by James Frey
I rolled my eyes. “I meant we practiced as if we were outnumbering them. Like there were going to be more of us, like this morning when Kat and I went after Raakel. We only beat her because there were two of us.”
“Guys,” Kat said. “How do we even know we’re going in the right direction?”
“Blood,” John said simply, and pointed at the roadway. “The Sumerian is bleeding.”
I hadn’t noticed, but now that I was looking for it, I could spot it on the street. Not a constant trail, but every ten steps or so there was a drop. As we went farther, the drops got bigger, more the size of smallish puddles. And then they turned into small, patterned impressions, like the blood was now on the bottom of his shoe. He would have to stop somewhere soon and wrap the wound, but—
Mary’s face came back to me, unexpectedly, filling my mind—just that image of her broken face, a face that I had kissed so many times. A girl who I once thought was mine. I’d been wrong. She’d played me for a fool, but I had still loved her. And now all I could see was her lifeless body, the gaping hole in her cheek.
I looked over at Kat, who glanced back at me and gave a weary smile.
The trail took us out of the Olympic Village and into the streets of downtown Munich.
“Look,” Kat said, pointing down a side street to where an ambulance was parked, surrounded by paramedics and one police officer. There was the Sumerian, sitting up, his back against the stone foundation of an old government building.
“Damn it,” John said. “Shit.”
“What?” I asked.
“The trail only leads to him. We don’t know where the others are.”
“Is he alive?” Kat asked.
We looked down at him, waiting for some movement. The Sumerian lifted a hand wearily.. He seemed to be desperately signaling for help.
John immediately started walking toward the emergency team, and Kat and I followed.
“What are we doing, John?” I asked. “There’s a cop there.”
“We have to kill all the Players,” he said, anger in his voice.
“Yeah,” I said, “but won’t it be easier to track him down at the hospital? Besides, look at him—he’s not going to make it much longer anyway. We should go after the others.”
“Don’t talk,” he said, and put a finger to his lips.
I exchanged a look with Kat and let go of her hand, getting ready in case I needed to pull the gun from my waistband.
“The Nabataean and the Harappan can’t be far. They’re trying to kill the Sumerian too, remember.”
I nodded. The two of them seemed the calmest under pressure. I didn’t imagine one of them would run from the other. They’d face off, sword versus spear, somewhere nearby. An alley, maybe, or a parking garage—somewhere out of the way, out of sight.
I didn’t know what John expected to do here. Kat’s hand was red with blood and the paramedics would likely want to treat her too. And the cop would be suspicious of the three of us.
If there was anything helping us today, it was the hostage crisis with the Palestinians and Israelis. The police probably had a lot of manpower surrounding the Olympians’ apartments, which would take a lot of cops off the streets. They were overwhelmed and couldn’t chase Players across the city.
“Where are we going after this?” Kat asked.
“We’re going to find the other two,” I said.
“That’s not what I meant. I mean when we’re done today. Where are we going? Not back home.”
“You speak German,” I said. “We could stay here.”
“How about England?” she said. “Forge some forms and get student visas.”
“If we’re going to forge papers anyway, let’s just get our citizenship.”
John again told us to be quiet. “Kat, talk in German. Pretend to be tourists.”
We were only twenty yards from the cop, and he turned to look up at us.
“Geh weg,” he said. “Dies ist ein Tatort.”
“Wir suchen für den Olympic plaza,” Kat replied.
“Gehen Sie weg; oder werden Sie verhaftet.”
The cop turned his back to us to speak to the paramedics, and John pulled out his gun.
“No!” I cried out, but my voice was covered by the sound of three gunshots. One for each paramedic and one for the cop.
“What are you doing?” Kat screamed.
“I’m finishing Endgame,” he said, walking up to the bodies. The Sumerian watched us through droopy eyes. John took the cop’s gun—a Sig Sauer—and held it out to me.
“Where are the others?” John asked the Sumerian.
“Fighting,” he said. “I have lost.”
I noticed now that he had a new injury—there was a half-bandaged wound on his torso.
“Where did they go?” John insisted.
The Sumerian shook his head, coughing up blood. He raised his hand slowly and pointed. “That way. They will be close. Neither is wounded, and they want to fight. Are you the pacifists?”
John stood up, shaking his head. He walked to the end of the narrow street.
“What do you mean?” Kat asked.
“Three Americans visited me this morning. They told me to stop fighting. They said all I had to do was walk away and never Play.”
Kat nodded emphatically. “Yes. That’s us.”
“I will walk away.”
Kat stretched the bandage around his side. “It’s deep,” she said. “I think you’ve got a punctured lung.”
“Move,” John said, returning. “I think they’re just a few blocks away. You can hear a crowd to the west.”
Kat stood up and reached into the ambulance for a box of bandages. I helped her, since she couldn’t use her right hand.
BANG!
I spun around to see John pointing a smoking gun at the Sumerian. There was a bullet hole in the kid’s forehead, and he began slumping over onto his side.
“What the hell was that for?” I shouted.
John looked back toward the cross street. “We’re killing all the Players. No mistakes.”
Kat threw the box onto the road. “He said he was going to walk away. He said he was going to stop.”
I pointed my gun—the cop’s gun—at John. “What happened to all of our rules? What happened to trying to talk to the Players?”
“Of course he would say he was going to stop. We had him defenseless and injured. He was saying what he needed to say to survive.”
“You’ve made me a murderer, John,” I said. “I was just a college kid. I just wanted to make a difference. I wanted to protest the war. I wanted to get out from under my dad’s thumb. And this is where we end up? Shooting a wounded teenager in the street?”
“You’ve known what we were about since day one,” he said, tucking his gun into the back of his pants. “You just pretended that we could do this without killing.”
“I pretended? I pretended? You asked me to write the dialogues. You had me train the others on how to sell, how to build a relationship of trust with the Players. You told me to do that, and now you’re saying I was pretending?”
“We have to stop them all,” John said, looking back over his shoulder. “They’ve killed enough of us. They killed Mary—didn’t you see that? And now we outnumber them again. Three on two, and soon it may be three on one, if the Harappan and the Nabataean are really trying to kill each other.”
“We don’t know what they’re trying to do,” Kat said. “We don’t know where they are.”
“Follow the sirens. Speaking of which, we need to get out of here.”
I was fuming. “Yeah, because of your gunshot.”
“Yes,” he said, turning back to face me. “Yes, because of my gunshot. We’re killing them all. Every Player. And if you don’t like that, then you should have damn well said it three months ago. When you killed that sheriff, you knew what you were in for. Every time you sighted down your gun at the range, you knew that you were preparing for war. You could have left at any
time, but you didn’t. You stayed, and you trained right along with the rest of us. You delivered the invitations, and you killed the Minoan. You’re a part of this, Mike, whether you like it or not, so don’t act like you’re morally superior. Do what you need to do to get your head straight, but do it now, because we’re going to end this game.”
I kept my gun on him for a long ten seconds.
“It’s okay,” Kat said, putting her hand gently on my back. “Let’s get it over with. When we’re done, we won’t have to see John ever again. We won’t have to think about this ever again. For all we know, the Players are killing each other right now anyway. We can do this, and get it over with, and leave. You and me. Together.”
I let out a long breath and then lowered the gun.
“Come on, then,” John said. “I think they went this way.”
We ran to the left down the cross street. I was getting lost, not knowing which way was north or south, east or west. I just followed John and held Kat’s hand.
How were we supposed to stay in this country? We’d spoken easily about forging papers, but it was Barbara and Douglas who had done all of that, and they hadn’t come back from their mission to kill the Olmec Player.
As we walked behind John, I pulled the walkie-talkie out of my backpack. I sent a call out on our channel.
“Anyone listening, this is Mike. Does anyone copy?”
There was static.
“This is Mike,” I said again. “Anyone listening?”
Nothing.
“Maybe their walkie-talkie is turned off,” Kat said. “Or in a backpack, like ours was. We need to get back to the safe house.”
We walked on, hearing sirens here and there but not seeing anything. These streets were so narrow that I wondered if John was actually following a real sound or just echoes.
“Do we know who that sniper was working for?” I asked John.
“I couldn’t tell. His face was dark, but I don’t know if that was because of his skin color or because of camouflage paint. He was doing a really good job of hiding on that roof.”
“So he could be either Nabataean or Harappan, right?”
“Or none of the above,” Kat said. “Besides, he’s dead. Or she’s dead. I thought she looked like a girl when she fell.”
“But if she was, say, Nabataean, that would mean that the Nabataeans are cheating by bringing along extra combatants. There could be another up here somewhere, ready to take us down.”
“Could be,” John said, and then he held up his hand and made a fist—the sign to stop.
Kat and I froze, watching and waiting while John moved forward to look around the end of a building. He stopped, and his hand went to his gun. I grabbed mine, and Kat awkwardly took hers in her left hand. We slowly moved around the edge of the building, following John’s lead.
I could hear the fight now, the scrape of metal on wood, the heavy breathing and grunting of exhausted combatants.
And then I saw them.
It was a wide avenue, with a wide island in the middle of the street. Among the trees, benches, and flowers, the Nabataean and Harappan were locked in an epic battle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We weren’t the only ones watching the fight. I could see faces in the windows up and down the street. And outside, there were onlookers watching from what they must have considered was a safe distance—but as soon as they saw our guns, they began to clear out. There was a siren coming from somewhere down the road, out of sight behind buildings and trees.
The Harappan was whirling, a blur with his curved sword. The Nabataean was standing mostly still, parrying each strike with his spear—about two inches in diameter, and made of some very hard wood, it was hardly getting nicked by the sword. But the Nabataean was on the defensive, backing up as the Harappan was advancing.
John fired, hitting the Harappan in the chest—he fell back onto the stone. The Nabataean turned back to see us, and he ran for the cover of a newsstand. John and I fired at him as he ran, but he was fast and out of view almost immediately. A motorcycle cop appeared at the end of the road—John took a couple of shots in his direction, and the bike slid out from underneath him. The cop crawled for the cover of a parked car.
I couldn’t see anyone from where I was—the Harappan had disappeared under the shrubbery, and the Nabataean was well hidden.
“Both of you,” John said, “go to the far side and work your way up.”
“The Nabataean’s the last,” I said, and nodded. That side was where the newsstand was.
“I don’t know,” John said. “Did you hear the ping? The Harappan’s wearing a barrier vest. Bulletproof, I think.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. We’d never practiced shooting at targets with bulletproof vests.
“It means I wish I still had my Kalashnikov. Pistols at this range won’t penetrate. Either get closer, or shoot for the head.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What about the cop?” Kat asked.
“Will you just get going?”
Kat glanced at my face, and our eyes met for a moment; then we crossed the street, running in a low crouch. The road was lined with shops with large front windows. I kept my shoulder against the glass as I moved up, looking for a sign of either Player.
The cop shouted something in German that I didn’t understand.
“Do I have to know what that was?” I asked Kat without turning to look at her.
“‘Stop’ and ‘surrender,’ I think. High school German didn’t cover this kind of vocabulary.”
John was opposite us, on the other side of the street, moving cautiously, his gun in a solid two-hand grip. He moved with confidence. He looked like a soldier. I imagined I looked like an idiot. I looked like a target.
Suddenly the Harappan was on his feet again, throwing something at John. John fired back at him, and glass on our side of the street exploded into a million little pieces. I ducked and scrambled to take cover by a lamppost. I lined up my sights on the Harappan—John was downrange, but not in my sight line, and I decided to take the shot.
Without a noise I was smashed to the ground.
The Nabataean had swung his heavy spear like a seven-foot-long baseball bat, and it had knocked me to the sidewalk.
Dazed, I saw Kat fire wildly with her pistol—her left hand shook despite trying to hold it steady with her wounded arm. But as I lay on the ground, I saw the big man pause and reach for his chest. Blood was dribbling down from his sternum, soaking his shirt.
He raised the spear one last time, threw it, and fell to his knees. He said something in a foreign language and then collapsed to the street.
The cop was up, gun out, yelling at the Harappan and John.
I turned back to Kat.
CHAPTER NINE
The spear had buried itself deep into Kat’s chest, exiting through her back so that she was halfway sitting up. Blood was everywhere. So fast, it was pouring from her body. So much blood.
“Kat,” I called, and scrambled through the broken glass to get to her. “Kat, no.”
She was gone. There was no life in her eyes, and I grabbed her throat to feel for a pulse, but there was nothing. The spear had gone straight through her heart, piercing her like she was a piece of paper.
No last words. No good-byes.
She had killed him and he had killed her.
And there was nothing left of me.
CHAPTER TEN
I could hear shooting, distant and unimportant.
I touched Kat’s face. She was so pale, all color rushing out of her as she bled.
“Kat,” I said again, wanting to put my arms around her, but blocked by the mammoth spear. She shouldn’t have come. When her arm got cut, she should have stayed in the hospital. She should have stayed at the safe house. She shouldn’t have been here, backing me up.
Somehow I had lost track of the Nabataean. Stupid. I’d been so stupid. I’d known where he’d gone, where he was hiding, but I’d focused on the Har
appan. Shooting at the Player who was threatening John, not the one who was only a few yards from me. It had been stupid, and Kat had paid for my stupidity. She’d killed him, her last act on Earth, but it hadn’t been enough. If I’d kept my eyes on the edge of the newsstand, I could have shot as soon as he’d come out of hiding.
But I hadn’t. I’d kept my eyes on everything but that.
I looked back at John, but he was gone. The Harappan was gone. The policeman lay dead in the bushes. I wondered who had killed him. It didn’t matter, I guessed. Someone had done it, and John and the Harappan were continuing their battle elsewhere. I wasn’t going to chase them down and find out. John was a Green Beret. He could handle the Harappan. We’d have won: all the Players were dead.
I looked at Kat. Her eyes were open, and I reached out to close them, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her again. I turned away and tried to think of my other memories of her—of her smile, of her laughter, of her kisses.
But all I saw was her contorted face. Her dead eyes. Her blood on the sidewalk.
More sirens.
I dropped my gun on the ground and stood up. I half expected to see John’s body lying across the way, but there was only the cop’s.
The windows were filled with faces, and as I turned around, searching for a sign of John, they all just focused on me, perhaps unafraid, maybe foolish. Maybe they’d seen me drop my gun. Maybe they could see into my heart and know that I wasn’t going to fight again. That I was done. That my part in the Endgame legends was coming to an end.
I started to jog away, then broke into a full sprint. I didn’t know where I was, so I couldn’t know where I was going, but I tried to pick the least-busy streets and alleys. I tried to run in the opposite direction of the sirens, but there were sirens everywhere. It sounded like it was going to be an impossible task to avoid them, but I would do what I could.
I was going for the safe house. Maybe there would be someone there. I didn’t really care. I was going for the money we had stashed in a communal fund. I was going to take what was left and get on a train and get out of Munich—out of Germany altogether. Maybe, I thought, I’d go back to Turkey. We hadn’t encountered any notable security while we were there, and the cost of living was low—the money at the safe house could easily support me for a year, maybe more. I didn’t even try to think of anything further away than a year. In the last hour I’d just seen people I cared about die in horrible ways. I didn’t need anyone new in my life right now. I’d be a hermit. Maybe I’d get a job on a fishing boat, or in a café. I’d learn more of the language. I’d fade into the background.
