The End Games (9 page)

“It’s your weapon, buddy. If you see any Bellows, zap ’em with the light.”

Patrick took his hand away from his mouth, hesitating. He gulped. “Can I be Woody
instead?”

And Patrick,
yes-yes
, took the light and gun. And satisfaction and relief blossomed in Michael as Patrick
stepped back, at least for a second, from the ledge inside himself that wanted to
swallow him whole.

They reached the interstate’s even plain. Cars and big rigs clogged the two-lane,
cast ascatter like spilled toys.

Creatures within the big rigs’ cargo hulls screamed.

Cargo hulls’ doors roared open to the new nightfall.

Michael did not breathe and his blood soared through him, and he seamlessly slalomed
the Volvo through the just-wide-enough gaps between wrecks.

But you can’t outrun Rulon’s maniacs here,
Michael saw—not thought, but
imaged.
Gun to heart or pedal to floor: that was how it always worked. A plan, fully formed,
flashbulbed in his mind, and its brilliant light seemed to transform the world around
him into something like a high-definition video-game screen shot, an impromptu tutorial,
with arrows and highlights and clues indicating what path to take.

Too many cars,
Michael saw.

So, you stop your car.

And hide from the maniacs, in the woods past the interstate guardrail. Climb up a
tree and wait it out. Then come back to the interstate in the morning and follow the
road to the Safe Zone. To Game Over.

And maybe even to Mom—

“Bub, how ’bout a bike ride?”

“Huh?” Patrick began, but Michael shouted,
“Hold on to something!”
and crushed the brake.

He did not know why
. The
yes-yes
was telling him to, that was all.

The car screamed over the frozen concrete, and when it finally came to a stop, Michael
understood.

His headlights revealed the bottom of a flipped eighteen-wheeler, perhaps ten yards
ahead. A dozen Bellows crawled over the underparts, glistening like wasps. If he hadn’t
braked, either the Bellows or the wreck would have ended him.

He wasn’t psychic, that wasn’t it. Just accustomed to the terrible. Very much so.
Just ask Ron.

The remaining motorcyclists were still a half mile back, negotiating the traffic tangles.
Michael hooked his .22 caliber over his shoulder and carried Patrick from the Volvo.

Michael unbungeed the mountain bike from the back of the car, Patrick still piggyback,
then guided the bike through stalled cars toward the guardrail on the side of the
interstate, taking out, with his rifle, two Bellows who followed from the eighteen-wheeler.

When they reached the guardrail, Michael put the car keys in his pocket, and something
deep inside of him seemed to tear. He and Mom had gone to Myrtle Beach a thousand
times in that car, back when it was just the two of them.

“Michael? Why’re you sad?” Patrick asked, leaning over Michael’s shoulder and peering
at his expression with growing dread in his voice.

God, he sees everything. Control yourself.

“I’m not,
pfff
,” Michael said, and turned toward the guardrail.

The falling darkness beyond the railing: a sheer downhill slope, mohawked clear of
trees in the middle where power lines were strung, dense Bellow-sounding woodlands
surrounding the empty lane on both sides.

It looked like a path off the edge of the known world. Like a void, waiting to swallow
him.

No. No. I’ve done worse,
Michael told himself. That ride had been when he was thirteen, and the bike had been
his birthday present. In his pickup, Ron had taken Michael to the top of a mountain-bike
trail in the city park. “Well go ’head,” he’d said, and seemed a thousand miles tall,
his smell like sweat and strong coffee, the sun glinting the gem of his championship
football ring. But the trail was nasty, snarled with roots. “Your mother and I worked
hard for this bike. If you think we got money layin’ around, you can go on back to
dreamin’,” Ron said, seeing Michael’s hesitation. “Do you know what
hard work
is, Michael-boy?”

“I—”

“Oh, did I know
you’d
pull this shit. You ain’t sittin’ on your ass with your damn video games all day
while your mother and I work. A boy should
want
to ride his bike. Don’t you think that’s what real boys want?” Ron was a bomb. Yes,
he was a bomb, and that was the first time Michael lit him. But when Michael’s tears
threatened—
tears a
real
boy would never have,
he thought—Ron said softly, “’Course, maybe the problem is, this boy’s
really
becoming a
man
.” The hairy hand Ron placed on Michael’s shoulder had felt amazing, like everything
that was powerful and mysterious and special about grown-ups. How easy it is to believe
in kindness when you are young and your world has not yet ended. So Michael rode the
trail.

He spent the rest of his birthday in the emergency room, his collarbone broken in
two places.

But that was before,
Michael told himself.
Back when I still thought he was safe. Before I realized I had to, like, take scary
things and use them.

This wasn’t a suicide run. This was a hill made of Awesome and Getaway.

Michael lifted Patrick into the kid’s seat mounted on the back of the bike. God, he
felt so small.

“We’re gonna hafta go purty fast,” Michael said. “Sooo guess who gets to control our
headlights?”

Michael demonstrated, turning the flashlight on behind the binoculars, so that a single
beam entered the back of the binocs and twin pipes of bright shot out the front.

Patrick smiled a little, in awe. He put the orange toy gun into his pocket, took the
light and binoculars from Michael.

The riders—Michael did not see Rulon among them—reached the Volvo, dismounting and
searching the car in the light of their headlamps. Michael got shakily onto his own
bike. He was toeing silently forward when Patrick screamed:

“
Wait! Michael! Ultraman!
I forgotted him!
”

One of the riders shouted,
“
Oh Lord! There! The side of the road!”

“I got him in my pocket,” Michael lied.

And he pushed off.

The mountain
whooshed.

One instant they were on flat; the next, the world tilted up in a misty punch of snow.
The drop was far steeper than it had looked, and the snowstorm thick enough to blind.
But Michael focused desperately on the adrenaline-sick pulse hammering in his throat—

And he twisted around the crawling Bellow, leaning into his turn, and it felt that
he was leaning onto air just firm enough to hold him gently up.

He smiled without realizing it.
Yes-yes
, this was chuckling at gravity. This was, in the depths of insanity and wrong, perfectly
right.

Exhilaration.

Freedom.

Control.

“Left-left-left!”
he said breathlessly, and Patrick shot light upon a Bellow emerging from the woods.

“Reach fer the skyyyyy!”
Patrick cried in his cowboy voice.

The Bellow screamed and fell and sledded down the mountain on its back.

“Nice shootin’, Tex!”
Michael heard himself say, and his brother laughed, clapping happily on his back.
And Michael remembered joy.

Now came the first four-wheeler, following, flying over the guardrail.

Its headlight hung wildly among the treetops to their left, then landed down in the
snow.

Michael hooked the bike into the tree line. Here the moonlight faded, so the forest
was a maze of shadow. A hundred trees seemed to blast into existence just beyond his
handlebars— dangerous, ah, and thank you very much for that. Michael jabbed the handlebars,
surging between the trees like a missile.

The four-wheeler entered the woods, its headlight whipping side to side as it copied
Michael’s path.

Up ahead came what Michael had hoped for: a thick collection of trees, their trunks
so tight they’d be impossible to steer through—

—except for him.

He wove straight through,
so close he felt the bark brush his sleeves, and an instant later the four-wheeler
tried to follow and an instant after that, the four-wheeler crashed.

“Newb!” Michael crowed.

Go.

Go.

This is mine.

I can bike every mile of moonlit snow in the world.

Chase me, ’cause me and my brother?

We. Can. Run. Forever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Michael shot out of the trees, into the clear lane between the two sides of forest,
and it began to occur to him that, despite the three motorcycle-riding crazies still
coming down the snow-covered mountain for him, he was really going to make it. He
was going to be safe. He would find the Others that Rulon had mentioned, and sometime—maybe
soon—he was going to make it to the Safe Zone and The End.
No more secrets,
he thought.
No more lying all the time. I won’t have to
do
this anymore.
He was going to find Mom, and everything since Halloween and after it—all the time
away, all the battles with Bellows—would be worth it.

He was thinking those things when he gasped, because he saw something wonderful ahead
that blazed through him like light.

Charleston,
he thought breathlessly.
That is
Charleston.

Down the mountain, in the valley a mile below, Michael saw a golden dome, tiny from
here, lit up like a Christmas tree. Spotlights beside the Capitol building traced
into the sky, blotting out the starlight.

“Patrick! Bub,
it’s the Safe Zone
!” Michael said.

Patrick gaped over his shoulder, going,
“Whoa-ho-ho!”
in amazement.

“
We’re going to win—” Michael began.

He saw the coming threat at the last, last second. A buck, a deer, hugely antlered
and explosively fast, had cut in front of him. Michael yanked the handlebars, and
felt his bike tipping with a slow, gummy, nightmare awareness.

The bike collided with the ground, hurling snow, its leftover speed carrying them
forward. Patrick cried out; Michael felt him slip away.

Get the bike!
Michael thought even as he barrel-rolled violently through the snow.
Keep going!
He sat up, his eyes stinging with snow. “It’s okay, Bub!” he said. Half blinded,
he was patting the ground, looking for the bike. . . .

The ground vanished beneath his hand.

Cliff.

Michael felt a screaming vertigo and paddled backward.

“Michael!”
Patrick called, a few steps behind him . . . which Michael could see because of the
light of the motorcycles, which had stopped maybe fifty feet back.

The Bellows were coming from the tree line, too, behind Patrick. Many of them glistened
and crackled, their limbs lined with ice.

We’re trapped.

The men on the motorcycles stepped off their bikes, stamping toward them through the
snow.

Michael ran to Patrick, held onto Patrick, his heart thudding, and he felt his blood,
and—

And, he didn’t move.

He didn’t run.

“Help us, Michael,” Patrick said. “
Please
.”

Standing between the coming killers and the edge of the world, with no place to flee,
something happened. Michael felt his own breath course down his raw throat, his blood
rushing through his terror-stoked heart . . . and a feeling he couldn’t name enveloped
him.

It’s fine,
said the strange feeling.

It was deafening, inside.

But it was, too, amazingly, purely calm.

And strong: so strong that it didn’t seem to come from him, as
yes-yes
did, but
through
him. It was a voice so immense and
not him
that the instructions could have originated in the stars. And the voice was telling
Michael what to do.

Wait,
it said.
Just wait.

What?
his mind protested.
Why?!

“Michael, what are you doing?” Patrick said.

Wait.

“Michael—”
Patrick cried,
“Michael, what is that?!”

Michael turned, expecting to see the city. But something had taken the city away.

Awe and dread overpowered him.

Oh my God.

Over the cliff, something was rising: an orb, like the dark twin of the true moon.

“What is that?” Patrick breathed. “Is that
real
?”

“It’s real, Bub. It’s . . .”

The orb ignited.

“A hot-air balloon,” said Michael.

And it was.

CHAPTER NINE

They stood there while the shadow eclipsed them.

Why the balloon had arrived or where it came from: mysteries.

But, a fact: the balloon was a jack-o’-lantern.

Up from the cliff’s edge came twin black-hole eyes, a great triangle nose, a huge,
magic, maniac, Cheshire-cat smile. The rising aircraft smelled of fire. Snow fell
onto the canvas and hissed away as strings of steam. That hiss—like a cat, recoiling—was
the only sound.

This is going to scare Bub!
Michael thought. The panic overrode him, deleting the strange, certain feeling he’d
possessed a moment before.

But Patrick surprised him: the balloon reflected in his eyes, and he gazed upward
with cautious happiness, like a child playing peekaboo.

“
Whose
balloon?” he said.

Someone must have ignited it. But there wasn’t anyone in the pilot’s position. The
basket was empty.