Endgame: Rules of the Game

by James Frey

  “Yes.”

  “It has a suicide vest in it.”

  “Dirty?”

  “More.” BLINKSHIVERBLINKBLINK. “Nuclear.”

  “Ah. The Maker shouldn’t be able to survive a point-blank explosion that big.”

  “No. Even I have faith in some things.”

  “The Church of Immaculate Demolition.”

  An cracks a smile but doesn’t laugh. “That’s right. I Play for death.”

  “And I do too,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  They don’t talk for a quarter hour. The road is mostly straight here, but then they round a turn and Nori Ko taps the brakes. “Shit. Checkpoint. About half a kilometer.”

  An thrusts his head next to hers. “How many?”

  Nori Ko squints. “Four cars. At least as many officers.”

  “Police or army?”

  “Looks like police.” She downshifts the Defender. “You’ll have to hide under something.”

  An climbs into the passenger seat. “No, I won’t.” He counts five—no, six—officers. All standing around in slick rain gear. They look bored. One is on a radio. Two others smoke, their hands cupped over the orange ends of their cigarettes. One officer looks up, throws his cigarette to the ground, moves to the center of the road. Waves a hand back and forth demonstratively.

  An flips open the panel on the dashboard that hides the car’s grenade launcher. He presses the left button and slides his fingers over the pistol grip. He grabs the steering wheel with his other hand and jerks it from Nori Ko.

  “Hey!” she protests. The car snaps left. An pulls the trigger. He releases the wheel as a white arc traces forward, the projectile clanking into one of the police cars and then rolling in a tight spiral on the pavement. The cops scatter as they anticipate the explosion, but the one in the middle of the road plants his legs and draws his pistol and begins firing.

  “Speed up,” An says calmly, the slugs glancing off the bulletproof glass, none of them hitting the wipers that swish back and forth.

  Nori Ko does as she’s told.

  The grenade goes off. But it doesn’t explode in a ball of fire like the one in Kolkata. Instead it lights up brightly and falls open and the police cars’ twirling cherry lights go out. In fact, all of the cars’ lights go out—the white headlamps, the red taillights, the yellow parking lights.

  “EMP?” Nori Ko asks.

  An doesn’t say anything, but Nori Ko sees his head snap in the affirmative.

  Nori Ko chuckles. “I suppose they won’t be calling for backup, then.”

  “No,” An says. “They won’t.”

  The police peek from behind cover. The Defender isn’t more than 100 meters away.

  An opens his window. Air rushes in. “Slow down,” he says over the sound of the wet road.

  He casually hoists the Beretta to his shoulder and sticks it outside. Rain splashes onto the weapon and his arm. He aims quickly and pulls the trigger. A casing sails into his lap, a police officer twirls and falls, the back of his head gone. The cop in the center of the road adjusts his aim to get a bead on An, but Nori Ko turns slightly so the front of the car shields the Shang. An fires three more times at the scrambling officers, and three more officers die. The only cops left are the one in the road and another who’s abandoning her post, running as fast as she can south across a field of waist-high grass.

  “Stop,” An says.

  Nori Ko hits the brakes. The Defender swings 90 degrees, rocking to a halt and straddling the centerline of the road. The officer fires at will, aiming directly for Nori Ko’s stoic face. He empties his magazine into the glass, not understanding why his bullets aren’t doing anything. Nori Ko almost feels sorry for him.

  An exits on the sheltered side of the Defender, rifle in hand. He drops to the ground and, shooting below the undercarriage, lets off a burst. The bullets hit the man above his feet. He falls into a heap, screaming, reaching for his shredded ankles. His hands come up soaking red.

  Nori Ko shakes her head.

  What a Player, she thinks.

  An swings his rifle to the field. The fleeing officer is about 50 meters away, the swaying grass above her hips. A torso and a head and pumping fists bobbing up and down, up and down. Alive and scared.

  Fool, An thinks. She should drop and hide among the greenery.

  But fear clouds her mind and she runs instead. He flips open the scope’s covers. Sights through it. Tucks the rifle into his shoulder. She moves in and out of the crosshair. He exhales.

  Let her go, Chiyoko says.

  A SHIVER rattles his stomach but doesn’t rise into his arms or hands. His eye is unblinking. He presses the trigger. The officer is thrown forward with the shot. A bloody mist pops in the rain like a firework and then is washed away.

  No one gets away, An thinks.

  He turns to the downed officer in the road. Walks forward. Nori Ko puts the Defender in first and creeps along. An reaches the officer, a fresh-faced young man not much older than he is. The officer’s mouth is drawn shut in a tight line. His eyes are red and full of anger. His eyelashes are clumped together from rain and tears. The man spits, but the gob of phlegm misses An’s pant leg and lands in a puddle. An smiles. He places the muzzle on the man’s forehead. The skin turns pink around the metal. Water runs down the barrel and onto flesh.

  “You!” the man says.

  “Yes.”

  Nori Ko honks the horn. “Come on!” she calls from inside the Defender.

  “They’ll find you,” the man says.

  “No, they won’t.”

  “I see you. Someone else will too. They’ll find you and—”

  The final shot rings over the countryside.

  Nori Ko honks again.

  An gets in and they leave.

  Nori Ko wants to light the cigarette, and badly. Screw it, she thinks. She digs in her pocket and pulls out a lighter and flicks it on and holds it to her sweet-smelling Golden Bat. Her cheeks glow orange. She smokes noisily, making a show of enjoying it.

  “Open your window,” An says, but Nori Ko already is. Fresh air whisks the smoke away.

  “Can we take back roads to Zhao’s pyramid?” An asks, releasing the Beretta’s magazine and checking it.

  “I think so,” Nori Ko answers, swiping at her phone’s map once more, trying to hide that her hand is shaking.

  “Good.” An opens the glove compartment and takes out a box of ammunition. He snaps new rounds into the cartridge one at a time.

  Click, click, click.

  “I don’t want any more of that today.” He holds a single brass-colored round between his thumb and forefinger. “I want to save these for the Nabataean.”

  He pushes it into place.

  Click.

  “He better not be there before us, Nori Ko.”

  And she understands perfectly. Because if he is, then An Liu is going to try to kill me too.

  She takes another pull off the cigarette. She blows the blue smoke out of the side of her mouth, aiming it at An.

  She says, “Don’t worry. He won’t be.”

  SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC

  En route to Monks Mound, Collinsville, Illinois, United States

  Sarah and Jago fly out of Thailand on an initial heading of 009˚ 35' 26". After double-checking to make sure their plane didn’t get hit during takeoff, they spoke to Hilal and Shari and Aisling to make sure they got away safely too. They did. They synchronized their watches to Zulu time and reiterated when they would check back in. They wished one another good luck and said good-bye and that was it.

  For at least the next two or three days, Sarah and Jago will be on their own.

  And they couldn’t be happier.

  They pass over Laos, China, Mongolia, Russia. The Asian air is empty of other aircraft and, in the immediate aftermath of Abaddon, still normal-looking. They enjoy clear skies and unlimited visibility. They encounter very little turbulence and virtually no communication from ground contr
ollers, all of whom accept Jordan’s top-secret clearance codes without question.

  Their heading turns easterly as nighttime settles in. They trace over the Arctic Ocean and see signs of life on the surface below—the orange twinkle of far-flung Siberian settlements and the white glow of ships plying the cold, dark waters. Signs that things perhaps are not so bad on the surface below.

  Both Players remember that night at the Calling, when kepler 22b showed them an image of a scarred and ravaged Earth, promising that this was what their planet would look like at the conclusion of Endgame. And both Players think: Maybe, just maybe, Abaddon won’t be that bad. Maybe the kepler was wrong.

  The plane’s navigation system works as it’s meant to—meaning that the GPS satellites orbiting 20,000 miles above Earth haven’t been swept away by the asteroid—so nine hours into the flight they activate the autopilot and go to the spacious cabin. The chairs are huge. The tables are wide. The bathroom is stately, there’s no other word for it. And, best of all, there’s a bed.

  Sarah is exhausted and teeming with nerves, but she also wants to feel what it’s like to forget. Jago wants it too. They stand shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, staring at the bedcovers for a few moments.

  “Action or oblivion,” she whispers, lacing her fingers into his. “Those are the only things I want now, Jago. To stop Endgame, or to have my memory wiped clean.”

  He wraps an arm over her shoulder. His lips touch the curl of her ear as he whispers, “I could say maybe the cheesiest bedroom line ever right now, Alopay.”

  “What’s that?” she asks coyly.

  “I can’t. It would ruin the mood, what little there is.”

  He helps her out of her shirt and peels her legs out of her jeans and she sighs when he inexplicably fumbles with her bra’s clasp and then he takes off his own clothing eagerly and clumsily and she sees how young he really is, how young she is, how for all their experience—with each other, and Jago’s with other women, and hers with Christopher—even with all they know about the world and their bodies and their physical limits, she sees and she feels and she knows just how young they are, and how foolish. While he’s on top of her, being careful of her arm, and deliberate with his movements, while she’s enjoying the attention and the sensation and fulfillment of her immediate desire, she realizes why it is that the Players are required to be young. Until then she thought it was so they could have long leaderships as they helped to guide and repopulate a broken planet, but the real reason must be because only young people are so sure of themselves and so willfully foolish. Especially the young Players of Endgame, who are taught from the beginning that they’re special—no, unique—as if all of their received wisdom and training could wring their foolishness out of them. But now Sarah sees that really, it’s their foolishness that is exactly what’s being counted upon by the perpetrators of Endgame.

  She wonders if the Makers were likewise as foolish at some point in their cognitive development. She wonders if true wisdom runs through their veins now. Because for all of her own foolishness—which led her to kill Christopher, which allowed her to believe that she was responsible for finding Earth Key, which drove her so quickly into Jago’s arms—she also sees in her heart some wisdom. Baitsakhan, he was foolish. But he was also 13. Jago, Hilal, Aisling, Shari—probably Chiyoko too—these are not foolish people. Not necessarily wise, but not only foolish, and each of them is proof that the Makers have miscalculated.

  Maybe they should have started Endgame sooner.

  She wonders if kepler 22b thinks something similar. She wonders if he might possibly be worried about whether Endgame will go the way he wants it to go.

  These thoughts fly through her mind in rapid succession, but then she refocuses on Jago. She kisses him fully and clumsily and tugs at his lower lip with her teeth. Jago, who is so humanly unpretty and so strong and also so tender. He kisses back, and keeps moving, and within moments she’s gone.

  There it is.

  Oblivion.

  Sweet, sweet oblivion.

  She stays gone—they stay gone—until they’re finished. Probably not more than a few minutes, but while they’re there it feels stretched out and all-encompassing and timeless.

  Afterward she pulls a sheet over their bodies and she falls into a deep sleep. She’s shaken awake as the plane passes through some rough chop and Jago sits bolt upright.

  She rubs her eyes. “How long was I out?”

  “Not very long. Maybe an hour.”

  “You sleep at all?”

  “Mmm, no.” The plane flies smoothly again and he lies back down. “Mainly I was doing more cheesy things.”

  “Like?”

  “Watching you.”

  “Creepy.”

  “Sí.”

  Pause.

  “What were you going to say before?”

  “¿Cuándo?”

  “Before. The bedroom line.”

  “Ah. I was going to say, ‘I can give you action and oblivion, Sarah Alopay.’”

  “Super creepy!”

  He shrugs. “Would’ve said it in Spanish at least. ‘Yo puedo dar acción y olvido.’ Everything sounds better in Spanish.”

  She pushes her hip into his thigh. “Yeah, it does.”

  The plane jostles again but this time it doesn’t stop. Jago bounds out of bed in a T-shirt and underwear and zips to the cockpit. Sarah goes to the bathroom. She has to hold onto the handle as she pees. She removes a robe from a hook and pulls it over her shoulders, keeping her injured arm underneath the plush terrycloth. She works her way through the cabin, her good hand grasping for things to help her stay upright. When she reaches the cockpit she plops into the copilot chair and buckles in, shoulder belts included.

  What emerges in the distance is bewildering.

  They’re well over 3,000 miles away from the eastern United States, but it doesn’t matter.

  It’s there.

  Abaddon is as bad as kepler 22b said it would be.

  There is no horizon in the east. The entire expanse from top to bottom is black, like a hole punched through the sky and earth. The only light comes from high-altitude lightning flashing constantly and everywhere over the reaches of Canada, and while it’s a ways off, they’re going to be flying through this storm soon.

  “It’s going to get rough,” Jago says, flicking switches and punching commands into the touch screen, disabling the autopilot.

  “I know. We can handle it.”

  For the next several hours they fly through or over a succession of terrible storms, each growing in intensity. They stay in the cockpit and don’t sleep as they white-knuckle it across Canada. Somewhere over Saskatchewan they lose contact with the external GPS systems and are forced to fly by instruments alone, hoping that by the time they reach the small airport Hilal marked for them, everything will be working again, otherwise they’re not sure they’ll be able to find it. As they cross the US border they manage to reconnect to the satellites overhead, but for the rest of the flight this connection remains erratic and unreliable. They get a few automated pings from ground control systems in North Dakota, and they answer these with Jordan’s codes, but otherwise they have no indication that anyone on the ground is tracking or even aware of them.

  Dawn arrives but the sun does not. The sky barely brightens. A little light leaks through the gas and ash directly overhead, but otherwise it’s as if the world has been dipped in smoky ink. Sarah expected the eastern side of the country to be like this but not the western too, and for a while neither she nor Jago can figure out why it’s happening. The jet stream should be blowing everything Abaddon has kicked up over the Atlantic, not over the plains.

  And then, somewhere over Nebraska, they understand.

  The plane flies into a pocket of decent visibility, and when they look west they see the contours of a massive plume of ash, several hundred miles across, billowing from the Rockies like it’s being vented from the depths of hell. The plume rises so high that it looks as i
f it reaches into space itself. Every now and then crooked streaks of blue and purple lightning web through it, or the plume glows with a fiery orange light that’s quickly snuffed out.

  “The Yellowstone Caldera,” Sarah says. “It blew. Jesus Christ, it fucking blew.” She turns to Jago, her face pale. “My family’s down there somewhere, Feo.”

  “Countless other families are relying on us right now, Sarah.”

  She ignores this. “I want to see them.”

  “You can’t. Not yet.”

  She almost protests—they went to his family, didn’t they?—but he’s right. They can’t take a detour. Action or oblivion, she thinks. Running to Mom and Dad is neither.

  “All right, but I do want to see them eventually.”

  Jago can’t argue with that.

  Her thoughts of home are interrupted when their visibility returns to zero and they slam into a wall of turbulent air that lasts the rest of Nebraska. The jostling reaches a crescendo over a corner of Kansas that throws the plane 20 feet in all directions over several minutes. The air settles again over Missouri, which they pass over at a relatively low 25,000 feet, flying under a high-altitude storm and over a low-slung bank of ash carried on the wind. Not since the far north of Canada have they seen the ground. As they approach the small Creve Coeur Airport near St. Louis, Jago puts the plane into a virtual dive to get below 2,000 feet, trying to keep the engine intakes from jamming full of particulate. Communication with the GPS system is blessedly functioning and they find the airport—really nothing more than a runway and an array of private hangars—to be completely empty. They touch down at a little after 11 a.m. local time, and as they taxi to the hangar Hilal marked for them, the plane’s tires cut through a thin layer of Yellowstone ash that coats everything. The windshield wipers swish back and forth, pushing the stuff to the side and making streaks on the glass. The sun is nearly at its zenith, but the sky is stuck in a constant state of dusky twilight, and with the exception of the airstrip’s emergency lighting, including that on the runway, nearly all power in the area appears to be out.

  After a couple hours spent getting the plane inside and packing bags with weapons and supplies and changing clothes and putting on respirators and goggles and firing up a vintage Harley-Davidson XLS Roadster, they hit the road.