The End Games (36 page)

Because Patrick was pretending. His candle was not snuffed, Michael insisted.

I know it’s not real,
he thought.
I
know.
I know it’s not, I know I
know—

Michael cried,
“Please, Bub
—
!”

—a gasp—

Patrick’s eyes blew open, his breath flying out.

Michael, quite quickly, slid against the door, to the ground, began to laugh and cry.
. . .

It was like Patrick was shooting up and out of a pool after a breath-holding contest.
He bent forward, his hands on the floor, coughing. “It got hardta . . . hardta . . . breathe . . . .
I held it
in
,” he said. Hacking still, he flexed his biceps over his shoulders, his orange toy
gun in one hand.
Look at me, World’s Awesomest Holder of Breath and Kicker of Undead Badonkadonk.

Even though Patrick wasn’t looking, Michael gave a thumbs-up. He wiped his eyes, his
fingers coming away shaking, but he couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Guess what, Game Master?” Patrick said. “Guess what, I found—
Hey
.” He raised his eyes and saw Michael. If it was possible to cough indignantly, that
was what Patrick did. “No. Out.”

“Huh?”

“You’re not s’posed to be here.”

I just saved his life,
he thought,
and he
’
s acting like I pooped on his b-day cake.

“Get
out
,” Patrick repeated, getting to his feet.

But Michael had just seen something.

There was something else in the vault with them.

There was a clear plastic tunnel stickered with
BIOHAZARD
. The tunnel led to a zip-up plastic door. Past the door, a metallic halo secured
in the ceiling draped a pyramid of heavy plastic biomedical sterile tarps. Banks of
ultraviolet lights, flickering, gave them the look of arctic ghosts.

Within the tarps was a laboratory. Steel tables and charts and tubes and a gyroscopic
machine sporadically spinning beakers. A moment of joy, then a sense of unreality
washed through Michael.

It’s too small.

That was it. This lab was
too small.
Was it . . . like, a decoy? How could the hope of every possible future fit in here?
It couldn’t contain the importance.

It wasn’t big enough to be the . . . the, like, Last Level.

Don’t you
know
yet, Michael? It doesn’t look like the Last Level because this isn’t a game.

“No you doooon’t,” said Patrick, singsong. Michael stopped; he hadn’t realized it,
but he’d been walking toward the transluscent tent. “You can’t
geeeet
it in
theeeere
.” Patrick was teasing, as giddy and scared as if he were about to launch a tickle-attack.
Why?

He put his orange gun in his pocket.

And from another pocket, like a magic trick, he pulled a vial, sticky with lint. The
cure.

It was no thicker or longer than a number-two pencil. The reddish liquid within glimmered.

Michael’s blood seemed to try to leap through his skin, but he conjured calmness on
his face.

“The Game Master said only
I
had to get it, not
yooouuu
.” Patrick was delighted, because he thought The Game was almost over. He just had
to get that vial back to the Game Master.

So get it from him. Charm him. You’ve done that crap a million times.

Michael smiled. “Duuuuude.”

“What?”

“C’mon.”

“Nerp.”

Michael shrugged, acted like,
Hey, let
’
s make a deal,
scooped up a bill from the floor. “How’s ’bout for a hundred bucks?”

Patrick reached in his own stuffed pocket. “I already got, like, a million.” Which
was true.

“
Cha-ching!
Can I borrow some?” Michael took a cautious step toward Patrick. “I’m hoping to get
butt implants.”

“No.”

“Well,
that’s
really inconvenient, because I already changed my name to Booty-Meister Mike.”

The joke seemed to slap the playfulness from Patrick’s face. Suddenly, his brother
wasn’t laughing. Wasn’t holding anything on his face except a mask of anger and determination.

Despite the madness of the moment, it stung. When you got right down to it, it kind
of broke Michael’s heart.

“O-
kay
,” Michael said. “How about just a little . . .” He peeked over his shoulder, pretending
to be making sure they were alone. He looked back, winked. “Just a little sip? I’m
just thirsty.”

“You’re tryin’ to trick me!”

“Patrick!”
Guilt-trip
. “C’mon, Bub. I do solids for you.”

“
Pfff
, like what?”

Michael, very briefly, wanted to slap Patrick.
Like save your life,
he thought,
like run away for you
.

“I . . . gave you the last s’mores Pop-Tart,” he finished lamely.

Patrick gave a dismissive, “So?”

And somehow that was too much. The heat burst in Michael, bitter and fine.

“Don’t be an asshole, Patrick.”

Patrick didn’t recoil or gasp. His face squinched down, becoming like a hard stone.
His lips pursed white. It was the first time he or Michael had ever—
ever
—been mean to each other. To Michael, the anger felt like good poison.
Just because you’re screwed up doesn’t mean you aren’t a brat.

Then, as if Patrick couldn’t hold the hardness anymore, his face became his own again.
“Michael, I’ll
tell
.”

And with that sentence—said as a pitiful beg—Michael realized that he had no chance
of getting the cure from Patrick peacefully. What Michael saw now was the same thing
he had seen in Holly’s eyes when she asked if Michael had been lying, in Mom’s eyes
sometimes: Patrick trying to hold on, for dear life, to a lie.

He won’t let go of The Game. Not even for me. He can’t. It’s the only thing that makes
sense anymore.
Michael felt a crush of sympathy for his brother . . . and hate toward himself.

“Just . . . 
please
, Bub,” he tried, without hope.

“I’m. not. ‘Bub,’” Patrick said emphatically. “I’m a
Gamer
.
You
’
re
a Betrayer.”

“Your brother, too.”

“Not right now,” Patrick said.

Pull the gun out of your pocket and point it at him,
Michael thought,
so he thinks it’s The Game. It’s what the Betrayer would do. Just point the gun at
him and take it!
But he felt instantly sick with himself.

You can just run. You can tackle him and get it.
But he would break the vial; it was so small, and—

And now an image floated up in him, like a gift.

More vials.
There was more cure.
Had
to be.

Patrick sensed Michael’s thought and threw up his hands, panicked. “Wait wait, you
sure you don’t waaant it? Here!” He put the vial of cure between his feet. When Michael
ignored it, Patrick nudged it a little closer to him with his foot.

Michael wheeled for the tunnel to the lab.

Patrick whispered,
“Wait . . .”

Michael reached the tunnel, lifted the flap.

“Michael!
Wait,
Michael! It’s back here, outside the vault!”

Michael had to hand it to his brother: he actually sounded afraid. “’Kay-yeah-no,
nice try. Mine’s in
there
.”

“No. Not ‘the cure,’” Patrick replied.

He showed his teeth, like a monster.

He said, “The ‘It’ . . .”

At first it was just peripheral eeriness.

Outside the vault, on the ceiling of the bank proper, visible through the frame of
the vault door, a new shadow hung, like a great bat. With a whispery
click
sound, the shadow moved. Eyes shone, like black lamps.

Michael’s heart seemed to have shut off.

The Shriek moved toward the vault. Something gleamed: its finger bones. The skeleton
of its fingers flashed clean white, the skin and sinew there ripped away like tips
worn from old gloves, so its fingers were not just bones, but sharp exquisite axes
that could pass your throat and make it smile red.

Michael’s first shot, fired while whirling, missed by yards, two more he squeezed
coming closer, not much.

The Shriek cried out and skittered out of sight.

Michael held frozen, the echo of the gunshots cracking around him like caged earthquakes.
Then he burst out of his shock and went to the door.
It was too fast last night, it will be now too
, he thought, panicked. But he also thought:
if I can kill it, if I can shoot it in the head, it will die.

Every bad guy has a weak spot in every game.

It’s the last really dangerous one in Charleston. Kill it, and all this is
over.

How do you know that’s true?!

Because . . . it
has
to be.

“Bub,”
he whispered,
“you stay here while I go out and—”

Except Patrick was at his side as he stepped out of the vault, flattened himself against
the wall, like a SWAT member.

“Stop tryin’ to trick me! He’s on your team!”
Patrick hissed.

“What?”

Far too loudly:
“You’re the Betrayer!
The Game Master told me you’re even supposed to
have
guns!”

“Bub, shh—”

“You have to play right!
MICHAEL, PLEASE!
”

“Sit. Down!”
Michael whispered.

“
Pfft
,
you
sit down!” Patrick came back.

Oh my God, omigod.

A call of claws, clicking the ceiling. Shadows coiled all across the ceiling like
snakes in a basket. Then the Shriek cried out.

The sound was followed by a second cry, nearer, and suddenly Michael knew where the
creature was, on the dark ceiling above the bank’s rows of desks, so Michael breathed
out like a
Modern Warfare
sniper, aimed, and tugged the trigger.

The shot struck absolutely nothing.

One reason: Michael heard another
click-click-click
movement now, far from where he’d aimed. The Shriek was using the echo in the Bank
of Charleston for misdirection.

The second reason: Patrick had laced his finger into the triggerhold, attempting to
take the firearm, and this sorta compromised his aim.

Patrick tugged the gun down with a grunt.

Another round accidentally discharged between their four feet.

“Play
right
!” Patrick pulled the gun toward himself, like he was fighting over a TV remote. He
spied down the barrel.

Michael said, “I’m not the Betrayer, let’s switch teams, I want to be on your team!”

“A-la-la-la-la-can’t-hear-you!”

Stone dust rained from the ceiling, this time the cry of the Shriek issuing from directly
above. The rippling air pressure came down on Michael’s head like a cold cap.
It’s trying to paralyze its prey, shock us, like it shocked us last night, right before
it jumped.

The corpse landed on all fours in the aisle leading to the counter and wove among
the desks, like a feral wolf.

Michael shoved Patrick and gained the gun.

Patrick stumbled back, over a rumpled orange carpet, and landed on a black metal box,
grabbing his butt in pain. Michael was wheeling his aim back to the Shriek when the
box began to roar. The creature echoed the cry. But this box’s roar was mechanical:
this box was an air pump.

The carpet jerked, which would have been odd except it was not a carpet; it actually
was a tarp, a great orange inflatable man with pennants for limbs, and in the adrenaline-soaked
brightness of his mind, Michael knew that it had been used as a Halloween decoration,
and the employees had brought it in for the night, not knowing the tarp-man would
never dance for customers again. Now the tarp-man furled high.

And slapped the gun from Michael’s hand.

The pistol zipped across the marble, skidding underneath a wooden desk between him
and the Shriek.

The Shriek stopped, head cocking, as if amused.

The orange, faceless giant jigged.

“Stay,”
Michael whispered,
“down.”

“
Pfff
, whateve—”

Michael ran. He ran for the gun.

The Shriek dropped behind one of the desks like a magician into a trapdoor, then rematerialized
behind the desk closest to Michael. Michael grabbed a leather roller chair, and thrust
it at the Thing.

The creature bounded over the chair, seemed to hang midair before coming down in a
cougar’s crouch.

The creature scrabbled toward him. Michael reached behind himself blindly, found on
the desk an energy bar,
not helpful,
then something better: an orb-crystal paperweight. He hurled it. A thud and a snap:
the ball slammed into its target’s neck, both a bludgeon and a blade because it shattered
on impact. Blood hit a floor fan and flew up: black mist.

The creature went still. Surprised or angry?

Its cry answered that.

“Oh, you are effing pissed,”
Michael whimpered.

Michael reared his hand back like he had another weapon, and the Shriek responded
by going for the nearest wall, which, with its bone-grips, it scaled in a vertical
sprint.

For glowing moments, Michael thought it was over, the Shriek was retreating to some
secret place in the ceiling. Then the pattern of the monster’s movements on the ceiling
became clear. It wasn’t searching for an exit: it was circling overhead, as vultures
do.

Michael rotated on his heels with a craned neck, not daring to let it out of sight.
Speed and shadow hid the creature: it would slip out of one shadow and seem to teleport
to the next instantaneously. But its all-black lamp eyes were always on Michael, even
when its body faced the opposite direction: its head twisted and contorted to unnatural
angles, its neck breaking again and again.