The End Games (2 page)

Then Michael turned back. He picked a Bellow at random by the dark shore under the
bridge and raised his scope on it, amplifying the enemy. Once it had been a man, twenty-five
years old perhaps. Now its loose jawbone swayed, a pendulum clicking on a hinge; now
it screamed with a power so tremendous it was as if the Bellow were not the screamer
itself but the mouthpiece of some beast that blasted through its bones from within
the earth.
“THE CAAAAAAR!”

Michael’s crosshairs wavered as he shot and a chunk of earth on the bank beyond the
Bellow ripped away.

Idiot idiot
.

The Bellows droned on.

Michael cocked the bolt again, chambering the next round. Three shots left. If he
remembered right.

Breathe out before you shoot,
Michael told himself.
Like Modern Warfare
.

Michael breathed out hard to steady his crosshairs, and his breath fogged the lens.

“Stupid stupid—”

“Sssstuuuuu—”

Patrick turned the ignition, and Michael heard the engine whine.
Frakking cripes, the alternator!

The engine kicked over. Relief flooded him.

And Patrick screamed.

From twenty feet away, Michael watched a Bellow moving toward the station wagon. Blonde
hair crawled over her scalp. A silver necklace glittered on her skinless clavicle.
She fell on the hood, clawed toward the windshield.

“Lay down, Bub!”

Patrick’s silhouette gave two thumbs-up and vanished.

The woman reared an arm back. With the power common to all Bellows, she struck at
the windshield. Cracks popped across it. Patrick laughed as glass dusted down. “She’s
good!” he shouted.

Too good.

Michael exhaled a slow stream like a digitized sniper and he pulled the trigger. He’d
been aiming for the forehead; the side of the Bellow’s skull flipped away instead.
The creature stopped screaming and slid from the hood and spun to the dirt with a
thud. And a wild satisfaction swelled Michael’s chest.

Two shots now.

“Lay—Paaaaatriiiiiiick—Paaaatriiiiick down!”

The Bellows were moving up the hill. Sixty, seventy-five. The forest echoed, in hideous
stereo, alive.

So burn it alive,
Michael saw. He
saw
it, even though it had not happened yet: the satisfaction and the
yes-yes
simply loaded the image
,
fully formed, inside his mind.

Burn. It. Alive.

He ran to the car. Pulled out from the trunk a five-gallon nickel tank. Patrick looked
through the window, said, “That’s our gas.” Michael sloshed rainbows in a semicircle
behind the car, then went to the front, trailing liquid. Patrick said, “Michael, it’s
our gas.”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s our gas, though.”

“Patrick!”

“Why’re you using it for?”

Just shut up, Patrick, shut your face. If you say one more word, tonight they are
going to win.

He said, “Remember the Game Master talked about tricks?”

Delight spread on Patrick’s face. “You’re gonna trick ’em up? Yesssss!”

Michael nodded, glugged more on the downslope road, then hurled the canister.

It stopped on a rock several steps ahead of the approaching Bellows, glinting.

Michael cocked the bolt and lifted the rifle. He steadied the crosshairs. He checked
the safety—
off
—and—

—wait wait wait!—

—and then took the rifle down and adjusted the outer aperture a quarter turn to the
left, and the trigger came back with an easy tug.

He’d been right; the scope sight had been slightly off.

His shot now was flawless: the tank sang and bled some of its insides.

But didn’t explode.

No.

The night went casket black. The sleeping-bag fire behind them had died, the flare,
too.

Flare!

Michael rushed to the trunk and grabbed another flare. He slammed it bright on the
seat of the bike, waved it once in an arc over his head to drive back the Bellows
now only paces behind the car, then flung it at the tank.

Where it landed too far, the sparks hissing the wrong way.

“Michael. Michael, they’re coming, they’re gonna win.”

Michael chambered their last chance.

He settled on the lead Bellow ahead. Maybe it would fall, make the others stumble,
giving the car time to escape.

He breathed,
“Please.”

Feel your blood.

And without thinking, at the final instant, swung the bead back at the tank.

A cry of light and a flat crack. The slug punctured the tank and slung a tongue of
gas forward: a liquid fuse, an airborne fuse.

The flare lit it and it detonated.

Knew it!
Michael’s chest shouted.
Knew it knew it knew!

A blazing arm roared high from the gas tank, exploding the canopy above in a catastrophe
of flame. Fire glimmered and traced the gas trail up the hill, raising a primal barrier
between the car and the Bellows of the forest. Over the chaos, beyond the inferno,
Michael could hear the Bellows’ agony. His eardrums shook with it.

Patrick laughed and clapped and kicked the driver’s seat in delight, and Michael jumped
into the car and rammed the pedal to the floor.

An airborne moment when the car bucked off a tree root, then they were off, tearing
snow and earth toward the core of the explosion. When the fire leapt onto the hood
he yelled out, “Duck, Bubbo, close your eyes!” and fell down on the seat. He heard
and felt the fire, a hot cloak unfurling above, then it was gone and he was moving
like a pinball between the standing Bellows, feeling sick and smiling, both, as he
watched them burn.

Michael cocked the wheel at the bottom of the hill, fishtailed, barreled down the
length of the dogleg road parallel with the creek. He shot them onto the bridge and
across it and only then slowed to under sixty.

Patrick asked, “Did we win?”

Michael looked in the crooked rearview.

“ZOMGosh, we won, didn’t we?” Patrick bumped his butt up and down in his seat. “Vic-tor-ee?”
he said in his computerized RoboPatrick voice. “Ach-eeved? This eeeeve?”

The night air squealing through the cracks in the windshield was blinding cold.

It felt gorgeous.

Knew. It. Would. Work.

Michael grinned and held up his crossed fingers.

“Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe.

“Game on?”

Patrick’s smile didn’t falter. “Ai-firm-ai-tive.” Then, regular-voiced, “Ya-ya.”

“Ya-ya, too.”

Patrick nodded. Michael nodded.

“Seat belt, dawg,” Michael reminded.

And he drove himself and his brother from the torching woodland.

CHAPTER TWO

Twenty-two days.

Michael lifted his finger from the Sharpie’d tally in his journal.
Wow. Man.
Twenty-two days since Halloween. Twenty-two days since Michael followed the Game
Master’s Instructions and carried Patrick through a door into the night and saw their
first Bellow. Twenty-two days since that moment, since the world seemed to end, but
then instantaneously resurrected to a frightening and beautiful life.

Five hundred and twenty-eight hours of The Game,
Michael figured. And grinned.

Pretty good for a seventeen-year-old nerd, his five-year-old brother, and a crappy
rifle.

He tossed the Sharpie into the station wagon’s cup holder. Patrick murmured in the
back but didn’t wake up. Michael pulled out a map from the glove compartment and spread
it on the passenger seat.

Outside, the predawn sky was the shade of a bruise. The station wagon sat parked on
a half-paved road that was not much more than a path in the woods. A rotten-wood fence
ran along the roadside, separating them from a valley. Automatically, Michael scoped
it out, taking brain snapshots of the world around him.

The valley: an ugly crater, its flat walls sheered into the rock face.

The small coal refinery: a gray factory, spired with stout smokestacks that made it
look like the final castle of some ambushed kingdom.

The refinery’s doors: well padlocked.

But a double-wide trailer (probably the refinery’s “office”) sat in its shadow, about
fifty yards from the Volvo. The trailer had been knocked off its cinder blocks, probably
by nothing awesome.

The erratic holes puncturing the trailer’s door: shotgun.

And for just a moment, looking at this scene, Michael could almost
see
someone running in there, finding themselves cornered. Maybe the Someone had been
caught by the sunset, which comes almost supernaturally fast in the mountains. Or
maybe the Someone was exploring the trailer during the day, thinking they’d be safe . . . and
Someone didn’t bother to check the dark of the closets first. Seeing the evidence
of people’s Game Over was sad, of course. But it was also, at this point, pretty ridiculously
predictable. That was just what happened, right? You did the things the Game Master
said or you were out.

Or . . . maybe they just got surprised, Michael
, he thought, his smile fading a little.
Like
you
did last night.

Suddenly, the trailer’s door slapped open, and a Bellow lurched from the shadow: an
old woman with one ear, her nightgown snapping, flaps of skin coming off her face
like soggy wallpaper.

Michael reached under the map for the rifle and thumbed off the safety.
No bullets left, dude
, he thought. A little thread of fear made him consider driving off.

Man, no. One little Bellow doesn’t get to
make
me run.

The Bellow began staggering toward the car. Patrick snorted in the back but still
didn’t wake, even as the Bellow began its shapeless moan. Michael waited for an idea—an
image—about what he should do. Followed his breath.

Then he checked his watch. And felt his small smile come back.

He returned to the map.

COALMOUNT, 13 MILES
, read the sign on this country mountain road.

Michael found the state capital of Charleston on the map, then traced outward. This
was a regional map, taken from the cabin where he and Bub had ridden out the first
few Game nights. The map’s Pennsylvania and Virginia were thick with cities, but most
of West Virginia was simply grayed out, with patches darkened to indicate rising mountain
elevations. Thick black lines symbolized the interstate; a couple of reds marked the
highways; a long blue marking, the Kanawha River, shot north to south through the
entire state, occasionally branching with capillaries. The state looked a little like
a health textbook illustration of a diseased lung. The first few days that he and
Patrick had spent on the road, traveling the switchbacks that dived and webbed through
the mountains, Michael had sometimes tried to gauge the contours of the hills around
him against the charted elevations on the map. He’d peered close to the paper, as
if he might spot his miniature self on it, glowing like a radar dot on a video game
map-screen.

Now, though, he just looked at the handful of larger towns plotted along the interstates.

The Bellow let loose another bay. Michael hummed, thought about turning on the CD
player, then remembered how sick of “Ron’s GOOD OL’ COUNTRY Mix” he was.

And soon he confirmed what he’d already guessed: Coalmount wasn’t on this map. The
map lines converged on the capital city, but he was somewhere out in the uncharted
gray. With the woods and the switchback roads and the trailers. Still. He had no idea
where he was—and no idea how to find an interstate road to the Charleston Safe Zone
and The End.

Well,
he thought,
there go my vacation plans
.

The Bellow staggered over a cinder block and found its footing again, now about thirty
yards away, continuing toward him as Michael went back to his journal. He wrote:

Day 22

No one in forest. Smoke in the sky yesterday = from lightning probably :(

Camped near river last night. Kanawha? Not labeled.

In one hunting shed: Backpack/protein bars. Yum.

Last nite, way way more Bellows. 80+? Why? Never grouped together B4. One-time deal?
(Plz?)

Fire EXTREMELY good on Bellows. Hate it. Theory about light/eyes = w00t. (Note: let
Bub know Game Master confirms! It’s not their skin—it’s the eyes.)

Don’t know where we are. River nearby—Kanawha? Will keep heading south.

Don’t want to stay outside after last night. Thought it wld be fun for Bub. Actually:
just cold. And uhhh not fun.

4 Atipax left . . .

Michael lifted his Sharpie, staring at that last note. For a second, he was surprised
by a stitch of an anxiety inside.

He added:

P.S. I am an awesome shot ;)

P.P.S. BUT SRSLY: AWESOME.

The Bellow reached the fence, bouncing back a little when it struck. The creature
looked down, blankly puzzled.

Michael chuckled.

The Bellow raised a thin, nightgowned arm; the arm sliced downward; the wood blasted
apart in a burst of shards.

C’mon over, Grandma, I’ve got something to tell you.

Patrick’s snoring hitched again, and this time, he woke up.

Michael checked his watch, cranked down his window a bit.

Seven, six, five
 . . . 

“Hey, newb,” he said to the Bellow just paces away.

The Bellow replied:
“NEEEEEWWW—”

Three, two . . .

“Good morning,” Michael said, and the first shafts of the dawn slit bright and pink
over the trees, glimmering the snow and windshield dust on their dashboard. The sunshine
struck the Bellow’s eyes: the creature collapsed on its knees, and its roar became
a roar of pain.