The End Games (20 page)

“I have an idea. T-trust me.”

Was it enough?

Michael watched her nod.

She didn’t scream when he lifted his palm from her dry lips. But her mouth still moved.

As Bobbie offered her desperate face to the dying bright heart of the sky, Michael
realized: she was praying.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Soldier! Drive the ’Vee!”

Startled, Michael looked up. The captain’s silhouette stood on the roof.

“Move us!” The captain slapped a clip into the mounted weapon, tugging back the slide.
Dozens of blinded Bellows, after all, were gathering, their shadows scrawling out
in the square, remaking the world in their images.

Michael numb-nodded, got in the car.

How long does it take to become a Bellow?
He’d never actually seen it happen. And Bobbie’s bite was small, barely bleeding,
which had to help, right? Would the change take an hour? A day? He thought back to
the first infected people he’d seen on Halloween.
Just
move,
Michael!
He sat down.

“How did they know to tear out their eyes?” Hank was asking Holly, like she would
Google it.

Where was Michael going to drive them?
Just get Bobbie to the Capitol, then figure out what to do. ’Cause if you tell the
captain, right now, that she got bit, he’s so freaking “tough” that he’ll just leave
her.

And what exactly do you think
you
can do to help her?!

I don’t know—I’ll figure it out!—I know I can. Maybe the soldiers will have a cure.
Maybe we can just amputate her leg
. Horrible but it might work, if Bobbie didn’t lose too much bloo—

Feel—

“Faris, take us home, goddamn it!”
boomed the voice above him.

Michael cranked down the window, answered, “I don’t know the way!”

And from the back:

“Bridge, left, left, right, left”—a sniffle—
Shit!
—“right, right, movies,” said Patrick.

“It’ll be reversed going back, though,” Michael said.

“So
do
it!” Hank squealed.

And Patrick began to reply with the correct reversed directions, but Michael spoke
over him: “Bub, sit up here, Bobbie can fix her harness by herself this time, stop
trying to help her!”

All at once:

“Go—”

“Faris, drive—”

“MOVE—US—OUT—”

Have to go, oh fug, bad bad bad, Patrick be careful!

Michael ignited the engine, wheeled a wide arc, turned the correct direction. To the
sounds of screams, arms of Bellows swished in through his open window, through the
open doors in the rear.

The mounted weapon above their heads, manned by Captain Jopek, roared doom.

Bellows in the headlights were spun from their shoes. Spent copper shells cascaded
across the windshield.

“Go right?” Michael called to the back of the car—not because he had forgotten the
directions, but because he did not know if the screams included one of pain from Patrick.

“Left, retard!” Hank cried, slamming the double doors closed.

“Right,” Patrick sniffled.

Michael told him,
“Ten points!”
thought again,
How long does it take to change into a Bellow?,
swerved to the right and everyone screamed, like riders of a roller coaster that
has begun to tilt homicidally from the tracks.

The new road was filled with twice as many Bellows.

Didn’t matter. The captain unleashed fury like chains of fire, shot out land mines
that raised roaring towers. The monsters flew, flipped into gutters, splashed through
dusk-filled storefront glass and into cars, whose alarms went
REEEE!
And the only Bellows Michael had to avoid lay already dead on the ground.

Michael felt a powerful, frightening love for the captain. He looked in the rearview;
Bobbie was nodding off, Patrick clinging to her, trying to shake her awake.

“Up here, Patrick!” Not loud enough, Patrick didn’t hear.

Suddenly, Hank stood and pointed out the windshield.
“Plaaaaane!”
he screamed.

The sight through the windshield was so huge, so surreal, that at first its danger
didn’t register.

An airplane.

It was a jetliner, enormous, and it had used the street as a landing strip. Its nose
had ruptured the concrete. Only one wing was visible, for half the plane was
inside
a gray building. It was the plane that had brought Bobbie to Charleston. One hundred
souls, fallen from the sky; welcome to your final destination.

The visible wing was coming like a brilliant guillotine.

Michael swung the wheel wildly, knowing even as he did that it was too late.

The great steel of the wing came whistling, and struck. The car bucked wildly on its
shocks. Friction drew sparks in a fat line down the edge of the car, the shriek hideous
and bright.

The captain’s voice, from above, growled,
“Switch.”
Combat boots materialized in Michael’s window, pushing him to the passenger seat
as the captain monkeyed from the roof into the driver’s seat. He took the wheel and
looked at Michael.

“Goddamn near threw me, you dumb asshole,” said the captain.

Michael nodded.
Just take us home. Just make everything work.
Why had he not told the captain about Bobbie? Just then, he couldn’t remember.

“Sorry,” he breathed to the passengers in the back as they flew past the gate that
separated the explosive side streets from the mine-free main roads, careened by the
Busted Knuckle Garage,
BEST PLACE IN TOWN TO TAKE A LEAK
! And Michael did feel terrible, he felt ashamed, but he was also looking back because
of Bobbie.
How much longer before she changed?

Bobbie moaned, then slouched, unconscious, against the chest-bar of her seat harness.

And for the first time since the insane drive from the Magic Lantern began, someone
noticed that Bobbie looked unwell.

Holly, sitting across from her, said, “Miss Bobbie, what’s the matter?”

Beyond her, through the portholes on the rear doors, Michael could see mobs of Bellows;
dozens more were out front, too. Many were eyeless, but by now the last slice of sun
had slipped beneath the horizon. Even the Bellows who had not learned to destroy their
sight were emerging from the city’s hidden darknesses, from doorways and manholes
and Dumpsters.
What’re we gonna do if the captain isn’t up top shooting? Omigod, what’re we gonna—

“Throw ’er out the back!” shouted Captain Jopek.

They’re going to throw Bobbie out!

Hank, slimed with sweat, stood from his seat and threw open the double doors.

But he did not reach for Bobbie; he did not seem even to have noticed her new unconsciousness.
Instead, Hank reached for the gurney in the back. He grabbed the sheet off the gurney,
pulling it upward like a matador; the wind sucked it out the open rear door.

The gurney was loaded with grenades, which were stuck to the mattress pad and the
bars with duct tape.

“When?” Hank called.

“Wait till we get ’round the corner to cut it! We got a ten-second delay on those
frags. I want to clear those assholes on the bridge. I wanna watch them try to swim.”
Jopek’s face was smiling, his voice was so, so calm. Like it was all a game.

They swung around the corner, the last one.

Hank loosed the chocks from the gurney’s wheels, then yanked upward on the silver
line that had been strung among the grenades: all the grenade pins flicked up at once,
like bright popcorn. He thrust the gurney out the rear, where its wheels met the road,
squealing smoke. A rope-tether, tied on one end to the gurney and on the other to
a pole on the inner wall of the Hummer, unspurled rapidly then tugged, taut.

“Henry, my good man: cut it!”

Hank’s face was hard and determined, but his eyes were also shiny with joy.

He nodded and reached for his pocket. And that was when, with slow dreamy terror,
his smile transformed to a frown.

“Dropped it,” he breathed to himself, disbelieving. “Captain, I dropped my knife in
the theater—
THE GRENADES’RE TOO CLOSE THEY’RE GONNA BLOW US U—”

“Aw, hush,” the captain said.

Did the captain ever flinch? No. He took the handgun from Michael’s lap—the same one
Michael had stolen from his ankle—and turned in his seat and, only half-looking, single-shot
the thick nylon rope that tethered the deadly gurney to the back of their speeding
car. The severed rope zipped through the back and out to the screaming street, and
a moment later the crowd of Bellows swallowed the homemade mass-extermination device
whole. The explosion was huge, scorching, a great radius of blast that burst Bellows
away from earth and their own limbs. The sun had set now, but for that moment the
captain resurrected the day, and
his
light still had the power to hurt all the Bellows, blind or not, as much as he pleased.
Holly put her hand to her chest like she was trying to push down her pounding heart.
Hank reached out for Holly’s hand, which she took. So everyone was looking out the
back, at the captain’s fire, when Bobbie opened her eyes and raised her face to Patrick,
and turned into a Bellow.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Michael knew that he should move. He should dive into the backseat and grab his brother.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t help thinking of Halloween.

The expression on Patrick’s face had been the same, then . . .

 . . . as Michael opens the door on the side of the garage, telling Patrick about
The Game. Now there is the night with its smell of leaves and its feeling like freedom,
and of course Patrick is afraid of the dark; but, of course, he pretends not to be.
“This is so
cool
, huh?” he only whispers, and clasps his hands tighter on Michael’s chest.

And then, shattering the dark: the scream.

A man’s, from the blue house across the street: “I don’t know you, darlin’, but you
best get outta this house, pronto! You—HEY! You come at me again, I swear I’ll shoot!
Get back! Get baaAAACC—” A burst of sound and light from the neighbor’s living room
window: a woman’s body crashes out through the glass, landing on the jack-o’-lantern
in the concrete driveway with a sound that makes Michael’s throat crawl.

Michael freezes. His brain shouts, fleetingly, that this is a Halloween prank—but
then all thought comes to an end when a light turns on in
his
house, and he realizes Ron is coming, Mom is coming, and she is going to ask him what
he is doing out here. . . .

Michael looks back, to maybe reassure Patrick. But though Patrick’s frightened hands
are unclasping and clasping on Michael’s chest, his mouth is also fidgeting to not
smile. He thinks this
is
The Game, Michael realizes. He thinks that lady was a bad guy. And he’s trying to
look brave.

Because becoming brave means something—maybe everything—to him.

And just before the front door of Michael’s house opens and the night falls apart,
Patrick’s eyes hold a hope: a hope that maybe this time, he, Patrick, can finally
be strong, even when things are scary. That hope that if he is just brave enough,
he can outrun the pit inside him.

That hope that is so beautiful, and dangerous.

As the Hummer roared across the bridge to the Capitol, Bobbie’s eyes widened . . . but
not just to whites. Her eyes were a rapidly pooling black. It was as if the old woman’s
pupils had been pierced by a pin, and the darkness was leaking out.

Holly turned away from the fire behind them and noticed Bobbie again, this time recoiled
instinctively and without sound.

“What the?”
Patrick whispered.

“WHAAAAAATTTT!”
Bobbie screamed.

Her hands curled into claws, her jaws a nest of fangs. She meant to kill; there was
no doubt.

She lunged.

And with no more than a half inch between her claws and Patrick’s face, her seat harness
caught her, with a
click!

Michael dove for her. His ribs struck the hard top of his seat and sang. For a terror-syrupy
moment, he was caught atop the seat, wriggling.

“PATRICK, GET AWAY!”
he cried, and finally thudded into the rear of the Humvee. Hank and Holly watched
in shaken awe.

The monster wearing Bobbie’s skin lunged again, this time throwing the harness off
with impossible strength, and Patrick was just staring in confusion.

“What the hell’s goin’ on back there?” Jopek shouted, heaving the steering wheel back
and forth as he dodged the few remaining Bellows ahead.

Michael snagged Bobbie by the arm of her coat, redirecting her momentum, slamming
her to the floor. Something inside her snapped, hard and loud. Tears leapt to Michael’s
eyes, his stomach going hot and loose.

The wind was shrieking with each swerve of the car; the rear doors flapped and zoomed,
back and forth.

“What—what—what—” Hank kept repeating.

Without warning, Patrick burst into tears, collapsed onto the floor.

“She got bit, oh Christ, she got bit somewhere!” Holly cried.

Everything was screaming. Everyone knew.

Bobbie squirmed beneath him like a weasel in a sack. But her eyes: they hadn’t turned
all-black like Bellows’ eyes yet. Thin white strands still remained in her eye sockets,
and the dark and light in her eyeballs were churning, as if warring for domination
of Bobbie’s body.

Bobbie, in her own voice for one millisecond, said, “Michael?”

She’s not all-dead yet—oh God, maybe we can still figure something out. We’re almost
to the Capitol, just hold her down, just for a few more seconds—

Michael called out, “Hank, help me, hold her—
Hank!”