The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  Holly scooted over, offering him a space. But he found himself shaking his head. “Actually, thanks, I’m not hungry,” he mumbled, and walked out into the street, feeling a little numb.

  What’s the matter with you, Michael? he thought. You wanted to get here. And now you are here.

  But what am I supposed to do now?

  Why do you have to “do” anything?

  He shook his head at himself, looked across the road. Sealed-off parking lot; a Super Walmart past that. So you want to play a game, Michael, his mind hissed. Okay: guess how many Friday nights Ron dropped you off at Walmart.

  Guess how many Friday nights he came home reeking like popcorn and sweat and beer—like he’d rolled in the trash under the high school football bleachers instead of sitting on them? How many Friday nights did he take you and Patrick to Walmart so he could have his parties with the buddies he only liked when he had alcohol in his blood? Michael and his brother would wander the night fluorescently, playing the demo PlayStation 3, eating Oreos, drinking Game Fuels. Michael pretended, of course—pretended it wasn’t stealing, pretended this was normal and kind of awesome, actually; so the make-believe was Patrick’s real life, and the happiness Patrick felt was real, and that was the only thing that could ever make Michael feel something good. And so when he was asked first by a cashier and then a manager, were they okay, he was not pretending when he said, “Hunnert percent, good buddy.” And Patrick loved that—giggled inside his hoodie—but even still they had to duck suspicion, so when the manager went away, they did, too, to the bathroom handicapped stall, where after playing Hot Hands, for a couple hours, they slept. In peace.

  Which never lasts.

  Guess how many nights?

  (“A lot” doesn’t count as a guess.)

  No guesses?

  Huh. How ’bout instead of a game, I tell you a story.

  So there’s this little kid, right, and he thinks his mom is awesome. The strongest, best person on Earth, in his humble opinion. And the mom and the kid are so close that they’re each other’s entire world; the kid doesn’t even really want any friends. But they’re poor, and sometimes the kid can tell his mom is lonely, and he fantasizes a lot about someone coming into their lives and lifting away that sadness in Mom that is becoming harder and harder to soothe with a joke. And then—stay with me, this is where the story gets good—then a Someone actually does come into their lives. Name o’ Ron, this fella, and he’s got muscles and this sense of humor that always feels wonderfully/scarily on the edge of becoming too dirty for a kid to hear. At first, Ron is magical. Like one time when the kid—Michael, let’s call him—is in fourth grade and gets an earache, Ron blows a gentle puff of pipe smoke into his ear, and the pain evaporates. But Ron’s best magic? Taking away that little bit of fear that always seemed to hang behind Mom’s eyes. Then he and Mom get married. Michael takes Ron’s last name, and he thinks, This is who I am now; I’m this man’s son; he’s going to take care of us. This man, who builds houses for a living, builds a home for all of them. This man pats Mom on the butt in front of Michael sometimes, and Michael, of course, groans, but every time he sees Mom smile, it’s like feeling the sun on his back. Soon little cross-stitches hang on the walls of their house: FAMILY IS THE BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END.

  But soon . . . sometimes . . . the man comes home at night feeling mean.

  And the kid learns to tread carefully, then, yes-yes. Learns to look into Ron’s eyes and gauge the man’s moods. Learns to walk into a room and instantaneously detect the emotional temperature. Learns to know how to act and speak to diffuse Ron when the kid senses Ron’s countdown ticking.

  Neat tricks.

  But then the economy goes downhill. And Ron doesn’t have anything to build anymore. So—just as another little boy, Patrick, is born—Ron begins to tear everything down.

  The thing is, this little boy does not know how to stay quiet inside. He does not understand why their “big happy home” is getting filled more and more with screams. So yeah, Patrick is scared; yeah, he starts hitting himself. And so Ron puts him in this psychiatric place, sometimes for weeks, and Patrick doesn’t get to go to preschool or kindergarten, doesn’t really ever get the chance to realize much of what outside life is like. And nobody seems to realize that the only reason Patrick has this terrifying emotional pit inside of him is because Ron has put it there. Nobody understands that once Patrick is in a home that makes sense, he will be fine forever.

  And Michael thinks: we need someone to rescue us.

  And Ron starts hitting Mom, too.

  And one time, Patrick sees Mom getting hit before Michael can get him out of the house. And for the first time, Patrick Freaks.

  Punches and slaps and bites himself, yes, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is, after Patrick makes himself bruise and bleed, he vanishes. His body is there, nothing else; Patrick’s eyes go glassy and he will not speak or eat or flinch, ’cause he’s fallen down that emotional pit into his own secret hell. Drugs don’t bring him out of it. For weeks, Patrick is just a shape in a gown, and the doctors do not know when—or if—he will come back to himself. He does come back, though; it just randomly happens in the middle of one night in the hospital, when Patrick wakes up and says he wants a cup of apple juice. Let’s call this a miracle, the doctors say.

  Oh, and just one other thing, they say: if Patrick has another episode like this, it’s likely to be much worse. Perhaps never-come-back, lost-forever worse.

  Right when all that is happening, guess what? The rescuers do come. The cops ask why Patrick got scared. Mom lies to the cops.

  And Michael realizes he has to make Mom tell the police, somehow. So he decides to run away. He still has this yes-yes inside him, but it’s not quite yes-yes that tells him to run away. Because one night, after Patrick accidentally breaks Ron’s football championship trophy and Michael takes the blame, Ron hits Michael for the first time. And in the pain and terror of realizing how close Ron came to hitting his small brother, something speaks inside Michael: something that felt as if it were telling him not just how to outplay or endure all the in-the-moment dangers, but how to escape Ron’s games altogether and forever. You’ll leave, this Game Master says. You’ll run away. You’ll change everything. You’ll save everything, Michael. Because if no one saves Mom and Patrick, then someday—probably soon—they are going to be lost.

  This is who I am; I’m the one who can really make us safe. I can save us, by making Mom tell the truth to the cops. “Mrs. Faris,” the cops will ask, “is there any reason your sons would run away? Has there been any trouble at home?”

  Yes, yes.

  Michael can see the image of a finish line, then: he can see The End. The cops taking Ron away, and Patrick no longer being torn apart by a world that is supposed to be safe but isn’t. And Mom looking at Michael with astonishment and sadness, yes, but also with gratitude, and that smile, that smile like light. . . .

  So Michael leaves on Halloween night.

  And the yes-yes does keep him safe every moment.

  But something gets in the way of Michael’s great plan.

  The end of the world.

  EENSY DETAIL, HA HA HA HA.

  Gunshots from inside the garage. The captain whooped.

  “That captain,” Holly said, “he’s like a kid in a munitions factory, huh?”

  Michael startled: Holly had walked the twenty feet or so from the Hummer to him. He felt, honestly, depressed; he didn’t want to talk. Still, the automatic response, honed from living with Ron and from weeks on the road with Patrick, kicked in: Michael wiped his face of any upset emotions, made a politely interested face.

  “You sure you’re not hungry?” she asked. “Miss Bobbie’s the best cook in town.”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Holly seemed to wait for him to go on. When he didn’t, she said cautiously, “For sure? I mean, you’re sure you’re okay?”

  Awesome. Cute Girl feels bad for me. Man, I must look
so stupid, moping out here.

  “Just tired,” he said.

  “Not that I’m prying or anything,” Holly said. She laughed nervously, shook her head at herself, pulled a cloth napkin from her hoodie pocket, wiped the tomato sauce from her fingers. The confidence she’d shown in the cafeteria wasn’t there. “Anyhoo, hey look,” she spouted quickly, “I just wanted to say, please don’t feel horrible-awful about this morning, because I did not actually see anything.”

  Michael, despite himself, blushed, even laughed a little. Patrick looked up from his perch on the bumper with a happy, curious expression.

  “Well,” Michael said, “I didn’t feel bad, except you just implied that letting someone see my bod would be something to feel horrible-awful about.”

  Holly grinned sheepishly, put a hand on her head. “Ahhhh, mister. I came over here absolutely convinced that I would figure out a non-awkward way to say it.”

  Starting a sentence, Michael thought, and hoping it finishes itself. He felt a surprising, glad spark of connection.

  “You finally reach the Safe Zone, only to encounter Holly, the world’s worst conversationalist,” Holly said. “That can’t be at all how you imagined.”

  “Yeah! Yeah, that’s exactly what it is—no no, not that you’re the worst.”

  I can kill, like, a hundred monsters, he thought, but I cannot talk to a girl.

  “I just mean, I had all these ideas about what things I had to do to get me and Patrick to someplace that was, y’know, not awful. And now I’ve done them all. And if there’s nothing else to do, it’s like it means . . .” He paused, self-conscious.

  “No no, I totally get it,” she said. “You worked the whole time to get to ‘the Safe Zone,’ but it lacks ‘the Safe,’ so if that didn’t work, then what will, right? What we’ve got on our hands is one highly unreliable apocalypse. A hundred years of post-Armaggedon narratives! And the world ends without the courtesy of a safe place to go to.”

  Michael only nodded. What else was there to say?

  At that same moment, as if to prove the “not-safe” point, there was an explosion.

  The sound came like a cannon report, maybe a half mile away in the streets of downtown. Michael flinched, which made Holly laugh, though not at all unkindly. “Land mines,” she said. “The captain’s been installing them around the city. Probably that one got set off by a Zed that couldn’t find someplace dark to hide.

  “Anyhow, things are dreadful here, granted. But I’m now going to tell you a story that will make you feel better.”

  “Okay.”

  “So a week ago, the Zeds started pouring into the city and killing lots of people—”

  “You’re right. Wow. I literally cannot believe how uplifted I am right now.”

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha, okay, that’s enough, you.”

  Am I, like, flirting right now?

  “So the night the evacuation was going on, Hank and I were supposed to leave with our dad, but things were crazy-chaos, and we got separated from him in the crowd. Hank and I wound up on the last evac bus, and it was just about out of the city when Zeds mobbed us. The bus got overturned; people were getting pulled out through the windows. It was even less fun than it sounds.

  “Hank and I locked ourselves in this tiny bathroom in the back. I will admit that I cried, and Hank . . . he really tried to be sweet, saying we’d be safe there, that we just had to wait it out. But we could hear everything. A baby screaming, and then not. Soldiers shooting, then not.

  “But you know what the very worst moment was?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “It was when this thought popped into my head. I realized—and I don’t know why—the reason the soldiers in the Zone had stopped calling the dead people ‘the Infected’ when everything was getting so much worse. Why they’d started calling them ‘the Zeds.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because ‘zed’ is slang for the last letter of the alphabet. And the soldiers thought the world was really coming to an end, that they couldn’t do anything else. And I did, too, you know? But the thing is: the captain found me and Hank, and he’s taking care of us, and we’re gonna be rescued soon.

  “Therefore. In conclusion. This isn’t The End. The world isn’t over.”

  Michael almost said, Hey, about the soldiers . . . But he couldn’t bring himself to spoil the moment. “So what is the world?” he asked instead.

  Holly shrugged, smiling. Michael was again struck by how big her grin was, how open it made her face look. “Just paused, man,” she said.

  A couple more gunshots from inside the garage. A moment later, the captain emerged, flush faced, changing out his machine-gun clip with an almost liquid grace. “Clear and clear, by God! Pile back in, platoon. We’re wastin’ daylight,” he called.

  As they returned to the Hummer, Holly said, “May I say, for the record, how fab it is to have you guys here now? New friends rawk.”

  “Totally,” Michael said.

  Friends, Michael thought.

  Daaaang.

  It’s hard to describe any moment on a planet rife with screaming corpses as “carefree.” But that afternoon came close.

  Because as Captain Jopek led them on the methodical Humvee expedition of the downtown grid, Michael felt like he wasn’t just being driven through the city.

  He was also being taken through a Postapocalyptic Greatest Hits Collection.

  Finding Food. Check.

  Collecting Medkits. Check.

  Accumulating Bullets. Check.

  Searching for Fellow Man. Check.

  He found himself relishing the tasks, which were so awesomely familiar from almost Every Video Game Ever. It couldn’t have felt more different than The Game did, and in no small part because somebody else was shaping the day, which—true fact—was awesome.

  The captain stuck to the (landmine-free) main roads, going building by building deeper into downtown; Hank X’d off each successive searched street on his map (and Hank also, for no discernible reason other than it was Totally Badass, often requested to hang out on the machine gun-equipped roof of the Hummer whenever the captain went into the buildings). The captain did pick some semi-weird places to look for people, Michael thought, like a pileup of silver Red Cross trailers, which he insisted on exploring compartment by compartment, not satisfied with simply shouting into them. But mostly the afternoon passed with a pleasant rhythm of driving, finding, and talking.

  Michael was relieved that he didn’t feel “normal”—that he didn’t feel like the person he’d been before Halloween, as he’d feared he would after his brief stare down with Hank. He’d had a fantasy, as a kid, about going to summer camp, someplace where nobody knew who he was, where he could reassemble himself and become something other than The Poor Kid or The Skinny Kid. It had only taken the rising of the dead to make this an affordable option for the Faris family, ha-ha-ha, but this afternoon trip through the “paused world” really was the closest he’d ever come to it. Michael told everyone his story of the Rapture confrontation. Holly ooohed, which he pretended, all cool-guy, not to notice. Hank actually “bumped knucks” with him. (“Respect,” Hank said.) It wasn’t the attention that felt good, exactly. It was: Michael could see the pieces of him adding up in their eyes. He’d thought that up a long time ago, how people are really just puzzles, this final image that was composed of all the different moments and pieces of them that you’ve seen. Most people didn’t seem to realize that you were a puzzle, too: if you were careful enough, you could choose the image other people put together. Holly and Bobbie and Hank saw the post-Halloween him, and it made that (kick-ass) him seem real to Michael himself, in a way that felt almost dizzyingly wonderful. And as much as he loved Bub, he had to admit that it was nice to be seen as something other than an (admittedly awesome) older brother.

  The only thing that could have made it better, Michael thought, was if he could see the captain’s expression beyond that sliding plate. He hoped the captain was smiling a
t his story, astonished and impressed by the new kid in town, and saying under his breath, “No shit . . .”

  By the time they found the third ammo cache of the day—in a sniper post beside a McDonald’s PlayPlace—the sky was burning with the pale fire of late afternoon.

  “Goddamn, this light leaves fast,” the captain said, his back to Michael. “Just a couple more stops.”

  Michael checked out the sky, too. “I don’t know. Maybe we better call it a day, though?” he asked.

  The captain didn’t turn, but Michael saw his shoulders tense. Is he angry?

  Bobbie seemed to notice. She put in, kind of quickly, “Yes, that sounds about right to me.”

  When the captain looked to them, his face seemed affable enough. Imagined it. “All right, Old Bones, let’s get you to bed,” he said. Bobbie laughed politely. “Why these walkin’, talkin’ dead targets only come out to party in the nighttime, though, I’ll never know.”

  “Pssh,” Hank went, like he was a 24/7 party animal.

  “It’s their pupils. When you die, they stop closing in response to the light,” Michael offered.

  Holly looked impressed.

  “Respect to the scientist!” said the captain.

  “Where’d you learn that?” asked Hank.

  I watch entirely too much NCIS, Michael thought. “I read, tons,” he replied, shrugging.

  As they filed through the gate to exit the kids’ playground, Michael wound up walking near the rear of the pack with Captain Jopek. Everyone loaded into the Hummer, but when Michael looked back he noticed that the captain had paused a few feet away. He was gazing at something. Michael tried to figure out what it was by snapshotting the world. The footprints in the snow. The city in suspended animation around them. But the captain’s gaze was oddly far away—as if he were watching something beyond the scope of Michael’s sight. “Well, that’s the secret, ain’t it?” he murmured.

  “The secret?” Michael said.

  “The way to enjoy this world. Figure out a way to live forever.” He looked at Michael, winked. “Know what I mean?”