The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  “Over here, if you please,” Holly said, pointing to an overstuffed chair.

  Michael stopped in the doorway. “You know, don’t worry about it.”

  “No worries, won’t take two minutes.” She pulled a stool next to the chair, opening a first aid kit.

  I don’t want to do something that’s “good for me” right now, Holly. I don’t want to “take care of myself.” I want to just be with you.

  “Holly, I can do it myself, really—”

  “I know you can,” she said, her voice shaky. “But I really would like to be able to do something useful right now.”

  For the first time since leaving the Senate chambers, Holly’s gaze met his full on. What he saw there was sadness, confusion, fear about everything that had happened today.

  He offered tentatively, “I guess I’m just a little nervous it’ll hurt.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, you might not be able to guess this, Holly,” Michael sighed, “but I am a man haunted by a tragic bikini-waxing incident.”

  He watched her frown relax, warmed by the joke. “Oh no, I totally got that vibe from you. It felt like bad manners to bring it up, though.”

  That slightly too-big smile momentarily spread over her face. That smile pierced Michael, somehow; there was something about it that was so open, so unguarded, that it let out a little of the heaviness in his chest.

  He sat down in the chair. A window in front of him overlooked a dark alley; he watched Holly’s reflection in the black glass as she scooted closer to remove the square of tan tape holding the cotton to his neck. Just before she did, Michael thought, This is the first time a girl ever really touched me. Yeah, okay, maybe this getting-scratched thing isn’t so bad after all, ha-ha.

  Except that Holly made what looked like a disturbed face. “How’s the war wound lookin’?” he asked, trying to sound light, though suddenly distinctly insecure about his neck’s physique.

  “A little inflamed . . . ,” Holly murmured. “But it’s fine, I’m sure. I know you figured this out already, but scratches aren’t really a danger. The virus doesn’t transmit through anything except bites.

  “Okay, mister, prepare to be zapped,” she whispered, and pulled, fast and hard, on the adhesive. Michael grunted. “You are welcome,” Holly said. She rooted through the first aid kit in her lap.

  “So. You’re pretty good with the science-y stuff.”

  “You’re pretty good with the flattery-y stuff,” Holly chuckled. “But I’m not so good. Mostly, I just repeat what my daddy taught me.”

  Michael saw Holly’s reflection smile. In the dark glass, the expression was difficult to read, but something about it became strangely distant.

  “He’s a doctor?” he said after a pause.

  “Pharmacist,” Holly replied. “But, like, a fancy kind. This’ll be cold; that’s your warning.”

  She gently circled a cool, sterile-smelling cotton ball over his neck. “But, yeah, the virus—do you mind if I geek out a second and tell you about it?”

  Michael shook his head, happy to hear the eagerness, even excitement, in her voice.

  “Rad! Oh Nerd Joy, you are one of the things I miss most about the world Before.”

  I don’t miss anything from Before, Michael thought.

  “So yeah, the dead-people virus: It’s a new virus, obviously; you don’t see the dead rising every flu season. Like Hank was saying yesterday, a lot of people think the virus is man-made—maybe in Iran, because of the war.”

  How can people do that to each other? But after everything he’d seen at home, maybe cruelty shouldn’t surprise him. “God . . . ,” Michael said.

  Holly suddenly took a deep, nearly angry breath. “If God is around,” she said shortly, “maybe He should be trying harder.” She breathed hard again. “Like, Christ, with this shit with Bobbie . . .” She stopped herself, then said, “Hold this,” and taped a new cotton square to his neck.

  Her voice sounded far away, as if already mentally deciding what to put where in the first aid kit. Bring out the awkward: “Well, thanks” and “So, yeah.”

  “So yeah,” Holly said, “we should probably get back to bed now. I don’t think the captain really wants us walking around. You and I should totally hang out tomorrow, though. Did that bandaging ordeal hurt as much as you thought it would?”

  Michael held in a sigh. He didn’t want the respite from the crappy world to be over. “Nah,” he said.

  “Tell the truth,” said Holly.

  “You’ll be hearing from my attorney.”

  “Heh. But . . . thanks for this, Michael,” she said. Seriously, no jokiness at all. “It was really sweet of you.”

  Michael made a “no big deal” gesture, and bent over to move the stool out of his way to hide his blush.

  They went out the door and headed back to the Senate, and Holly was saying, to fill the quiet: “Yeah. So. The virus. The government was working on a cure. The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, basically the FBI of the germ world, they even had this lab in town. They had to keep moving the lab to different places, though; people kept trying to overrun it and get the cure for their infected families. The CDC scientists were supposedly on the verge of getting a working formula that would reverse the virus’s effects on the brain. I don’t know how soon after getting bitten you’d have to take the cure for it to work; the scientists were hopeful, though. But then Charleston got overrun. I don’t know if the CDC even was able to get the ‘cure’ out of the city during the crazy evacs.” Holly sighed. “Anyway—it’s hard to make a cure, because viruses evolve and go through mutations.”

  “Like how a cold changes all the time?” Michael said.

  “Exactly, because a virus’s job is to survive. So it keeps changing, but on a deeper level—that’s my dad’s fave phrase: ‘on a deeper level’—it’s not changing at all. It’s becoming what it already is. The environment becomes hostile; maybe antibodies are introduced, new proteins or something. So the virus does what viruses do: it adjusts. But it’s not reacting, because what it mutates into was already a part of it. Coded, like a secret, all along.”

  They were walking past windows: light and shadow.

  “But what’s it heading toward?” Michael asked. “Like, does it have a ‘goal’?”

  Holly nodded. “I guess, sort of, it’s heading ‘home.’ Viruses do that literally, sometimes: there are some that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on Earth where the virus originated. Which gives me the jibblies. But even if it doesn’t do that, the goal of every virus is to ‘go home’ to itself: to make the ultimate, purest form of itself. It’s why the Zeds’ behavior is changing, why they seem to be growing . . . not smarter, but savvier. Like you said, they tore out their eyes, they’re just using sound now—which, holla, dork points for figuring that out. But yeah, as with every virus, this one is evolving to its most powerful-slash-purest form.”

  Michael asked if that form had a name.

  Holly said, “The endgame.”

  Michael stopped, a few feet from the Senate. That odd, soaring feeling again—like things syncing together. Like . . . clockwork.

  “What’s up?” Holly asked. “You okay?”

  And now was as good a time as any to admit how much he liked her. In the long, empty, snow-lit hall, it would have been easy to imagine that they were the last two people left on Earth, that he could just say good night and see Holly tomorrow, and continue his limited-time crush at the world’s most bizarre sleepaway camp. And maybe that was cheesy pop-song stuff, but to Michael nothing felt false about it. It was right then that Michael understood, in his bones and heart and breath, that this moment was what he’d wanted: to be just a normal teenager, to not have to worry about anything other than the mystery of a cute girl’s feelings for him, to just let an adult instruct and protect him.

  And Michael could not stand it.

  Now that he had reached this endgame, he realized he could not stand feeling regular, smi
ling breathlessly at his own minor-league daring. Going back to his Senate bed would be safe and not-scary, because he would be following Jopek’s orders instead of this “what-does-she-think-of-me” feeling. Yeah, it would be not-scary, but here was a true fact about Michael Faris: right then, he missed danger. He missed the type of recklessness that somehow also made him feel safe, the kind he dashed into blindly, trusting only that he would feel his heart and breathe his breath and smile his way out of it.

  When he replied, “I’m fine. I don’t think I’m tired yet. Do you want to maybe hang out right now?” he felt sort of terrified, because one: she was beautiful, and two: he wasn’t, and three: Jopek, who’d seemed unhinged earlier, might catch them.

  But mostly, at last, a little yes-yes—that was what Michael felt.

  “Absolutely,” Holly said. Genuinely happy. Almost like, despite Jopek’s rules, she had been wanting him to ask.

  Which was, of course, The Best Thing Ever.

  So after they ran through the marble halls that sang with moonlight and rang with calls of Bellows, after they reached the rotunda with the ruined chandelier, after they jokingly high-fived the rows of governor statues—after all that, Holly opened an oak door padded with leather, identical to the one at the other end of the hall, and whispered, “Welcome to the Capitol Sanctuary.” Pews and a pipe organ, and no cots or postcrisis clutter. “They used it for state funerals and stuff. I think they sealed it after things got awful-awful. The captain actually had to move a coffin out of here and down into somewhere in the Capitol’s basement—that kid who died in a coal mine, remember? Cady Gibson. But it’s just beautiful in here, you know? Anyway, what do you wanna do?”

  In a movie, the hidden meaning of the question would be something like: baby, let’s smooch. But he didn’t think it was now. Anyway, he didn’t really have anything in mind.

  Michael shrugged, his heart pounding from running and from nerves.

  Holly thought a second, then she wove through the pews, to a podium at the front of the sanctuary, flicking the microphone it held with a fingernail.

  “So. Everyone,” she said in a game-show-host voice, “welcome to The Holly Hour! Tonight’s guest is a very special friend of mine: Holly. Holly, how have you been?

  “Not so bad. Just hanging out with dead people.

  “And how is that?

  “I find them beautiful.

  “Is that so?

  “Especially their skin.

  “Because it’s beautiful?

  “Because it’s a-peeling.”

  Michael chuckled, did a rimshot.

  Holly faked an awkward pause at her joke, pulling an “eesh!” face to a “camera.”

  “Now, our next guest here in West Virginia is a guy who hails all the way from West Virginia. Please welcome Michael . . .” She gave him an expectant look.

  “Oh,” he said. “Michael Faris.” Holly’s “Come on down!” applause echoed in the chamber as Michael walked to the front of the Sanctuary and sat in a fancy priest’s chair, a few feet from the left side of the podium.

  “So Michael.” Very “Oprah” solemn. “Tell us about yourself. How old were you the first time you got pregnant?”

  And for the next couple minutes, sitting there after curfew in this secret sanctuary, Michael joked with this cute-hot girl. Which felt kind of enjoyably risky in itself: he kept checking the sanctuary door out of the corner of his eye, making sure that Jopek wasn’t coming in. And he really did want to impress Holly, to keep the conversation light, so that she would see the purposely-and-perfectly-selected Michael.

  Then Holly said, “Now, let’s get back to something we started discussing before the commercial break: what are the things you miss about the world Before?”

  “Um, how ’bout you first?” Michael said, keeping his tone casual.

  “I miss knowing what I’m gonna do every day. I mean, I don’t miss class, necessarily, but I miss knowing I have class, and then I have lunch and more class, and then I have Quiz Bowl or Mathletes or Readers’ Regime—Michael! Don’t laugh! A-hole!”

  “I’m n-n-n—” Michael chuckled.

  But she was laughing, herself, and her smile was somehow even more open than usual. It was a little like a live wire. “I miss who I got to be in class,” she said, playing with loose wood paneling on the podium. “Because now . . . okay and maybe this’ll sound cocky, but whatever—it’s like I’m still smart, but who cares? Not that I want all y’all to worship at The Altar of Muh Brain, but I liked being that girl. It’s like with Hank, though: that kid makes me insaaane sometimes, but I also feel sort of profoundly dreadful for him, ’cause I don’t think he really knows how to be in this world. He was so cool in school, and—not that this is the world’s great tragedy, granted—he’s kinda trying to figure out how to feel okay without coaches telling him what to do, you know? That’s partly why we were so relieved when Jopek found us. We had this soldier who was going to protect us, and then we’ll get to the Richmond Safe Zone, and . . . and if the CDC did make a cure, everything will get back to the way it was before.”

  A thought hit Michael, and it hurt. You wouldn’t have liked me in the world Before, Holly. I don’t even think we would have ever talked to each other. My only friends were 1) people on Xbox LIVE, 2) my mom, and 3) my little brother. And my main hobby was trying to rescue them from their awful lives. I didn’t do such a hot job of winning that game, either, so yeah, you could say I’m still a loser.

  She pulled the piece of wood paneling off of the podium and flicked it at Michael. “All right, mister, your turn.”

  Just keep it light. Michael began: “I miss being in school, too, definitely. . . .”

  But the sentence didn’t finish itself.

  Something odd was happening inside him: he thought, with surprise, I—I don’t want to lie anymore. I didn’t come for that. He’d believed, a moment ago, that he’d sneaked to the sanctuary to yes-yes his way out of things, to feel nervous but in control, too, with the “danger” being the dance of what pieces of himself he let her see. But he didn’t want to look in Holly’s eyes and just see his puzzle reflected back to him. Tell her.

  “No. I—I don’t miss Before. At all,” Michael said.

  Stop, Michael. It’s going well, don’t eff it u—

  “I ran away,” Michael said. “On Halloween.”

  “What a cliff-hanger! More in a minute after a word from our sponsors—”

  “I mean it though.” God, what am I doing?

  Holly blinked at him. “Whoa, wait—really? Like, from home?”

  Michael nodded, and she responded, “Okay . . . ,” sounding cautious but not unkind. And that settled it.

  The more he went on, the realer it became. Holly listened, not interrupting as he told her the CliffsNotes version of Ron: Ron was the one always pushing Patrick into the psych hospital; Ron was the first person Michael had ever hated, a feeling that was enormously mutual, and so big between them that it had to come out somewhere, and one time it came out of Ron’s fists.

  “Sorry if this sounds weird,” Holly said gently, “but why doesn’t your mom just leave?”

  “Because that’s just what she is, you know? It’s like, when The Game started, Patrick and I called the Zeds ‘Bellows,’ because ‘bellow’ is what they do. And Mom is someone who can’t leave someone who loves her; she’s someone who needs to be rescued. And I just realized, if I was quick enough, I could rescue her. . . . But . . .”

  Michael had no idea why he was telling Holly this; it just felt important that he do so.

  When he paused, Holly asked, “When what ‘game’ started?”

  “I lie to Patrick, about everything. To protect him from this thing one of his idiot doctors called ‘Freaking.’ Bub just disappears into himself. I tell him everything is a Game; that this whole world is all a Game.”

  “Wow. So that’s why he feels so safe with you. I can see why the kid loves you so much.”

  But Michael suddenly felt s
adness and an incredible loneliness. He wasn’t so sure Holly was right about Patrick. In a way, Patrick didn’t really know him.

  He guessed Patrick worshipped him.

  And there was a difference—huge, he sensed—between worship and love.

  “Anyway, on Halloween,” he went on, “Bellows crashed the party, and Mom comes outside and . . .”

  “. . . and?”

  Michael gulped.

  And shut up, Michael, he thought. He’d felt almost sure that there was a point he had to make, something vital in the retelling, something that he was missing . . . but he just felt exposed, now.

  Holly tried to meet his eyes, and he felt his blood.

  He said, “Ron came out; Mom wouldn’t get in the car. That’s it.”

  “Michael . . . that is so hard, man. But you know that it’s not, like, your fault, right?”

  “Right,” Michael said noncommittally.

  “No, listen, you are not even slightly allowed to feel bad about that,” she said earnestly, leaning forward, her eyes intense. “Getting to Charleston, protecting your brother? I’d say you’re sort of amazing. And things are going to work out, the soldiers will be here any day, and then . . .”

  Michael nodded, his chest hurting.

  Holly noticed how upset he was, and said, “You know what? I’d like to share something with you.”

  Now she moved out from behind the podium, through the pews, through bars of moony snow-light, her skin like smooth milk, and he followed her, until they reached a patch of darkness, and her hand floated through space and found his hand, and his heart was alive in his throat.

  A ladder was set against the wall, stretching up toward a recessed balcony. “You first,” she said, and when Holly followed him, he took her hand, helping her from the ladder. He noted, First Initiation of Hand-holding.

  “It’s quiet up here. Why, I don’t know. The Zeds’ screams don’t seem to reach—I guess because they’re all out in front of the Capitol. And it’s kind of generally wonderful up here, don’t you think so?”