The End Games (40 page)

Isn’t this just
fun
, baby?

No taillights in either direction. He nearly screamed; he closed his eyes; he tried
to hear the telltale buzz of engines.

But heard only his heart, exploding in his ears.

An image loaded unbidden to his mind: Rulon’s knife arcing up over his head, Rulon’s
knife screaming down, and his brother screaming back. . . .

Holly emerged from the plane.

She marched to the Hummer, not looking at Michael. He stood there, knowing why she
was mad but powerless to say anything. Holly popped a compartment above the passenger
seat. A moment later she came to him with two flashlights, planting one, unlit, against
his chest, still not sparing him a glance.

She strode to the center of the street, her light beam racing back and forth. The
light caught the falling snow in a bubble around her, like a storm of meteors, and
Michael was again struck with utter loneliness: she looked like a girl firing a distress
signal while the world ended at her feet. Michael started telling her the Rapture
had left already—then he realized what she was doing. He turned on his flashlight,
copying her search for vehicle tracks.

All he saw were footprints: so many.

“Here. This way,” Holly said brusquely after a moment. “Let’s go.”

“W-wait—”

She jabbed her light beam at wide tire imprints in the snow that receded into the
west. “The
tracks
go
this
way, Michael.
That’s
the way out of Charleston, to the mountains where their
town
is.” She had the tone of a teacher explaining something simple to the least favorite
student in the class.

“Some already filled in, though,” Michael replied. “What if that’s the way they came
from
? I mean, the new tracks could’ve been covered by the snow, or the wind, or . . .”

Holly shook her head in frustration and shot her light into his face, blinding him.
Michael flinched, raising a hand to block the light as she stamped toward him.

“Okay—fine! Absolutely!” Holly said, her voice quivering. “Where do
you
think we should go, captain? It must be convincing, since I know you wouldn’t say
anything that wasn’t true. So please: hi, I’m Holly, please inform the damsel what
you’re
thinking
.”

Michael began to defend himself, but there was no time. And there was no defending
himself. Yes, she saw him plainly now.

“Fine,” he said softly. “We’ll go to Coalmount. That’s probably smart.”

“Oh, excellent. I’m oh-so-glad you trust me.” Holly moved toward the Hummer again.

“Holly, I’m—”

Who are you?

“—I’m sorry. Look, you don’t have to go. This is my fault.”

She spun on him, then. Her glasses flashed fiercely; Holly hurled her flashlight at
the ground. The bulb exploded in a burst of bright that illuminated the tears tracing
down her cheeks. She thrust a finger at him. “Stop. Right now. Stop talking like you
think I don’t care.”

Not defensive.

Furious, misunderstood.

Michael nodded.

And his injured hand beat like a bomb and countdown both.

“Then we should hurry,” Michael said. He went to shut the open rear doors of the Hummer.
Maybe Rulon
won’t
think of me following him to Coalmount. I mean, he
is
insane.

Yeah, but you have a history of underestimating evil, you goddamn idiot
.

He grabbed the handle of the left rear door, and when Holly shouted,
“Wait wait wait, there’s somebody in—”
Michael jerked away, and accidentally yanked the door with him.

Jopek, coming out of the darkness at him—

Jopek, lunging into the bright tube of his light beam—

Jopek—his
corpse—
was strapped into the jump seat, his eyes closed, his head lolling bonelessly against
his shoulder. Jopek’s face was slack; he might have been sleeping (if he ever
did
sleep) except for the cake of dark blood on his forehead.
That’s where they shot him. Dead.
Michael tried to feel . . . he wasn’t sure what: relief, or something. But the sight,
the reality
,
of the corpse made his stomach roll over as if in a cold grease. It wasn’t tidy;
the body didn’t fade away like in a game.
Killer
.
Killer.

But why was Jopek’s body out here, when he’d been shot in the lobby of the bank
?

“Eff,” breathed Holly shakily at his side. “So this is where he went.”

“What? When?”

“Jopek got up after you went into the tunnel. He was bleeding, like, profusely, and
he staggered outside. I don’t think he even knew where he was. I heard him scream.
And then I heard people running in the streets.”

She must have seen Michael’s anger forming on his face:
And you didn’t
warn
me?
“No, not the Rapture,” she said. “The Bellows in the street. But they weren’t Bellows
anymore.”

A realization slowly dawned inside him. He had been running around in an
empty
street.

The hundreds of corpses that he’d had to high-step an hour ago were
gone
. How? He didn’t understand.

So add that to the fugging list
.
Move.

He began pushing the door shut, and a rippingly bright agony flowed up his arm again.
He cried out, snapping his hand back.

“Oh man,” Holly said pityingly. For the first time, she looked at him without fury
on her face. “That needs a bandage.” She began climbing up the side of the Hummer
toward the roof. By now, the jack-o’-lantern balloon, tethered atop the Hummer, had
deflated, its hot-air fabric messily collapsed into its passenger basket.

“What are you doing?” Michael said.

“There’s a first aid kit in the balloon.”

“It’s empty,” he said.

“What? How do you know?”

Trust me,
he thought.

Holly hopped back down. “Well, we’re going to wrap it with
something
. You’re losing too much . . .” But she trailed off.

Holly was staring at his bloody sleeve, her forehead kneading in concentration.

“Blood. Red,” she breathed. “You’ve got red all over you.”

“Yeah,” he said confusedly. “I hear that’s what happens when you get shot in the hand.”

But Holly did not respond to his comment. A strange half smile twitched on her lips.
She grabbed his flashlight from his good hand and turned away, casting the beam onto
the road that had been so recently clotted with not-yet-resurrected Shrieks. “Look,”
she said, her half smile now full, her palm pressed to her forehead as if in disbelief.
“Look at the road.”

What? Nothing there besides snow.

“The blood—the Bellows’ dried blood!”

The street was crisscrossed with mangled patterns of dark color: the blood spilled
from the Bellows that Cady Gibson had bitten to convert them into carriers of his
mutation. Michael stared, understanding not at all why this mattered.

“It’s
black
,” Holly said. “Your blood is different: it’s red
.
The same color as Jopek’s when he got shot. The same as anyone normal’s blood.”

“It only looks black because it’s dried,” Michael began, but he stopped. Hank’s blood
had dripped onto Patrick from the ceiling in the bank . . . 
and that blood had been black, too
.

“Michael,” said Holly, and the wind howled, and she rose her voice against it to tell
him, “I don’t think you’re infected!”

“But you said that Cady had to have been infected by a scratch. You said the virus
was mutating—”

“As it turns out, Holly was wrong! The virus is mutating, but—I guess not the basic
stuff. Scratches still don’t cause an infection. Although how
did
Cady get sick? And where the hell did all the monsters go?” she said as if to herself.

“Shit,” Michael said. “No no, shit shit.”

“How is being uninfected bad news?!”

Because it shows how freaking wrong I always am, Holly. Because I was fooled.
“It’s not. I just was so stupid, I should’ve figured it out somehow—”

“GOD!”
Holly shouted.

Michael flinched.

“Michael, do you know what your problem is? You think the whole world
is
‘your problem.’ You think that you can
fix
everything.”

And, flinching again, for a different reason, Michael said, “So—what? ‘Michael, don’t
try to help people. Don’t try to save your mom. Don’t try to save Patrick.’”

“You should try,” spat Holly. “But what the
hell
is the point of feeling so sorry for yourself? You didn’t take Patrick;
they
did!”

“But I didn’t stop them.”

Holly shook her head. “So, congratulations. You’re not God.” She raised her palms,
as if in exasperation. “Look, you said you left your mom? Even if she
had
gone with you on Halloween, how long until she would’ve wanted to go back for Ron?
Even if the world hadn’t ended and your mom did talk to the police, how do you know
that she wouldn’t let him come home later anyway, and everything would have gone back
to the way it was? I know you said your mom’s ‘good,’ Michael. But God, people are
a
lot
of things. Her life doesn’t suck because you ‘didn’t save her.’ Michael, her life
is like that because she’s
weak
.”

His heart twisted. What she was saying sounded true . . . but it sounded true like
The Game sounded true: it would just be him trying to make himself feel better. Holly
went toward the passenger door, Michael to the driver’s seat, getting ready to drive
back to Coalmount.

Wait. Wait.

How long until she would have made you go back?
Holly had said.

The idea set off something else inside him.

Go back . . .

Cady Gibson, though unbitten, had died in the mine.

There are some viruses that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on
Earth where the virus originated,
Holly had said on their “date” in the Capitol.

The mine. Oh my God, the
mine.

The reason Cady Gibson had returned from the dead without a bite mark from a Bellow—the
reason he had changed into a Shriek before any of the others—was that Cady had received
the virus in some different way. The little boy who wandered into a mountaintop mine
had stumbled upon something dreadful in the dark, and so he had become the first human
on Earth to be given the disease.

Then how did it spread?

Maybe Cady bit
someone else
before he died,
Michael thought. Maybe a miner; perhaps the very miner that had been tied to the
altar in the Rapture’s church; Coalmount’s “First.” And with that first poisoned bite,
a diluted form of the disease had passed from its first son out into the world.

Maybe.

But with horror threading up his spine, Michael knew something for sure: the disease
hadn’t originated in Iran, or some terrorists’ lab. . . . 
And those were not the places the Bellows had been marching toward
.

“I know where the Shrieks went,” Michael breathed.

“What? Where?” Holly shut the passenger door behind her
.

How had Cady gotten the terrible virus?
What
had given it to him in that mine?
I don’t know
.

But Michael remembered looking into Cady’s eyes and seeing something ancient peering
back at him, like a beast blinking from inside a human skull. And Michael was afraid.

“They went home,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

COALMOUNT

MOUNTAINTOP QUARRY

MINE #1337

!!! DANGER CAUTION DANGER !!!

BLASTING AREA—NO TRESPASSING—
NO SMOKING!!!

(SAFETY, ITS OUR #1 RESOURCE!)

Spray-painted below:

TELL IT TO CADY (BEAUTIFULL BOY), U CORPRAT BASTERDS!

Michael drove over that rusted sign and parked the Hummer on the top of the world.

How much time had passed? He didn’t know.

Sightless windows of skyscrapers had flashed past. The silvery trails of the Rapture’s
tire tracks and the Shriek’s footprints in the headlight-lit snow. And then the on-ramp
to the abandoned highway, which climbed out of the city, taking him back into the
dark fortress of the West Virginia mountains.

’
Cause nothing changes
,
Michael
.
The past doesn’t really die; it just comes back to life,
his mind had hissed as he drove into the black hills
. You’re looking for Patrick in the mountains, like when you woke up in the woods
and you couldn’t find him. But you can’t just pull him out of the trees this time.
He fell off the end of the world.

It’s not a game, but it’s still over.

Patrick. Patrick.

“Do we have, like, weapons?” Michael had thought to ask only as the city vanished
from their sideview mirrors.

“What about the pistol?” Holly had replied, paling. “The one you took from Jopek?”
He tried not to mentally add “you retard?” to the end of her sentence.

“
I dropped it . . . back at the bank. . . .” Michael said.

The snow streaked through the headlights; following the trails of the Rapture and
the Shrieks, Michael turned off the highway, onto a rutted, country road. And Holly,
still angry and disappointed, looked at him for the absolute minimum amount of time.

“I’ve got pepper spray,” she finally said. “My dad gave it to me the day I got my
license.” After a minute, almost to herself: “I remember thinking, ‘Daddy, seriously:
quit being so overprotective.’”