The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  But now, Michael shook his head at that, inside. It was like a movie: real in the moments, but afterward you sort of laughed at yourself.

  “I only ask because sometimes I wonder if this world is all . . . well, the end-times,” Bobbie said, and Michael got the feeling that letting her talk was the best thing he could do to help her feel better. “Because the plane that brought me to the Safe Zone? It was a crash, Michael. The pilots were attacked, and we fell out of the sky, a hundred souls on board. I should have been killed. And my husband—did I tell you Jack is his name?—only broke his legs. The government began to evacuate Charleston just a few hours after the crash, when those creatures began overwhelming the city. The injured were on the first buses, and you could hear the soldiers fighting downtown, trying to clear a way through for the buses, but Jack was so calm, so brave, when they were loading him onto that first bus.”

  “So you’ll be seeing him soon, then,” Michael said, trying to cheer her as her voice trailed off. “Also, I think you’re doing pretty good in the bravery department.”

  “Thank you, Michael,” she replied. “But I just mean, such incredible things have happened in this world. I’ve always prayed: it’s like talking to yourself, then it changes. And I used to think that God answered all prayers—that if you honestly gave yourself to His grace, and if you treated people with kindness, you’d be safe and carried through whatever was to come. I still pray. But with all the terrible things around us, now I’m finding . . .”

  “What are you finding?”

  “I’m finding that I don’t want God to speak back to me,” Bobbie said. “I do not think that I’m prepared for what He has coming.”

  Michael didn’t believe in what Bobbie was saying, but he couldn’t help it: chills crept up his spine.

  “I know those people in the mountains believe this is The End, too,” Bobbie said, so softly it was almost as if she were speaking to herself. “But I think I understand them. I grew up in a coal town; I know what it’s like to have all your hope tied up with the mining company. Then they had a little boy die in their mine.” Michael remembered the newspaper he’d found in the coal company trash can, the article about the accident that killed Cady Gibson, the young boy with the ragged, crooked haircut. “And then the dead rose. And I believe that the people in that town needed hope, and the only thing they could do was try to believe that these awful things meant something, even if the meaning is something terrible. Their priest took their pain for his own purposes. And I believe that makes him a dark man.”

  The idea gave Michael pause. It struck him that, if Bobbie were right, then the Rapture’s situation felt uncomfortably like Patrick’s and his own: after all, Michael was using The Game to shape meaning out of their pain. But no, it’s totally different, Michael thought. When The Game is over, Patrick’s going to be fine. The Rapture’s only goal seemed to be destruction.

  “But Miss Bobbie, there’s no reason to believe that anything bad is coming.”

  She looked back to Michael, seeming to snap out of the small reverie. “Oh. No, of course. I’m so sorry to go on like this,” Bobbie said.

  Michael nodded, and then Bobbie, still looking distant and shaken, headed for the door. He felt a need to interject again, to repay her for her being kind to Patrick—to feel useful again after the moment with Jopek, which had made him feel so small.

  “Miss Bobbie?” She turned to him. “You know, you’re not going to have to be ‘waiting around’ too much longer with the soldiers on their way.”

  Bobbie nodded, but didn’t look reassured.

  “And you don’t even have to just ‘wait around’ at all. I don’t pray, but you know what did make me feel better when I was out in the mountains? Keeping busy. That’s the big thing. And carrying a gun didn’t hurt, either.”

  Bobbie smiled, said jokingly, “Maybe I’ll try that sometime, honey.”

  “Heck yeah. Maybe those soldiers will recruit you; I just hope your husband will recognize you in camo.”

  And, finally, looking like her bright self again, Bobbie laughed.

  A reminder that soldiers were coming back soon; the obvious truth of the awesomeness of Bobbie’s survival mirrored back to her: these things added up, slightly refocused the world, to give her a picture of happiness. And not just her.

  I’m good at this, aren’t I, making people feel better? Michael thought as he headed out of the kitchen.

  But you never saw any soldiers, Michael, something in him whispered.

  He felt a small pang of guilt. Well . . . even if I didn’t see them, soldiers really are coming. And if this little not-even-half lie makes Bobbie feel better, isn’t it worth it?

  Yes, he responded, with warmth in his ribs. Yes, yes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The rest of the day passed quickly. Michael ate a couple cinnamon rolls for breakfast, which gave him this mostly pleasant mix of sleepiness and sugar-jitters, and afterward, he asked Bub, “So what do you wanna do today?”

  Patrick seemed almost confused by the question. After Michael reassured him—yep, anything—Patrick took him to the cots in the marble halls, where they played with a couple of Nintendo 3DSes. Michael was delighted to play a game with a screen; he told Patrick about the time that he’d beaten the original Super Mario Bros. in eight minutes. “I gotta try it again one day,” he said. “With my eyes open this time.”

  Patrick didn’t find that funny, though. And when Michael tried to show him the secret warps on the Mario 2 cartridge, Bub replied, seeming oddly restless and grumpy, “Michael, I know ’em all already.”

  He asked if they could go explore.

  And Michael said sure, partially hoping to bump into Holly. Patrick led them through most of the Capitol, but they didn’t run into her. The “exploration” of the building was dampened also by another fact: Nearly all of the Capitol’s corridors and chambers were identical, and the novelty of the whole mayhem-meets-marble decorating scheme had already kinda worn off. Michael traveled through these Safe Zone halls with his brother, the mesh-filtered winter light streaming around them, but he had a vaguely depressed “stuck” feeling, as if he were repeating the same screen over and over on a scratched game disc. Patrick began doing things that he usually only did when he was uncomfortable or bored: he counted the cots, up into the hundreds, as well as all the left and right turns of the halls. Even when Michael and Bub discovered a two-lane bowling alley in the east wing of the Capitol, they wound up quitting after only one round: resetting the pins themselves turned out to be brain numbing . . . and when Michael told Patrick that he couldn’t remember how to keep score, Patrick seemed—uncharacteristically—almost angry.

  He remembered how Bub’s doctors had once mentioned that “children like Patrick” could get upset if their diet was not monitored. Maybe Bub just had too much sugar this morning?

  So after a tuna-fish-sandwich, sugar-free lunch—after an unsuccessful attempt to get Bub to take a nap—Michael suggested they play a game of Sorry! in the Governor’s Dining Room. Bobbie, who had found the board game, played as well. Even though it was one of his favorites, though, Patrick was uneasy, fidgeting and saying, midway through, “Can’t we do somethin’ else? Michael, can’t we?”

  And Michael began to realize what was the matter with Patrick today.

  That realization made Michael’s stomach drop a little, for it implied a dimension to Patrick’s anxiety he’d not previously considered. Michael always knew, of course, that Bub needed to understand the world around him in order to feel safe.

  Now, though, the world around Patrick finally was safe . . . but because hanging out aimlessly at the Capitol wasn’t what The Game said they should do, Bub could not understand that he did not have to feel his horrible anxiety anymore. It struck Michael that the respites Patrick had received from that anxiety—the way he’d been so happy around Bobbie, for example—were only temporary. Patrick can’t really get better, can’t really feel comfortable—can’t really change�
��until I get him to the real Safe Zone.

  Michael’s watch read 2:30 and the sun outside the windows of the Governor’s Dining Room had begun its sure descent toward the skyline. Okay, he thought. So, just give Bub a “Game task” to do.

  And so, at the tail end of that afternoon, just as Patrick was putting away the board game pieces and Michael was still trying to come up with a new task, Captain Jopek elbowed open the door to the cafeteria and announced: “Headin’ downtown for a quick trip, troops. Load up at the Hummer in three minutes.” The captain saw Michael check his watch, said:

  “Got a problem with that idea, Faris?”

  Michael shook his head, both because he felt that unaccountable Jopek-seems-strange shame and also because, for the first time that afternoon, Patrick seemed excited.

  So Michael dressed his brother in his coat and wool hat and mittens. He loaded Bub into a rear-compartment harness in the Hummer, Hank and Holly and Bobbie following him. He comforted himself with the knowledge that it was 2:47; sunset was almost an hour away. He caught Holly’s eye, nodded, both nervous and happy when she took the harness right across from him, with only the white emergency gurney to separate them.

  The captain revved the engine, beginning their “mission.”

  And very soon after that, everything began to go wrong.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Aren’t there, like, land mines here?

  Michael shifted in the harness, looking uneasily out the Hummer’s rear portal window. The captain had taken them across the Capitol bridge, into the downtown grid, but instead of simply continuing yesterday’s systematic search of the main, mine-less streets, Jopek had unlocked several thick layers of fencing, and taken them into an alley so narrow that the sides of the Hummer nearly scraped.

  Michael looked to Holly, wanting to know what she thought of this, but the captain had opened the sliding plate between the front and rear Hummer compartments: the unfiltered sound of the engine was so loud that nobody in the back could hold a conversation.

  Calm down, man, Michael thought, feeling a little panicky. The captain knows what he’s doing.

  They got to their destination safely. The side streets didn’t contain as many mines as Michael had thought, perhaps because the recent influx of Bellows into the city had detonated them already.

  But still.

  The Hummer stopped. Captain Jopek hurled open the rear double doors.

  The pale fire of late afternoon burned on the captain’s grinning, eager face. “’Mon out,” he said, strapping on his Kevlar vest, his wrist knives, ankle pistol. “This little mission shouldn’t take too long.”

  They’d parked next to an enormous fake-corn maze, set up in a shopping square across from an old movie theater as a Halloween decoration, Michael supposed. Scarecrows hung inside the maze, ragged and off-kilter on crosses; jack-o’-lanterns rested on bales of hay, their puckered mouths stuffed with snow. Much of the corn was flattened; all of it was browned. Michael felt, again, that sense of vague depression: seeing the maze was like walking past a water park closed for winter.

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” Hank said as he disembarked. Observe the badass is what it sounded like.

  Michael helped Bobbie out of her harness, then waited with Patrick as she and everyone else piled out of the Hummer.

  “What’re we gonna do?” Patrick whispered as Michael set him down on the street, heading toward the maze behind the rest of the group.

  “Just wait while the captain looks for people,” Michael replied. I guess. “Hundred points for each one.”

  “Points for people?” Patrick said, and stopped walking. “There’s never people in buildings, though.”

  And just like that, the momentary relief that Bub had gotten from Jopek’s “mission” announcement was gone: his small face crinkled down with disappointment and frustration; his mittened hands clenched and unclenched. Michael could feel, like something electrical, the tingling signals of Patrick’s anxiety through the air between them.

  Michael’s heart hurt a little. He saw the scene around them through Bub’s eyes.

  The snow, all slushy and gray.

  No gentle hills to sled.

  No Lightball-able places to explore.

  And most of all: no real reason to believe that The End was one step closer than it had been before.

  Michael remembered the other night, in Coalmount, when he and Patrick had been taken aback by the brilliant starpointed sky, how it had seemed that they almost owned the world. Now the captain was standing beside this dreary abandoned maze, talking to “his troops,” undoubtedly telling them to wait outside “while yer captain does a little explorin’.”

  Uh, Michael, are you seriously feeling nostalgic for the good old days when you and your brother were trying not to get eaten?

  Well. Actually: yeah.

  “Maybe can we look for more pieces for my weapon tomorrow?” Patrick murmured, almost to himself, walking toward the maze, his shoulders slouched. He pulled his tiny orange toy gun from his coat pocket, then put it away again forlornly. “I can’t even make it shoot, the trigger’s too hard to pull.”

  “Bub, hold up.” Patrick looked back. “Why don’t we go look for the pieces now? Secret style.”

  ’Cause who’s it gonna hurt, if I do what I want for a couple minutes?

  “Nuh-uh, really?” Patrick replied, his face coming alive. Michael nodded, and Patrick offered him a double fist-bump. And it was as Michael led back around the opposite side of the Hummer, going away from the captain and the maze and everyone else, heading toward an Ace Hardware storefront, that in the back of his mind he realized something was off.

  Footsteps, coming toward him, fast across spattering snow.

  Michael turned.

  And when he looked, the captain’s face was there, filling his vision.

  “Hi! What’cha doin?” Captain Jopek said.

  Michael startled, trying to search the captain’s eyes, finding instead only that perpetual blankness. But he told himself: I’m just taking my brother for a walk, captain, and I’m allowed to do that.

  The captain’s checking to make sure you’re safe, that’s all.

  “Taking Patrick for a quick walk,” Michael replied, trying to sound confident.

  The captain’s brow darkened. He nodded, like a man in contemplation.

  “Taking Patrick for a walk,” Jopek repeated. “Takin’ P,” he said, grinned blazingly, “for a . . .”

  The captain paused.

  And growled:

  “WAAALK?!”

  The sound rumbled and cracked the winter air between them. In that moment, the captain exploded toward Michael, stopping inches short of Michael’s nose.

  “What the,” Patrick breathed.

  Michael opened his mouth to say something, but the captain shook his head with such authority that he silenced himself. Michael became aware of Hank smirking in the background, though Bobbie and Holly were nowhere in sight. Michael suddenly felt like a kid who had struck out at Little League tryouts.

  “Maybe you’re too dumbass to recollect this, but I told you to start listenin’ to my orders, Mikey,” the captain whispered, close, so close, his hot breath like a small invasion.

  Jopek’s just trying to . . . to . . . He hoped the sentence would finish itself. But, no.

  Jopek put his right hand, shaped like a pistol, to Michael’s temple. The crescent of his nail pressed inward. Before Michael knew what was happening, tears pushed on his eyes. He took an awkward step backward, but his butt struck the wheel bay of the Hummer.

  “I—I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  The captain smiled ugly humor. “Aw, I think you proved you didn’t think.”

  Hank guffawed. Michael did not understand the malice: He’d thought he and Hank had formed some degree of rapport yesterday.

  The captain cocked his thumb back, like the hammer of a gun . . . and, finally, with a light push, drew it away from Michael’s skull.

&nbs
p; “You just gotta be careful, boyo,” he whispered, and clapped Michael happily on the shoulder, without at all changing those dark eyes. “You just want to make sure you follow my rules.”

  Hank chuckled. The keys on the captain’s hip sang like a ring of knives as he left.

  The captain is like Ron, Michael.

  Jopek is just like Ron.

  Welcome home.

  Patrick’s expression was an honest blank, as if someone had taken an enormous pink eraser and wiped away everything that made sense to him. “Michael?” he said uncertainly, and reached out to take his hand.

  “Bub,” Michael hissed, snapping his hand away. “Not now.”

  What the hell is the matter with you? he thought. What is wrong with you? Why, when he’d looked down the barrel of Rulon’s rifle, should Captain Jopek’s gun hand seem so horrible?

  “’Kay but, why you fighting with—”

  “I said not now. What part of that is confusing?”

  Patrick’s face crumpled. The expression should have broken Michael’s heart. And he realized, resentfully, that Patrick seemed to think it should, too.

  Michael did what he knew would hurt most: He rolled his eyes and shook his head, like he was trying to hide annoyance at a little kid who wants to play but is too small to do it right.

  Patrick made a face of raw pain and walked away, around the Hummer, toward the maze.

  Okay, so the captain’s being an asshole, Michael told himself. So what? So freaking what?

  By the corn, everyone else stood in a circle that looked sealed to him.

  “Just had to fetch Mikey, is all,” the captain was saying lightly to Holly and Bobbie. “And I tell you what: y’all come in with me this time.” He looked at Michael; a subtle sneer. “Yeah, I think the man in charge is gonna keep a real close eye on you from now on.”