Dedication
For my wife, Sarah Louise Martin,
whose love is my life’s very best truth
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
After the End . . .
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend.
Do not wait for the last judgment,
it takes place every day.
—Albert Camus
Everything not saved will be lost.
—Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
CHAPTER ONE
Michael awoke in the dark to the screams again.
He drew up the rifle in the tarp at his side. He kicked out of the sleeping bag and ripped his gun from its waterproof wrap and raised the sights up toward the perimeter blindly. A form appeared twenty feet ahead. He tugged the trigger; it would not give. He cursed himself, clicked off the safety, resighted the shape. But the form was nothing more than a tree, a yew, arthritic and leafless. So dark: God, so dark out here. By the gunmetal moonlight, the ring of trees around their camp was all but invisible. But that was impossible. Unless—
Their fire had died.
He gasped, “Ohcrapno.”
A crimson bed of cinders popped in the circle of stones. A spindle of smoke twisted.
He whispered, “Patrick!”
Out there in the night the scream went on. Human but not. Living but not.
Patrick didn’t stir.
Michael knelt unsteadily in the snow. He felt for the Pokémon sleeping bag, torn and patched and torn again. “Patrick, get up!” The lining swished. “Bub! Let’s go!”
Only when he tossed it open did he realize the bag was empty.
His heart rammed his throat.
But the lining was still warm. His brother hadn’t been gone long.
Michael risked everything and shouted, “Patrick!”
Several seconds of silence, then a call reported through the darkness. “Paaaatriiiick!” But the echo was not his own. It was a voice without depth or dimension, choking on earth. A dead, elongated roar. The Bellow, mimicking him.
Heavy feet changed direction and dragged through the brush, maybe one hundred yards away, nearing.
Stay—frakking—calm.
Don’t let Patrick be sleepwalking again. Jeezus, why did I say we could camp outside?
Concentrate. Think, like Mom.
I swear, please don’t let him be out there—
Hey a-hole: Feel. Your. Blood.
Michael closed his eyes against the dark cold, and there was that moment, that ever-repeating instant, when everything inside him hissed that it wouldn’t work, that he didn’t have time. Then he thought of his breath, and emptied his brain.
His focus aligned on the quick warm creek within his veins, the powerful flex against his ribs, the deliberate drumming inside his ears. It felt like every fiber and thought of himself fusing into one another, until his mind and his movement merged to a single thing, seamless and bright, like a glowing radar dot.
It felt like: yes-yes.
His eyes leapt open, and he moved, focused, fine.
He tore open the duffel bag next to him.
“Paaaatriiiick!” said the Bellow, closer now. “Paatriiiick!”
Michael grabbed a safety flare from the bag and stood and punched it on his thigh—a whoosh. Sparks fanned a molten dandelion.
The forest conjured orange before him, their camp and the rotten deer stand and their car ahead on the dirt road. He spun on his boot heels, wafting away flare smoke.
New-cast shadow lunged in the trees.
He saw no one.
An image jumped into his head: Patrick, hiding behind a tree as a joke. Patrick, laughing into his elbow, until he heard the Bellow coming . . . then froze, afraid.
“Patrick, good one! You—you got me!” Michael stepped over the sleeping bags, nearer the trees. His voice wavered as he shouted. He cleared his throat, calmed, continued, “Bub, come on out now; I’ll let you shoot this Bellow! A hundred points!”
“Youuuuuu got meeeee!”
Michael whirled.
Fifty feet away, he could just make out the creature: staggering, hitching wild legs through the woods. Its limbs hung at impossible angles, a dozen times shattered. Its clothes were stripes of rot. What skin still clung to the skeleton was in some spots the color of mushrooms and in others that of wax and mostly it was as pale as the bones that jutted through it.
But a moment ago it had been coming from the other direction.
There are two of them.
“Buuuuuuub,” it said, “pooooooin—”
“Cheating . . .”
The whisper was small: so small that it could have been the voice of the flare. But Michael knew the sound too well. It was the same excitement as when he and Patrick had beaten Halo 4 on Legendary Mode, their headphones plugged into the TV so they could stay up all night without anyone knowing; the same giddy, too-many-Sour-Patch-Kids, One more level, c’mon puh-lease excitement at a new part of The Game.
As the Bellow bayed once more, Michael flung himself into a nearby cluster of pines—and his knees went weak with relief.
Patrick sat on a snow-slick log, hunchbacked in a down coat and two hoodies, looking at something on a steep hill slope. His hands kneaded his hair—not in terror, in annoyance. He looked like precisely what he was: a five-year-old kid getting equal parts ticked and thrilled by what was happening.
“They’re not playing right,” Patrick said.
A skeletal hand shot through the needle thickets above Patrick’s head. Michael automatically raised the gun, discharged a round, exploded a branch. A body fell in the shadows and slid down the hill. Michael’s hands shook with adrenaline, but that did not stop his smile.
Patrick covered his ears, whined, “Hey, watch it.”
Then he pointed at the twitching shadows down the steep hill by the bridge.
“THEY’RE NOT—THEY’RE—RIIIIGHT—NOT PLAAAAAY–ING!”
Michael’s heart frosted.
There weren’t two Bellows. There were ten, at least.
“There’s so many. Fourteen, I counted ’em up,” Patrick said, bewildered. “They’re never in groups. You know?” And stood, suddenly furious. “Hey, cheating! You’re cheaters!”
“Patrick, shut up!” Michael hissed, and seized him back from the edge of the overlook.
&
nbsp; “But they’re bein’ buuuutts!”
Michael smothered Patrick’s mouth, gently, beneath his fist. “Right and it’s not that I don’t agree, Bub, but just this sec we need to concentrate on getting our butts outtie here.”
Because holy hell, where did all those Bellows come from? Why why why are they moving in a pack? Michael thought. The Game Master never said they would!
“PATRICK—UPPPP—SHUUUTTTT, PAAAAATRIIIICK!”
Images burned into Michael’s head:
Bellows, in greater number than his bullets, would surround him and Patrick.
Block the bridge.
He and Bub would be trapped. Among the dead trees. And dead screams, and claws—
Stop it! If you lose it, it’s Game Over.
The car, he thought. Like now.
“You don’t get it?” Michael said. “Seriously?” He chuckled and then stopped—as if trying not to mock Patrick.
“What?” Patrick said.
“They’re not cheating.” Michael stood and strapped the rifle over his shoulder and took his brother’s tiny mitten-hand in his own. He led him back through the pines. “It’s just a surprise, that’s all. Like a surprise attack.”
“Surprise attack?”
Michael nodded.
They got back to the clearing.
The Bellow with the shattered arms stood fifteen feet away. “ATTTAAAAAAACK!”
Michael swallowed a shout and instinctively hurled the flare at the creature. The flare landed two steps in front of it and the Bellow raised its broken arms, trying in vain to block the dazzling light that tortured its never-closing pupils. The Bellow staggered backward, the illumination driving it momentarily away, like the crack of a lion tamer’s whip.
At least five more Bellows than there had been a minute ago screamed in the forest beyond the creature, imitating the pain of their fellow.
A finger of terror crawled up Michael’s throat.
Go move quick move quick go.
He grabbed his pillow and their duffel. He jammed a box of raisins into Patrick’s hands and pocketed their small cardboard box of .22-caliber rifle rounds.
“Aw,” Patrick said, “we leavin’?”
Michael rushed Patrick to the dirt road and the car. He slid his hand through the tire of the bicycle bungee-corded on the back, popped the trunk, shoved the bag and food in there. He felt his blood. Calmed.
He pulled the square ammunition box from his pocket.
Patrick said, “What about our beds?”
The bullet box was upside down: its cardboard flap came open. The little missiles fell into the snow: wet, ruined.
Michael slammed the trunk. “What, our what?” he snapped.
Patrick pointed at the sleeping bags back in the clearing. The flare had landed on top of the bags, and the bags had burst into flames. Past the bags, held temporarily at bay by the flare light but still visible, were a dozen Bellows.
Michael said, “Uh, we’ll get new ones.”
“NEEEWWWWWW OOOOOOOONES!”
Bellows screamed this almost as one over the hill down by the bridge. Michael jogged to the hill. Fifty: fifty of them. Down the mountain, in front of the bridge, the mass stumbled nearer on the dirt road that curved up toward their car.
The terror-finger grew another knuckle, nudged his Adam’s apple.
No. Why? How the hell are we supposed to fight them? What are they doing?
Having a rave. Beginning a shindig. Doesn’t matter. Plow through them.
That many’ll crack the windshield!
Then you shoot. You shoot as many as you can.
“Get in the car, Bub,” Michael said. “Go ’head and start it, then lay down in the back.”
The prospect was candy to Patrick. “Okay! Really? Wait, in the trunk?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to lay down in the—”
“Just the backseat, Patrick! Go!”
Michael jammed the keys into his brother’s hands and watched him go to the car.
Then Michael turned back. He picked a Bellow at random by the dark shore under the bridge and raised his scope on it, amplifying the enemy. Once it had been a man, twenty-five years old perhaps. Now its loose jawbone swayed, a pendulum clicking on a hinge; now it screamed with a power so tremendous it was as if the Bellow were not the screamer itself but the mouthpiece of some beast that blasted through its bones from within the earth. “THE CAAAAAAR!”
Michael’s crosshairs wavered as he shot and a chunk of earth on the bank beyond the Bellow ripped away.
Idiot idiot.
The Bellows droned on.
Michael cocked the bolt again, chambering the next round. Three shots left. If he remembered right.
Breathe out before you shoot, Michael told himself. Like Modern Warfare.
Michael breathed out hard to steady his crosshairs, and his breath fogged the lens.
“Stupid stupid—”
“Sssstuuuuu—”
Patrick turned the ignition, and Michael heard the engine whine. Frakking cripes, the alternator!
The engine kicked over. Relief flooded him.
And Patrick screamed.
From twenty feet away, Michael watched a Bellow moving toward the station wagon. Blonde hair crawled over her scalp. A silver necklace glittered on her skinless clavicle. She fell on the hood, clawed toward the windshield.
“Lay down, Bub!”
Patrick’s silhouette gave two thumbs-up and vanished.
The woman reared an arm back. With the power common to all Bellows, she struck at the windshield. Cracks popped across it. Patrick laughed as glass dusted down. “She’s good!” he shouted.
Too good.
Michael exhaled a slow stream like a digitized sniper and he pulled the trigger. He’d been aiming for the forehead; the side of the Bellow’s skull flipped away instead. The creature stopped screaming and slid from the hood and spun to the dirt with a thud. And a wild satisfaction swelled Michael’s chest.
Two shots now.
“Lay—Paaaaatriiiiiiick—Paaaatriiiiick down!”
The Bellows were moving up the hill. Sixty, seventy-five. The forest echoed, in hideous stereo, alive.
So burn it alive, Michael saw. He saw it, even though it had not happened yet: the satisfaction and the yes-yes simply loaded the image, fully formed, inside his mind.
Burn. It. Alive.
He ran to the car. Pulled out from the trunk a five-gallon nickel tank. Patrick looked through the window, said, “That’s our gas.” Michael sloshed rainbows in a semicircle behind the car, then went to the front, trailing liquid. Patrick said, “Michael, it’s our gas.”
“Yeah.”
“But that’s our gas, though.”
“Patrick!”
“Why’re you using it for?”
Just shut up, Patrick, shut your face. If you say one more word, tonight they are going to win.
He said, “Remember the Game Master talked about tricks?”
Delight spread on Patrick’s face. “You’re gonna trick ’em up? Yesssss!”
Michael nodded, glugged more on the downslope road, then hurled the canister.
It stopped on a rock several steps ahead of the approaching Bellows, glinting.
Michael cocked the bolt and lifted the rifle. He steadied the crosshairs. He checked the safety—off—and—
—wait wait wait!—
—and then took the rifle down and adjusted the outer aperture a quarter turn to the left, and the trigger came back with an easy tug.
He’d been right; the scope sight had been slightly off.
His shot now was flawless: the tank sang and bled some of its insides.
But didn’t explode.
No.
The night went casket black. The sleeping-bag fire behind them had died, the flare, too.
Flare!
Michael rushed to the trunk and grabbed another flare. He slammed it bright on the seat of the bike, waved it once in an arc over his
head to drive back the Bellows now only paces behind the car, then flung it at the tank.
Where it landed too far, the sparks hissing the wrong way.
“Michael. Michael, they’re coming, they’re gonna win.”
Michael chambered their last chance.
He settled on the lead Bellow ahead. Maybe it would fall, make the others stumble, giving the car time to escape.
He breathed, “Please.”
Feel your blood.
And without thinking, at the final instant, swung the bead back at the tank.
A cry of light and a flat crack. The slug punctured the tank and slung a tongue of gas forward: a liquid fuse, an airborne fuse.
The flare lit it and it detonated.
Knew it! Michael’s chest shouted. Knew it knew it knew!
A blazing arm roared high from the gas tank, exploding the canopy above in a catastrophe of flame. Fire glimmered and traced the gas trail up the hill, raising a primal barrier between the car and the Bellows of the forest. Over the chaos, beyond the inferno, Michael could hear the Bellows’ agony. His eardrums shook with it.
Patrick laughed and clapped and kicked the driver’s seat in delight, and Michael jumped into the car and rammed the pedal to the floor.
An airborne moment when the car bucked off a tree root, then they were off, tearing snow and earth toward the core of the explosion. When the fire leapt onto the hood he yelled out, “Duck, Bubbo, close your eyes!” and fell down on the seat. He heard and felt the fire, a hot cloak unfurling above, then it was gone and he was moving like a pinball between the standing Bellows, feeling sick and smiling, both, as he watched them burn.
Michael cocked the wheel at the bottom of the hill, fishtailed, barreled down the length of the dogleg road parallel with the creek. He shot them onto the bridge and across it and only then slowed to under sixty.
Patrick asked, “Did we win?”
Michael looked in the crooked rearview.
“ZOMGosh, we won, didn’t we?” Patrick bumped his butt up and down in his seat. “Vic-tor-ee?” he said in his computerized RoboPatrick voice. “Ach-eeved? This eeeeve?”
The night air squealing through the cracks in the windshield was blinding cold.
It felt gorgeous.
Knew. It. Would. Work.
Michael grinned and held up his crossed fingers.
“Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe.
The End Games Page 1
