The End Games (4 page)

Now Patrick bent and opened his Pikachu knapsack and put in two cans of Campbell’s
Chicken & Stars, tucking his chin as he arranged them carefully. Then he picked up
another soup can at his feet, considering it with pursed lips before swapping out
a Chicken & Stars for this new one.

“Hey, Bub,” Michael said, loading his own duffel bag with some beef jerky, “you don’t
like tomato soup, remember?”

“But you do,” Patrick said casually, zipping the knapsack shut.

A twist of warmth spread in Michael’s chest. “Are you trying to get on my good side?
Because I have to tell you: not gonna happen. Okay, low-five,” Michael said, and drew
it away when Patrick went to slap it.
“Pfff,”
Michael laughed.

Lunch, Day 22:

3 jerky sticks each

Soup for me :)

Two Flintstone Vitamins for Bub

(Okay, they’re delicious, I ate one, also)

Between a couple buildings sat a small dumping yard, and Michael suggested that they
explore it for pieces of the new weapon the Game Master told them to build for Patrick
(Bub was preeetty sure it was going to be a rocket launcher). They found only some
old springs and a busted recliner with no footrest, though, and Michael noticed there
were some bits of glass from a shattered television; he told Bub they should probably
leave. But on their way out, Patrick spotted a length of pipe sticking out from an
oil-stained blanket, and the pipe, upon close inspection, was definitely the barrel
for a launcher. Michael packed the pipe into their duffel bag and asked, “When we
get this thing done, can I borrow it sometimes?” Patrick said, yeah sure, yeah he
could, if he gave him five bucks.

Michael pointed at the hardware store and said, “Ammo.”

The windows of Mountaineer Supply were boarded, though not super well; there were
foot-wide square gaps near the top of each window, which meant that the store was
brighter inside than Food’N’Such. It was also less pickle-y, if more well raided.
Michael noted patches in the wood paneling above the door that were a lighter shade
than the paneling around them; somebody had even taken the bubble-letter words that
had been hanging there. The pale patches were in the shape of these words:

GOD. COAL. BELIEVE.

The ghost words were kind of creepy, for some reason.

Michael and Patrick found an aisle with some kid-sized shovels and rakes hanging on
pegs; a handwritten sign claimed that the tools
MAKE GREAT BIRTHDAY GIFTS! That just doesn’t seem very likely,
Michael thought, amused. Farther up the aisle, twisted coat hangers lay scattered
on the floor, some still bearing children’s black sweatshirts. One looked like it
actually might be Bub’s fit, but when Michael checked, the neck tag said it wasn’t
100 percent cotton. Which was one of the things that the idiot “doctors” who Ron thought
were so awesome had been right about: the feel of synthetics drove Patrick sorta bonkers.

The glass of the store’s firearms counter was shattered; not so much as a single bullet
remained. They did find a couple hunter-orange sleeping bags, though, and a bathroom
in the back of the store with a Bellow-repelling daylit window. Michael placed roughly
half the nation’s remaining reserves of toilet paper onto the chilly seat; Patrick
thought that was hilarious. Well, Michael might happily do a lot in the name of The
Game, but one indignity he wouldn’t endure (for the third time, ugh) was getting his
butt cheeks frozen to a porcelain thunder box.

They were walking down the road again when Michael stopped and said, “Wait. Wait,
I’m not thinking.” He looked back at Mountaineer Supply, an image flashing behind
his eyes.
The boards on the windows. The holes.

Not accidental,
something in him said. Those were, like, sniper holes.

Taking Patrick by the hand, he jogged back to the store. He checked the floors around
the windows that overlooked the streets and soon he discovered that he’d been right.
There was a duffel bag, filled with ammunition, lying by a window behind the cash
register. Boxes of bullets for every gun caliber inside. He felt good, pleased, for
a second. Then he realized that the bag was camouflage, and not the leaves-and-grass
kind of camo that people use for hunting.

Soldier camo.

Wait—were soldiers here?
And if they had been, why would they leave this? What would happen to make them leave
it?

Patrick, standing a few feet behind Michael, gasped.

Michael’s hand blurred automatically for the rifle strapped on his own shoulder. But
Patrick was just standing at
GREAT BIRTHDAY GIFTS
, picking up a tiny toy: a windup tin man with a pickax, like the no-face guy at the
fountain.

“Michael?”

“Yeah?”

“You . . . okay?” Patrick said, sounding worried.

Michael said, “Yeah,” then he wound the key of the toy for Bub. The toy man raised
his arms and “mined” . . . though Michael couldn’t help but think that it also looked
like he was driving back invisible monsters.

“A. Roe-Bot. Like. Meee,” Patrick grinned, delighted.

When Patrick turned the key, though, it snapped off in his hand.

The sadness Michael saw flash behind his eyes was swift and familiar and overpowering.

“
Whoa
, buddy, you’re strong,” Michael said.

Patrick looked up at Michael. “Yeah,” he said. His face relaxed. “Ya-ya.”

Love you, too,
Michael thought. Then said: “Ya-ya, too.”

100 points already. Reloaded rifle!

If soldiers were here, why would they leave stuff behind?

Maybe . . . some are here?

No,
he thought. Anybody could have a bag like that. It probably just belonged to someone
who had lived here in this town and left for the Safe Zone.

But Michael found something amazing at the bottom of the hill that made him wonder
if he was wrong.

A short school bus, yellow in the road, sat longways across the span of the street,
jammed perfectly snug with both ends striking buildings, sandbags stuffed underneath
the belly. A barricade.

“They’re protecting something on the other side,” he said to Patrick, who looked up
at him, excited.

The body and windows of the bus were peppered with bullet holes, though, like the
aftermath of an enormous conflict, which was probably not the best indicator that
the blockade had been a success. But still.

Don’t get your hopes up, Michael. Don’t.

Michael called out for Bellows to mimic him: “I’ve got butt pimples—”

“—They are narsty—” called Patrick, giggling.

But no one, and no thing, responded. They crawled through a small cove in the sandbags,
Patrick going first, fake farting the whole way through. Day goes by freaking fast
in winter West Virginia: it was only 3:55, but that meant they had maybe twenty good
minutes for exploring the town.

The first thing Michael saw on the other side of the school bus were houses, familiar-issue:
squat (also depressing and ugly); layered with dust (coal, of course); set with too
many too-small windows (covered over with metal and/or wood). The cold air carried
that hallmark dead-place smell: sour, rank, coiling, green. But at the end of the
road was a building labeled
MEETING HALL
, and its lawns featured long wooden spikes, pounded into the earth at forty-five-degree
angles to repel the dead.

Michael stood with his brother in the husked-out street, calling.

He got a response. But it was, alas and aw crap, the same one as always: a deadened,
elongated echo from the Bellows’ daytime hiding places in closets and attics and closed
coal bins and woodsheds.

Except.

Wait:
Does
it sound different than normal?

Michael called out, again, “Hello!” his heart lifting a little.

An image came into Michael’s mind before he could control it, before he could tell
himself to calm down. He pictured soldiers coming around a corner, men with weapons,
power, and looks of astonishment.
Boys!
they’d say.
Wow! Hell-oh! Wow! Lookit these boys! Lookit this kid, will ya lookit this hero! C’mon,
let’s get you out of this place, let’s get you someplace warm, fellas. It’s over,
Michael, you did it, you won, let’s get you boys to the Zone—

And Michael was already walking through the Meeting Hall’s lawn of spears when he
realized, in the back of his brain, that a few of them were strangely shaped.

Four or five sets of planks had been fashioned into crosses.

He realized why the responses sounded unique: the Bellows’ calls, eerily, were emanating
from under the ground, radiating from beneath the snow and earth under his boots.
Tacked onto the crosses (the red paint, he noted, was faded) were small wooden signs:

(RANDAL VOLPE) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED

DO NOT TOUCH!!!

(ABEL MASSEY) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED

(GERALD BRAY) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED

(EMMA ZARR) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED

DON’T DISTURB, BELOVED, MOST-BLESSED

Michael shook his head, feeling a bewildered resentment. Why the crap would people
keep Bellows here? The instructions from all Safe Zone flyers and endless radio announcement
loops said that Bellows were to be destroyed on sight.

But seriously, even if nobody ever told you, how could people not realize: if monsters
show up at your home,
you get rid of them.

At least it doesn’t sound like there’s as many Bellows as last night,
he told himself
. Maybe last night
was
just a fluke. Maybe—

And sensed movement behind him.

As he spun, the snow grinding under his heels, several nearby crows cawed and exploded
into flight. On a house where the vinyl siding had been torn off and hammered over
the windows, a series of icicles stretching nearly to the ground collapsed, bringing
the storm gutters they’d hung from down with them.

Nobody there,
Michael thought, his heart knocking in his temples. He pictured the map, the gray
zone, his miniature self lost in all that gray.
No Bellows. And no soldiers. No Mom. There’s nobody here, newb. There’s nobody
anywhere
—

“Michael?” Patrick said. He looked at Michael, his eyes asking,
You okay?

I—damn,
Michael thought.
I thought for a second . . . I really thought . . .

“Just tired.”

“So . . . just Bellows here, then?”

“Yeah. I know where we can stay tonight, though.”

Michael led them under the bus and said, “Piggyback,” as they went back up the hill,
Michael pulling the sled behind them.

Stupid to think . . . stupid to think that . . .

“Dinner when we get back,” Michael said, crunching through sunset-shaded snow.

“Okay,” Patrick replied. “I’ll save some of my jerky for Mommy.”

After a second, Michael nodded. “Good call.”

He set Patrick down to walk when they reached the level Main Street, and that was
when all the thoughts about being stupid vanished from his mind.

Starlight lay bright and crisp and strange across the snow. Patrick stopped spontaneously,
his smile beautiful and alive. They could hear, from some other street, the hoof-falls
of the passage of deer in snow. They could hear the crisp crackle of ice splitting
in some unknown river. The night, the whole of it, felt like a private thing, as if
Michael could grasp the star-rich horizon and pull it over them like a quilt and keep
themselves in it forever.

“Michael?”

“Yeah?”

Patrick took his hand.

They ran to the door of the shelter for the night—the business building they’d parked
beside on Main Street earlier—which he lock-picked with his multi-tool, opened, slammed,
bolted, chained. By the Coleman lantern’s flat green light, they ate a dinner of dusty-tasting
nut bars. Michael laid out their new sleeping bags in the west of the office, tucking
his brother in while the moon rose, and that moment of beauty had eased Patrick, so
after only one Atipax he clicked to sleep so instantly it made Michael almost laugh,
both happy and sad.
Day twenty-two,
Michael thought. They’d sledded, explored a ghost town, foraged, and Patrick was
sleepin’ easy in Southern West Virginia Coal and Natural Gas’s office, ’cause all
in all, in this weird Game world they now lived in, yeah, that was pretty much your
average day.

CHAPTER FOUR

All right, Game Master, when you gonna show up?

There was this fantasy Michael had, which went like this:
go to bed before midnight.
Not fancy, nah, but when your muscles itched from a night of driving and a day of
snow walking, man oh
man
, did it sound sexy. How many days without once sleeping through the night? How many
hours waiting, exhausted, for their Game Instructions?

Twenty-two days, plus one day, equals I wanna sleeeeeep.

Michael sat in a folding chair with an uneven metal seat, purposely ignoring the comfortable
leather chair behind the desk. He sipped the last of the Mountain Dew Code Red they’d
had with them when The Game began, idly tapping the .22-caliber rifle on his lap,
watching a ribbon of world through the planks of wood on the window.

A snowstorm had moved in since they’d arrived at the office. Occasional shrouded flares
of lightning; thunder in the hills. The falling snow largely veiled his view. Michael
wouldn’t have wanted to try to spot flashlights or lanterns in the mountains tonight,
anyway—not after he’d gotten his hopes up that there were people here who could lead
them to the Zone. ’Cause sometimes, looking at the mountains, if you weren’t careful,
you could
feel
all the dark miles that lay between the place you were and the place you wanted to
be. You could feel like a radar blip, marooned in the nether-zone of all those miles
that weren’t on the West Virginia map. You could feel like The End of The Game wouldn’t
ever really come.