The End Games (42 page)

The thing was, the tires were not.

The front two tires detonated with flat airbursts: the car wrenched violently left,
fishtailed, and Michael was still on the access road, still a hundred feet back when
the Hummer finally flapped to a stop and a tall man with a dust-caked mouth and a
red coat scrambled to the driver’s door, his gun clumsily spitting bullets with every
step he took.

As Red Coat wrenched opened the driver’s door, Holly screamed, “Don’t shoot, he made
me, he made me!” Red Coat yanked her out of the cab by her hair. “He’s here!” Holly
shouted. “HE’S RIGHT THERE IN THE BACKSEAT!”

Michael skidded to a stop in the snow, stunned, confused.

He thought wildly, as he once had before:
Holly, you’re a crappy liar
. But then he understood her plan, and his head filled with light.

Red Coat seemed to sense Holly’s lie.

But Hammy didn’t. Hammy was already opening the back Hummer door when Red Coat cried:
“Stop that. Right now! Belinda, it’s a trick!”

Even from this distance, Michael understood the emotion that flew across the face
of the woman who had questioned Rulon’s prophecies in the First Bank of Charleston.
The rear Hummer doors creaked on their hinges, revealing what was within, and Hammy
was not filled with terror.

Nor surprise.

Just . . . heartbreak.

Devastation that all hope had led to this. Michael knew, more than ever before, how
freaking much that this was not a game. In games, you don’t pity the enemy.

An earsplitting cry came out from the dark of the Hummer. Far overhead, one of the
field lights burst apart, showering sparks and glass.

Captain Horace Jopek, mutated and risen, launched out of the back of his Hummer.

The sightless, bone-clawed captain collided into Hammy, ripping into her throat before
she had even struck the ground. Red dimes of blood flew.

Jopek’s vocal cords issued a second shriek, and with it, pandemonium burst. Most of
the remaining Rapture near the Hummer fled in all directions; those who had already
run tripled their speed as Hammy’s pleas gurgled and faded. Two or three of the Rapture
stood rooted and mesmerized, not knowing what to do when the camouflaged Shriek looked
up from Hammy with their friend’s blood and skull fragments on its teeth, and began
to chase after them, too. . . .

Through the chaos:
“Michael, go!”

Michael’s gazed snapped upward. Having escaped from Red Coat, Holly stood on the roof
of the Hummer, waving frantically.

She thrust her arm toward the entrance of the mine. The
now-unguarded
entrance to the mine.

“GOOOOO!”
she shouted.

“I’ll trust you, if you trust me.”

Gratitude and emotion flooded Michael. He did not feel his blood. Clearly, certainly,
with no lie between it and himself: Michael felt his
heart
.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

He dashed, with the Rapture’s screams resounding from the four walls of the world.

Thank you. Oh man, oh God, thank you so, so much.

Weaving through the fleeing members of the Rapture (who did not care to stop him),
darting between mountains of coal and ancient machinery, his breath whistling into
him, out from him, and he felt every flowing inch.

And then—nearly unbelievably—Michael realized he was going to make it.

He passed under thick wooden beams of the mine entrance; the air, already bitter,
seemed to die off ten degrees; the carpet of snow changed to gritty coal. Michael
ran. With tears of thank-you in his eyes, he ran into the homeplace of the virus that
ended the world . . . and Whatever had created it.

Don’t scream for Bub
.
Don’t let Rulon know you’re here.

Though his face was drippy with sweat, and his pulse slammed inside his eardrums,
just twenty feet into the mine Michael made himself slow. His crunchy footsteps were
way too loud. The sounds of the world had faded back with eerie speed: the havoc back
in the quarry had a from-the-other-side-of-the-tunnel quality, no realer than a movie
playing in a different room.

And Michael had no weapons.
Except, maybe, surprise.

Yeah. Yes. Slow down, not too much, but be quiet—do it.

Rulon isn’t slowing down,
his mind hissed.

Shit. Damn it.

Michael jogged.

The mine around him looked like pictures he’d seen in school: the roof rough and chokingly
low (he could almost reach up and touch it); the walls a rippling black that were
squared with wooden beams. But the pictures couldn’t tell how the nightmare of the
mine
felt
. They couldn’t describe the cold, so sharp it was nearly like breathing glass. They
couldn’t describe the smell, like the back of a basement, with a cloying stink of . . . was
that gas?
Could that poison you?

It feels like being swallowed,
Michael thought.
And Bub went through this
.

Oh, Bub, I’m sorry. Ya-ya, I ya-ya.

Water, somewhere in the dark throat ahead: a delicate
drip
, trailed by a ghostly chuckling echo. Michael tasted fine metallic fear on the back
of his mouth. Images pushed into his mind. Bone-hands blossoming from the loose soil
at his feet. Faces rising white and thin from the dark. Cady Gibson spidering toward
him on the ceiling . . .

Michael glanced back at the entrance. Only a hundred feet into the mine, now. How
had he not gone farther?

Michael swallowed and went on.

Ahead, the shaft of the mine curved sharply, almost a right angle. To continue would
be to lose sight of the entrance. Michael spied around the corner. The light reached
another twenty steps. After that: inner casket.

Doesn’t matter,
Michael jabbered at himself, beginning to move again now, slowly, keeping one hand
to the wall, trying not to picture Cady Gibson floating from the outer rim of the
darkness ahead.

It won’t just be Cady, though, Mikey. Look at the footprints in the coal dust.
All those footprints. The evidence of the unimaginable size of the migration.
Like the mind-frying, infinite black of space
.

Michael’s hand passed over one of the wooden beams. He saw that it and all the others
were cracked, ragged with splinters. They’d been sideswiped by deadly force. Oh Jeezus,
what was he walking toward?

Keep going. You’re scared, that’s true, but. Maybe the Shrieks aren’t going to come
back out. Maybe they just came home, and they’re going to stay here. Maybe—

He had turned the corner, and was approaching the very last ledge of the outside world’s
light, when he heard the dead people shrieking.

Michael’s head snapped reflexively back, a jagged outcropping punching into the back
of his scalp so hard that it made his eyes water.

But it wasn’t the pain that made Michael’s head swim, or that blanked his brain, or
short-circuited all sense of himself in reality. It was the
sound
.

He had heard dead people bellow and shriek. He’d heard thousands at once, on Government
Plaza. But nothing had ever sounded like this. Nothing on Earth.

Place your ear on train tracks at midnight; listen to the nearing thunder; let a ten-thousand-ton
roaring black freight train highball to you and take off your head.

This was much worse.

Michael’s hands clamped over his ears, but there was no denying this. The coal ground
under his feet rumbled like thimbles in an earthquake. Particles shivered from the
ceiling. Wind sped from the secret chambers and passages of the earth, flying through
his hair and freezing him through his clothes.

It was primeval; it was first power; it was whatever unholy sound comes from ten thousand
or more dead throats as they begin a game.

Michael’s skull seemed to shake with harmonic vibration.

That’s not wind
.
It’s air pressure: they’re coming.

And for one second, one shivering terror-blank second, Michael thought:
Leave! Go back! Bub’s not down here
.
And if he is, it’s too late.
Sounded true. Sounded smart and grown-up.

Leave now, and you can still get out with Holly before those monsters get here
.
Leave now, and maybe you can go back and get the cure. Maybe you can still save Mom!
Doesn’t that sound good, Michael?

Leave, and you can save yoursel—

“NOOOOO!”
Michael shouted, and he ran toward the dark.

As if in response, the shriek cut off.

The ground still vibrated, and that wall of air pressure still barreled toward him.

But Michael heard a different, single, high scream flying through the darkness, now
not far away. Footsteps, pattering toward him. His chest leapt.
Oh my God. Oh my God, is that . . . ?

Echoing somewhere: “
Child, come here! Meet your fate, boy! Come back to me now! Oh, I can make it so much
worse if you don’t!”

Rulon’s chasing him.

And Michael stood there, hypnotized, a sunburst of amazement flooding him as Patrick
sprinted out of the darkness.

How? How is he—?

Patrick looked like a kid escaping the boogeyman: his lips were strung back by strain
and terror, his elbows scissoring, his breath coming in frightened little hiccups.

His face registered astonishment as he saw Michael, but for only a second before horror
overtook it again. He slammed full speed into Michael, not hugging him, bouncing back
and stuttering:

“Help help help me help me please HELPHELP—”
A hand-shaped bruise covered almost half of his face.
“Can you, will you, help, PLEASE PLEASE!”

“Bub, it’s okay!”

“He’s comin’!” Patrick gasped. “The cheater’s comin’! The deer, the deer knocked ’im
down,
then I was brave, but the bad man’s comin’!
”

Deer? What?!

Patrick shook his head, pleading. His coat was shredded away at his elbow, blood leaked
out from a knife-slit wound. Patrick looked very pale. His tiny hands suddenly grabbed
at the belly of Michael’s space suit, his eyes bulging and white.

“Let’s go, please!”
he cried.
“He’s so bad! Michael, NOTHING IS PRETEND ANYMORE!”

Michael still did not understand how Patrick had been saved from the “Freaking” pit
inside himself. But there was no time to consider it. He pulled Patrick’s quivering
body against him, planning to retreat out of the mine shaft and up into the light
of the world.

The mega-shriek blasted once more, this time much closer, the rancid air pressure
surging.

And over Bub’s shoulder, Rulon’s yellow grin materialized in the mine shaft, like
the world’s final, possessed jack-o’-lantern, come back from Halloween.

The priest’s face was the twisted rag of a man who cannot wake from a nightmare. Hell-winds
caught the folds of his tattered robes and hauled them in all directions. One of his
eye sockets was a cratered soup: the eyeball had been pierced and popped, like the
Old Testament justice, so Rulon wept both tears and ooze.

He bore the hunter’s knife in his right hand.

“Michael Faris?” said Rulon. As if confused. Stopping for one second.

“R-r-reach—” Patrick was stuttering. He unzipped his jacket pocket, pulled out his
orange plastic gun. “R-reach fer the s—”

Rulon snapped out of it. “If you know what will please your soul, boy,” he growled
to Michael,
“give me the sacrifice, give him to me!”

Michael pulled his brother closer.

The sounds of the Shrieks, building like drums of doom.

“Sacrifice yourself, asshole!” Michael bellowed.

The priest’s face went savage with rage. His knife sang upward. Rulon lunged toward
them.

Michael had no time to plan: as Rulon attacked, Michael shoved Patrick away and out
of Rulon’s path, then leapt in the opposite direction like a boy dodging the train
in the very last moment in a game of chicken. Rulon screamed fury as Michael evaded
him. Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw the priest try to rein back the momentum
of his lunge, but perhaps there comes a time when momentum is fate: Rulon’s knife
stabbed down, yes, but not on Michael or Patrick:

His blade came down, with his full force and hatred behind it, into the fractured
wood of a support beam.

The support snapped like a wishbone.

The ceiling rumbled.

Rulon looked up, blinked.

The ceiling came down in front of Michael with a guttural roar. Air displaced. Michael
threw up his hands, shouting, certain his life was over.

But a second later he looked up, still uncrushed. Only part of the ceiling had fallen
in. How much, though, he didn’t know: the air was a swirling, nostril-burning haze.

“Bub?”

He heard Patrick hack.
Over there, left, left!
Michael crawled, feeling out like a blind man.

His hand found Patrick’s delicate chest, which was heaving and hacking viciously.

“Got you, Bub, here I am.” He looked down at Patrick, and he realized he
could
see now: light, low and weak, was illuminating Patrick. Which meant, oh thank God,
that the way to the exit had not been blocked by the cave-in. In fact, all he had
to do was go around that corner a few steps away, and he would be able to take them
out of the mine shaft the same way he had come.

“H-here, M-Michael!” Patrick coughed.

Run. Now. That’s all. Just run around that corner and out of the mine, and this is
over.

“I know. I’ve got you, Bub.”

“N-no, I mean,” Patrick racked, shaking his head,
“They’re
here
! THEM!”