Endgame: Rules of the Game

by James Frey

  Their bindings come free, the gun is removed from Hilal’s head. Shari is pulled to her feet. Jenny retreats another step into the shadow of the old tree trunk.

  “What’re you here to do?”

  “Try to find Sun Key before the Nabataean does,” Shari says.

  “He alone Plays the way the Makers want,” Hilal says. “He has the first two keys. He is close to winning.”

  Jenny nods slowly. “I know. I seen as much in the Dreaming. It’s why we’re here guarding this place now. To make sure the Nabataean didn’t claim his prize.”

  “We’re also here to save my child,” Shari says, her voice measured and firm.

  Jenny smacks her lips. “There are no guarantees there, Shari. Like any of us, your daughter could die a thousand different ways in the next day or week. But I am glad to hear you’re lookin’ for her. Big Alice would be glad too.”

  “Thank you,” Shari says.

  Jenny’s shoulders slacken. “Too much violence these days, if you ask me. Since I got properly old I kinda soured on Endgame. I been telling the Koori about it for a while, but I’ve always been a bit of an odd bird.” The bush-covered guards retreat to the edge of the circle as if on cue and seem to disappear. “Listen, now. I have a proposition like. And it will require a thing much more hard to come by than violence.”

  “Trust,” Hilal says.

  Jenny dips her head in his direction. “Trust, Aksumite. Line to line, human to human.” Then, her head slowly turns to Shari. “And, most importantly, mother to mother.”

  The stars turn overhead. The Milky Way pulses with an untold amount of life, even if it is cold and distant and unobservable. Hilal can feel it.

  “I’ll help you. And together we’ll try to Dream Little Alice Chopra right on back into her mother’s arms.”

  The air grows warmer, and Hilal again hears the breeze, where before he heard nothing of the world.

  Jenny grins kindly at Shari. The old woman only has a few teeth left.

  “We’ll get you your girl, mum,” Jenny says. “Promise.”

  SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC, SIMON ALOPAY

  Monks Mound, Collinsville, Illinois, United States

  Sarah holds on to her father so, so tightly. She can’t breathe. Excitement. Relief. The improbable—no, the impossible—good fortune of crossing paths with him.

  And judging by how tightly Simon holds on to her, he feels exactly the same way.

  After several moments Jago clears his throat. Sarah eases up on her embrace and Simon pulls away from his daughter, holds her by the shoulders. Jago looks this way and that, watching for any movement on the horizon, his gun reloaded and ready.

  “What did you do to your hair?” Simon whispers, staring into his daughter’s eyes.

  “Disguise. After the Shang showed us in his video.”

  “Of course. With Abaddon and Yellowstone and everything else, I’d actually forgotten about that video.”

  “It’s all kind of overwhelming, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like back east,” Simon says.

  “Me either. Don’t want to, frankly.”

  “It is hell, we all know it,” Jago interjects.

  Simon’s gaze shifts to Jago. His eyebrows scrunch. “And you are?”

  “Jago Tlaloc. The Olmec. Sarah’s . . . friend.”

  Simon steps back defensively and puts a hand on a black pistol holstered to his hip. Jago doesn’t flinch. Sarah claps her hand on top of Simon’s gun hand, squeezes his knuckles. “It’s all right. He is my friend. He’s saved my life more than once. He’s here to help.”

  Simon’s eyes dart back and forth—Sarah, Jago, Sarah, Jago—as he tries to decipher what’s happening. “Why are you here?” Simon asks Sarah. “Do you have the keys? Are you ready to end it?”

  “No. It’s a long story, but basically we’re here because we need to find the third key. According to some people who seem to know, it could be hiding in there.” She points at the grass-covered hill that is Monks Mound.

  “Sun Key’s in there?” Simon says. “I’ve been in there a hundred times. Sun Key is not in there.”

  “We still have to look,” Sarah says. “If we have any chance of stopping Endgame then we have to find it. It’s the best chance we have at surviving. And by ‘we’ I mean humanity, Dad. All of us. You. Me. Jago. Pricks like these,” she motions to the bikers littered around their feet. “Mom . . .” Her face goes white.

  “She’s fine, Sarah.”

  “Omaha?” she asks.

  “No. The farm. She’s there with your uncles and Aunt Millicent and also a few neighbors from home. We couldn’t leave them behind to fend for themselves. We brought the Smithsons and the Nixes and the—”

  “Vanderkamps?” she asks, a big part of her hoping he’ll say, No, not the Vanderkamps.

  “Yeah, the Vanderkamps too,” Simon says. “I thought they would hole up at one of their ranches, but they didn’t want to be alone. Especially not after, well . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s Christopher. He . . . disappeared. Not long after you left. I’m sorry, Sarah.”

  She falters. Jago reaches out and touches her arm.

  I’m going to have to tell them. His parents. I’m going to have to tell them what I did to their son.

  “I’m sorry,” Simon repeats. He can tell something isn’t right, but he doesn’t press.

  “It’s okay,” Sarah says.

  Jago peers to the east. “A car’s coming. We should move.”

  “Yeah, of course.” She holds out her hands. “Dad, will you come with us? Will you help?”

  “Search the mound for Sun Key?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “But before that, we need to do something else.”

  “Sarah, come on,” Jago says urgently. He points through the haze. A pair of bright halogen lights is headed right for them, but not with any apparent urgency. “Probably nothing to worry about, but we are standing in the middle of a murder scene. No point in asking for more trouble.”

  “Agreed. We didn’t come here to kill people,” she says, as much to herself as to Jago. That was so easy, she thinks of killing the bikers. Too easy. If I really am going to get back my humanity, I need to work harder at sparing people. Even people like these. Especially people like these.

  “Are our line members at the welcome center?” Sarah asks her father.

  “No. I told them to be with their families before the impact. I told them I was on my way here and that they weren’t needed anymore.”

  “Good,” Sarah says. “Get the bike, Jago.” He pivots and runs to the Harley. “Let me help you with your passenger, Dad.”

  She moves around the Taurus and takes one of the giant’s ankles with her good hand. Simon takes the other. They heave in unison, pulling hard on over 270 pounds of dead weight. But Sarah and her father are strong, and they get the giant out of the car. What’s left of his head makes a sickening smack-pop-hiss when it hits the pavement.

  Jago pulls up next to them. “Go to the welcome center,” Sarah shouts over the bike’s engine, indicating a building off the main road to the south. Jago guns the bike and leaves them. Simon slips around the front of the car and gets behind the wheel while Sarah climbs into the backseat, where the seats are blood-free.

  “We’re going to stop Endgame, Dad.” She speaks quickly, hoping Simon won’t interrupt her. “We’re working with other Players and some CIA guys. A woman named Stella Vyctory was helping us too, but she was killed. The Makers may have been gods to us once, but not anymore. They’re frauds. Maybe we all are.”

  She takes a breath and holds it. Here it comes. She expects him to rail against her, to remind her of their history, of her training, of the honor of being named and molded into a Player, of her dead brother, of her dead friends, of her destroyed school, of the old stories and the rituals and the rites and ahama muhu gobekli mu, ahaman jeje, ahaman kerma.

  And while she waits for it she remembers
what she said on that commencement stage in the sun, right before the meteors came, when she was still young and innocent as well.

  I choose to be the person that I want to be, she’d said. Those words felt so meaningless after finding Earth Key, and then again so true as she chose not to kill Sky Key.

  What a fucking ride it’s been, she thinks, waiting for Simon to light into her.

  Except he doesn’t.

  She looks in the rearview mirror and finds her father’s eyes. He looks at her, not the road. Jago banks the bike into a parking lot in front of them. Simon blinks. He follows the Harley.

  Sarah leans into the front half of the car. “Dad, why are you here?”

  “Because I’m scared, Sarah.”

  “Of what?”

  “Maybe of what you’re hinting at.”

  “The Makers . . .”

  Simon shrugs. “At the worst, yes. But also of people. Of uncertainty. Of that.” He tilts his head to the east, to Abaddon. “Let’s not kid ourselves. None of us ever thought we’d see it. No Player or trainer really does, and now that I have seen it I understand why we thought we never would.”

  He pulls next to Jago in a handicap spot right next to the entrance. Jago is already off the bike and stalking to the welcome center, gun up, to clear it of anyone else who might be hanging around.

  A crack of bright lightning near the mound. A loud clap of thunder shakes the car. A gust of cold wind.

  Simon runs his hands nervously over the top of the steering wheel. “Why am I here? Because once Abaddon happened all I could think of was keeping what’s left of my family and my friends safe, and—” The corners of his mouth crumple. His eyes well. “You look so much older, Sarah.”

  She touches his cheek. “You too, Dad.”

  “Grown-up, huh?”

  “I guess. Mostly just fucking exhausted, mentally and physically.”

  “Me too. Maybe that’s all it means to be grown-up.”

  Pause.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” Simon says. “Me and your mother, not an hour has passed since you’ve left that we haven’t spoken of you. We think about you always. Hoped you were alive, hoped you were Playing, or at least surviving.”

  “You trained me well.”

  “I know. Now I understand why. It wasn’t because I wanted Endgame or even cared for the prophecy, if you can believe it. It was because I wanted to protect you. You’d been chosen and I wanted to give you the tools you’d need to survive, whether the prophecy came true or not. But lucky us . . .”

  “Yeah, lucky us.”

  Jago emerges from the welcome center, giving a thumbs-up.

  Simon grabs one of Sarah’s hands. “I came here to get the weapon, Sarah. The one the stories tell of, the one the Makers gave us and showed us how to use. If I’m going to continue to protect the ones I love, then your mom and I thought we should have it.”

  “No shit,” Sarah says.

  Simon doesn’t understand.

  “I’m not being flip, Dad. The weapon? That’s why we’re here too. If we’re going to ever cross paths with a Maker—and before this thing is through, we might—then we want it too.”

  Simon smiles wanly. “I really did train you well.”

  Jago raps a knuckle on the passenger window. Simon rolls it down. Jago leans in. “Done catching up?”

  “More or less,” Sarah says.

  Jago looks at Simon. “You going to help us, Señor Alopay?”

  Simon reaches for Sarah’s shoulder and kneads it lovingly.

  His thin smile melts away as his eyes darken. “Let’s get our gun.”

  Event 17iii

  AISLING KOPP, POP KOPP, KEPLER 22B

  Seedrak Sare’en, active geosynchronous orbit above the Martian North Pole

  Ssssssup!

  Aisling can’t see but she can hear.

  Her head swims, her eyes flutter, her quads twitch, her fingers clench into fists. She feels light and upside-down and twisted and her stomach turns and she strains forward to let it out but her entire body—stretched long from head to toe, her arms pressed to her sides—is locked in place.

  The vomit comes anyway. Her last meal and some cashew nuts and water and bile. Mostly bile. The vomit doesn’t fall onto her shirt or her shoes or across her face. It doesn’t linger on her lips, she doesn’t have to lick it away, it doesn’t get stuck in her nose or entangled in her hair. She realizes that that sucking sound has whisked the vomit away. She realizes that her face is covered with something—a mask, a skin, a device, she’s not sure what. She tries to turn her head but can’t. She tries to move her legs but can’t. She tries to scream but can’t. The intent is there, the neurons are firing, the synapses are transmitting, the axons and dendrites are twinkling, the brain is converting her disorientation into fear, but there is no release, no flight, no fight.

  Because she can’t.

  There is only her body, and her clouded mind, and the darkness, and her fear.

  And more bile.

  Ssssssup!

  Gone.

  An electric pulse shoots through her body, from bottom to top. She senses it most in her toes and behind her knees and under her triceps and at the base of her neck and then at the tip of her tongue. In a fit of synesthesia she experiences the pulse as color and taste. Blue at first, bursting and bright, imploding from the edge and flying toward the center and consuming everything. The blue spikes with fingers of red then purple then orange and then a blob of green that eats all the other colors away. While these kaleidoscope through her visual cortex, her taste buds are subjected to an onslaught of milky sweetness, to the point of being disgusting, and she retches again and vomits whatever might be left in her stomach into the tube.

  Sssssssup.

  She flicks her tongue and finds that it’s blocked by something, that it can’t reach her teeth or her gums, and in this instant she realizes that a tube has been inserted into her mouth, and her tongue is inside the tube. She swallows and feels an extension of the tube in her throat.

  And then a thought forms—the first not dedicated to her body or her senses or to her primal fear.

  Where am I?

  For some indeterminate amount of time she is unsure. She remembers Mongolia perfectly—Marrs’s vaporization, Jordan’s last volley, the cool face of the kepler who wasn’t 22b, the frigid air that enveloped her—but there is nothing after that. She is a prisoner, of that she has no doubt, but where, and what exactly, is her cell?

  An inkling of an answer comes when she finally discerns something. Several feet from her face the light changes, and she makes out the hazy contours of a ceiling. It is curved and reflective and liquidy. Wisps of white and yellow trace across it, and a tuft of red and a fun-house mirror blob of blue. A reflection. She squints through the film covering her face and understands that the red is her hair, and the tube is her body, shrink-wrapped in an unknown material.

  She tries to move again but can’t. It’s not so much that she’s being restrained as it is that her body simply doesn’t work. Her toes and her tongue and her eyeballs in their sockets can move when she wills them to, but none very well.

  She strains to look in as many directions as possible. She eventually sees that another form is some distance to her left, topped by white instead of red. This must be Pop. Her fear is nearly all-consuming, tinged with a small offering of relief in this moment. She is not completely alone. Pop is not dead. Or if he is, his body is intact.

  Maybe I am dead, she half thinks. Certainly as good as dead.

  There is nothing else. Seconds or minutes or hours or days pass. She can’t tell. The slivers of color on the ceiling change now and then, like a psychedelic dream. Something shoots through the tube and passes tastelessly over her tongue and passes directly into her stomach. Food. The electrical pulses tickling her body come and go. She is powerless, and afraid, but she settles into her predicament as best she can. What else can she do?

  She drifts here and there and in and ou
t and then . . .

  Then . . .

  Then . . .

  Her eyes tear up and shoot open and in front of her is not the ceiling or the wall but the unmistakable face of kepler 22b, lithe and blue and cold.

  The alien busies its hands over her body, tending to unseen controls. His dark eyes are blank, his mouth slightly agape. She tries to make a noise but it’s useless. kepler 22b certainly doesn’t make any noises.

  He does whatever he does and lifts away, apparently satisfied. Aisling’s mind begins to cloud again. She’s been injected with something. The sickly sweet taste returns. kepler 22b spins away and speaks—no, he doesn’t speak, he thinks. Aisling can hear his words not as language but as ideas, clear and completely comprehensible.

  She is strong, and the grandfather holds on. Both survived the transport. We hope the other two will survive as well. We hope we can retrieve our weapon.

  It cannot hurt that we have more Player-hostages, Nethinim.

  More will be better.

  SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC, SIMON ALOPAY

  Monks Mound, Collinsville, Illinois, United States

  Sarah and Jago follow Simon along the groomed walking paths that loop around the smaller hillocks south of Monks Mound, and then beat a track through a stand of leafy hardwoods. Each wears a respirator and goggles and carries a compact M4—Jago’s with an M203 grenade launcher—and a blade.

  Simon consults a small laminated map the size of a credit card. Although it’s midday it looks and feels like a cloudy evening, one where a storm is on the horizon or has just passed. And while they know the sun is high overhead, the yellow disc is blotted out by the ash and gas choking the atmosphere. The lights of houses and buildings in the middle distance are extinguished, the power still out. People are somewhere out there, huddled inside and confused, but for now these three Endgamers are alone.

  Sarah is glad for that. She’s had enough of other people for one day.

  They head south for half a mile and hit the Conway rail tracks running east to west. No train cars block their path. They skirt over the steel bands and leave the boundary of the state park, jogging over an open and rough field, the settled Yellowstone ash padding their footfalls. They don’t speak. Jago watches the countryside like a hawk, and Sarah watches Jago. She trusts him to safeguard them, but she’s not sure what he might say about this Cahokian rebellion that the Olmec elder told him about. She hopes he says nothing. They’re here to do a job, not to talk fuzzy ancient history.