The End Games (3 page)

Michael nodded, satisfied, slapping the dome light off as he put the car in drive.

“Michael?” Patrick said.

“Yeah?” Michael answered.

“Mornin’,” yawned Patrick, stretching upright. “What we doing today?”

CHAPTER THREE

They were a couple hours into the day before the twisting, rutted road brought them
to the town called Coalmount. Michael opened Patrick’s door, did a butler bow, and
told Patrick his butt crack was showing as he stepped out.

Then Michael climbed over the hood and glassed the new town with his binoculars from
the roof of the station wagon.

“Michael?” called Patrick.

“Yeah?” Michael replied, smiling at the routine.

“Nothing,” said Patrick.

The town might call itself Coalmount, yeah, but
no offense, ol’ buddy, but you look sliiiightly like every other coal town ever
. Michael scoped the dozen or so buildings on the main street, all of them brick and
stout. He noted, not for the first time, that the only structure that looked less
than thirty years old was an office building labeled
SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA COAL AND NATURAL GAS
.

“How many
R
s are in ‘Faris’?” called Patrick from behind the car.

“Why?”

“I think I spelled it wrong in the snow.”

“Oh.”

“With my pee,” Patrick said.

“Yeah, I got that the first time,” Michael laughed.

He looked back through the binocs, tracing up the length of the main drag. A statue
of a coal miner stood in what, if you were feeling just ridiculously generous, you
could call the town square. The miner statue carried a pickax, but its face had been
either carved or blasted away.

Power poles plastered with Safe Zone flyers (he made a mental note to check if the
flyers had road maps on them). Four or five pickups abandoned in chaotic arrangement
in the street and sidewalks.
That’s more cars than there usually are, though,
Michael thought. It occurred to him that the pickups might be a sign that people
were still here, and for a second, before he could stop the thought, he pictured soldiers
coming around the corner, soldiers they’d finally found.

He surveyed the crust of the snow, searching for footprints . . . but all he saw were
wide, erratic imprints: evidence of the Bellows’ shambling gait. He felt a moment’s
disappointment, but then also a relief.

There were only ten or so Bellow trails. Some tracks wound to a closed Dumpster he
noted he should stay away from; most simply vanished into the dark open mouths of
the buildings’ broken front doors. The few scattered Bellows here had sought their
daytime sanctuaries in some of Coalmount’s dark crannies, but there weren’t as many
Bellows as there had been during the weirdness in the woods last night. Not nearly
as many.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to entertain ourselves today,” Michael said.

“What the?”

“No people have been out since last night’s snow. See?” He hopped off the car, pointing
the binoculars at Coalmount. Patrick looked through excitedly, his cheek warm and
smooth against Michael’s.

Bub’s lips moved silently; Michael knew he was counting something even before Bub
lowered the binocs and informed him, “Eight flyers.”

The binocular strap looped around Michael’s neck, and when Patrick saw it drawing
tight, he said softly, “Sorry—whoops.” Most kids would yank it as a joke.

But this kid isn’t most kids,
Michael thought, smiling a little.
Actually, sorta the opposite
.

“You want to Game On?” Patrick asked after he’d looked at the town. Michael nodded.

As he always did when they began the day, he hoisted Patrick onto his shoulders, letting
Bub do The Yell.

“We’re gonna Game On!” Patrick called to the town.

The Bellows’ echo, from all their hiding places:
“GAAAAAME!”

Patrick’s own snow-muffled echo: . . . 
we’re gonna, gonna . . . 

“I’m a butt!” Patrick added.

The dozen or so hidden Bellows informed them that they, too, were
A BUUUUUTTT
; Patrick giggled at himself. And standing there outside the town that was shouting
back Patrick’s joke, Michael felt Bub’s happiness like a transmission, like a tingling
signal that traveled perfectly through the fingers that Patrick tapped on his head,
through the ankles that twisted in Michael’s hands as he laughed. And the last thread
of the anxiety Michael had hardly realized he’d had slipped away. So they got in the
car and drove into Coalmount, two Gamers gaming on.

Coalmount looked like it had been postapocalyptic even before Halloween.

Gray mountains, studded with dead trees, rose up and up beyond the buildings around
them as Michael drove down Main Street. The sun was a tarnished dime that only got
above the peaks at noon, so the towns always seemed like an image on a screen with
permanently lowered brightness. A mile or so to the east, the gentle waving of the
mountain range gave way to sharp rock, severe and flat: there the coal had been mined
by exploding the mountaintops. The silhouette of the range was like a heartbeat measurement
that had been alive and suddenly stopped.

When you said “West Virginia” before Halloween, Michael thought, places like this
came to people’s minds. You thought of dusty sunlight through yellowing blinds; you
thought of damp trailers; you thought of mountains that roamed and loomed and locked,
like a fortress designed to keep you in. It was impossible, of course, to grow up
in West Virginia and not be told roughly thirty times a week that “Coal Mining Is
What Powers Your Lights.” But Michael’s hometown was just a “meh” suburb of the city
where West Virginia University was, its own mountains tamed with Walmarts and McMansions.
And in places like that, it was easy to believe that coal towns like this didn’t exist.

So entering these towns was always a slightly surreal experience.

Michael parked the Volvo in front of the Southern West Virginia Coal and Natural Gas
office on Main Street, which sat beside a tired-looking red church. The office and
the church were the only buildings on the road whose front doors and windows were
still intact; unraided.

“Pop-Tart me,” Michael said, and they stepped out of the station wagon, Patrick handing
Michael a foil-wrapped pastry, s’mores flavor: cornerstone of a healthy breakfast.

“So. Got the message from the Game Master,” Michael said. He paused, taking a bite
of the Pop-Tart, grimacing a little at the taste. They’d been old even when they’d
found them in Ron’s cabin, and being in the car had not done much in the way of making
them less
gaaaah
.

Patrick nodded, eating his Pop-Tart with both hands. He shivered pleasantly, like
he would waiting for a surprise party. There wasn’t anything that Bub looked forward
to more than hearing their Instructions. Nor anything that Michael looked forward
to more, either—even though, with the way The Game worked, neither he nor Patrick
had ever actually
seen
the Game Master.

The Game Master’s Instructions were delivered in the total silence of night.

And here was how. You stop in the woods, or in a stranger’s emptied house, or in the
car along a frost-starred road. You wait for Patrick to go to sleep. And after he
is snoring, if you are quiet (very), the Game Master materializes from out of the
dark and speaks. You have to really listen: the Game Master’s arrival, when it happens,
is no louder than the knock of your heart. His whisper is more silent still. But ahhh
man, his Instructions about how to play The Game, his directives about how to get
closer to the Safe Zone and to winning: what a relief and wonder to receive.

If all of that sounded like some kind of magic—a Master fashioning the apocalypse
around a Game he’d made, instructing you precisely about where you should go next
in order to stay safe—well . . . it kinda
felt
magic. It was a power that would have seemed impossible to Michael before Halloween.

So add that to the “impossible stuff” list,
thought Michael now.

He cleared his throat, beginning his imitation of the Game Master’s voice: smooth
and richly deep, an utterly grown-man’s voice.

“You’re getting closer to the Safe Zone. You performed well last night, Michael and
Patrick. You encountered the first Bellows that seemed to move in a group. ‘Why?’
is a question which may be of importance. So ponder it. But not at the expense of
my new
Instructions.

“You will set out upon a new town. Although it is not certain, the possibility remains
that soldiers—who can escort you to the Safe Zone—may be near.

“I have left, scattered for you in this town, metallic parts for Patrick’s new weapon.

“Because your stores of food and ammunition have been thinned, seek to replenish them.
Before you travel from this town, you must earn one hundred points.

“
Stay alert. Stay sharp.

“I will be watching. I will be waiting. And I will be, as ever, your Game Master
.”

Patrick did a fist-pound, said, “Booyah.”

Michael and Patrick crunched down the street through the ankle-high snow with their
pants cuffs duct-taped to their boots to keep out the cold. Their duffel bag was strapped
across Michael’s chest, the .22-caliber rifle slung over his shoulder like a fishing
pole; with his other hand, he pulled the rusty Radio Flyer sled they’d found at a
garbage dump last week.

In the center of town, next to the tiny fountain with the no-face statue, Michael
cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting, “Hello!” to the streets. Sun glittered
on the snow. Patrick switched his wool hat for Michael’s huge gas station aviator
shades.

As a couple Bellows’ replies and his snow-muffled
Hello!
voice echoed to him—but no human calls—Michael’s brain clicked over everything around
him. Standard stuff. Squat mounds of snow-buried cars; soggy Safe Zone flyers (mapless,
alas); charred sheriff’s cruiser; gas station with an explosion-crater where the pumps
should have been.

“So where ya wanna start?” Michael asked Patrick.

Patrick pointed to the snow-covered downhill street behind him.

Zoom.

They sledded down the series of hills from the square, bobbing through the abandoned
cars and trucks, Michael’s arms wrapped around Patrick’s waist, Bub chuckling at fake-danger
every time they narrowly avoided clipping the cars.

The Coalmount grocery store was called—seriously— Food’N’Such.

The storefront’s shattered windows had been boarded. Through the open door, streams
of daylight filtered in, making the inside dusky.

No Bellow replied.

“All right, Sticky Fingers, let’s clean out the joint,” Michael said. He stepped in
over the bits of glass that had been busted from the door. But he noticed Patrick
hadn’t followed: he was still at the threshold. Bub tried a grin, but his eyes were
afraid, and he was doing that hum of his. Michael felt a tug of sympathy for him—and
annoyance with himself.

“Right. Sorry, buddy. The Lightball.”

Michael unzipped the duffel bag and pulled out the weapon he’d made last week: a ball
of duct tape, almost the size of a volleyball, with its whole surface affixed with
shards of a mirror. Bub took the Lightball from Michael (the globe had several outer
layers of plastic wrap, so it couldn’t cut you), looking grateful.

Then Michael took out their long, heavy-duty, red Maglite, nodding to Bub:
we’re a go.
Bub rolled the Lightball into the store like a bowling ball. Michael ignited the
flashlight and aimed it at the ball, the light beam striking its mirrored surfaces,
the mirrors blazing in turn and streaking star points in all directions in the dusky
store, over the walls and the ceiling and the floor, traveling down the center aisle
like a scanner and a light-grenade for any Bellows within.

The ball bebopped jauntily over a couple cans, then came chiming to a stop against
the far wall.

“Booyah.” Patrick nodded, satisfied that Food’N’Such was Bellow-free.

Then they went shopping.

The store was pretty standard, the ceiling tiles brown, low, sagging. A Little League
trophy topped with a miniature brass kid collected dust on the counter. A 7UP clock,
which had to be at least twenty years old, hung over the register, forever proclaiming
that the time was 8:40.

“Ten points for safe cans today, too?” Patrick asked.

“You know it.”

They ventured into the aisles, stepping over cans and moldy, plastic-wrapped food.
There was a smell of pickles. Patrick went ahead of him—only a couple steps; even
then peeking over his shoulder to make sure Michael was close—bending, inspecting
labels, rolling away the cans he didn’t want down the aisle.

Michael felt grateful for his brother’s caution. Last week, when they’d been searching
a camping supply store for ammo, Patrick had opened a gun cabinet to find a pair of
clawed hands lunging at him from the dark. Michael had been right there, had shot
the Bellow instantly—he never even let the creature get close, of course—but even
with the points they got for shooting the Bellow, the pure wallop of the surprise
had left Patrick so shaky that he didn’t even use his usual
of-course-I’m-not-scared
cover-up. That was a three-Atipax night, and Patrick took the extra pills with a
mix of gratitude and embarrassment that Michael found a little heartbreaking. Michael
couldn’t stop thinking about it, either, though for a different reason. The Bellow
hiding itself from the daylight was a blonde girl, maybe nineteen. He’d tugged Bub
back too quickly for him to really see anything, but she was naked from the waist
up, and Michael’s stomach and face had gone explosively hot: it was the first time
he’d seen a girl naked. She was rotting. So would you believe there was sorta nothing
at all in any way sexy about it.