMN Was Right
“Does It Hurt?”
“Yeah, That’s One Of Them”
“Did You Know That Cigarettes Have Almond Oil In Them?”
When They Tell You Not To Mess With Texas, They Mean It
“I’m Not Even Sure This Is A Marriage Anymore”
“I Don’t Know If Anyone Will Ever Get Married Again”
Afternoon Link Roundup
“This Is Good”
Home Cure?
“Look At Me”
III - Saturation: March 2059 (Twenty-Eight Years Later)
“The Cure For The Cure”
The Hippie In The Graveyard
What They’re Saying About End Specialization
A Few Minutes With The Worst Domestic Terrorist In American History
Exit Interview: Edgar Duchamp
“You Look Just Like Me”
Alison On Stage
“You Get Six Shots”
A Field Trip To The McLean Community Friends Church Of Man
“We’re Going To Take What We Need To Survive—And Then Maybe We’ll Take A Little More”
My Cure Day Surprise
“They Can’t Do Anything To Us”
“Let It Overwhelm Me”
“The Cure For Everything Else”
“They Don’t Think This Is The End Of It”
“They Just Can’t Help Themselves”
“Wait Over There”
“You’re A Real End Specialist Now”
That Was My Hospital
There Is Nothing Left To Lose
IV - Correction: June 2079 (Twenty Years Later)
“We Weren’t Afraid To Love Her Like Our Own”
Today’s Insurgent
The Girl In The Marketplace
The Sweep
The Birthday Girl
“They wouldn’t stop eating”
“This Is The Next Logical Step”
“A Very Urgent Feeling”
An Unwelcome Dawn
The Human Wave
Outtakes
Acknowledgments
Copyright
THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary is a writer for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim, and Kissing Suzy Kolber. He’s also written for GQ, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, ESPN, Yahoo!, Comedy Central, Playboy, Penthouse, and various other media outlets. The End Specialist is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.
You can contact the author at [email protected], or at twitter.com/drewmagary.
A Note About The Text From
The Department Of Containment, United North American Territories
FEBRUARY 6, 2093
In March 2090 a worker for the Department of Containment named Anton Vyrin was conducting a routine sweep of an abandoned collectivist compound in rural Virginia when he stumbled upon an eighth-generation wireless-enabled projected-screening device (WEPS.8) that was still functional after charging. Stored inside the device’s hard drive was a digital library containing sixty years’ worth of text files written by a man who went by the screen name John Farrell.
The text files appear to have been written as posts for a blog or online journal. It’s impossible to know which of these files Farrell actually published in a public forum, as all mentions of his name in the cloud as it now exists lead to sites whose servers were destroyed during the Great Correction. There is also no way of corroborating that John Farrell was ever a licensed end specialist for the United States government for twenty years prior to the Correction. All U.S. Department of Containment servers were destroyed in June 2079.
However,