The End Games (41 page)

Gravel popped beneath the tires. The newly rough way was barely wide enough for the
Hummer: bare branches of trees scratched the windows. Michael heard Holly jolt several
times. As if to simply occupy herself, she tugged at the belly pocket of her hoodie
until the seams popped; she found electrical tape in the glove compartment, then wrapped
the cloth as a filthy bandage around Michael’s blood-crusted hand. It made the nerves
in his wound screech, but he didn’t let himself cry out. She needed that distraction,
and what other help did he have left to give her?

As they reached Main Street in Coalmount, Michael saw something glimmer in the headlights
off to the right. His heart nearly imploded when he realized it was a Pop-Tart wrapper.

Patrick, Patrick.
Sounding in Michael’s head like a bell.
Patrick Dale Faris, Patrick Dale Faris—

Sounding in his head like a prayer.

Please,
he thought, feeling sick with weakness,
please help me, God, Universe, whatever. If You’re there, if Anybody is there, please!

But what did he expect? What the hell did he
expect
? The night was quiet, except for his car. And there was nothing in the sky but the
cold witch-fire of the stars.

Holly sat there, inches away, finishing his bandage, but Michael had never felt so
alone.

Nor so hopeless. Coalmount, an average coal town he’d explored by sled, now reminded
him of a place obliterated by a hurricane. Great hectic gashes were torn into the
storefronts; lampposts were ripped from their concrete; old burnt-out cars had been
turned pathetically onto their sides. Past the Food’N’Such grocery store (
tomato soup
, he thought, his chest clutching), Michael saw that the big, yellow school bus that
once had blockaded the street was now in two pieces, the metal shredded down the center
by some massive force. On the cramped Charleston streets and winding mountain roads,
the sheer number of the Shrieks’ footprints had been disguised by the Rapture’s own
tire tracks. But now, traveling through these wide-open ruins and taking the one and
only road out of Coalmount, Michael began to truly understand what it was he was steering
toward in this ghost’s world. Not just the Rapture. Every Bellow—
every one of the Bellows that had lain in every Charleston street
—had risen again as Shrieks and led this lunatics’ stampede, drawn by some dark instinctive
signal of the blood.
Every. Effing. One
. He tried to picture Them, but their sheer number somehow made it impossible.

A random memory occurred: lying in a whispering field of timothy grass when he was
a boy, asking Mom how many miles were in outer space.

Not miles,
she whispered. She had smiled for him.
It just goes and goes and goes,
she said.

The idea of infinity—both simple and unimaginable—had horrified him, somehow.

What’m I going to do? What?

But that was when the Hummer made a dramatic turn, and uphill, perhaps a mile away,
the mountain road ended with what
should
have been a gentle mountain peak.

But of course, the peak wasn’t there.

The gentle, heartbeat-measurement-like mountain range was killed dead, the summit
ripped away. In place of the apex, there was instead only a severe line of decapitation.

COALMOUNT MOUNTAINTOP QUARRY

“We’re here,”
Holly whispered.

Michael gulped, turning off the headlights, slowing to ten miles an hour.

Even with the headlamps off, there was light enough to steer by: an eerie glow shot
straight up from the earth ahead.
Like high school football-field lights.
It made him think of Ron, and there was one frightening, bitter moment when Michael
nearly burst into laughter at the thought that Ron had once been his ultimate idea
of evil.

The electric light radiated from the “decapitation” line, which marked the end of
both the road and the mountain’s ascent.

“It’s the quarry pit for the mine,”
Michael whispered. Which was supposed to, what, sound insightful?

What’s happening in there? What are they doing to Patrick?

As the Hummer inched up the mountain, the light filled the cab, sickly blue-white.
So effing
bright
. What if Rapture lookouts were watching?
At least the windshield’s bulletproof,
Michael told himself when his foot twitched on the brake.

I think.

Gravel ground underneath them. The pit was so wide as they approached—a quarter mile
at least—and the Shriek prints spread across the whole span of it. All the way to
the ledge. They’re all in that pit, Michael. And they’re going to come over it now,
now
, like poison boiling over the edge of a pot, because you were too slow, you’re not
good
, and Patrick is dead—

“Please what?” said Holly.

“Huh?” Michael replied, startled.

“You said please.” She sounded scared.

Michael’s teeth snapped together,
click
. “Nothing,” he said.

Finally, he stopped the Hummer a few feet from the rim of the quarry: close enough
that, if he sat up from his seat, he could look over the edge and see what was in
the pit. He had an urge to delay the moment, to think of something to say to Holly.

But Holly’s seat squeaked. She was already leaning forward.

“What the ass are they doing down there?”
she whispered, bewildered.

The Rapture, all still alive, were gathered in the crater in the earth. The walking-dead
worshippers, the dozen of them, stood at the far end of the excavated hollow. The
great oval crater—maybe a hundred feet deep and set on all sides with steeply cut
rock faces (they staggered down, like stairs outside a temple)—was illuminated by
enormous fluorescent light poles and dotted with mining equipment: cranes, conveyor
belts, load trucks, silos, miniature mountains of coal. It was all fossilized by the
snow.

But the Rapture weren’t looking at
any
of that.

They were gazing unmovingly in the other direction, into the blank face of rock wall
before them.

“Do you see him?” Michael said.

Holly scanned the crowd, then shook her head. “I don’t see Rulon either,” she said
softly. “Is it just me, or does it seem like the rest of them are
waiting
?”

Looking again, closer, at the wall, into which all the Shriek footprints funneled.
The wall, with a squat, square, black hole at the base of it.

The entrance to the mine.

“The Shrieks went into the mine,” he said.
And what was there to say hi to ’em?
Cady’s eyes, ancient and unfathomable, flashed again in Michael’s head. “And Rulon
must have taken Patrick in after them,” he finished.

Michael looked to Holly. This was a different game than they had known they would
have to play here.

But despite her fear, she would not blink.

“Then I guess that’s where we’re going,” she said.

God,
Michael thought. It was the spontaneous
goodness
that made it hard for him to find his voice. Whatever the anger and confusion that
had passed between them before, this was just
her
: good, despite the world.

“I don’t have a plan, Holly. We have to get into the mine, but I don’t know how. Maybe
I’ll just . . . ram through the Rapture with the car.” He tried to convince himself
that that was not the world’s stupidest suicide.

She reluctantly said, “Isn’t there gas in some mines, though? I mean, couldn’t the
car accidentally make us, y’know . . . ?” She made a “blow-up” motion with her hands.

“Maybe.”

She’s going to say:
that plan doesn’t make sense.

She’s going to say:
your stupid ideas aren’t good enough.

She said: “For those taking notes, that would have actually been an
okay
time to lie.” Holly half laughed weakly. Still hurt. Maybe still furious. But: a
peace offering.

Michael made a small smile.

Wished he could actually deserve the offer.

But what was the point in delaying? He began to lift his foot from the brake, then
paused. “If I don’t make it . . . tell Patrick I’m . . .”

You’re what
?
What are you, Michael?

“Tell him ‘I ya-ya.’”

Holly wrinkled her forehead:
You what, now?
“Nothing,” Michael replied, shaking his head, yanking the shift into
DRIVE
with his good hand. “When Bub was little-little, he couldn’t say ‘Love you.’ I just
wanted him to feel good about himself. You know? To make him feel normal. So I said
it—
ya-ya
—like him. I guess I thought . . .

“I thought I could make him feel ‘good’ enough that he really would become normal.”
He looked to her. “Holly, I’m sorry. I did that a whole freaking lot.”

Something strange—like a revelation—crossed Holly’s face.

But that was when they heard the knock, behind them, on the rear door of the Hummer.

Everything inside Michael jolted.

He spun in his seat, to look back through the sliding panel between the front and
rear compartments of the Hummer. But it was Holly who got the first look. Before he
could even see a single thing, Holly slid the panel closed.

Michael said, “What are y—”

“Listen to me.” And when she spoke, it was with beautiful, semi-crazed determination
on her face. “If
I
don’t make it, will you tell Michael that I hate that he lied.”

She was coming closer to him, so the skin of their noses nearly touched, so close
that, if he hadn’t been so shocked, he could have felt her breath—

“But the reason he lied? That’s the real him. And that, I honestly have a big ol’
crush on.”

Michael felt something in his chest seem to open up an inch.

And it happened.

There.

In the freezing Hummer, with the neon light flooding the cabin vivid and full: the
distance between them evaporated.

Holly put her hands on his space-suited chest, and then her lips were on top of his.

It did not feel like a cut-scene in a game; he didn’t feel like they were kissing
in front of a bursting sunset, or a victory field.

He closed his eyes, and he felt: her lips.

Warm. Dry, but wondrously soft.

And his heart was hammering like that of a panicked animal who has finally been cornered,
but when he opened his eyes, Holly’s lashes had parted, and her green eyes looked
at him, directly into and
at
him in the full-blast exposure of the light.

Holly’s lips twitched against his.
Smiling
.
She’s smiling.
Crazily, he thought:
Which means I’m good at this?
Gently, she broke away, and before he could say anything, she placed her warm, smooth
cheek to his.
“Michael-Michael-Michael.”
A whisper in his ear.
“I’ll trust you, if you’ll trust me.”

Michael blinked as she pulled back.
Trust you for . . . ?

Holly placed her hand dead center on the car horn, and pushed.

Hooonk!
it blatted through the quiet.
HONK-HONK! HONK-HONK-HOOOOOOOOONK!!!
so air-slappingly loud that it might as well have added a cartoony
Ah-ROOOO-ga!

“Holly what are you doing?!”

Awareness was rippling across the Rapture crowd in the quarry: heads turning, searching
for the source of the sound, looking at the sky,
looking at the Hummer.

Their surprise was blown
.

And Michael realized what Holly was doing only when he saw her hand reaching for his
door handle beside him.

The door that he’d been leaning on tilted away.

He tipped backward, gasping. He grabbed out but grabbed nothing, and flew out of the
car, landing on his hip in soaked, trampled snow.

“I lost Hank,” Holly shouted over the horn,
which she was still honking
. “I am
emphatically
not losing you guys, too!”

Michael lunged, but Holly transferred to the driver’s seat and pulled the door out
of his reach.

“Now,” she said, and offered him a heartbreakingly shaky smile, “let’s see that skinny
ass
move
.”

“ARE YOU INSA—”

The door slammed shut, the motor revved; the tires spun, ripped snow, caught hold.
Holly ignited the roof-mounted spotlights and flickered them like strobes. Michael
didn’t even get to stand: he was still stumbling up, screamingly shocked, when the
Hummer grabbed air over the edge of the canyon and missiled down the access road,
straight toward the Rapture below.

What are you doing?
Michael thought.
Stop her stop her go go go,
as he scrambled over the ledge, trailing Holly down the access road, impossibly far
behind.

The Hummer was flashing and honking and be-bopping back and forth. It skied, scattering
snow as it leveled out on the “ground floor” of the pit, clipping the rear bumper
of a
SOUTHERN WV COAL/GAS
dump truck. The deflated hot-air balloon, which had been knocking madly atop the
roof, finally snapped free of its retraints and pirouetted heavily to the ground.

Did Holly think she could just drive into the crowd and scatter them?
Oh crap, Holly you are wrong
: already on a hair trigger, the Rapture crowd burst apart when she got within fifty
feet, yeah, most of the men and women spreading like startled quail.

But some of the believers made their stand
.

Their machine guns rising, rising . . .

“NO!”

Thunder crashed across the crater.

Michael’d been right. The windshield
was
bulletproof.