The End Games (11 page)

Here were wallets, backpacks, toy trucks, an old-school iPod with no earbuds.

Here were photo albums, pizza crusts, Bibles, half-bitten doughnuts, a book Michael
recognized from freshman English,
Story of a Girl
. Here was—oddly heartbreaking and heartwarming—a plastic sheriff’s belt with orange-tipped
guns.

The room held
lives
, in other words.

Michael whirled, looked out the windows: the glass was covered with protective mesh,
which pixelated the world, and that was actually perfect, because what Michael saw
outside was something out of
Modern Warfare
.

A courtyard, dotted with statues.

Government buildings—anonymous, the color of drizzle, pocked with a trillion grimy
windows—hedging the plaza on two sides.

And, in the courtyard: a network system of barricades.

Layer beyond layer of chain-link fence stretched for an acre at least. The fences’
tips were coiled with razor wire, which swayed back and forth in the wind, and whistled
a thin, tinny tune.

Between these layers, spaced evenly, were sandbagged gun posts, outfitted with heavy
artillery. Here and there were high shooting towers.

Beyond the fence, arranged in a rough arc, were Hummers. Beside the Hummers, a camouflage-colored
fuel truck.

And at the very end of the courtyard, positioned before a statue of a coal miner,
was a freaking tank.

Michael felt a grin spreading on his mouth. It faltered, held frozen a moment. Then
it spread to a point of almost-ache.
I can’t see the mountains.
The thought hovered before him, almost incomprehensible. The mountains and monsters
of the gray zone were gone, blotted out by things that
people
had made. He had battled back to the sane and charted sections of the map.
To The End,
Michael thought.

I won
.

I saved myself. I saved us.

He stood there, wrapped up in the sunlight and silence of the Safe Zone, and it seemed
to him that the moment tasted almost holy.

And then, in a thin, cracking voice, he shouted: “HEYYYYY, YOU CRAZY MUTHAFUGGING
WORLD, YOU JUST GOT
P’OWNED
!

“I BEAT YOU!” he said, then paused because this was making his headache throb like
the world’s worst cavity. Then went on, ’cause it was worth it. “YOOOOOU GOT OWNED,
BONED, AND STALLONED! I TEABAG YOU!” He began, half realizing it, to jump up and down.
“IIIII—TEEEEEABAAAG—YYYY—”

“—
oh Christ
—”

There was someone at the door to the Senate chambers. Michael looked over his shoulder
and saw it was a girl. For one single instant, he was embarrassed by her witnessing
him smack-talk Earth, but then he was flooded with a happiness so intense that he
was surprised by his own small tears.
Day twenty-four,
he imagined himself writing in his journal.
Saw first new person in three weeks who IS NOT CRAZY OR DEAD.

“So sorry!” she cried.

The girl’s hands flew up to her face: the tray of food she’d been carrying flipped
to the ground. She fled, slamming the enormous oak double doors behind her.

Didn’t get a good look,
he mind-wrote.
But I think she’s kinda cute.

Also: uh, maybe
is
crazy.

Michael blinked, wondering why the girl was horrified. Then he realized why, and the
horror was his.

He was naked.

Ohcrapohcrap,
he thought.

“Ohcrapohcrapohcrap,”
he hissed desperately, and, several seconds too late, cupped himself.

“So
so
emphatically sorry!” said a voice through the door.

Michael stood there, his mouth working open and closed.
Bwah,
he started to say; but that was not, strictly speaking, English. A long time since
he’d held a mature conversation, but he felt reasonably sure even his A-Game might
not have been up to the task of smoothing out Surprise Nudity as Introduction.

“Uh,” he said, “it’s cool.”

And cold. Understand me, girlie: in here, it is
cold.

“I thought that you would have . . . There were supposed to be, like, clothes left
on your cot.”

There were: a blue V-neck like a nurse would wear, and a pair of camouflage pants.
Michael tugged them on, wondering how and why he’d wound up, y’know, nude. But despite
his bewilderment, he smiled at the door with a little awe, jittery with embarrassment
but also adrenaline and a buzzy joy. He was talking to a person. A girl. A human.
In the Safe Zone.

He stepped around the apple juice burbling out of a plastic bottle on the overturned
tray. “H-hi?” he called through the door.

Flatly: “Yes.”

“You can come in,” Michael said.

“No thank you.”

“I mean I’m dressed now.”

“And yet,” she said.

Michael smiled a little.

He waited for her to go on. But all he could hear was that rusty tune of the razor-tipped
fence outside. Michael placed his hand on the cool oak of the door, leaning against
it. “Hey.”

No answer.

“Hey, I get it,” he said. “You saw me naked. Embarrassing. Obvz. But you, I’m sorry
to say, are not the first to walk in on me in the buff.”

There was the tune, his breath, and then—as his heart leapt—very softly: “Uh-huh?”

“Right, so I was in marching band,” Michael went on, his throat feeling stiff and
unpracticed. “What it should be called is, The Club Where Sweaty Dorks Collectively
Undress. Well, I don’t love doing that, so I wait till everybody else is gone and
even then I dress in the stalls, which works great except that sometimes I forget
to lock the stall. And that is the reason that my band director, Mr. Green, who has
a mullet and is
awesomely awkward
, opened the door, wanting nothing more in this world than to take a dump, and instead
saw me with nothing on but a pair of socks and a marching helmet.”

He pushed on in the silence. “I was literally putting the plume in when we started
screaming.”

The door moved between them as the girl laughed; Michael realized that she was leaning
against it on the other side. Michael closed his eyes, spontaneously grinning:
laughing
, a new person
laughing
.

“That was . . . humorous,” she said. “So, you should come down and eat with everyone.
That is, if your brother saved you any food.” Michael’s heart lit with relief and
excitement and a thousand other emotions that just jittered together.

“Just make sure you keep your clothes on. There’s no dress code, but naked asses?
They’re frowned upon.”

Michael laughed and was about to say something, but he heard footsteps echoing away.

The girl had gone, and the joke deflated behind her.

But still, Michael leaned back, roughing his hands through his hair in relief.
The Safe Zone,
he thought. He didn’t think he’d be able to eat—his stomach felt like a home for
ADD butterflies. But he looked for shoes at the cot he’d been sleeping on, and he
found his old clothes, neatly piled under the cot, slit raggedly up the middle, and
he felt an unexpected pang. When he went to shrug a camo jacket on, he heard a soft
brushing sound, and his fingers went to his neck. He winced at the tenderness he found.
He looked at his pale reflection in the windows and saw the clean, tan square taped
there. The scratch had been bandaged. Which made him think of the Bellow from the
church. Which made him think of the phone. Mom’s number was floating in his head as
he grabbed the cell from his old pants and pushed the power button down, wondering
if he could actually place a call now that he was in the Safe Zone. But he hadn’t
turned the phone off after using it with Rulon; it was dead.

He thought about Mom being in the same city as him . . . maybe the same
building
.
I. Made. It. Just like I knew I would—just like the Game Master, ha-ha, said I could.
I saved Patrick and myself, and soon Mom’s going to understand how I saved
her
, too.

And the butterflies in his belly did backflips.

Wow. So. This level is a little nicer.

The Capitol halls evoked an almost eerie sense of dignity. It was like a brass-work,
marble palace—except the palace was also interspersed with the accessories of crisis.

Bracketed lanterns and a series of chandeliers hung on the walls and ceiling, but
tripod-mounted banks of fluorescents—tethered to squat, silent generators by thick
cables—rested on the floors. Columns soared to ceiling arches, but countless dozens
of cots jammed the floor. Daylight filtered through metallic mesh that protected the
windows lacing the dome, and it cast prison-diamonds of shadow. Life-size statues
of West Virginia’s governors—
the Bosses
, Michael thought giddily—stood on their pedestals, their eyes darkly eternal. The
governors had been mustached, ninja-masked, pirate-patched, and navel-pierced. A politician
Michael vaguely recognized had a thought sprayed on the wall above his bald head:
DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.

The hall, though currently uninhabited, smelled overcrowded, like too much skin. It
was a human smell, and shockingly, powerfully nostalgic.

Michael stood there, in borrowed socks, and a kind of awe curled over him. For three
weeks, he’d fought the dead, traveling alone except for a fragile five-year-old. But
he had never let despair overtake himself, for he’d been always aiming for now, for
here, for this endgame moment. He had felt not hope, but certainty:
yes-yes
. And now here he stood, in the cold/sweaty/majestic/chaotic promised land.

So the fact that the halls were so quiet simply didn’t quite register with him right
then.

His clothes whisperingly scratching him—that feeling other people’s clothes always
seem to have—Michael found his way through the halls. He came to another dome, far
higher than the one before, that looked as if it were painted with gold. He imaged
what it was like here: people lying together in the winter night, warmed by their
generators and their own communal body heat. The soldiers patrolling through the halls.
He wondered if he would see the enormous soldier from last night again, or if that
strange sniper was only on rescue duty, ballooning in the mountains.

And looking at the cots, for the first time, Michael began to wonder where everyone
was.

Michael took a wide stairway that curved around the rotunda beneath the golden dome
and, at its bottom, he heard something that he hadn’t heard in so long that his brain
took a second to understand it: a group of people talking somewhere behind walls.
The marble had a confusing effect on sound: there was a frustrating minute when Michael
was chasing echoes.

But he found the door. A brass plaque read
THE GOVERNOR’S DINING ROOM—PASS REQUIRED.
He paused, feeling weirdly like he had on the morning of the very first day of high
school.

He wondered if the girl had already told people about their encounter—indeed, if anyone
else had seen him naked before he’d awakened.
You know what?
he thought, grinning nervously.
I don’t even care
.

Michael opened the door.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

And he experienced a moment’s disorientation. Like stepping down, wrongly expecting
a stair.

The people at the table looked up at him, silenced. As Michael entered, an old woman
with short, wavy hair put one hand to her mouth, as if delighted by the sight of him:
her smile stretched past the edges of her fingers.

Michael thought for a second he had found the wrong room, and was about to mutter
an exiting apology. But then he saw Patrick, drinking chocolate milk through a crazy
straw from a clear plastic milk bag, sitting beside the wavy-haired old woman.

“And here he is, this new fella,” laughed the old woman brightly.

Michael eloquently replied, “Hey.”

Patrick looked at Michael, then the old woman, as if he wanted to get up and run to
Michael but was too shy to do so in front of anyone. Instead, he threw a high five
across the air with such grunting power that everyone stared at him anyway.

Michael’s chest warmed, seeing his brother: his smile, his posture. Patrick was fine.
Last night’s emotional storm of near-Freak, however horrible, had passed. One thing
Michael understood about Bub better than anyone: when the world around him made sense,
Patrick could be pretty kick-ass strong.

The dining room,
Governor’s
or not, was a cafeteria: all plastic chairs and wipe-down tabletops. Four people,
including Patrick and the old woman, sat at the nearest oval table. One of them—a
muscle-y guy staring eagerly at him—looked about Michael’s age. The other person was
a girl, dark-haired, whose head was down as she poked at her pancakes; Michael could
just see a pale, round nose and small pink mouth. He assumed this was the girl he’d
inadvertently streaked for.

And that was it. Nobody else in the cafeteria. Chairs upside down on the tables, silver
legs pointing up.

“And how are you today, Michael?” said the old woman. Her softly Southern accent was
lovely. So weird, hearing someone not-Patrick use his name.

She moved toward him with an old person’s small, careful steps. And then she surprised
him: she took his hand in both of her own.

The unexpected contact, though warm and obviously sweet, made Michael’s cheeks prickle
with heat for some reason. Despite how much he’d wanted to see people, he was struck
by an urge to pull back.

“Well, we just want to say welcome,” she said. “And to tell you what a good day you’ve
made this. We are so thankful to see you.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking his hand back. “I can honestly say that it is very awesome
to meet you.” It occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken with a sane adult in weeks.
He added, “Ma’am.”