The End Games (17 page)

Hank was crying.

“It’s hard, I know it’s just so hard,” Bobbie was saying softly. “But Richmond, it’s
just waiting for us. You have to focus on that, Henry. And you said yourself how smart
your father is, you know it? And this captain of ours, he’s a good ma—”

Bobbie paused, as if reconsidering.

“He’s so good at what he does,” she finished.

“Y-yeah. You’re right,” Hank said, his voice warped and throaty. His face looked so
weird to Michael, like a little kid’s. “But . . . what if the other soldiers get here
before the captain can do it?”

“Do what, sweetie?” asked Bobbie.

“What if the captain can’t find—”

“Why’s Hank crying?”
Patrick whispered.

Michael flinched away from the door just as Hank’s head sprang up. Patrick’s brow
knitted, confused and troubled by what was happening. “I bet he just has a stomachache,”
Michael whispered to him.

A chair scraped in the caf. “Gonna go fill the generators,” Hank said to Bobbie. A
moment later, a door (not the one beside Michael) opened somewhere, and the sound
of Hank’s footsteps faded away.
He must not have seen me,
Michael thought. Though, he wondered. . . .

Patrick opened the door to the Governor’s Dining Room. Bobbie was clearing plates
from her table, her head down, speaking softly. Michael glanced around, expecting
to see Holly (and honestly, really looking forward to it).

There was nobody else in the room, though.

As the door swung shut, Bobbie flinched and looked up, startled. She looked much older
than yesterday, somehow.

“Good morning to a handsome sleepyhead,” Bobbie said, trying for lightness, not quite
making it. She collected spoons into a bowl half filled with oatmeal. “I did make
you breakfast, Michael, but I am so sorry, a puppy named Patrick ate it.”

The bowl of oatmeal suddenly slipped in Bobbie’s hands. It crashed onto the tray,
spoons clattering.

Patrick, who had been walking toward a table covered with blank papers and Crayolas,
stopped, his shoulders pinching back. Michael could feel Bub’s tension ping through
the air, his emotional radar lighting up. Michael considered making an excuse for
both of them to leave.

But, no
.
I don’t want to just leave her by herself, not if she’s upset.

“Miss Bobbie, I can get those,” he said casually as he walked to her. He picked up
the tray. “Would you show me where the dishes go?”

Bobbie shook her head absently. “Just back in the kitchen,” she began, but then she
understood the meaning behind Michael’s question. Gratitude made her worry lines relax.
“I will, certainly. Patrick, would you do another sketch of that robot for me?”

Patrick had sat down at the table and picked up a red crayon. He looked relieved at
Bobbie’s new tone, if still confused.

“Heckz. Yez.”

The door to the cafeteria’s kitchen was past an empty salad bar. The kitchen was darker
than the dining room: light filtered through the porthole, swinging as the door shut
behind Michael and Bobbie, glimmering across the stainless steel of the sinks and
counters.

“That was very kind of you,” said Bobbie. She pulled a red handkerchief from her pocket.
She raised it to her face, then seemed to realize she wasn’t actually crying. She
wiped spots of oatmeal off her hands instead.

“Miss Bobbie, can I ask: What’s got you so upset?”

“It’s just something the captain said,” Bobbie replied.

Remembering how small the captain had made him feel, and now experiencing a little
anger about how Jopek had upset Bobbie, Michael asked, “What did he say?”

“Oh, Henry asked last night, after we got back, if he could help the captain with
his patrols in the fences outside the Capitol. Henry is always so eager around him.
But the captain just said, ‘You ain’t got no job other than sittin’ on yer butt ’til
I tell you otherwise, Henry.’ Maybe it’s good that the captain is taking care of everything,
I suppose. Maybe he was only trying to be friendly. But something about the way he
said it felt . . . not friendly. I don’t know why, but sometimes, when I look at the
captain, it’s as if there’s a secret in everything he says.”

Like when I said we should get back to the Capitol at sunset, and the captain pretended
it didn’t make him angry.
But Michael pushed that thought down: he’d only imagined the captain’s anger.

“I’m probably just thinking too much. It’s all this waiting; it’s so difficult.” Her
voice trailed off; she shook her head, frowning in wonder. “I can’t imagine how it
must have been for
you
, out there. The cold. The lonesomeness. The not-knowing. I don’t know how you did
that.”

“Aw, it wasn’t that bad,” Michael said, downplaying the difficulty out of habit.

“You sell yourself short, honey,” Bobbie said, looking him earnestly in the eye. “You
do.”

Michael paused, tempted to again shrug off the compliment from this sweet old woman.
He’d never known his own grandparents, but he’d always thought that old people’s smiles
and their “Hey, good-lookin’” and “I think y’all might be the best marching band in
the state” were too sweet—
unearned
was maybe the best way to put it.

But there was something far different from that too-sweetness in Bobbie’s eyes now:

This is painful, Michael
.
It’s safe for you to admit that to me.

“It was . . . tough,” he said.

“That’s one way to put it,” Bobbie chuckled, momentarily brightening. “Michael, may
I ask a strange question?”

He nodded, wanting even more, after her kindness, to make Bobbie feel better.

“When you were out there, when you were just trying to get through each day,” she
said, “did you ever pray?”

He started to say,
No
, or, to be polite,
My family’s not really religious
. But then he remembered seeing the Coalmount church, before he’d found the mirror-eyed
mannequins. How the steeple had pointed for the sky. And he remembered the feeling
he’d had on the cliff just before the balloon arose from nothing: that sense of awe,
both good and terrible, as if a plan were being invisibly synced together for him
and Patrick, like unseen clockwork behind a curtain. Those cliff-and-church feelings
had not been
yes-yes
, exactly.
Yes-yes
was an inner quiet, both weapon and joy, that supplied an understanding of how Michael
must handle himself in any present moment. The church-and-cliff feelings had felt
different
, somehow.

But now, Michael shook his head at that, inside. It was like a movie: real in the
moments, but afterward you sort of laughed at yourself.

“I only ask because sometimes I wonder if this world
is
all . . . well, the end-times,” Bobbie said, and Michael got the feeling that letting
her talk was the best thing he could do to help her feel better. “Because the plane
that brought me to the Safe Zone? It was a crash, Michael. The pilots were attacked,
and we fell out of the sky, a hundred souls on board. I should have been killed. And
my husband—did I tell you Jack is his name?—only broke his legs. The government began
to evacuate Charleston just a few hours after the crash, when those creatures began
overwhelming the city. The injured were on the first buses, and you could hear the
soldiers fighting downtown, trying to clear a way through for the buses, but Jack
was so calm, so brave, when they were loading him onto that first bus.”

“So you’ll be seeing him soon, then,” Michael said, trying to cheer her as her voice
trailed off. “Also, I think you’re doing pretty good in the bravery department.”

“Thank you, Michael,” she replied. “But I just mean, such incredible things have happened
in this world. I’ve always prayed: it’s like talking to yourself, then it changes.
And I used to think that God answered all prayers—that if you honestly gave yourself
to His grace, and if you treated people with kindness, you’d be safe and carried through
whatever was to come. I still pray. But with all the terrible things around us, now
I’m finding . . .”

“What are you finding?”

“I’m finding that I don’t want God to speak back to me,” Bobbie said. “I do not think
that I’m prepared for what He has coming.”

Michael didn’t believe in what Bobbie was saying, but he couldn’t help it: chills
crept up his spine.

“I know those people in the mountains believe this is The End, too,” Bobbie said,
so softly it was almost as if she were speaking to herself. “But I think I understand
them. I grew up in a coal town; I
know
what it’s like to have all your hope tied up with the mining company. Then they had
a little boy
die
in their mine.” Michael remembered the newspaper he’d found in the coal company trash
can, the article about the accident that killed Cady Gibson, the young boy with the
ragged, crooked haircut. “And then the dead rose. And I believe that the people in
that town needed hope, and the only thing they could do was try to believe that these
awful things
meant
something, even if the meaning is something terrible. Their priest took their pain
for his own purposes. And I believe that makes him a dark man.”

The idea gave Michael pause. It struck him that, if Bobbie were right, then the Rapture’s
situation felt uncomfortably like Patrick’s and his own: after all, Michael was using
The Game to shape meaning out of their pain.
But no, it’s totally different,
Michael thought.
When The Game is over, Patrick’s going to be fine.
The Rapture’s only goal seemed to be destruction.

“But Miss Bobbie, there’s no reason to believe that anything bad is coming.”

She looked back to Michael, seeming to snap out of the small reverie. “Oh. No, of
course. I’m so sorry to go on like this,” Bobbie said.

Michael nodded, and then Bobbie, still looking distant and shaken, headed for the
door. He felt a need to interject again, to repay her for her being kind to Patrick—to
feel useful again after the moment with Jopek, which had made him feel so small.

“Miss Bobbie?” She turned to him. “You know, you’re not going to have to be ‘waiting
around’ too much longer with the soldiers on their way.”

Bobbie nodded, but didn’t look reassured.

“And you don’t even have to just ‘wait around’ at all. I don’t pray, but you know
what did make me feel better when I was out in the mountains? Keeping busy. That’s
the big thing. And carrying a gun didn’t hurt, either.”

Bobbie smiled, said jokingly, “Maybe I’ll try that sometime, honey.”

“Heck yeah. Maybe those soldiers will recruit you; I just hope your husband will recognize
you in camo.”

And, finally, looking like her bright self again, Bobbie laughed.

A reminder that soldiers were coming back soon; the obvious truth of the awesomeness
of Bobbie’s survival mirrored back to her: these things added up, slightly refocused
the world, to give her a picture of happiness. And not
just
her.

I’m good at this, aren’t I, making people feel better
? Michael thought as he headed out of the kitchen.

But you never saw any soldiers, Michael
, something in him whispered.

He felt a small pang of guilt.
Well . . . even if
I
didn’t see them, soldiers really
are
coming. And if this little not-even-half lie makes Bobbie feel better, isn’t it worth
it?

Yes
, he responded, with warmth in his ribs.
Yes, yes
.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The rest of the day passed quickly. Michael ate a couple cinnamon rolls for breakfast,
which gave him this mostly pleasant mix of sleepiness and sugar-jitters, and afterward,
he asked Bub, “So what do you wanna do today?”

Patrick seemed almost confused by the question. After Michael reassured him—
yep, anything
—Patrick took him to the cots in the marble halls, where they played with a couple
of Nintendo 3DSes. Michael was delighted to play a game with a
screen
; he told Patrick about the time that he’d beaten the original
Super Mario Bros.
in eight minutes. “I gotta try it again one day,” he said. “With my eyes open this
time.”

Patrick didn’t find that funny, though. And when Michael tried to show him the secret
warps on the
Mario 2
cartridge, Bub replied, seeming oddly restless and grumpy, “Michael, I
know
’em all already.”

He asked if they could go explore.

And Michael said sure, partially hoping to bump into Holly. Patrick led them through
most of the Capitol, but they didn’t run into her. The “exploration” of the building
was dampened also by another fact: Nearly all of the Capitol’s corridors and chambers
were identical, and the novelty of the whole
mayhem-meets-marble
decorating scheme had already kinda worn off. Michael traveled through these Safe
Zone halls with his brother, the mesh-filtered winter light streaming around them,
but he had a vaguely depressed “stuck” feeling, as if he were repeating the same screen
over and over on a scratched game disc. Patrick began doing things that he usually
only did when he was uncomfortable or bored: he counted the cots, up into the hundreds,
as well as all the left and right turns of the halls. Even when Michael and Bub discovered
a two-lane bowling alley in the east wing of the Capitol, they wound up quitting after
only one round: resetting the pins themselves turned out to be brain numbing . . . and
when Michael told Patrick that he couldn’t remember how to keep score, Patrick seemed—uncharacteristically—almost
angry.

He remembered how Bub’s doctors had once mentioned that “children like Patrick” could
get upset if their diet was not monitored.
Maybe Bub just had too much sugar this morning
?