The End Games

by T. Michael Martin

  “But I didn’t stop them.”

  Holly shook her head. “So, congratulations. You’re not God.” She raised her palms, as if in exasperation. “Look, you said you left your mom? Even if she had gone with you on Halloween, how long until she would’ve wanted to go back for Ron? Even if the world hadn’t ended and your mom did talk to the police, how do you know that she wouldn’t let him come home later anyway, and everything would have gone back to the way it was? I know you said your mom’s ‘good,’ Michael. But God, people are a lot of things. Her life doesn’t suck because you ‘didn’t save her.’ Michael, her life is like that because she’s weak.”

  His heart twisted. What she was saying sounded true . . . but it sounded true like The Game sounded true: it would just be him trying to make himself feel better. Holly went toward the passenger door, Michael to the driver’s seat, getting ready to drive back to Coalmount.

  Wait. Wait.

  How long until she would have made you go back? Holly had said.

  The idea set off something else inside him.

  Go back . . .

  Cady Gibson, though unbitten, had died in the mine.

  There are some viruses that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on Earth where the virus originated, Holly had said on their “date” in the Capitol.

  The mine. Oh my God, the mine.

  The reason Cady Gibson had returned from the dead without a bite mark from a Bellow—the reason he had changed into a Shriek before any of the others—was that Cady had received the virus in some different way. The little boy who wandered into a mountaintop mine had stumbled upon something dreadful in the dark, and so he had become the first human on Earth to be given the disease.

  Then how did it spread?

  Maybe Cady bit someone else before he died, Michael thought. Maybe a miner; perhaps the very miner that had been tied to the altar in the Rapture’s church; Coalmount’s “First.” And with that first poisoned bite, a diluted form of the disease had passed from its first son out into the world.

  Maybe.

  But with horror threading up his spine, Michael knew something for sure: the disease hadn’t originated in Iran, or some terrorists’ lab. . . . And those were not the places the Bellows had been marching toward.

  “I know where the Shrieks went,” Michael breathed.

  “What? Where?” Holly shut the passenger door behind her.

  How had Cady gotten the terrible virus? What had given it to him in that mine? I don’t know.

  But Michael remembered looking into Cady’s eyes and seeing something ancient peering back at him, like a beast blinking from inside a human skull. And Michael was afraid.

  “They went home,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  COALMOUNT

  MOUNTAINTOP QUARRY

  MINE #1337

  !!! DANGER CAUTION DANGER !!!

  BLASTING AREA—NO TRESPASSING—NO SMOKING!!!

  (SAFETY, ITS OUR #1 RESOURCE!)

  Spray-painted below:

  TELL IT TO CADY (BEAUTIFULL BOY), U CORPRAT BASTERDS!

  Michael drove over that rusted sign and parked the Hummer on the top of the world.

  How much time had passed? He didn’t know.

  Sightless windows of skyscrapers had flashed past. The silvery trails of the Rapture’s tire tracks and the Shriek’s footprints in the headlight-lit snow. And then the on-ramp to the abandoned highway, which climbed out of the city, taking him back into the dark fortress of the West Virginia mountains.

  ’Cause nothing changes, Michael. The past doesn’t really die; it just comes back to life, his mind had hissed as he drove into the black hills. You’re looking for Patrick in the mountains, like when you woke up in the woods and you couldn’t find him. But you can’t just pull him out of the trees this time. He fell off the end of the world.

  It’s not a game, but it’s still over.

  Patrick. Patrick.

  “Do we have, like, weapons?” Michael had thought to ask only as the city vanished from their sideview mirrors.

  “What about the pistol?” Holly had replied, paling. “The one you took from Jopek?” He tried not to mentally add “you retard?” to the end of her sentence.

  “I dropped it . . . back at the bank. . . .” Michael said.

  The snow streaked through the headlights; following the trails of the Rapture and the Shrieks, Michael turned off the highway, onto a rutted, country road. And Holly, still angry and disappointed, looked at him for the absolute minimum amount of time.

  “I’ve got pepper spray,” she finally said. “My dad gave it to me the day I got my license.” After a minute, almost to herself: “I remember thinking, ‘Daddy, seriously: quit being so overprotective.’”

  Gravel popped beneath the tires. The newly rough way was barely wide enough for the Hummer: bare branches of trees scratched the windows. Michael heard Holly jolt several times. As if to simply occupy herself, she tugged at the belly pocket of her hoodie until the seams popped; she found electrical tape in the glove compartment, then wrapped the cloth as a filthy bandage around Michael’s blood-crusted hand. It made the nerves in his wound screech, but he didn’t let himself cry out. She needed that distraction, and what other help did he have left to give her?

  As they reached Main Street in Coalmount, Michael saw something glimmer in the headlights off to the right. His heart nearly imploded when he realized it was a Pop-Tart wrapper.

  Patrick, Patrick. Sounding in Michael’s head like a bell. Patrick Dale Faris, Patrick Dale Faris—

  Sounding in his head like a prayer.

  Please, he thought, feeling sick with weakness, please help me, God, Universe, whatever. If You’re there, if Anybody is there, please!

  But what did he expect? What the hell did he expect? The night was quiet, except for his car. And there was nothing in the sky but the cold witch-fire of the stars.

  Holly sat there, inches away, finishing his bandage, but Michael had never felt so alone.

  Nor so hopeless. Coalmount, an average coal town he’d explored by sled, now reminded him of a place obliterated by a hurricane. Great hectic gashes were torn into the storefronts; lampposts were ripped from their concrete; old burnt-out cars had been turned pathetically onto their sides. Past the Food’N’Such grocery store (tomato soup, he thought, his chest clutching), Michael saw that the big, yellow school bus that once had blockaded the street was now in two pieces, the metal shredded down the center by some massive force. On the cramped Charleston streets and winding mountain roads, the sheer number of the Shrieks’ footprints had been disguised by the Rapture’s own tire tracks. But now, traveling through these wide-open ruins and taking the one and only road out of Coalmount, Michael began to truly understand what it was he was steering toward in this ghost’s world. Not just the Rapture. Every Bellow—every one of the Bellows that had lain in every Charleston street—had risen again as Shrieks and led this lunatics’ stampede, drawn by some dark instinctive signal of the blood. Every. Effing. One. He tried to picture Them, but their sheer number somehow made it impossible.

  A random memory occurred: lying in a whispering field of timothy grass when he was a boy, asking Mom how many miles were in outer space.

  Not miles, she whispered. She had smiled for him. It just goes and goes and goes, she said.

  The idea of infinity—both simple and unimaginable—had horrified him, somehow.

  What’m I going to do? What?

  But that was when the Hummer made a dramatic turn, and uphill, perhaps a mile away, the mountain road ended with what should have been a gentle mountain peak.

  But of course, the peak wasn’t there.

  The gentle, heartbeat-measurement-like mountain range was killed dead, the summit ripped away. In place of the apex, there was instead only a severe line of decapitation.

  COALMOUNT MOUNTAINTOP QUARRY

  “We’re here,” Holly whispered.

  Michael gulped, turning off the headlights,
slowing to ten miles an hour.

  Even with the headlamps off, there was light enough to steer by: an eerie glow shot straight up from the earth ahead. Like high school football-field lights. It made him think of Ron, and there was one frightening, bitter moment when Michael nearly burst into laughter at the thought that Ron had once been his ultimate idea of evil.

  The electric light radiated from the “decapitation” line, which marked the end of both the road and the mountain’s ascent.

  “It’s the quarry pit for the mine,” Michael whispered. Which was supposed to, what, sound insightful?

  What’s happening in there? What are they doing to Patrick?

  As the Hummer inched up the mountain, the light filled the cab, sickly blue-white. So effing bright. What if Rapture lookouts were watching? At least the windshield’s bulletproof, Michael told himself when his foot twitched on the brake.

  I think.

  Gravel ground underneath them. The pit was so wide as they approached—a quarter mile at least—and the Shriek prints spread across the whole span of it. All the way to the ledge. They’re all in that pit, Michael. And they’re going to come over it now, now, like poison boiling over the edge of a pot, because you were too slow, you’re not good, and Patrick is dead—

  “Please what?” said Holly.

  “Huh?” Michael replied, startled.

  “You said please.” She sounded scared.

  Michael’s teeth snapped together, click. “Nothing,” he said.

  Finally, he stopped the Hummer a few feet from the rim of the quarry: close enough that, if he sat up from his seat, he could look over the edge and see what was in the pit. He had an urge to delay the moment, to think of something to say to Holly.

  But Holly’s seat squeaked. She was already leaning forward.

  “What the ass are they doing down there?” she whispered, bewildered.

  The Rapture, all still alive, were gathered in the crater in the earth. The walking-dead worshippers, the dozen of them, stood at the far end of the excavated hollow. The great oval crater—maybe a hundred feet deep and set on all sides with steeply cut rock faces (they staggered down, like stairs outside a temple)—was illuminated by enormous fluorescent light poles and dotted with mining equipment: cranes, conveyor belts, load trucks, silos, miniature mountains of coal. It was all fossilized by the snow.

  But the Rapture weren’t looking at any of that.

  They were gazing unmovingly in the other direction, into the blank face of rock wall before them.

  “Do you see him?” Michael said.

  Holly scanned the crowd, then shook her head. “I don’t see Rulon either,” she said softly. “Is it just me, or does it seem like the rest of them are waiting?”

  Looking again, closer, at the wall, into which all the Shriek footprints funneled. The wall, with a squat, square, black hole at the base of it.

  The entrance to the mine.

  “The Shrieks went into the mine,” he said. And what was there to say hi to ’em? Cady’s eyes, ancient and unfathomable, flashed again in Michael’s head. “And Rulon must have taken Patrick in after them,” he finished.

  Michael looked to Holly. This was a different game than they had known they would have to play here.

  But despite her fear, she would not blink.

  “Then I guess that’s where we’re going,” she said.

  God, Michael thought. It was the spontaneous goodness that made it hard for him to find his voice. Whatever the anger and confusion that had passed between them before, this was just her: good, despite the world.

  “I don’t have a plan, Holly. We have to get into the mine, but I don’t know how. Maybe I’ll just . . . ram through the Rapture with the car.” He tried to convince himself that that was not the world’s stupidest suicide.

  She reluctantly said, “Isn’t there gas in some mines, though? I mean, couldn’t the car accidentally make us, y’know . . . ?” She made a “blow-up” motion with her hands.

  “Maybe.”

  She’s going to say: that plan doesn’t make sense.

  She’s going to say: your stupid ideas aren’t good enough.

  She said: “For those taking notes, that would have actually been an okay time to lie.” Holly half laughed weakly. Still hurt. Maybe still furious. But: a peace offering.

  Michael made a small smile.

  Wished he could actually deserve the offer.

  But what was the point in delaying? He began to lift his foot from the brake, then paused. “If I don’t make it . . . tell Patrick I’m . . .”

  You’re what? What are you, Michael?

  “Tell him ‘I ya-ya.’”

  Holly wrinkled her forehead: You what, now? “Nothing,” Michael replied, shaking his head, yanking the shift into DRIVE with his good hand. “When Bub was little-little, he couldn’t say ‘Love you.’ I just wanted him to feel good about himself. You know? To make him feel normal. So I said it—ya-ya—like him. I guess I thought . . .

  “I thought I could make him feel ‘good’ enough that he really would become normal.” He looked to her. “Holly, I’m sorry. I did that a whole freaking lot.”

  Something strange—like a revelation—crossed Holly’s face.

  But that was when they heard the knock, behind them, on the rear door of the Hummer.

  Everything inside Michael jolted.

  He spun in his seat, to look back through the sliding panel between the front and rear compartments of the Hummer. But it was Holly who got the first look. Before he could even see a single thing, Holly slid the panel closed.

  Michael said, “What are y—”

  “Listen to me.” And when she spoke, it was with beautiful, semi-crazed determination on her face. “If I don’t make it, will you tell Michael that I hate that he lied.”

  She was coming closer to him, so the skin of their noses nearly touched, so close that, if he hadn’t been so shocked, he could have felt her breath—

  “But the reason he lied? That’s the real him. And that, I honestly have a big ol’ crush on.”

  Michael felt something in his chest seem to open up an inch.

  And it happened.

  There.

  In the freezing Hummer, with the neon light flooding the cabin vivid and full: the distance between them evaporated.

  Holly put her hands on his space-suited chest, and then her lips were on top of his.

  It did not feel like a cut-scene in a game; he didn’t feel like they were kissing in front of a bursting sunset, or a victory field.

  He closed his eyes, and he felt: her lips.

  Warm. Dry, but wondrously soft.

  And his heart was hammering like that of a panicked animal who has finally been cornered, but when he opened his eyes, Holly’s lashes had parted, and her green eyes looked at him, directly into and at him in the full-blast exposure of the light.

  Holly’s lips twitched against his. Smiling. She’s smiling. Crazily, he thought: Which means I’m good at this? Gently, she broke away, and before he could say anything, she placed her warm, smooth cheek to his. “Michael-Michael-Michael.” A whisper in his ear. “I’ll trust you, if you’ll trust me.”

  Michael blinked as she pulled back. Trust you for . . . ?

  Holly placed her hand dead center on the car horn, and pushed.

  Hooonk! it blatted through the quiet. HONK-HONK! HONK-HONK-HOOOOOOOOONK!!! so air-slappingly loud that it might as well have added a cartoony Ah-ROOOO-ga!

  “Holly what are you doing?!”

  Awareness was rippling across the Rapture crowd in the quarry: heads turning, searching for the source of the sound, looking at the sky, looking at the Hummer.

  Their surprise was blown.

  And Michael realized what Holly was doing only when he saw her hand reaching for his door handle beside him.

  The door that he’d been leaning on tilted away.

  He tipped backward, gasping. He grabbed out but grabbed nothing, and flew out of the car, landing on
his hip in soaked, trampled snow.

  “I lost Hank,” Holly shouted over the horn, which she was still honking. “I am emphatically not losing you guys, too!”

  Michael lunged, but Holly transferred to the driver’s seat and pulled the door out of his reach.

  “Now,” she said, and offered him a heartbreakingly shaky smile, “let’s see that skinny ass move.”

  “ARE YOU INSA—”

  The door slammed shut, the motor revved; the tires spun, ripped snow, caught hold. Holly ignited the roof-mounted spotlights and flickered them like strobes. Michael didn’t even get to stand: he was still stumbling up, screamingly shocked, when the Hummer grabbed air over the edge of the canyon and missiled down the access road, straight toward the Rapture below.

  What are you doing? Michael thought. Stop her stop her go go go, as he scrambled over the ledge, trailing Holly down the access road, impossibly far behind.

  The Hummer was flashing and honking and be-bopping back and forth. It skied, scattering snow as it leveled out on the “ground floor” of the pit, clipping the rear bumper of a SOUTHERN WV COAL/GAS dump truck. The deflated hot-air balloon, which had been knocking madly atop the roof, finally snapped free of its retraints and pirouetted heavily to the ground.

  Did Holly think she could just drive into the crowd and scatter them? Oh crap, Holly you are wrong: already on a hair trigger, the Rapture crowd burst apart when she got within fifty feet, yeah, most of the men and women spreading like startled quail.

  But some of the believers made their stand.

  Their machine guns rising, rising . . .

  “NO!”

  Thunder crashed across the crater.

  Michael’d been right. The windshield was bulletproof.

  The thing was, the tires were not.

  The front two tires detonated with flat airbursts: the car wrenched violently left, fishtailed, and Michael was still on the access road, still a hundred feet back when the Hummer finally flapped to a stop and a tall man with a dust-caked mouth and a red coat scrambled to the driver’s door, his gun clumsily spitting bullets with every step he took.