The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  Imagining it. Paranoid.

  “Michael, you got somethin’ you want to tell me?” the captain said.

  “Like what, sir?”

  “Like a secret, maybe.”

  Michael’s stomach fell a little. “Hey, Bub,” he said, “I think I saw a 3DS out in the hall. Why don’t you go check it out?”

  Concerned, Patrick asked with his expression, How come, though?

  “Just for a sec,” Michael said. Patrick left.

  “Why don’t we just go on and get it out, Michael?” the captain said. Michael nodded, but sill couldn’t help but hesitate. The captain spoke after the silence: “You’re on drugs, aren’t you, son?”

  Michael blinked. “Sorry?”

  The captain unbuttoned a chest pocket, on which CAPTAIN H. C. JOPEK was stitched. He pulled a rattling pill bottle out.

  “This state’s got a problem with pills. And this ‘Atipax’ is serious stuff, judgin’ from all the warnings on the bottle.”

  Michael tried not to show his relief that the captain had not asked about the soldiers. “O-oh, no, sir,” Michael said. “They’re Patrick’s.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with him?”

  Nothing is ‘the matter with him,’ Michael thought defensively. It’s everything around him.

  “He just gets overwhelmed sometimes. They help take the edge off at night.”

  “‘Contact name: Molly Jean Faris’?” asked the captain, reading the label.

  Michael flinched, hearing her name aloud. “My mom.”

  “And where’s she?”

  “We haven’t seen her since Halloween. We . . . got separated.”

  The captain raised his gaze on Michael—and he did something that caught Michael totally off guard: the captain, this titanic Safe Zone guardian, put his hand on Michael’s shoulder, and made a face of sympathy and respect. “Well, I think you done one helluva job getting that little boy and yourself to my zone. Give you a medal, if I could, soldier.”

  Michael still could not quite read the captain, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. He wanted to tell the captain, “Thank you so much for saying that,” but he didn’t trust his voice to not catch on the lump in his throat. He nodded wordlessly, and the captain handed him the pill bottle.

  “I gotta ask, though, buddy: What you do to make those Rapture boys so mad?” said the captain, walking toward the exit, Michael following.

  “I killed one of their favorite ‘Zeds,’” Michael said.

  “No shit!”

  Michael grinned. He felt like a nerd who has just made the hottest girl at school laugh. “They called it their ‘First.’”

  “Those loonies blew their lids when we were shooting the Zeds during the mandatory evac,” said the captain. “They even captured two of my soldiers, shot ’em in the head, and fed ’em to the Zeds. ‘A holy sacrifice,’ they said, and I ain’t kidding you.

  “That priest thinks he can save the whole world, protecting the Zeds, worshippin’ ’em 24/7. When we started runnin’ his people out of that town, he even set up mannequins in his church, so it was like they were ‘worshipping’ the Zeds, while old Rulon couldn’t be around. He thinks this is the end times, and that the Zeds are the people God chose to raise from the grave so he can take them to Heaven. Rulon’s got that town screaming with Zeds, locked up and ‘protected’ everywhere. And here’s how shithouse crazy he is: if one of his people gets bit, Rulon takes off their heads before they can rise. Says they don’t deserve to become a Zed. Says he’s helping his people atone for all their sins, and if he don’t keep on doing it, God will leave them and everyone else behind. I’ve got land mines on most roads into Charleston, but the Rapture’s tried a couple times to get past ’em and into my city, to get more ‘sacrifices,’ I guess. Keep tryin’, I say, I’ll grab some popcorn.”

  Michael laughed. Jopek had a kind of good-ol’-boy humor that was foreign to him, and a little intimidating, but also somehow exhilarating.

  “Gotta admit, though, I’d love to meet that priest in a dark alley. I’ve got two words for him, and they ain’t happy birthday. Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll be meetin’ them today, not where we’re headed.”

  “Headed?”

  “Downtown. Big, big city, soldier. It’s been abandoned a week, and we want to be for-certain there’s no-livin’-body out there.”

  “I—” Michael stopped walking. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, sir. I just mean, my brother’s been through a lot.”

  “Aw shoot, I’ll get ya home by curfew. C’mon, Top Gun, we got a whole city waitin’ for ya.”

  His hand reached out and grabbed Michael’s bicep, squeezing gently, man-to-man.

  “Be all you can be, right?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The six of them, last-known Armageddon survivors in the Charleston city limits, walked down the stone steps with their shadows out in front of them.

  At the foot of the grand outdoor stairs stood a statue of Abraham Lincoln, hands clasped behind his back. Father of West Virginia, at Midnight read the sooted pedestal. A rope encircled this pedestal, tethering the deflated jack-o’-lantern hot-air balloon to Earth.

  Beside the president sat an enormous sixteen-wheeler gas tanker.

  Beside the tanker waited a camo Hummer.

  The sides of Michael’s mouth twitched, trying a smile. It felt cool to be walking toward the Hummer. Actually: it felt sort of ridiculously badass.

  The inside of the vehicle barked purpose and power.

  There were no Pop-Tart wrappers, no sleeping bags filthy from a night spent on the ground. Instead of seats, there were harnesses built into the walls, like roller-coaster bars that rode your shoulders. You must be this tall to ride the apocalypse. A hatch in the ceiling opened to the sky and a roof-mounted machine gun. From the Bellow-maddening ambulance strobes on the hood, to the combat gurney in this rear chamber, to the “jump seat” (Hank’s term, which he used as he strapped himself into it) on one of the rear double doors themselves: it was a vehicle reimagined for living-dead conflict.

  As Michael lifted his tiny brother into a huge seat-harness, Patrick’s eyes were big, taking it in. He put one hand out, and Michael playfully went to low-five it, “down-low-too-slow.”

  But Patrick didn’t yank his own hand back. He held Michael’s hand and pulled him closer.

  Robo-Patrick whispered in his ear: “You. Got. Us. Nice. Wheeeellllz.”

  Well, what could Michael do but smile?

  The trip into Charleston was like traveling across the span of a war painting: the peaceful far edges and the distance weapons, and the first battle lines and the central clash.

  The Hummer departed the rear of the Capitol (opposite the barricaded plaza Michael had seen from the Senate), where layers of chain link separated them from the enormous, brown-gray Kanawha River to their left: a natural moat-barrier against attack, supplied courtesy of West “By God” Virginia.

  Then the Hummer rounded the Capitol to the maze of chain link and razor wire, which stretched across Government Plaza and the long, cable-supported bridge beyond it. The Hummer paused here among the abandoned sniper posts: a series of padlocked retractable gates were set into the fencing in all directions, buffer zones like the locks of a canal that promised immunity from a breach. The captain opened the gates on their path toward downtown so his Hummer could pass through.

  There was an in-the-elevator awkwardness during the repeated stops.

  Patrick hummed. Holly gave a corners-of-the-mouth smile to the floor. Bobbie politely looked out the window, then turned back when she saw a cawing crow flap with an ear hanging from its beak.

  This is so freaking weird, Michael thought, I don’t even know if it’s weird anymore.

  Out of the maze, the captain looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat, through the sliding plate that separated the front compartment from the rear. “Mission zero hour,” he called.

  Hank thumbed a button on his own heavy-duty watch,
which Michael pictured him rooting feverishly through left-behind army supplies to get. “That means set your watches, too,” he added to Holly and Michael. Michael felt another pinch at Hank’s let’s-please-nobody-forget-how-cool-I-am tone.

  Holly lifted her sleeve; her wrist was small and milky. “Beep-boop,” she said, thumbing a “button” on her watch-less wrist, soft enough for Hank but not for the captain to hear. She seemed—maybe?—to flick her gaze Michael’s way to see his response.

  Dang, she’s so cool.

  Dang, don’t think that.

  Dang, why?

  Because of on account of this being the most horrible time to get a crush on a girl.

  Oh. Right. Daaaang.

  “So,” Michael called to Captain Jopek over the grumbling engine, “where to?”

  The captain must not have heard, though; he slid closed the panel, cutting Michael off.

  Patrick pointed double-finger guns toward the captain’s now-unseeable head. “That guy,” he said, “is a grump.”

  Bobbie laughed. Patrick grinned back, delighted, like he had when she laughed in the cafeteria, and this time he did not nervously look away.

  “A grump who saved your ass,” Hank said to Patrick.

  My God, my man, Michael thought, will you shut up? “Hey sorry, but remember the ‘keep it PG’ thing?”

  Hank bristled. “Uh, sure do, big guy,” he said, in a defensive, and-what-about-it? tone.

  Just let it go, Michael told himself. But something about the condescending way Hank spoke wouldn’t let him.

  He shot Hank a glare. He felt his pulse speed and found himself inexplicably looking forward to the quick yes-yes challenge of making a comeback to whatever BS Hank was going to say.

  Hank just scoffed dismissively, smirking slightly, like Michael wasn’t worth the time. “Anyway.”

  Hank produced a crisp detailed city map from his jacket, then spread it over the sheet-covered gurney, saying, “Let’s talk objectives, people. First thing, Search. After Captain’s aerial patrol last night, we can cross off Liberty and Jerry West Avenues downtown as possible hiding places for any survivors still in the city. . . .”

  But Michael didn’t quite hear. His face was flushing, his attempt to give a little fight frustrated.

  An image shimmered into his mind: Hank wearing a sports uniform. Soccer, probably, and he bet Hank was very good. There was no uniform right now, of course. But the world’s full of uniforms waiting to be picked up again, Michael thought. He suddenly remembered the first day of high school. He’d tried to sit with THE COOL KIDS, then, just sliding down his tray and sighing, like, Gawd, another year of microwaved sewage, huh? Theory being, they would definitely not remember his Middle School Wimpy Kid years. But mid-sigh, there Cool Kids sat, staring. Oh, balls, thought Michael, and the moment hangs; and then Bobby “B. O.” Oliveto burps chocolate milk and draws laughter so Michael thinks maybe the moment could go just amazingly well until Caleb Rakestraw smiles with the same cold command he uses to bellow plays as JV QB. “Raise your hand,” he says. “Raise your hand high if you want Faris to leave.” Well, landslide. People at nearby tables noticed, nudged the news, and Michael stood, thinking: No, you don’t get to start over. You get to be you forever, sorry.

  Is that what it means for things to be “normal” again? Michael thought now.

  Dude . . . no, he told himself. Just think of everything you fought through. You’re not that “you” anymore.

  Hank looked up now, saw that Michael was not enthralled by his “briefing.” Hank offered that expression again: I’m not so sure I like your face.

  Fair enough, Michael thought. That makes us even.

  Battlelines:

  As the Hummer left the bridge and entered the modest, grimy skyline (coal dust, Michael thought), gutters began glittering with spent bullet casings; skidmarks striped the road more and more. Hank continued talking, but Michael watched through the rear windows . . . and let Charleston’s recent past echo to him.

  The side streets had been armored with barbed wire and sandbags and staggered gun posts, as if the designers of the Safe Zone had sealed off all possible approaches of attack, save two or three main roads. Probably strategically smart, except for one fact: in the end, when the Bellows laid their mysterious siege to the city, the defenses sucked. The gun posts were toppled, the sandbags burst; bodies by the dozens spilled over the “protective” barbed wire, onto the sidewalks and even onto this main road itself, like ooze escaping from some cataclysmic wound. On his own long battle to Charleston, Michael had seen hundreds of walking corpses, of course. And the bodies here, which the captain now maneuvered around, were truly dead and no threat. But looking at the corpses, a cavity in Michael’s chest ached. He’d imagined finding platoons of soldiers, many times. Just not inanimate: not decomposing.

  The tragedy was just, like, relentless.

  The green, sour dead–smell penetrated even the strongbox of the Hummer. A mass grave, Michael thought. That’s what the Safe Zone is. That’s all it is. He remembered the grave markers on the lawn of the Coalmount meeting hall, and pictured thousands of spears, pounded into crosses, spanning across Charleston.

  The Hummer stopped, jerking Michael forward against his seat harness.

  A sign outside their window read:

  BUSTED KNUCKLE GARAGE

  BEST PLACE IN TOWN TO TAKE A LEAK!!!

  Hank folded his map into his pocket.

  The rear double doors of the Hummer opened, letting bitter winter light flood in. The world outside was a shapeless, cruel white.

  “Okay, you apes, welcome to Disneyland!” Jopek said good-naturedly. “Hope you brought your mouse hats. Now somebody get me a snow cone and I don’t mean yellow.”

  “—lloooowwwww—” The calls of Bellows, hundreds of them, emanated from buildings along the road, from within alley Dumpsters, from underneath manholes.

  “Rapido, amigos,” Hank said as the captain disappeared around the side of the Hummer.

  “I love it when you speak French,” Holly said dreamily.

  Michael unfastened Patrick from his safety harness. As they stepped down out of the Hummer and into the street, Michael noticed that Bobbie was struggling with her own harness, her small, arthritic hands slipping on the security clips.

  Before he could help her, though, Patrick climbed back inside the Hummer, undid her clasps himself, and helped lift the harness over her shoulders.

  Bobbie looked him straight in the eye. “Patrick, thank you very much,” she said. “That is very kind of you.” She spoke with a sweet, but not condescending, tone, like she was used to dealing with kids.

  “Booyah,” Patrick said, and flexed his muscles.

  He always says that to Mom when he opens the door for her, Michael thought. And the ache in his chest expanded.

  The Busted Knuckle Garage stood in the corner parking lot of a flat downtown street. Three raised garage doors, plastered with WVU stickers, led inside. Within were cars, within were shadows, within were patches on the ground that were either oil or blood.

  Michael glanced around for the captain . . . and what he saw made a little breath of happiness rise inside him. The captain was straddling the double-yellow line dead center in the war-torn street, strapping on the last of his arsenal: a bulletproof (or bite-proof) Kevlar vest; a combat knife held to his wrist by three Velcro strips; a pistol on his ankle. Compared to the chaos around him, the captain looked strangely right.

  “‘Reach fer the skyyyyy,’” Michael whispered to Bub in his Old West sheriff’s voice. Bub giggled.

  The captain’s gaze snapped up to Michael. His eyes were narrowed.

  “I miss somethin’?” he said.

  “Just: nice equipment.”

  The captain nodded, looking pleased. “I’ll tell you what: it’s my duty, that’s all. This stop won’t take too long. Not too many folks dumb enough to try ridin’ this out at a mechanic’s.”

  “Not even in West Virginia?” Hank j
oked.

  The captain ignored that. “Could still be some hidin’, afraid to come out. Gotta check; standard operatin’ procedure. Henry, why don’t you check my oil while we’re here?”

  “Do you want any help looking?” Michael asked the captain.

  The moment the sentence was out of his mouth, he was surprised he’d said it. I thought you didn’t want to “play The Game anymore.”

  The captain cocked his head. “Help? Uh, nah, Private, I didn’t bring y’all to come in with me: just brought you to keep you close to yer captain, nice and safe. You have yourself some lunch.”

  “O-oh. Right, yeah, of course.”

  The captain turned, strolled into the garage, and casually shouted, “This is Captain Jopek of the United States Army! If you’re healthy, say the first three letters of the alphabet!”

  “Ay. Bee,” Patrick said softly, to himself. He paused, trying to remember. “Ay, bee, dee, gee . . .”

  Watch out for holes under the cars, where the mechanics change your oil, Michael almost called out. But the captain disappeared through a door in a brick wall inside, and was gone.

  “Now, how does lunch sound?” Bobbie opened the shoulder bag she’d been carrying and pulled out a large Tupperware container, which was steamed white. “I think you might like some goulash.”

  “Miss Bobbie,” Holly said, “that looks lovely.”

  A picnic? Out here? Michael thought. Seriously, no offense, Miss Bobbie, but this kinda isn’t the place for a Martha Stewart moment.

  Patrick looked up to Michael: Am I allowed to have some? Michael nodded vaguely, then said, “I’m gonna see if Hank needs any help.”

  He went to the front of the car. Hank was pouring oil from a plastic container into the engine. Hank said, not looking up from the engine: “Nope.”

  O-kay, Michael thought.

  Bobbie and Holly sat on the rear fender of the Hummer, Patrick between them. Bobbie had her eyes closed, and seemed to be whispering. Praying before she eats, Michael realized. Her old-fashioned-ness and cheeriness seemed so oddly out of place.