The End Games (13 page)

“Ah, soon for sure,” he said calmly. “Next couple days. Right, Bub? Then, party time,
right?”

Relief, on everyone’s face then, and in their eyes. Relief—especially in Patrick’s.

Michael felt slightly guilty. He wasn’t quite
lying
when he said that soldiers would be here soon, if the captain was saying the same
thing.
And I can just explain myself to them later, that I was saying it for Bub. It’ll be
fine—

And then those relieved gazes traveled over his shoulder.

Something tilted. The change in the room was invisible, but as real as one side of
a brass scale tipping with a violent clang.

The steady clocking of combat boots. The tinny, atonal music of a ring of keys.

Michael looked over his shoulder and saw the man from the balloon.

“Well, ain’t it my crew,” said Captain Jopek. “How’s doin’s, folks?”

The captain had looked a hundred moon-blasted feet tall last night. Even up close,
he’d been all eerie speed and seamless shadow: a sniper from the stars. Here and now,
walking through the upturned chairs and the overhead light, the captain was a little
more human, comprehensible. But man, still, he made Michael feel tiny.

Silence from the table. For some reason, it felt tense to Michael—though that was
probably just because of his nervousness from a moment ago.

The captain took off the helmet he’d had cocked back on his head, took a loud sip
from a Red Cross coffee mug.

“Henry, you sleep okay, or you still wakin’ yourself up with your own farts?”

Hank blushed, though he didn’t look displeased. “Just, ah—just when Bobbie makes chili,”
he said, grinning.

The captain didn’t smile back, though. Instead, sipping his coffee, he watched Michael.
Seemed to do it for a long time. So long that Michael got the idea that the captain
was waiting for him to speak, and Michael began to stand up, to thank him for last
night, when Captain Jopek suddenly said, “Looks like we got our new lady friends fed.”
He spoke with a slight hill-country drawl that seemed to ghost in and out; it would
fade in, jab at every couple words.
Looks
like we got
our
new lady
friends
fed.

“I’m a boy,” Patrick pointed out.

“That a fact? Well,
boy
, this captain’s just happy he could help y’all get to his humble home.”

Michael wasn’t sure he
looked
that happy.

The captain set his mug down loudly, glided toward them, boot heels clocking, key
ring tanging. Michael, still awkwardly hunched, wasn’t sure whether to stand or to
sit back again. He settled on sitting.

“Get enough to eat?” the captain asked.

“Yeah. Amazing,” Michael said.

“So, Captain,” said Hank. He stood up, so that it was like he was with the captain
on one level, and everyone else on another. “We have some new reconnaissance. The
new ladies, heh-heh, were telling us—”

“I heard that, I sure did!” The captain sat down on a tabletop across from them, crossing
his arms. After a second, Hank sat back down, looking sheepish. “Pretty excitin’.
Boys comin’ back to town! Huh, Bobbie?” he said, yanking her into the conversation
without looking to her. “Ain’t that excitin’?”

“Oh. Yes, absolutely.”

“Miss Bobbie, you’re sweet as tea,” said the captain, “but you sure oughtta sound
more excited, ladylove, ’cause this is
the news
. The big one. We oughtta put this on a banner and drag it behind a plane.”

Bobbie tugged at her gold wedding band, fidgeting.

“Whelp, I reckon it’s time to do us another field trip. Hank, you get that gear primed.”

“On it.” Hank nodded. And okay, it was official: he was
absolutely
trying to make his voice deeper. “When do you want to leave, sir?”

“How about oh-now-hundred?”

Hank snorted laughter.

“I think I’m gonna chat first, though,” the captain said, “with my new buddies here.”

He cleared his throat.

And nodded toward the door, indicating that everyone else should exit the cafeteria.
As Holly and Hank and Bobbie left, Patrick whispered to Michael, excited,
“Like a zoo field trip?”

Michael shrugged to quiet Patrick.

Follow your breath,
Michael thought.
Feel your blood
. Because the captain was probably going to ask questions about the soldiers. Which
would not have been a big deal—Michael could just take the captain aside and tell
him he’d white-lied. . . . But sitting there, looking up at the captain’s odd, unreadable
eyes, Michael couldn’t help but think of last night. And the way the captain had been
so quick to strike him in the head.

“So, hey,” Michael said at last, “I have to say, thank you so much for last night.”

“Got pretty good accommodations compared to what you’re used to, I reckon. Glad I
could get you some clothes, too—hope you weren’t attached to the old ones; I had to
check you for bites before I let you into my Capitol. We’re a little low on food and
meds, maybe. But of course, with them soldiers comin’, sounds like that won’t be a
problem soon, right?”

That smile again: all teeth, no eyes. Captain Jopek uncrossed his arms, lay thick,
scarred hands on the table. Relaxed, comfortable with the quiet: that’s how it looked.
So why did his waiting feel like a prodding finger looking for a loose board?

Imagining it. Paranoid
.

“Michael, you got somethin’ you want to tell me?” the captain said.

“Like what, sir?”

“Like a secret, maybe.”

Michael’s stomach fell a little. “Hey, Bub,” he said, “I think I saw a 3DS out in
the hall. Why don’t you go check it out?”

Concerned, Patrick asked with his expression,
How come, though?

“Just for a sec,” Michael said. Patrick left.

“Why don’t we just go on and get it out, Michael?” the captain said. Michael nodded,
but sill couldn’t help but hesitate. The captain spoke after the silence: “You’re
on drugs, aren’t you, son?”

Michael blinked. “Sorry?”

The captain unbuttoned a chest pocket, on which
CAPTAIN H. C. JOPEK
was stitched. He pulled a rattling pill bottle out.

“This state’s got a problem with pills. And this ‘Atipax’ is serious stuff, judgin’
from all the warnings on the bottle.”

Michael tried not to show his relief that the captain had not asked about the soldiers.
“O-oh, no, sir,” Michael said. “They’re Patrick’s.”

“What the hell’s the matter with him?”

Nothing is ‘the matter with him,’
Michael thought defensively.
It’s everything around him.

“He just gets overwhelmed sometimes. They help take the edge off at night.”

“‘Contact name: Molly Jean Faris’?” asked the captain, reading the label.

Michael flinched, hearing her name aloud. “My mom.”

“And where’s she?”

“We haven’t seen her since Halloween. We . . . got separated.”

The captain raised his gaze on Michael—and he did something that caught Michael totally
off guard: the captain, this titanic Safe Zone guardian, put his hand on Michael’s
shoulder, and made a face of sympathy and respect. “Well, I think you done one
hell
uva job getting that little boy and yourself to my zone. Give you a medal, if I could,
soldier.”

Michael still could not quite read the captain, but in that moment, it didn’t matter.
He wanted to tell the captain, “Thank you so much for saying that,” but he didn’t
trust his voice to not catch on the lump in his throat. He nodded wordlessly, and
the captain handed him the pill bottle.

“I gotta ask, though, buddy: What you do to make those Rapture boys so mad?” said
the captain, walking toward the exit, Michael following.

“I killed one of their favorite ‘Zeds,’” Michael said.

“No
shit
!”

Michael grinned. He felt like a nerd who has just made the hottest girl at school
laugh. “They called it their ‘First.’”

“Those loonies blew their lids when we were shooting the Zeds during the mandatory
evac,” said the captain. “They even captured two of my soldiers, shot ’em in the head,
and fed ’em to the Zeds. ‘A holy sacrifice,’ they said, and I ain’t kidding you.

“That priest thinks he can save the whole world, protecting the Zeds, worshippin’
’em 24/7. When we started runnin’ his people out of that town, he even set up mannequins
in his church, so it was like
they
were ‘worshipping’ the Zeds, while old Rulon couldn’t be around. He thinks this is
the end times, and that the Zeds are the people God chose to raise from the grave
so he can take them to Heaven. Rulon’s got that town screaming with Zeds, locked up
and ‘protected’ everywhere. And here’s how shithouse crazy he is: if one of
his
people gets bit, Rulon takes off their heads before they can rise. Says they don’t
deserve to become a Zed. Says he’s helping his people atone for all their sins, and
if he don’t keep on doing it, God will leave them and everyone else behind. I’ve got
land mines on most roads into Charleston, but the Rapture’s tried a couple times to
get past ’em and into my city, to get more ‘sacrifices,’ I guess. Keep tryin’, I say,
I’ll grab some popcorn.”

Michael laughed. Jopek had a kind of good-ol’-boy humor that was foreign to him, and
a little intimidating, but also somehow exhilarating.

“Gotta admit, though, I’d love to meet that priest in a dark alley. I’ve got two words
for him, and they ain’t
happy birthday
. Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll be meetin’ them today, not where
we’re
headed.”

“Headed?”

“Downtown. Big, big city, soldier. It’s been abandoned a week, and we want to be for-certain
there’s no-livin’-body out there.”

“I—” Michael stopped walking. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, sir. I just mean,
my brother’s been through a lot.”

“Aw shoot, I’ll get ya home by curfew. C’mon, Top Gun, we got a whole city waitin’
for ya.”

His hand reached out and grabbed Michael’s bicep, squeezing gently, man-to-man.

“Be all you can be, right?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The six of them, last-known Armageddon survivors in the Charleston city limits, walked
down the stone steps with their shadows out in front of them.

At the foot of the grand outdoor stairs stood a statue of Abraham Lincoln, hands clasped
behind his back.
Father of West Virginia, at Midnight
read the sooted pedestal. A rope encircled this pedestal, tethering the deflated
jack-o’-lantern hot-air balloon to Earth.

Beside the president sat an enormous sixteen-wheeler gas tanker.

Beside the tanker waited a camo Hummer.

The sides of Michael’s mouth twitched, trying a smile. It felt cool to be walking
toward the Hummer. Actually: it felt sort of ridiculously badass.

The inside of the vehicle barked purpose and power.

There were no Pop-Tart wrappers, no sleeping bags filthy from a night spent on the
ground. Instead of seats, there were harnesses built into the walls, like roller-coaster
bars that rode your shoulders.
You must be this tall to ride the apocalypse
. A hatch in the ceiling opened to the sky and a roof-mounted machine gun. From the
Bellow-maddening ambulance strobes on the hood, to the combat gurney in this rear
chamber, to the “jump seat” (Hank’s term, which he used as he strapped himself into
it) on one of the rear double doors themselves: it was a vehicle reimagined for living-dead
conflict.

As Michael lifted his tiny brother into a huge seat-harness, Patrick’s eyes were big,
taking it in. He put one hand out, and Michael playfully went to low-five it, “down-low-too-slow.”

But Patrick didn’t yank his own hand back. He held Michael’s hand and pulled him closer.

Robo-Patrick whispered in his ear:
“You. Got. Us. Nice. Wheeeellllz.”

Well, what could Michael do but smile?

The trip into Charleston was like traveling across the span of a war painting: the
peaceful far edges and the distance weapons, and the first battle lines and the central
clash.

The Hummer departed the rear of the Capitol (opposite the barricaded plaza Michael
had seen from the Senate), where layers of chain link separated them from the enormous,
brown-gray Kanawha River to their left: a natural moat-barrier against attack, supplied
courtesy of West “By God” Virginia.

Then the Hummer rounded the Capitol to the maze of chain link and razor wire, which
stretched across Government Plaza and the long, cable-supported bridge beyond it.
The Hummer paused here among the abandoned sniper posts: a series of padlocked retractable
gates were set into the fencing in all directions, buffer zones like the locks of
a canal that promised immunity from a breach. The captain opened the gates on their
path toward downtown so his Hummer could pass through.

There was an in-the-elevator awkwardness during the repeated stops.

Patrick hummed. Holly gave a corners-of-the-mouth smile to the floor. Bobbie politely
looked out the window, then turned back when she saw a cawing crow flap with an ear
hanging from its beak.

This is so freaking weird,
Michael thought,
I don’t even know if it’s weird anymore.

Out of the maze, the captain looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat, through
the sliding plate that separated the front compartment from the rear. “Mission zero
hour,” he called.

Hank thumbed a button on his own heavy-duty watch, which Michael pictured him rooting
feverishly through left-behind army supplies to get. “That means
set your watches
, too,” he added to Holly and Michael. Michael felt another pinch at Hank’s let’s-please-nobody-forget-how-cool-I-am
tone.

Holly lifted her sleeve; her wrist was small and milky.
“Beep-boop,”
she said, thumbing a “button” on her watch-less wrist, soft enough for Hank but not
for the captain to hear. She seemed—maybe?—to flick her gaze Michael’s way to see
his response.