The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  The balcony was generally wonderful. There were seats for an audience facing out over the bowl of the Sanctuary, but behind these seats was a wall of glass, which looked out on the Kanawha River. It was the river that ran from one tip of Michael’s West Virginia map to the other, the connective tissue through coal towns and McMansions, gathering pieces of the poor West Virginia and carrying them to where less-poor West Virginia could pick them up. The river was polluted, of course, and Bobbie was there now, but you couldn’t tell. The Kanawha only shone like a black ribbon, its surface spangled with the reflections of star points, as if the heavens momentarily had come to earth.

  It would be easy to pretend the world was a world without the Bellows. And as Holly sat beside him, Indian-style, a warmth spreading in his skin when their knees touched, Michael understood that this was the gift she was giving him: a little piece of a world that made you think the whole thing was different.

  The world can be different, Michael thought. I don’t have to let myself and people I care about get cornered. I don’t have to pretend that someone else is going to save me. I can leave, and this time, I can take all of us.

  “I think we need to leave Captain Jopek,” Michael said. “Soon.”

  Holly looked over, confused. “What? Why?”

  “Because he’s dangerous, Holly. He never should have taken us into the city so late. It was pointless. And I swear, I think Jopek made us go into the Magic Lantern because he was pissed at me for questioning him.”

  “That . . . doesn’t sound right, Michael,” she said.

  Yes, it does. “Even if it isn’t, though, Jopek is letting us get cornered. The daylight doesn’t stop Bellows anymore, who knows how long it will be before they get through the barriers outside? There are more Bellows here all the time. Jopek is being stupid. I never let Bub and me get cornered when we were out there by ourselves. We can take the Hummer and get out of Charleston, and the . . . other unit, the one I saw,” Michael said, feeling a twinge of guilt and regret for having to lie, but pushing it down. It’ll be worth it in the end, he thought. I’ll get us to the Safe Zone, and we’ll all be safe. “They’ve gotta be close. But even if we can’t find them, the other Safe Zone is just across the border to Virginia.”

  Holly looked not at all convinced.

  “Holly, you’ve never thought that there’s anything weird about Jopek?”

  “Well. I don’t know, maybe he’s too bossy sometimes. But that’s probably just the army, y’know?”

  “No, I don’t think so at all,” Michael said. “I don’t know what it is, but when I look into his eyes . . . it’s like I’m looking over the edge of a pit. Even Bobbie said, ‘It’s like there’s a secret in everything he says.’”

  Michael saw Holly flinch a little—because of the mention of Bobbie, he supposed.

  After a moment, she said, in a light tone of voice that Michael didn’t quite buy, “I guess I’ve thought the captain can seem a little weird sometimes. Let’s make a deal, Michael: if you get me a week’s supply of food, a gun, and a charger for my iPod Touch, I am in on this road trip.”

  Michael nodded, wanting to push for a more serious Yes, but Holly looked out the window, and he saw her face become that same, strange—hurt?—faraway thing that it had been after she’d mentioned her father.

  “Do you think,” she asked, in a soft voice, “that things happen for a reason?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you think that they work out ‘like they’re supposed to’? Bobbie thought so. Even though the world is so messed up, she told me she really felt like things would be okay, if you held on to hope, that Something was in control. When I couldn’t sleep, she’d, like, pray for me. She said praying could . . . not control things, but help them. Sometimes I felt like her praying did help me sleep, so I gave prayer the old daughter-of-an-agnostic-scientist try. But I never heard any voice or whatever. This sounds crazy, Michael, but I just wish, so bad, that I could know if Bobbie still believed things happen like they’re supposed to, after she got bit. I wish she could tell me that she did, that even though the worst possible thing happened to her, she still felt like there was a reason to hope. I . . . I think she would. I don’t know about God or anything, but I definitely believe in hope. Because even if awful-awful stuff happens, sometimes out of nowhere, there’s okay stuff, too. Good stuff. Kind-of-great stuff.”

  Holly looked at him. The river chopped. Michael’s heart thudded.

  “Like . . . what?” he said.

  And although the truth burned from her eyes to his, Holly only shrugged.

  Michael took his second shower of the day. This one cold. Very. As arctic as he could fuh-reaking stand.

  And against the pelting freeze of it, his mind spun, clocking like a magnetized needle on a pool of oil seeking out its North.

  The first yes-yes truth came to him at 11:47 p.m.: some part of Holly still wanted to believe in Captain Jopek.

  Why?

  For some reason, Michael suddenly thought of Jopek’s eyes flashing in the darkness of the Magic Lantern, so much like those mannequins in the pews and aisles of the Coalmount church.

  First escape plan, 12:03 a.m., thought up en route to the Capitol Senate: Since Holly might not want to leave Charleston, we can just hide somewhere in the city. Yeah, Michael and Holly and Patrick (and Hank, if Michael could convince him) could find a building and barricade themselves, and wait for the soldiers to return from Richmond and rescue them.

  There’s a whole city out there, Michael told himself.

  But his blood sped in his excitement and he sensed, immediately, the lie in that.

  The Capitol was moated by gates and locks and the Kanawha River; all other roads apart from the main ones were tacked with mines; there was not a whole city for him.

  There was this building.

  There were these blood-splashed, echoing halls.

  How the hell did I not realize that?

  That thought felt frightening. Good. Michael focused on the fear.

  And stood at the starlit windows of the hall and gazed across the empty city. He imagined the city and the mountains around him as a vast electronic pixilated videoscape, its surface teeming with countless characters . . . before being cleared with an apocalyptic swipe of a virus’s god-hand.

  Reset.

  Michael thought of the wasteland gamescape, where two sprite figures—he and Patrick—encountered a man, a huge-rendered soldier: a man whose mere existence seemed to promise to keep them safe. He was, after all, a guardian, in the old world. He was a protector, a good guy, by all the old rules. He was, after all, supposed to be The End.

  And suddenly, Michael understood:

  The eerie magnetic hold that Captain Jopek of the First Division of the Crapocalypse had over the others came not from their stupidity, not their fear, but their empty idea of the future. It came from not realizing that they were clinging to an endgame—“A soldier will save us”—from a world that no longer existed.

  Michael had once believed there were two West Virginias, one composed of coal towns, the other of cities.

  But the truth was that no West Virginias existed anymore. The state from Before was simply gone, and in its place there was only a blank slate, a void.

  That was a truth that Michael had known, somehow, since the Halloween moment when he saw his first Bellow, and took the reigns of the apocalypse: this was a new world. And what was a world, in video games or in life? It was an arena on which you placed an avatar: an image of yourself.

  But everyone’s still trusting their old pictures.

  No, Jopek was not the saving soldier who would be found at The End.

  Jopek was the accidental idiotic survivor of a war that he was convinced was his destiny.

  And who are you, Michael?

  I’m the one who can save us. I’m a Gamer. And the Master.

  So what are you going to do?

  I’m going to remake the world.

  And after that? I’m
going to beat that world.

  Day 25:

  First date ever. (I think.) Went well. (I think.)

  Also:

  I know why Jopek’s eyes look empty.

  He’s lying to himself.

  He believes that he knows best. That he’s The Man In Charge, even though the world changed around him.

  “You ever feel like you were born for some special greatness?”

  Like the mirror-eyed mannequins in the Coalmount church, the captain looked so much like what he pretended to be that it was hard to tell the difference. Until you looked very, very closely.

  And then it was the clearest, most yes-yes thing in the world.

  So I am going to lie, Michael thought, and grinned to the jack-o’-lantern in the secret dark of the Senate chambers. I will lie to save Patrick and Holly and Hank, and leave.

  Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, Captain, you get your next mission. You’re going to become part of The Game.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “What’s a Betrayer?” Patrick asked.

  Michael gripped the metal bars on the end of the gurney and ran down the hall. Patrick, sitting cross-legged on the gurney, whooped for joy and wrapped his hands around the sidebars.

  “It’s what the Game Master said we have to find today,” Michael explained.

  “Yeah, but—waaaaahh my butt tingles!” Patrick shouted as they rumbled over a patch of busted marble.

  “The Betrayer is the reason The Game’s been all weird, Bub,” Michael said. “It’s a person who’s not playing by the Rules. He’s someone who looks good, but isn’t. The Game Master wants us to figure out who it is, so he can’t mess up The Game anymore. And guess what, duder? After we find the Betrayer, we’re road tripping to the real Safe Zone.”

  “The Game Master said so? He said we can really go to The End this time?” There was hope on Patrick’s face, but Michael’s heart ached at the skepticism and worry that were also there.

  “He promised. And we’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ya-ya.”

  “Ya-ya.”

  So that was the first thing Michael did that day.

  “Hank. My man,” he said, an hour later. Hank stood at a urinal in the bathroom.

  “Faris,” said Hank coldly, “do you notice the piss I am taking?”

  Michael nodded, raised his palms up: my bad!

  He leaned against a stall, sucked the strings of his hoodie, waited until the pee-sounds stopped. Then said, “Man, the captain can shoot, but his handwriting sucks, right?”

  Hank went for the sink. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Huh?”

  “So the note he left you wasn’t messy, too?” Michael said.

  The implications of the question settled on Hank’s face. He looked like a fangirl who has asked for her favorite singer’s autograph and received a “maybe later, babe.” Michael actually felt a twist of guilt, remembering what Holly had said about Hank last night, but he couldn’t help but feel a yes-yes satisfaction that his lie was having the perfect effect.

  “What did it . . . what did yours say?” said Hank.

  “To talk to him, later, where he sleeps.”

  “I don’t think that crazy asshole ever sleeps,” Hank replied, trying to sound like he wasn’t upset about Jopek’s “snub.” “I heard, uh, Michelangelo never did, either,” he added.

  “And the note didn’t even say where that was, which is super nice,” Michael said.

  Hank raised his eyes, quickly, and Michael was suddenly afraid he’d overplayed his hand.

  Hank squinted for a long moment, then dropped his stare moodily. “Governor’s office, Faris, if that’s what you’re here to ask me.” He left the bathroom, his broad shoulders hunched so low that Michael felt sorry for him. Aaaaalmost.

  Michael had been in some semi-exciting situations since Halloween.

  But as he jogged past a headless governor and climbed the rotunda stairs, he decided that the best had been Halloween night, before the first Bellow appeared across the street from his house. In those seconds, there was only this: his brother, his plan, and his total control.

  That was the first time he had ever felt that way.

  Except. Right. Fuggin’. Now.

  The marble stairway, which curved wide and stately around the rotunda, overlooked Government Plaza. A snowstorm was swishing against the windows. Fun weather to drive in, if you could get the right car.

  He became aware, as he neared the governor’s office at the end of the empty hallway, of his heartbeat. Heavy and somehow thick, yes, but perfectly calm and even.

  Michael mentally replayed what he was going to say if Jopek was there, then knocked twice on the double doors, lightly. Ron’s voice echoed in his head: You always want to knock on my door, Mikey. Because then I can come out. ’Cause this is Ron’s den, and believe me when I say: You can’t come in.

  “But hey, Ron, if I did that, how would I have stolen the money to pay for, uh, running away?” Michael whispered.

  He waited there a few seconds more, feeling that anticipation like waiting for a game to load the next, last level. Then he opened the door.

  Stormy half-light poured through the great plate of glass on the opposite wall.

  Whatever Michael had expected a governor’s office to look like, this wasn’t it.

  It wasn’t oval; it was about as big as his principal’s office; there was an American flag, and a West Virginian, but they lay tipped, crisscrossed, on the floor. Maps spilled off a humble desk and across the carpet. He recognized a map of Charleston: like Hank’s, almost all the streets had been X’d out in red.

  There were no cots or couches in here, not even a rumple of blankets on the floor. I guess he doesn’t sleep, Michael thought, half-joking. But the thought made him uneasy.

  Michael went to the governor’s desk and got his first surprise of the day. He had expected—he wasn’t sure what. A struggle, anyway, before finding the extra keys.

  CAPT. H. C. JOPEK, he saw, stitched in fraying black thread on one end flap. The shoulder strap snaked lazily over the top, which yawned wide, like an open mouth.

  The captain’s canvas bag.

  No, I don’t pray, he thought. But sometimes? My prayers come true, anyway.

  Michael opened the flap, and heard, unmistakably, a muffled key-jangle somewhere inside the bag.

  He palmed aside a Playboy, and all at once, he became aware that he had left the door to the office open. He suddenly imagined Captain Jopek hiding behind the door, crouched there like a dark troll beneath the bridge of a castle, and now Michael’s palms broke sweat and he plunged his hands deeper into the bag but he only found one old walkie-talkie, three maps, no keys. Don’t freak out, he thought, but the keys weren’t in any of the side compartments, either, and Michael thought, Oh God, I just imagined the jangle. He swallowed. Noticed a tiny, zipped pocket on the front of the bag. And when he opened it and slid his hand inside, he finally did hear the sound of the keys, yes, but another sound, too, not the keys and definitely not imaginary.

  “Reckoned I’d find ya here.”

  The light through the window seemed to go cold on his clothes. Don’t spin, Michael thought. Don’t scream.

  “Hi!” he said, turning. There was a method to moments when you’ve been caught. You didn’t want your smile to look too guilty and give away the extent of trickery. But then again, looking not guilty, when you’re obviously off-limits, rang alarm bells, too.

  “Got a secret, Mike,” Jopek said. The captain’s bright, excited face shone like a searchlight. And for a horrifying second, Michael thought Jopek was questioning whether he had a secret.

  “Don’t you got an itch for what it is?” the captain said.

  Why isn’t he asking why I’m here? Michael thought, but said, “Absolutely. What’s up, sir?”

  “I was on the walkie this morning, tryin’ to raise up the units, out there in radio land.” Jopek grinned
at his wit. He walked closer, halved the distance between them. “And do you know what, fella? There I am with my coffee like always, and this mornin I did get a call. From some mountain folks who had tales to tell.”

  Jopek’s smile crackled, so wide it looked as if his flesh could split.

  “Mikey, c’mon, you know what I’m gonna say, ha-ha! I got in touch with the soldiers you saw, boy!”

  A round rim of his bike tire, flying over the edge of the world, had seemed to suck free of gravity. The same feeling as now: cliff-fall vertigo.

  Made it come true, Michael thought wildly, his vision puckering dizzily at the edges. I made it real. He kept his smile, but he could not stop the blood from boiling to his cheeks.

  “Yep, they’re ’bout thirty miles out, oughtta be here by tonight,” Jopek nodded. “Told ’em take their time: me and my troops will make sure the roads they need to get into town don’t have any mines on ’em.”

  Was the captain joking? Lying?

  And then, arcing like a flare: No! Telling the truth! Real unit, coming!

  “I know we had our differences, buddy. Yesterday, I was pissed at you, I won’t lie. But I’d sure be glad to have you come out to town with me today. I mean, just think,” Jopek said sincerely, “your mama’s gonna be so happy to see you.”

  And somehow, Jopek’s attempted emotional manipulation gave Michael a gift of focus; a power-up, he thought. Calm washed over him again.

  Here are two warriors, playing a game, and both are lying. I don’t know why you’re lying, Captain, but I know that you are. And actually, know what? I think I do know why. You know that I’m lying about the soldiers, don’t you? Maybe you’ve always known. You want to make me feel safe, want to make me feel like help is coming, so I’ll trust you . . . and then you’ll make an excuse. “Oh, the soldiers changed their minds, sorry.” “Oh, let’s keep camp here, like I was sayin’. Those monsters and those Rapture ain’t nothin’ that ol’ Jopek can’t handle.”

  “Sir? I couldn’t find—” someone said.