The End Games (38 page)

But something was glittering in Patrick’s closed hand.

Michael understood what the small silvery object was only as it shot up and out. The
vial of cure arced and twirled, catching the semi-strobing light like a comet. It
was the last dose, the single vial that Patrick had brought from the vault and kept
safe through the battle with Hank. Michael cried out and raised his hands to catch
it.

The vial struck him on the chest, the zipper giving a cheery
tink!
as it bounced off.

The vial struck the stone floor, hard.

But it didn’t break.

Instead, it rolled, back and forth. Settling. Unharmed.

Whisper of thought: 
. . . miracle
. . .

“Just take it,” Patrick said. He was sobbing now. “You stupid Betrayer, I don’t care.
I don’t even
wanna
win. I can’t, I
can’t.
”

Tears found Michael’s eyes. He saved me.
He
saved
me.

“Bub,” Michael breathed, “thank y—”

Patrick said, “I hate you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

And that was when Patrick sat down on the ground and began to Freak.

As if from another world, Michael heard Holly running breathlessly toward them.

She reached the end of the aisle between the desks. Her hoodie was spattered with
blood at the cuffs; a bruise had blossomed underneath her left eye. She stopped with
an almost comical swiftness, her sneakers squeaking as she spotted what Michael had
in his hands.

Her eyes glistened.
“Oh my Lordy,”
she whispered. “The lab’s really here.”

Michael tried to figure out what to say about the miracle in his hand.

But Patrick began to scream.

Michael watched Holly’s face transform as Patrick’s sound—so loud; how can such pain
fit into such a small body?—echoed through the lobby.

“I just want it over!”
Patrick screamed.
“Why can’t it, why why why why?!”

Patrick punched himself again, both hands beating his thighs; a sound like the slapping
of raw meat.

Michael moaned, “Patrick—”

“P-Patrick, you stop,” Holly said, hurrying past Michael. She leaned down and grabbed
Patrick’s flailing wrists.

“Don’t touch! No! Don’t try a’ make me feel better!”

“It’s going to be fine—”

“That’s what
he
always says!” Patrick spat viciously, and in the strength of his agony, wormed his
arms free. His little fists roared back downward with incredible speed to strike his
legs, over, over.

Holly pushed him to the ground. She looked astonished, horrified. She had known about
Freaking, Michael thought. But this wasn’t what she’d imagined.

“I
hay-hay-haaate
it! I’m
not
good enough to get to The End—I’m—I’m—I just need my
mommy!
—”

“We’re going to her,” said Holly hurriedly. “Aren’t we, Michael?”

Michael thought:
I can’t lie.

“Help me with him,” she implored him, and he nodded distantly, kneeling, careful to
keep the vial away from Patrick’s erratic movements, hating himself for even thinking
about that. Patrick—accidentally?—kicked Michael in the stomach. Michael pinned Patrick
down. His brother looked like he was being crucified.

“Dude, take the GD vaccine,” she said to Michael, picking Patrick up and pinning him
against her chest, ignoring his fists and cries. “Inject it and get the rest of it
and leave with us.”

From the vault, more shattering. Shrieking.

“What’s that noise?” Holly asked.

Michael began, “I don’t have—”
anymore of the cure
he planned to say, but Holly interrupted him:

“You need a syringe, right. There’s one in the Hummer— Patrick. Please. We’re going
home now, honey, okay?” Carrying Patrick—dragging him—Holly started back toward the
tunnel.

Take the vaccine,
Michael thought, floating after her. Yes. That’s what he could do
.
He could just say,
“Yeah—‘the rest of the cure.’ Which I’ve totally got.”

He could tell himself:
the Centers for Disease Control still has the formula.

He could tell himself:
there is more of the cure in Richmond.

He could tell himself:
even if this is the last of the cure, I have to take it, because I’m the only one
Bub has left.

He could pretend that the futures “the Game Master” promised him were real, instead
of a series of evaporating illusions that led to a corner he could not lie his way
out of.

He could take the cure.

But what
then
?

“His legs,” Holly said. “A little help, Michael.” She attempted lightness, to keep
cool for Patrick, but there were tears of frustration in her eyes. “We have to hurry,
we have to
leave
.”

“Michael . . . ?” said Holly.

Leave
, he thought.

But he couldn’t answer. . . .

Because it is Halloween, and he stands frozen in the very center of a world tilting.

His plan was to silently get into the Volvo station wagon and go; to drive to Ron’s
cabin a couple hours away. But an almost mystical shock stops him.

His neighbor’s scream pierces the quick of the night: “Get back! Get baaAAAA—!” His
brother’s heart beats through the shirt on Michael’s back.

Mom’s bedroom light clicks on. A second light follows. . . .

Patrick’s bedroom
, Michael thinks dimly.
Mom wants to make sure he’s okay.
And he can almost picture her flinging open Patrick’s door but keeping calmness on
her face. She’s good that way. One thing about Mom: she makes you feel good
now
. She can make you feel so good this second, you don’t even realize that soon
now
will mutate. She can make you keep continuing, and you don’t realize that all your
life is running out.

A police car screams down the street, a red-blue missile through the dark.

A jack-o’-lantern disintegrates under its tire as it stops in the driveway next door.
A husky cop—Wally Hawkin, the cop at school who always jokingly steals Michael’s Tater
Tots—gets out, running for the MacKenzies’ front door, leaping a tricycle as he pulls
out his pistol—and Michael has the odd feeling, not for the first time or the last,
that he has somehow stepped into a night of make-believe. Wally looks like Leon in
Resident Evil 6.

“Michael?”

Mom stands in their front doorway. She clutches her sky-blue robe closed at the neck
with one hand.

“It’s happening here, too,” says Ron behind her.

“What?” says Mom.

“The TV stuff, the stuff from earlier toni—”

Screams.

The door of the house across the road has been kicked open by Wally, and Michael’s
skinny, sweet-faced neighbor, Harry MacKenzie, materializes on the threshold. His
shirt says:
WORK IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T DRINK
.

Harry moans and throws himself at the cop.

Michael does not understand, but instinctively says, “Ten points for closing your
eyes,” so that Patrick will not be able to see whatever is about to happen.

Wally puts a bullet, heart-center into Harry. Harry keeps moving. Ron goes, “Oh shit!”
and Mom gasps, and Patrick tightens on his neck and he says, “What’s happenin’?” Harry
curls his hands around the policeman’s throat, and Michael thinks,
I have to go,
but he is frozen by the impossible sight of blood erupting from Wally’s mouth, which
will never taste a Tater Tot again.

“Get yourselves in here,” says Ron. His voice is oddly flat. “I don’t mean yesterday.
I ain’t playin’.”

Mom dashes barefoot for them. “Michael,” she hisses, “what are you
doing
out here?”

And stops, seeing the backpack, seeing the keys in Michael’s hand.

Many times, Michael has seen Mom look hurt. He has seen her angry. Those are not things
he sees now.

Honest revelation is what is on Mom’s face.

You were going to leave me.

For that moment, this is the world:

He and Mom.

Silence on the moonlit dew-cold grass.

He and Mom on their front lawn.

Which is just sixty feet square, pebbled and rooty, and its grass wilts brown every
July. But as they stand together in this shocked quiet, their yard seems to hum like
ordinary earth transformed by a magic circle. He remembers the day he and Mom moved
in, the downpour that day, Mom so eager for their own home that she carried boxes
through the rain. He remembers the birthday when he awoke to a Slip ’N Slide set up
right here, where they now stand. He remembers Mom taking his photo on the first day
of school, every year, with a disposable camera, while he held up fingers to show
what grade he was in.

These memories twist through him in seconds.

Then a pistol shouts somewhere, as if signaling the start of a competition.

“I’m sorry,” Mom says. She comes closer. “I’m sorry, so sorry, about everything. I
know it’s been . . . wrong. I know that; I do. But Michael. Michael David.” Tears
in her voice. “You cannot do this.”

He remembers the first night Ron came home drunk, his pickup leaving tire marks on
the yard.

Suddenly, Ron is at her side, his bald spot gleaming sickly in the houselight.

“I’m not stayin’ here while these happy assholes are shooting,” says Ron. “Get in
the car.”

He is already wearing his jacket, the letterman with
COACH
stitched on the breast
. He’s ready to go.
And just like that, Ron has ruined everything.

Except Ron reaches into his pocket and finds it empty. No keys. And Mom meets Michael’s
eyes with gathering fear.

“Where in the blue Hell’s my goddamn keys?”

“I left them inside,” Michael says. “The Snoopy tray. I went to Dairy Queen.”

“Why you little sack of . . .” But another gunshot snaps Ron out of it, and he goes
for the house.

Mom does not go for the house.

She doesn’t move.

“Michael. Give your mother the keys. Before he gets back, baby.”

She is using her Mom Voice.

“I’ll lie for you. You’ll be safe.”

But that mask does not fit her anymore.

He does not think of Patrick.

He does not think of Mom.

He thinks of himself.

It’s not like an adventure. Adventures, you control. Mom, you lied to me.

A cloak of smooth, cold fury unfurls from his heart. Go, the Game Master says. And
Michael drifts away from Mom, to the car, loading his brother into the backseat as
Patrick struggles with everything he’s got to maintain his smile.

Mom stutters, paralyzed by shock. And the moment she hesitates is the moment Michael
locks the doors.

Mom’s palms strike the glass. She shakes her head, screams. Patrick says something,
who knows what.

“It’s going to be okay. I know what I’m doing,” Michael shouts now.

“Say ‘See you later,’ Bub,” says Michael.

And drives.

He clears the driveway and careens by Wally, who lies in a pool of black moonlit fluid.
He speeds past Harry MacKenzie, who stumbles like an otherworldly pilgrim.

And when Michael sees Ron’s dashing form dwindling in the rearview mirror, he feels
a joy so intense it’s almost blinding.

Michael has found a door, he believes: a door to the next world, to another life.
Yes, he is seizing this mysterious catastrophe and barreling toward The End.

It’s over. I’m changing everything. I’m saving us.

I’m saving
me
.

He does not understand that tonight the earth has been damned beyond his comprehension
or control. He will not consider that he may have just murdered Mom. He doesn’t allow
himself to think that, no, because he feels his blood
now,
feels good
now,
and the only thought he will allow is:

IT WILL BE WORTH IT,

IT WILL WORK OUT,

IN THE END.

So each yard he travels is like a wakening from a long nightmare, a wakening to control,
a wakening at last to who he
really
is.

LOL, that’s a good joke, Mikey!

It is waking in the dark to the screams again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“Michael?”

Mom.

“Michael,” Holly said loudly over Patrick’s crying, walking backward toward the tunnel,
“it’s road time. What is
wrong
with you?” Michael shook his head. Patrick sobbed harder; Holly’s face clouded with
urgency. “Dude, please. Jopek is dea—”

She paused, looking unsure whether she could do Patrick any more harm.

“He’s out-out. I think. But there’s something weird going on outside—
are you even listening to me
?”

“I never saved anyone. . . .” Michael said to himself.

“What?”

And I can take the cure, and
I’ll
still be alive. But everything that’s wrong inside and outside Bub will still be
there, and all of this will just keep repeating, like it did with Mom. It will just
keep echoing, like a Bellow.

This
was
The End, Michael suddenly knew.