The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  And now the apocalypse had come.

  Michael looked toward the sound of the shattering behind the vault door again, and his reflection looked back. He could not tell what he looked like, but he did know the truth.

  I . . . I can’t lie anymore.

  It won’t work. There’s no secret passage and no code; there are no alternate endings.

  I can’t control this, Michael thought. Why did I do this? Why did I think I could do this? Who the hell did I think I was?

  “Bub, I’m sorry,” Michael said. “God, I—”

  “NO!” Patrick wailed, bringing his knuckles into the soft flesh of his cheeks. “DOOOOON’T TELL ME STUFF! IT WON’T WOOOOOORRRRRKKK!”

  “Bub, please—”

  Patrick’s face screwed into a vicious mask of anger and desperation. “You said The Game would be fun! The Game Master said I just hadta get the elixir to win—I thought I could WIN IT IF I WAS BRAVE—but I’m nooooot BRAVE, Michael, Daddy’s right, I’m NOOOOOT and I CAN’T BE—”

  “Bub, it’s not your faul—”

  “NO! BETRAYER, YOU CAN JUST HAVE IT!”

  Patrick reared back one tiny fist. For a single second, Michael thought his brother was going to hurl the hand into the marble counter beside him, to strike it hard enough to shatter his small bones as he had done in the psychiatric hospital. And this time there was no Atipax to help him.

  But something was glittering in Patrick’s closed hand.

  Michael understood what the small silvery object was only as it shot up and out. The vial of cure arced and twirled, catching the semi-strobing light like a comet. It was the last dose, the single vial that Patrick had brought from the vault and kept safe through the battle with Hank. Michael cried out and raised his hands to catch it.

  The vial struck him on the chest, the zipper giving a cheery tink! as it bounced off.

  The vial struck the stone floor, hard.

  But it didn’t break.

  Instead, it rolled, back and forth. Settling. Unharmed.

  Whisper of thought: . . . miracle . . .

  “Just take it,” Patrick said. He was sobbing now. “You stupid Betrayer, I don’t care. I don’t even wanna win. I can’t, I can’t.”

  Tears found Michael’s eyes. He saved me. He saved me.

  “Bub,” Michael breathed, “thank y—”

  Patrick said, “I hate you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  And that was when Patrick sat down on the ground and began to Freak.

  As if from another world, Michael heard Holly running breathlessly toward them.

  She reached the end of the aisle between the desks. Her hoodie was spattered with blood at the cuffs; a bruise had blossomed underneath her left eye. She stopped with an almost comical swiftness, her sneakers squeaking as she spotted what Michael had in his hands.

  Her eyes glistened. “Oh my Lordy,” she whispered. “The lab’s really here.”

  Michael tried to figure out what to say about the miracle in his hand.

  But Patrick began to scream.

  Michael watched Holly’s face transform as Patrick’s sound—so loud; how can such pain fit into such a small body?—echoed through the lobby.

  “I just want it over!” Patrick screamed. “Why can’t it, why why why why?!”

  Patrick punched himself again, both hands beating his thighs; a sound like the slapping of raw meat.

  Michael moaned, “Patrick—”

  “P-Patrick, you stop,” Holly said, hurrying past Michael. She leaned down and grabbed Patrick’s flailing wrists.

  “Don’t touch! No! Don’t try a’ make me feel better!”

  “It’s going to be fine—”

  “That’s what he always says!” Patrick spat viciously, and in the strength of his agony, wormed his arms free. His little fists roared back downward with incredible speed to strike his legs, over, over.

  Holly pushed him to the ground. She looked astonished, horrified. She had known about Freaking, Michael thought. But this wasn’t what she’d imagined.

  “I hay-hay-haaate it! I’m not good enough to get to The End—I’m—I’m—I just need my mommy!—”

  “We’re going to her,” said Holly hurriedly. “Aren’t we, Michael?”

  Michael thought: I can’t lie.

  “Help me with him,” she implored him, and he nodded distantly, kneeling, careful to keep the vial away from Patrick’s erratic movements, hating himself for even thinking about that. Patrick—accidentally?—kicked Michael in the stomach. Michael pinned Patrick down. His brother looked like he was being crucified.

  “Dude, take the GD vaccine,” she said to Michael, picking Patrick up and pinning him against her chest, ignoring his fists and cries. “Inject it and get the rest of it and leave with us.”

  From the vault, more shattering. Shrieking.

  “What’s that noise?” Holly asked.

  Michael began, “I don’t have—” anymore of the cure he planned to say, but Holly interrupted him:

  “You need a syringe, right. There’s one in the Hummer— Patrick. Please. We’re going home now, honey, okay?” Carrying Patrick—dragging him—Holly started back toward the tunnel.

  Take the vaccine, Michael thought, floating after her. Yes. That’s what he could do. He could just say, “Yeah—‘the rest of the cure.’ Which I’ve totally got.”

  He could tell himself: the Centers for Disease Control still has the formula.

  He could tell himself: there is more of the cure in Richmond.

  He could tell himself: even if this is the last of the cure, I have to take it, because I’m the only one Bub has left.

  He could pretend that the futures “the Game Master” promised him were real, instead of a series of evaporating illusions that led to a corner he could not lie his way out of.

  He could take the cure.

  But what then?

  “His legs,” Holly said. “A little help, Michael.” She attempted lightness, to keep cool for Patrick, but there were tears of frustration in her eyes. “We have to hurry, we have to leave.”

  “Michael . . . ?” said Holly.

  Leave, he thought.

  But he couldn’t answer. . . .

  Because it is Halloween, and he stands frozen in the very center of a world tilting.

  His plan was to silently get into the Volvo station wagon and go; to drive to Ron’s cabin a couple hours away. But an almost mystical shock stops him.

  His neighbor’s scream pierces the quick of the night: “Get back! Get baaAAAA—!” His brother’s heart beats through the shirt on Michael’s back.

  Mom’s bedroom light clicks on. A second light follows. . . .

  Patrick’s bedroom, Michael thinks dimly. Mom wants to make sure he’s okay. And he can almost picture her flinging open Patrick’s door but keeping calmness on her face. She’s good that way. One thing about Mom: she makes you feel good now. She can make you feel so good this second, you don’t even realize that soon now will mutate. She can make you keep continuing, and you don’t realize that all your life is running out.

  A police car screams down the street, a red-blue missile through the dark.

  A jack-o’-lantern disintegrates under its tire as it stops in the driveway next door. A husky cop—Wally Hawkin, the cop at school who always jokingly steals Michael’s Tater Tots—gets out, running for the MacKenzies’ front door, leaping a tricycle as he pulls out his pistol—and Michael has the odd feeling, not for the first time or the last, that he has somehow stepped into a night of make-believe. Wally looks like Leon in Resident Evil 6.

  “Michael?”

  Mom stands in their front doorway. She clutches her sky-blue robe closed at the neck with one hand.

  “It’s happening here, too,” says Ron behind her.

  “What?” says Mom.

  “The TV stuff, the stuff from earlier toni—”

  Screams.

  The door of the house across the road has been kicked open by Wally,
and Michael’s skinny, sweet-faced neighbor, Harry MacKenzie, materializes on the threshold. His shirt says: WORK IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T DRINK.

  Harry moans and throws himself at the cop.

  Michael does not understand, but instinctively says, “Ten points for closing your eyes,” so that Patrick will not be able to see whatever is about to happen.

  Wally puts a bullet, heart-center into Harry. Harry keeps moving. Ron goes, “Oh shit!” and Mom gasps, and Patrick tightens on his neck and he says, “What’s happenin’?” Harry curls his hands around the policeman’s throat, and Michael thinks, I have to go, but he is frozen by the impossible sight of blood erupting from Wally’s mouth, which will never taste a Tater Tot again.

  “Get yourselves in here,” says Ron. His voice is oddly flat. “I don’t mean yesterday. I ain’t playin’.”

  Mom dashes barefoot for them. “Michael,” she hisses, “what are you doing out here?”

  And stops, seeing the backpack, seeing the keys in Michael’s hand.

  Many times, Michael has seen Mom look hurt. He has seen her angry. Those are not things he sees now.

  Honest revelation is what is on Mom’s face.

  You were going to leave me.

  For that moment, this is the world:

  He and Mom.

  Silence on the moonlit dew-cold grass.

  He and Mom on their front lawn.

  Which is just sixty feet square, pebbled and rooty, and its grass wilts brown every July. But as they stand together in this shocked quiet, their yard seems to hum like ordinary earth transformed by a magic circle. He remembers the day he and Mom moved in, the downpour that day, Mom so eager for their own home that she carried boxes through the rain. He remembers the birthday when he awoke to a Slip ’N Slide set up right here, where they now stand. He remembers Mom taking his photo on the first day of school, every year, with a disposable camera, while he held up fingers to show what grade he was in.

  These memories twist through him in seconds.

  Then a pistol shouts somewhere, as if signaling the start of a competition.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom says. She comes closer. “I’m sorry, so sorry, about everything. I know it’s been . . . wrong. I know that; I do. But Michael. Michael David.” Tears in her voice. “You cannot do this.”

  He remembers the first night Ron came home drunk, his pickup leaving tire marks on the yard.

  Suddenly, Ron is at her side, his bald spot gleaming sickly in the houselight.

  “I’m not stayin’ here while these happy assholes are shooting,” says Ron. “Get in the car.”

  He is already wearing his jacket, the letterman with COACH stitched on the breast. He’s ready to go. And just like that, Ron has ruined everything.

  Except Ron reaches into his pocket and finds it empty. No keys. And Mom meets Michael’s eyes with gathering fear.

  “Where in the blue Hell’s my goddamn keys?”

  “I left them inside,” Michael says. “The Snoopy tray. I went to Dairy Queen.”

  “Why you little sack of . . .” But another gunshot snaps Ron out of it, and he goes for the house.

  Mom does not go for the house.

  She doesn’t move.

  “Michael. Give your mother the keys. Before he gets back, baby.”

  She is using her Mom Voice.

  “I’ll lie for you. You’ll be safe.”

  But that mask does not fit her anymore.

  He does not think of Patrick.

  He does not think of Mom.

  He thinks of himself.

  It’s not like an adventure. Adventures, you control. Mom, you lied to me.

  A cloak of smooth, cold fury unfurls from his heart. Go, the Game Master says. And Michael drifts away from Mom, to the car, loading his brother into the backseat as Patrick struggles with everything he’s got to maintain his smile.

  Mom stutters, paralyzed by shock. And the moment she hesitates is the moment Michael locks the doors.

  Mom’s palms strike the glass. She shakes her head, screams. Patrick says something, who knows what.

  “It’s going to be okay. I know what I’m doing,” Michael shouts now.

  “Say ‘See you later,’ Bub,” says Michael.

  And drives.

  He clears the driveway and careens by Wally, who lies in a pool of black moonlit fluid. He speeds past Harry MacKenzie, who stumbles like an otherworldly pilgrim.

  And when Michael sees Ron’s dashing form dwindling in the rearview mirror, he feels a joy so intense it’s almost blinding.

  Michael has found a door, he believes: a door to the next world, to another life. Yes, he is seizing this mysterious catastrophe and barreling toward The End.

  It’s over. I’m changing everything. I’m saving us.

  I’m saving me.

  He does not understand that tonight the earth has been damned beyond his comprehension or control. He will not consider that he may have just murdered Mom. He doesn’t allow himself to think that, no, because he feels his blood now, feels good now, and the only thought he will allow is:

  IT WILL BE WORTH IT,

  IT WILL WORK OUT,

  IN THE END.

  So each yard he travels is like a wakening from a long nightmare, a wakening to control, a wakening at last to who he really is.

  LOL, that’s a good joke, Mikey!

  It is waking in the dark to the screams again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Michael?”

  Mom.

  “Michael,” Holly said loudly over Patrick’s crying, walking backward toward the tunnel, “it’s road time. What is wrong with you?” Michael shook his head. Patrick sobbed harder; Holly’s face clouded with urgency. “Dude, please. Jopek is dea—”

  She paused, looking unsure whether she could do Patrick any more harm.

  “He’s out-out. I think. But there’s something weird going on outside—are you even listening to me?”

  “I never saved anyone. . . .” Michael said to himself.

  “What?”

  And I can take the cure, and I’ll still be alive. But everything that’s wrong inside and outside Bub will still be there, and all of this will just keep repeating, like it did with Mom. It will just keep echoing, like a Bellow.

  This was The End, Michael suddenly knew.

  This night in which Patrick’s only recourse was to betray Michael, just as Michael had betrayed Mom, was what The Game’s lies and false promises had led them to. This was the absolute end of the line, with no place left to run.

  Everything not saved will be lost.

  Save your brother.

  Remake his world.

  Michael felt tears burn his throat. But he nodded and thrust the vial of cure toward Holly. “Take it.”

  Holly gritted her teeth. “Okay, no offense, but you are pissing me off right now.”

  Michael opened her hand and jammed the cure into it. “Go. Leave. If you find the Safe Zone, tell them I’m here. If the scientists can copy that vial, send them back with more for me. But go.”

  Holly blinked at him. Michael began walking away from her, not trusting himself to stay. “Patrick, one second,” she said, and set him down on the ground. Patrick hit his head, sobbed.

  “Michael, what the hell are you doing?” When he wouldn’t take the vial with his hand, she jammed it into the pocket of his space suit.

  “Holly, no!” he said. “You’ll need it. Please just let me save Patrick! This is the only way to make everything right.”

  “You’re not thinking. You can use this dose, and we’ll bring the rest to Richmond with us.”

  “There is no more, Holly.”

  Holly’s brow knitted: What?

  “I lied. There are no soldiers coming for us. I didn’t see any, and Jopek said that Richmond is overrun, too. I . . . I guess I don’t know if that’s true, but getting the cure to the scientists is the only chance you’ve got. I’m not going to hurt anyone anymore. Not like when I left my mom. Go. M
ove.”

  He went to put his hands on her shoulders, to turn her back toward the tunnel. But Holly slapped him away. Like Patrick, she seemed as if she was trying to decide if she recognized a stranger.

  “You promised that there were other soldiers. Now you’re saying that the Safe Zone where my dad went might be gone? You’re saying that was a lie?”

  She really sees me. Finally.

  And in that moment, horror flooded him.

  But he didn’t answer Holly’s question. He’d just seen something behind her.

  The tunnel.

  Something coming out of the tunnel.

  The passage to the outer lobby had been cored with the very last fire of dusk, but now that dusk light was flickering. Something’s blocking it, he thought.

  “Who . . . ?” breathed Holly. Patrick looked at the tunnel, too. And seeing what was there, stopped sobbing.

  A man emerged from the tunnel.

  Not a bellowing man. Not a shrieking man.

  A living man.

  A soldier.

  Something flickered on and off in Michael’s mind like a busted sign: REAL. NOT REAL. REAL. NOT REAL.

  Real breath curled out from the gas mask that disguised his face, and Michael thought wildly: it’s Jopek! Jopek had beaten death. Jopek was gonna live forever. But no—this man was way too short.

  Patrick had been sitting perhaps fifteen paces away, halfway between Michael and the tunnel and the man who had come from it. Patrick sat up from the floor now. He turned to Michael, his face raw and streaked . . . but filling with a little amazement.

  “Did we win?” asked Patrick.

  The camouflaged man raised a gloved hand and beckoned Patrick with one finger.

  Other soldiers crawled out of the tunnel behind the first. Michael heard Holly laugh a little in relief, perhaps in joy.