The End Games (33 page)

Yes!

The things that shot across the basket next weren’t Jopek’s bullets.

They were Michael’s words, tumbling, tumbling:

“The first second I saw you, seriously, I thought, ‘Look at that Shortbus Kid, I bet
he asks me to tie his shoes.’”

Jopek was booming to a stand and his eyes were fiery with anger and joy, side-by-side
like complementary poisons. Jopek tried to pull back the hammer of the pistol with
a clumsy-with-emotion hand. He tried again. Got it the fourth try.

“Strike thr—”

“It’s not a strike; it’s just true. Are you too stupid to get that?”

Jopek slammed Michael sidelong into the wicker wall of the basket, and the moment
was so
yes-yes
that Michael had to fight to keep himself from shouting victoriously.

Jopek panted.

“Heyo, the truth stings,” said Michael.

The basket swung and swung in the sky.

Jopek aimed the gun at Michael’s heart . . . and opened his fist.

The gun dropped between the
V
of Michael’s feet, bouncing once before settling.

Jopek lunged at him: he keyed open the handcuffs, then hurled the cuffs over the side
of the basket in a glittering arc.

“Who do you think you are? Think you’re better, let’s
see
it, let’s play! Move, gunslinger! Sling!
Sling!
”

Michael gaped. At the gun between them. The gun in the pool of shadow between them.

“N-no,” he faked.

Yes,
he thought.
Yes!

THIS IS IT! This
was what Jopek was! Jopek was stupid, Jopek was jealous, and
this
was the final standoff the Game Master had promised Michael!

Jopek’s breath rose to the high canvas. “Go for it. Draw. Sling it! Let’s us see who’s
faster, see who’s better!”

“No,” said Michael.

“Sling!”

“I was kidding before,” Michael lied.

“
I
wasn’t.”

“Captain!”

“—Caaaaaaapppptttaaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnn—”
called Bellows a world below.

“Suh . . . ling
. . .
”
Jopek whispered. His voice was hoarse, and for a hovering, trembling moment, Michael
felt pity for him. Almost. “Sling,” Jopek said, collapsing into the stool, thudding
his head against the first aid kit that hung on the wall.

“Jopek—Captain—Horace, I’m not going to shoot you,” Michael said in what sounded like
desperation. “Let’s just talk this out like two grown-up dudes.”

And that was when Michael made his move for the gun.

The world clicked into
yes-yes
as he kicked the gun toward himself, straight into his space-suited hand.

Jopek shot up from the stool, shouting.

Michael knew, absolutely, that Jopek was going to strike him. He braced for it. He
had taken everything a world of corpses had: he could take anything Jopek could offer
and still get him to lower the basket and let him go free.

Jopek’s fist leapt—

—but not at Michael—

—because it went for the first aid kit. He grabbed it and the kit clammed open, so
for a second the red cross blazed before the sun like a sign, and out of the case
spat—
no, no, doesn’t work that way—
a large, black pistol that Jopek had hidden and now snatched from the air. The gun
in Michael’s hand began loudly clicking.
Empty,
he thought,
fool me twice oh my God NO
, and the basket exploded beside his head. Michael’s screams were trapped in his space
suit and he could only hear the missiles revving past his skull while Jopek laughed
and shot at his head
, Which is how you kill people who were too slow and became Bellows, like me
—

—I was wrong—

—Jopek isn’t like Ron—

Jopek’s eyes were blastingly bright with intelligence.

With cunning.

With bad genius.

Smart! He is
smart
! His secret is that he is
smart
!

“Hey,” said Captain Jopek. “You missed me.”

No accent,
Michael thought.

“Who are you?” Michael said.

The captain’s face flamed: new mask, same fire.

“Don’t you know yet, Mikey? I’m whover I damn well want to be.”

Michael paled. “Are you . . . even a soldier?”

“What I am,” Jopek replied, “is better than you. I want you to remember that.

“I want you to know that I put a kill switch on that Hummer, so even if you’d gotten
out of the Capitol last night, you never would’ve gotten away.

“I want you to know that there are no other survivors in Richmond, you goddamn dumbass,
’cause
every Safe Zone except mine got overthrown last week
.

“I want you to know that this world is
my
world, and the only reason you breathe in it is because I
let
you.

“Every day of my life I have known that this new world was coming down the pike. You
breathe and you think you can feel the future, Michael? No:
I AM the future
.”

Michael tried to back away but the balloon only bucked. “You’re—you’re lying,” he
said, his stomach falling. “There are other people.”

Jopek reached into his jacket, pulled out a stapled collection of crumpled white papers.
Michael recognized it instantly: the list that Jopek had shown Michael that had Mom’s
name on it; the registry of all those who had checked into the Charleston Safe Zone.

Now Jopek pushed the
CONFIRMED DECEASED
list at Michael’s face.

Michael’s chest swooned. “No please no,” he moaned, and tried to look away.

Jopek grabbed Michael’s chin through the space suit, forced his face back.

Highlighted in yellow: Michael David Faris, killed 11/24 (KIA; Infected; Security
Patrol)

“Wh-what?” said Michael.

“Yeah! Huh!” laughed Jopek. “It’s almost like somebody faked the list!”

“Why the hell did you lie? About everything, about who you are?”

Jopek cocked his head, as if vaguely amused.

“The same reason as you,” he replied. “Because I want to.”

That’s not true,
hissed Michael’s mind.
None of this is. Oh God, it can’t be. Mom. Mom can’t be dead—

“All right, buddy, let’s get down to business.”

Jopek seized Michael and thrust him up, forcing his face over the edge of the basket,
and the stench of the Bellows sailed up at him like ripe disease geysering from a
well.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A thing can hide right in front of your face, Michael had learned, if you’re searching
for something else. So at first, Michael almost didn’t trust what he was seeing.

They were in downtown Charleston.

The unbroken sky had been an illusion: Michael had mistaken the smooth, blue front
of a
Rush! Fitness
for the open air. He and Jopek had not been high up in the balloon, either, no more
than fifty feet in the air. Which seemed impossible when you considered how far away
those thousands of Bellows had sounded.

Except it was not impossible. Because
there weren’t
thousands of Bellows roaming the Charleston roads below. The road was covered in
Bellows, yes . . . 

But all the Bellows were dead.

Actually dead
.

Sprawled blindly and choking the road, like the aftermath of a massacre.

“What the hell happened to them?” Michael finally managed to say.

“Head wounds. All of ’em,” replied Jopek. He reached up and turned off the hot-air
balloon’s burner. They began descending toward the Hummer, which the balloon was tied
to.

“You killed all of them?” Michael said. But as they got closer to the ground, he understood
immediately that these monsters, which had overtaken the Capitol last night, had not
been destroyed by a gun. The Bellows’ head wounds weren’t bullet holes, all circular
and neat: the holes in their skulls were ragged crescents, cleaved into their foreheads
or above their ears, a ruptured chaos of black blood and bone.

They were bite marks.

“My guess? That little boy—that new Thing—got hungry in the night,” said Jopek as
the balloon touched down and settled atop the Hummer: he got out, tucked the pistols
in his belt, secured the balloon with something like heavy-duty bungee cords, and
turned off the balloon burner so it would begin to deflate. A moment later, Jopek
climbed down off the side of the Hummer, and Michael followed him. “By the way, Michael,”
he said, unlocking a gun case in the front seat and pulling out his AK, “you say a
word about the other Safe Zone, and I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you. And I’ll make
it hurt.”

And he was Jopek again—or at least the person Michael had thought of as Jopek: redneck
voice and cocky smile.

Michael nodded. He felt dazed by the Bellows’ massacre. But he still did not understand
something basic about his situation: “If I’m infected, why did you bring me?”

But right then, Holly and Patrick got out the double doors in the back of the Hummer.
Michael hadn’t expected to ever see them again. It seemed miraculous and absurd, the
way they casually unloaded, as if their car had just pulled into a rest stop.

“Hey, Bub,” Michael said, voice uneasy. “Like my new outfit?”

Patrick whispered to Jopek,
“Still the Betrayer?”
Jopek nodded, ruffling Patrick’s hair. It was the same thing Jopek had done yesterday
in the Hummer outside Walgreens, and back then, Patrick had look pleased. But Patrick
flinched tensely this time. There was something haunted in his face: that dread-filled
and desperate searching for something to believe. Patrick looked like a windup toy
whose key has been turned too many times, as if the gears that had supplied the power
to carry him through this nightmarish world were drawing tighter, tighter, tighter.
And if just a couple more things went wrong for Patrick, Michael knew his brother
was going to break.

“’Morning,” said Holly. Her arms were folded across the belly of her blue hoodie.
The skin under her eyes was puffy and red; she wouldn’t quite look at him. Her voice
sounded small: he didn’t know if it was just the faceplate, but Holly had never sounded
so far away.

“H-hey,” Michael replied.

Not:
I’m infected, help me, help me
.

Not:
Holly, why the hell did you have to tell Jopek about The Game?

Not:
Why didn’t you just leave with me yesterday?

“Damn, Cady had one hell of a midnight snack,” Jopek said to himself, high-stepping
over the corpses. The Bellows nearly carpeted the road, at some points stacked two
or three on top of each other: Michael saw a bloated old woman on top of a priest.

He wished he could ask Holly for an explanation of why this had happened. If what
she’d said before about viruses was true—if they only changed in ways that helped
them survive—the idea of Cady slaughtering carriers of the same disease . . . it didn’t
make sense.

Michael didn’t like it. Oh man, he didn’t like it
at all
.

But what exactly do you know,
his mind hissed at him,
about things working out the way you thought they would?

“No sign of Cady this mornin’, but there’s a few reg’lar Bellows left roamin’ around,”
said Jopek. “And I bet that those Rapture folks are just a mite pissed at us after
our little shootout with them yesterday. The Bellows riotin’ and all that last night
might’ve kept them off for a little bit, but I doubt for too much longer. Let’s get
going.”

“Get going where?” asked Michael.

“You ain’t figured it out?” Jopek said. “The only place left to search in the city.”

You still want to
“search”?

Jopek pointed up the road.

The ruins of the passenger jet lay shattered and enormous and grim with snow. It was
the same jetliner that had attempted to escort one hundred souls, including Bobbie,
to salvation, but been betrayed by its own pilot and fallen from the heavens. The
jet lay on the ruptured landing strip of the road, its nose disappearing into a building
labeled
FIRST BANK OF CHARLESTON
, its fuselage and wings pointing at the building like an arrow.

Jopek said, “The last place that ol’ secret lab could be.”

“In the
plane
?” Patrick murmured.

“Inside the bank, Bub,” said Jopek, and Michael cringed at the use of Patrick’s nickname.
“We’re gonna go make a withdraw.”

“Wait—what? What do you mean ‘lab’?” Michael said, looking up at the face of what
had survived of the front of the bank above the point where the crashed plane’s nose
had burrowed in, like a dog’s snout in a hole. It was an old building, with three
stories of faded, flat-red brick—the kind of building that seemed to say,
And this is where we put our
especially
boring adults
.

But then two ideas crashed together in Michael’s head: his suspicion about why Jopek
seemed so intent on his “rescue missions” in the obviously empty city . . . and Holly
saying that the Centers for Disease Control were working on a cure, with a hidden
lab located in Charleston itself.

Brain-stunned, Michael said, “There’s a cure.”

“Could be,” said Jopek.

“You want it.”

“Sure do! Hey, sounds like a real nice way to end The Game, don’t it? Mean ol’ world.
How else can you
really
be safe, huh, Patrick?”

“So . . . why don’t
you
get it?” Michael said.

I mean, you’re brave. You’re smart. You’re . . . you’re better than me.

Then Michael said, realizing: “You don’t have that many bullets left. And you don’t
know how dangerous it might be.”

“What do I look like,” said Jopek, throwing his head back, barking laughter, “some
kind of idiot who thinks they see the future?”