The End Games (21 page)

But in that moment, roaring again, Bobbie’s hands flew up and shoved Michael toward
the sucking door. He grabbed out blindly, and somehow snagged underparts of a seat,
stopping on his back; he could feel the vibration of the tires beneath him.

Bobbie stood again, seeming to flood the compartment, huge in her hunger. An image
rose, unbidden, in Michael’s mind:
let her come, grab her again, throw her out the door
.

Because you can’t save her,
Michael’s mind hissed, and the hopeless thought flooded him with a new variety of
terror. Bobbie had been kind, utterly good, but she was going to die, this was her
ending. And there was no controlling that.

And as despair struck him in the endless milli-moment, Michael pivoted out of Bobbie’s
path, caught Bobbie by the left shoulder of her coat, and spun her, flung her perfectly
into the jump seat mounted on the door.

“Michael—” said Holly, her voice quaking and teary, “do you need help?”

Michael ignored her, slamming the roller-coaster safety-bars down on Bobbie’s shoulders,
incapacitating her at least for the moment.

“Bobbie.
Bobbie
.”

He smelled her breath: stale and old.

In the dueling blacks and whites of her eyes was a slowly dawning recognition.

“Are you there?” he heard himself say, from far away.

There was a sniffle behind Michael. From the floor, his chin trembling, Patrick asked
Bobbie, “How come you’re being
mean
?”

Bobbie blinked.

Her eyes went normal-white again.

She touched her face.

And burst into tears.

And then the captain was stopping the car at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, opening
the rear door.

He didn’t holler or rage. He only gently motioned everyone to step out to the fenced-in
rear promenade of the Capitol, like a slightly tired crossing guard. “Bobbie, girl,
you come on out now. And I mean nice and slow.”

Michael felt himself step down out of the car. “Captain, can’t we wait?” Michael said.
“Do you have to do this?”

The captain just nodded.

Michael felt the pain and terror from Bobbie and Hank and Holly, circling in the air
over their heads. He felt Patrick’s confusion. He was even vaguely aware of everyone,
himself included, following the captain’s orders to go into the Capitol. At the top
of the great stone steps, Hank opened the double doors. Patrick, still sniffling,
whimpered, “Michael . . . what’s he gonna do? Michael, w-what happens if a Bellow
bites you?”

Holly took Patrick’s small hand with her big one. Michael looked at her with an almost
painful gratitude. She was silent, though, and didn’t look back as she guided Patrick
inside the Capitol.

Michael didn’t follow. From the top of the stairs, he looked back down to the captain
and Bobbie, beside the camouflage Hummer. Michael noted numbly that the buffer-zone
gates in the barrier fences were all open, even though the captain had never stopped,
tonight, to unlock them.

Bobbie was clutching her stomach.

Suddenly, she bent over from the waist, dry retching.

The dark sky with its scud of stars seemed low, suffocatingly low.

“When’d you get bit, girl?” asked the captain.

Bobbie retched once more. As she leaned back up, her gaze flicked to Michael. She
looked back at Captain Jopek.

“On top of the car,” she rasped, her voice hoarse and weak. “While you were inside.”

Why is she lying?

She doesn’t want Jopek to be mad. She’s protecting me.

But
you
couldn’t protect her. . . .

“Why do you ask?” Bobbie said to the captain. And the same expression came across
Bobbie’s face that had come across Patrick’s earlier: hope. Was it always so hard
to look at?

“Captain,” she went on, “do you think I might be all right? Do you think the soldiers
can reach us and help, somehow—”

The captain didn’t answer. It was unclear what he
was
doing, pacing calmly away from her, boots clocking. Then he seized two handfuls of
the chain-link fence.

He tugged, and the section of fence ran along its tracks, shutting in front of Bobbie’s
face, locking her out. Far beyond her, from the other side of the downtown bridge,
figures in the dark steadily approached and steadily moaned.

“Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do,” said the captain. He cocked his pistol. “Shit. Damn,
Bobbie Lou, what a mess. I swear to God: I’ll make it quick.”

Tears glided down her face. “Wait,” she said softly.

“Can’t talk me out of this, girl.”

“I
know
.” And for that moment her voice was strong again, her anger beautiful with its vitality
and life.

Bobbie raised her eyes, away from Jopek: her gaze pointing to the low stars. She was
speaking to something she could not see. Was praying going to make this better? Michael
wondered desperately. Was it—?

The gunshot flashed and illuminated Bobbie. She had no time to scream. Captain Jopek
of the United States 101st turned in the starlight, watching Michael with eyes like
guilty verdicts, the gunshot still echoing through the night, through Michael’s screaming
heart.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Michael undocked.

That was how it felt: one moment, he was an inhabitant of his body. And then he was
floating into the Capitol.

End. Dead. Thanks for playing.

Screams, in the black of Capitol rotunda. Hank, screaming. His white shirt glowing
like a spirit. Hank kicking out and striking the pirate-patched head of a bronzed
governor, sending it ponging between cot legs, away into the dark.

Somebody turned out the lights
.

The hall’s only illumination was coughing out of the tripod fluorescent light-banks.
They were knocked over, thrown on the floor. . . .

“What the HELL!” Hank was shouting.

Grief,
Michael thought.
The world is full of dead people, and that is the first grief I’ve heard.

“What the HELL IS THIS?! DAMN IT! GOD! DAMN IT! GOD!”

Everything looked oddly unhooked. A wind through the door could knock this building
into the sky.

“Hey!”

Michael turned.

His brother was running to him, dashing as fast as a little boy who is rounding third
and heading for home.
But this isn’t home. No, this isn’t home
at all. A wave of homesickness, sharper than any he had ever felt, threatened to
overwhelm him.

Patrick collided, hooping Michael’s waist like steel, hugging him with fierce need.
And for some reason, the homesickness felt so much worse.

Across the hall, Holly sat on a cot, her back locked straight, her eyes big and dully
hard, like unpolished glass.

Patrick said something into his right thigh, the skin tickling there. Michael looked
down, which seemed to take a very very long time.

“Is Bobbie gonna play, still?” Patrick said.

Michael watched his brother from the far theater of his own skull. He knew that he
should flick out a lie, a comfort. But all that came to his mind were funeral scenes
from games like
Gears of War
.

She was a good grunt, a damn good one! Raise your guns to her, men! She’ll be missed!

“Where is she?” asked Patrick.

Michael said, “She’s out.”

And now the hugeness of her death seemed to send a dizzying kind of vertigo to his
heart. She was dead. Away away. Call in a thousand doctors; collect a million med
kits; none of it would help.
Jeezus, it is not fair that she died.
That was a stupid thought, what everybody thought when anybody died. But that didn’t
make it untrue.

If I’d just seen the Bellow . . . If I’d just been quicker . . .  Bobbie would have
been fine,
Michael thought.
And maybe she wouldn’t have stayed out there by herself at all if it wasn’t for me
trying to make her feel better.

“But how
come
?” Patrick said.

Michael lifted his head, began taking in other things around him. Their shapes and
meanings vague at first, like pixels seen too up close. He looked at the walls. And
understood that Hank’s screams were not totally grief.

During the captain’s “mission” into the city, his Capitol had been invaded.

Crucifixes glimmered on the walls. Letters flickered in the twitching light, like
runes.

GUIDE OUR HAND, ALL MIGHTY WRATH.
Shadow.
GOD O WE BEG FOR THE SON.
Shadow.
THE SON O GOD GIVE US THE SON. WE SACRIFICE

WE SACRIFICE ALL

WE SACRIFICE OURSELVES TO YOU

Michael swooned with distant horror, because he realized that the markings slashed
across the walls were red—and the red did not look like it was paint.

The Rapture are sacrificing
each other
now,
he thought.
Not just other people who try to hurt the Bellows.

’Cause, you know what Rulon is doing now, Michael? He’s changing the rules. You know
how he’s making his followers believe that they can be saved?

Just look at the walls.

He’s making them feel their blood.

“What’s ‘out’? Why? Bellows aren’t s’posed to h-h-hurt people,” Patrick was saying.
He was not even trying to hide his rising anxiety. “Was Bobbie hurt real bad?” He
grabbed his right ear and twisted on it once, hard.

“Bub, don’t—” Michael said.

Patrick lowered his hand, but his chin still trembled. “I l-l-like Bobbie, she said
Mommy was going to see me soon. Where’s Mommy?”

“They were here, Captain!” Hank said, striding past Michael. The captain had entered
from the night, through the double doors. “The Rapture. Bastards came and broke right
in!”

“What gave it away, Detective?” the captain said softly.

Hank blinked. “The walls—the—over here, see?”

The captain looked at Patrick, trying to smile sadly about Hank’s stupidity or something.

“There was a letter nailed on the door,” Hank said. He handed Jopek a closed envelope,
which was addressed like this:

TO THE DEVIL IN CHARGE

Jopek took it, half interested. Nodded. “Class-A move with that knife in the car,
by the way.”

Hank frowned, blushing and wounded.

Suddenly, Jopek whirled, drawing his weapon, and firing into the darkness of the hall
at his back.

“I see you, sumbitch!”
he shouted, and his machine gun belched a ten-second, sweeping burst. The gun flashed
the empty halls, the rotunda, the dome above.

As randomly as he’d begun, Jopek stopped. “Checking,” he muttered. “I think they’re
gone. But, shit, they broke into my base, didn’t they? Got past all the land mines
and into my city, didn’t they? Even stole the weapons in the fence maze, I saw. Bet
they stole my caches in the Capitol, too. But yeah, I sure reckon they’re gone now.
I reckon they don’t wanna screw with ol’ Jopek—GODDAMN YOU—”

This time, the captain’s bullets were not random: Jopek hollered like a fury of thunder,
accompanied by lightning from his own hands, shooting out the chain that held the
chandelier within the dome. The chandelier plummeted past the balcony by which they
stood, shattering in the well of the lower level.

“Sore loser,”
Michael whispered huskily to Patrick. But suddenly this rotunda felt very small.

Holly stood from her cot, moving closer to where the rest of them stood, in front
of their panting protector.

“You think they took all our other guns?” she said.

“What’d I say?” the captain replied petulantly.

“So . . .” Hank said, a question in his voice.

So is it safe here? So when do we leave?
But Michael said nothing. He didn’t want any attention on himself right now. Or any
questions about Bobbie.

“So . . . do we need to do anything with Bobbie?” Holly asked when Hank didn’t go
on.

The captain shook his head. “She’s in the Kanawha, now.”

The image of Bobbie’s body, floating in the Kanawha River among six-pack rings and
coal-dirty water, sent grippy rolls of nausea through Michael. He felt Patrick’s arms
tighten on his waist, questioning. He felt it, but ignored it, trying to think of
what to say, what to do.

“So we should go,” Patrick said.

The captain looked at Patrick. Michael looked at Patrick.

“The bad guys are coming. And Bellows’re . . . bein’ jerks. We should
go
, duh.”

“No, boy, ain’t nowhere we’re goin’. Ain’t nowhere but bed.”

“Sleep?” said Hank, a little incredulous, even angry. It was the first time Michael
had heard him speak to Jopek with anything other than absolute respect.
“Here?”

“Hankzilla, cool down,” Holly said. She touched his shoulder, and there was real
care
on her face as she calmed her brother. “The captain’s right. We are all shaky right
now. And we aren’t sure what’s going on yet, with anything.”

“We know the frickin’ maniacs are stealing our shit!” Hank said. “And we know
They
’re starting to tear out their damn eyes and move around in the day now!”

“But we don’t know
why
,” Holly said. “We’re safer here than anywhere; we can put new locks on the gates
for tonight, and—Look, I am burnt. I am tired, and I want to lie down. And I want
to cry. The morning is when we can figure things out.” She looked to the captain.
“Right?” she said, then added, “Sir?”

The captain held her gaze.

“Absolutely,” he said simply.

They stood there, their remade halls rising into new darkness around them and ringing
with sounds of the Bellows approaching in the night, and it was a moment Michael would
remember for a long time: when he looked back on that night among the wicked graffiti,
the night before so much changed, it was the moment that seemed to sum it up.