The End Games (24 page)

Holly blinked at him. “Whoa, wait—really? Like, from home?”

Michael nodded, and she responded, “Okay . . . ,” sounding cautious but not unkind.
And that settled it.

The more he went on, the realer it became. Holly listened, not interrupting as he
told her the CliffsNotes version of Ron: Ron was the one always pushing Patrick into
the psych hospital; Ron was the first person Michael had ever hated, a feeling that
was enormously mutual, and so big between them that it had to come out somewhere,
and one time it came out of Ron’s fists.

“Sorry if this sounds weird,” Holly said gently, “but why doesn’t your mom just leave?”

“Because that’s just what she is, you know? It’s like, when The Game started, Patrick
and I called the Zeds ‘Bellows,’ because ‘bellow’ is what they do. And Mom is someone
who can’t leave someone who loves her; she’s someone who needs to be rescued. And
I just realized, if I was quick enough, I could rescue her. . . . But . . .”

Michael had no idea why he was telling Holly this; it just felt important that he
do so.

When he paused, Holly asked, “When what ‘game’ started?”

“I lie to Patrick, about everything. To protect him from this thing one of his idiot
doctors called ‘Freaking.’ Bub just disappears into himself. I tell him everything
is a Game; that this whole
world
is all a Game.”

“Wow. So that’s why he feels so safe with you. I can see why the kid loves you so
much.”

But Michael suddenly felt sadness and an incredible loneliness. He wasn’t so sure
Holly was right about Patrick. In a way, Patrick didn’t really
know
him.

He guessed Patrick worshipped him.

And there was a difference—huge, he sensed—between worship and love.

“Anyway, on Halloween,” he went on, “Bellows crashed the party, and Mom comes outside
and . . .”

“. . . and?”

Michael gulped.

And shut up, Michael,
he thought. He’d felt almost sure that there was a point he had to make, something
vital in the retelling, something that he was missing . . . but he just felt exposed,
now.

Holly tried to meet his eyes, and he felt his blood.

He said, “Ron came out; Mom wouldn’t get in the car. That’s it.”

“Michael . . . that is so
hard
, man. But you know that it’s not, like, your fault, right?”

“Right,” Michael said noncommittally.

“No, listen, you are not even slightly allowed to feel bad about that,” she said earnestly,
leaning forward, her eyes intense. “Getting to Charleston, protecting your brother?
I’d say you’re sort of amazing. And things are going to work out, the soldiers will
be here any day, and then . . .”

Michael nodded, his chest hurting.

Holly noticed how upset he was, and said, “You know what? I’d like to share something
with you.”

Now she moved out from behind the podium, through the pews, through bars of moony
snow-light, her skin like smooth milk, and he followed her, until they reached a patch
of darkness, and her hand floated through space and found his hand, and his heart
was alive in his throat.

A ladder was set against the wall, stretching up toward a recessed balcony. “You first,”
she said, and when Holly followed him, he took
her
hand, helping her from the ladder. He noted,
First Initiation of Hand-holding
.

“It’s quiet up here. Why, I don’t know. The Zeds’ screams don’t seem to reach—I guess
because they’re all out in front of the Capitol. And it’s kind of generally wonderful
up here, don’t you think so?”

The balcony
was
generally wonderful. There were seats for an audience facing out over the bowl of
the Sanctuary, but behind these seats was a wall of glass, which looked out on the
Kanawha River. It was the river that ran from one tip of Michael’s West Virginia map
to the other, the connective tissue through coal towns and McMansions, gathering pieces
of the poor West Virginia and carrying them to where less-poor West Virginia could
pick them up. The river was polluted, of course, and Bobbie was there now, but you
couldn’t tell. The Kanawha only shone like a black ribbon, its surface spangled with
the reflections of star points, as if the heavens momentarily had come to earth.

It would be easy to pretend the world was a world without the Bellows. And as Holly
sat beside him, Indian-style, a warmth spreading in his skin when their knees touched,
Michael understood that this was the gift she was giving him: a little piece of a
world that made you think the whole thing was different.

The world
can
be different,
Michael thought.
I don’t have to let myself and people I care about get cornered. I don’t have to pretend
that someone else is going to save me. I can leave, and this time, I can take
all
of us.

“I think we need to leave Captain Jopek,” Michael said. “Soon.”

Holly looked over, confused. “What? Why?”

“Because he’s dangerous, Holly. He never should have taken us into the city so late.
It was pointless. And I swear, I think Jopek made us go into the Magic Lantern because
he was pissed at me for questioning him.”

“That . . . doesn’t sound right, Michael,” she said.

Yes, it does.
“Even if it isn’t, though, Jopek is letting us get cornered. The daylight doesn’t
stop Bellows anymore, who knows how long it will be before they get through the barriers
outside? There are more Bellows here all the time. Jopek is being stupid. I
never
let Bub and me get cornered when we were out there by ourselves. We can take the
Hummer and get out of Charleston, and the . . . other unit, the one I saw,” Michael
said, feeling a twinge of guilt and regret for having to lie, but pushing it down.
It’ll be worth it in the end,
he thought.
I’ll get us to the Safe Zone, and we’ll all be safe.
“They’ve gotta be close. But even if we can’t find them, the other Safe Zone is just
across the border to Virginia.”

Holly looked not at all convinced.

“Holly, you’ve
never
thought that there’s anything weird about Jopek?”

“Well. I don’t know, maybe he’s too bossy sometimes. But that’s probably just the
army, y’know?”

“No, I don’t think so at all,” Michael said. “I don’t know what it is, but when I
look into his eyes . . . it’s like I’m looking over the edge of a pit. Even Bobbie
said, ‘It’s like there’s a secret in everything he says.’”

Michael saw Holly flinch a little—because of the mention of Bobbie, he supposed.

After a moment, she said, in a light tone of voice that Michael didn’t quite buy,
“I guess I’ve thought the captain can seem a little weird sometimes. Let’s make a
deal, Michael: if you get me a week’s supply of food, a gun, and a charger for my
iPod Touch, I am in on this road trip.”

Michael nodded, wanting to push for a more serious
Yes
, but Holly looked out the window, and he saw her face become that same, strange—hurt?—faraway
thing that it had been after she’d mentioned her father.

“Do you think,” she asked, in a soft voice, “that things happen for a reason?”

“Huh?”

“Do you think that they work out ‘like they’re supposed to’? Bobbie thought so. Even
though the world is so messed up, she told me she really felt like things would be
okay, if you held on to hope, that Something was in control. When I couldn’t sleep,
she’d, like, pray for me. She said praying could . . . not control things, but help
them. Sometimes I felt like her praying did help me sleep, so I gave prayer the old
daughter-of-an-agnostic-scientist try. But I never heard any voice or whatever. This
sounds crazy, Michael, but I just wish, so bad, that I could know if Bobbie still
believed things happen like they’re supposed to, after she got bit. I wish she could
tell me that she did, that even though the worst possible thing happened to her, she
still felt like there was a reason to hope. I . . . I think she would. I don’t know
about God or anything, but I definitely believe in hope. Because even if awful-awful
stuff happens, sometimes out of nowhere, there’s okay stuff, too. Good stuff. Kind-of-great
stuff.”

Holly looked at him. The river chopped. Michael’s heart thudded.

“Like . . . what?” he said.

And although the truth burned from her eyes to his, Holly only shrugged.

Michael took his second shower of the day. This one cold. Very. As arctic as he could
fuh-reaking stand.

And against the pelting freeze of it, his mind spun, clocking like a magnetized needle
on a pool of oil seeking out its North.

The first
yes-yes
truth came to him at 11:47 p.m.:
some part of Holly still wanted to believe in Captain Jopek
.

Why?

For some reason, Michael suddenly thought of Jopek’s eyes flashing in the darkness
of the Magic Lantern, so much like those mannequins in the pews and aisles of the
Coalmount church.

First escape plan, 12:03 a.m., thought up en route to the Capitol Senate:
Since Holly might not want to leave Charleston, we can just hide somewhere in the
city.
Yeah, Michael and Holly and Patrick (and Hank, if Michael could convince him) could
find a building and barricade themselves, and wait for the soldiers to return from
Richmond and rescue them.

There’s a whole city out there
, Michael told himself.

But his blood sped in his excitement and he sensed, immediately, the lie in that.

The Capitol was moated by gates and locks and the Kanawha River; all other roads apart
from the main ones were tacked with mines; there was not a whole city for him.

There was this building.

There were these blood-splashed, echoing halls.

How the hell did I not realize that?

That thought felt frightening.
Good
. Michael focused on the fear.

And stood at the starlit windows of the hall and gazed across the empty city. He imagined
the city and the mountains around him as a vast electronic pixilated videoscape, its
surface teeming with countless characters . . . before being cleared with an apocalyptic
swipe of a virus’s god-hand.

Reset
.

Michael thought of the wasteland gamescape, where two sprite figures—he and Patrick—encountered
a man, a huge-rendered soldier: a man whose mere existence seemed to promise to keep
them safe. He was, after all, a guardian, in the old world. He was a protector, a
good guy, by all the old rules. He was, after all, supposed to be The End.

And suddenly, Michael understood:

The eerie magnetic hold that Captain Jopek of the First Division of the Crapocalypse
had over the others came not from their stupidity, not their fear, but their empty
idea of the future. It came from not realizing that they were clinging to an endgame—“A
soldier will save us”—from a world that no longer existed.

Michael had once believed there were two West Virginias, one composed of coal towns,
the other of cities.

But the truth was that
no
West Virginias existed anymore. The state from Before was simply gone, and in its
place there was only a blank slate, a void.

That was a truth that Michael had known, somehow, since the Halloween moment when
he saw his first Bellow, and took the reigns of the apocalypse: this was a new world.
And what was a world, in video games or in life? It was an arena on which you placed
an avatar: an image of yourself.

But everyone’s still trusting their old pictures.

No, Jopek was not the saving soldier who would be found at The End.

Jopek was the accidental idiotic survivor of a war that he was convinced was his destiny.

And who are you, Michael?

I’m the one who can save us. I’m a Gamer. And the Master.

So what are you going to do?

I’m going to remake the world.

And after that? I’m going to beat that world.

Day 25:

First date ever. (I think.) Went well. (I think.)

Also:

I know why Jopek’s eyes look empty.

He’s lying to himself.

He believes that he knows best. That he’s The Man In Charge, even though the world
changed around him.

“You ever feel like you were born for some special greatness?”

Like the mirror-eyed mannequins in the Coalmount church, the captain looked so much
like what he pretended to be that it was hard to tell the difference. Until you looked
very, very closely.

And then it was the clearest, most
yes-yes
thing in the world.

So I am going to lie
, Michael thought, and grinned to the jack-o’-lantern in the secret dark of the Senate
chambers.
I will lie to save Patrick and Holly and Hank, and leave.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Captain, you get your next mission. You’re going to become part of The Game.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“What’s a Betrayer?” Patrick asked.

Michael gripped the metal bars on the end of the gurney and ran down the hall. Patrick,
sitting cross-legged on the gurney, whooped for joy and wrapped his hands around the
sidebars.

“It’s what the Game Master said we have to find today,” Michael explained.

“Yeah, but—waaaaahh my
butt tingles
!” Patrick shouted as they rumbled over a patch of busted marble.

“The Betrayer is the reason The Game’s been all weird, Bub,” Michael said. “It’s a
person who’s not playing by the Rules. He’s someone who looks good, but isn’t. The
Game Master wants us to figure out who it is, so he can’t mess up The Game anymore.
And guess what, duder? After we find the Betrayer, we’re road tripping to the real
Safe Zone.”

“The Game Master said so? He said we can
really
go to The End this time?” There was hope on Patrick’s face, but Michael’s heart ached
at the skepticism and worry that were also there.