The End Games (15 page)

But soon . . . sometimes . . . the man comes home at night feeling mean.

And the kid learns to tread carefully, then,
yes-yes
. Learns to look into Ron’s eyes and gauge the man’s moods. Learns to walk into a
room and instantaneously detect the emotional temperature. Learns to know how to act
and speak to diffuse Ron when the kid senses Ron’s countdown ticking.

Neat tricks.

But then the economy goes downhill. And Ron doesn’t have anything to build anymore.
So—just as another little boy, Patrick, is born—Ron begins to tear everything down.

The thing is, this little boy does not know how to stay quiet inside. He does not
understand why their “big happy home” is getting filled more and more with screams.
So yeah, Patrick is scared; yeah, he starts hitting himself. And so Ron puts him in
this psychiatric place, sometimes for weeks, and Patrick doesn’t get to go to preschool
or kindergarten, doesn’t really ever get the chance to realize much of what outside
life is like. And nobody seems to realize that the only reason Patrick has this terrifying
emotional pit inside of him is because Ron has put it there. Nobody understands that
once Patrick is in a home that makes sense, he will be fine forever.

And Michael thinks:
we need someone to rescue us.

And Ron starts hitting Mom, too.

And one time, Patrick sees Mom getting hit before Michael can get him out of the house.
And for the first time, Patrick Freaks.

Punches and slaps and bites himself, yes, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst
is, after Patrick makes himself bruise and bleed, he vanishes. His body is there,
nothing else; Patrick’s eyes go glassy and he will not speak or eat or flinch, ’cause
he’s fallen down that emotional pit into his own secret hell. Drugs don’t bring him
out of it. For weeks, Patrick is just a shape in a gown, and the doctors do not know
when—or if—he will come back to himself. He does come back, though; it just randomly
happens in the middle of one night in the hospital, when Patrick wakes up and says
he wants a cup of apple juice. Let’s call this a miracle, the doctors say.

Oh, and just one other thing, they say: if Patrick has another episode like this,
it’s likely to be much worse. Perhaps
never-come-back, lost-forever
worse.

Right when all that is happening, guess what? The rescuers
do
come. The cops ask why Patrick got scared. Mom lies to the cops.

And Michael realizes he has to
make
Mom tell the police, somehow. So he decides to run away. He still has this
yes-yes
inside him, but it’s not
quite yes-yes
that tells him to run away. Because one night, after Patrick accidentally breaks
Ron’s football championship trophy and Michael takes the blame, Ron hits Michael for
the first time. And in the pain and terror of realizing how close Ron came to hitting
his small brother, something speaks inside Michael: something that felt as if it were
telling him not just how to outplay or endure all the in-the-moment dangers, but how
to escape Ron’s games altogether and forever.
You’ll leave,
this Game Master says.
You’ll run away. You’ll change everything. You’ll
save
everything, Michael. Because if no one saves Mom and Patrick, then someday—probably
soon—they are going to be lost.

This is who I am
;
I’m the one who can really make us safe. I can save us, by making Mom tell the truth
to the cops. “Mrs. Faris,” the cops will ask, “is there any reason your sons would
run away? Has there been any trouble at home?”

Yes, yes.

Michael can see the image of a finish line, then: he can see The End. The cops taking
Ron away, and Patrick no longer being torn apart by a world that is supposed to be
safe but isn’t. And Mom looking at Michael with astonishment and sadness, yes, but
also with gratitude, and that smile, that smile like light. . . .

So Michael leaves on Halloween night.

And the
yes-yes
does keep him safe every moment.

But something gets in the way of Michael’s great plan.

The end of the world.

EENSY DETAIL, HA HA HA HA.

Gunshots from inside the garage. The captain whooped.

“That captain,” Holly said, “he’s like a kid in a munitions factory, huh?”

Michael startled: Holly had walked the twenty feet or so from the Hummer to him. He
felt, honestly, depressed; he didn’t want to talk. Still, the automatic response,
honed from living with Ron and from weeks on the road with Patrick, kicked in: Michael
wiped his face of any upset emotions, made a politely interested face.

“You sure you’re not hungry?” she asked. “Miss Bobbie’s the best cook in town.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Holly seemed to wait for him to go on. When he didn’t, she said cautiously, “For sure?
I mean, you’re sure you’re okay?”

Awesome. Cute Girl feels bad for me. Man, I must look so stupid, moping out here.

“Just tired,” he said.

“
Not
that I’m prying or anything,” Holly said. She laughed nervously, shook her head at
herself, pulled a cloth napkin from her hoodie pocket, wiped the tomato sauce from
her fingers. The confidence she’d shown in the cafeteria wasn’t there. “Anyhoo, hey
look,” she spouted quickly, “I just wanted to say, please don’t feel horrible-awful
about this morning, because
I did not actually see anything.
”

Michael, despite himself, blushed, even laughed a little. Patrick looked up from his
perch on the bumper with a happy, curious expression.

“Well,” Michael said, “I
didn’t
feel bad, except you just implied that letting someone see my bod would be something
to feel horrible-awful about.”

Holly grinned sheepishly, put a hand on her head. “Ahhhh, mister. I came over here
absolutely convinced that I would figure out a non-awkward way to say it.”

Starting a sentence,
Michael thought,
and hoping it finishes itself
. He felt a surprising, glad spark of connection.

“You finally reach the Safe Zone, only to encounter Holly, the world’s worst conversationalist,”
Holly said. “That can’t be at all how you imagined.”

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s exactly what it is—no no, not that you’re the worst.”

I can kill, like, a hundred monsters,
he thought,
but I cannot talk to a girl
.

“I just mean, I had all these ideas about what things I had to do to get me and Patrick
to someplace that was, y’know, not awful. And now I’ve done them all. And if there’s
nothing else to do, it’s like it means . . .” He paused, self-conscious.

“No no, I totally get it,” she said. “You worked the whole time to get to ‘the Safe
Zone,’ but it lacks ‘the Safe,’ so if
that
didn’t work, then what will, right? What we’ve got on our hands is one highly unreliable
apocalypse. A hundred years of post-Armaggedon narratives! And the world ends without
the courtesy of a safe place to go to.”

Michael only nodded. What else was there to say?

At that same moment, as if to prove the “not-safe” point, there was an explosion.

The sound came like a cannon report, maybe a half mile away in the streets of downtown.
Michael flinched, which made Holly laugh, though not at all unkindly. “Land mines,”
she said. “The captain’s been installing them around the city. Probably that one got
set off by a Zed that couldn’t find someplace dark to hide.

“Anyhow, things are dreadful here, granted. But I’m now going to tell you a story
that will make you feel better.”

“Okay.”

“So a week ago, the Zeds started pouring into the city and killing lots of people—”

“You’re right. Wow. I literally cannot believe how uplifted I am right now.”

“Ha-ha-ha-ha, okay, that’s enough, you.”

Am I, like, flirting right now?

“So the night the evacuation was going on, Hank and I were supposed to leave with
our dad, but things were crazy-chaos, and we got separated from him in the crowd.
Hank and I wound up on the last evac bus, and it was just about out of the city when
Zeds mobbed us. The bus got overturned; people were getting pulled out through the
windows. It was even less fun than it sounds.

“Hank and I locked ourselves in this tiny bathroom in the back. I will admit that
I cried, and Hank . . . he really tried to be sweet, saying we’d be safe there, that
we just had to wait it out. But we could hear everything. A baby screaming, and then
not. Soldiers shooting, then not.

“But you know what the very worst moment was?”

Michael shook his head.

“It was when this thought popped into my head. I realized—and I don’t know why—the
reason the soldiers in the Zone had stopped calling the dead people ‘the Infected’
when everything was getting so much worse. Why they’d started calling them ‘the Zeds.’”

“Why?”

“Because ‘zed’ is slang for the last letter of the alphabet. And the soldiers thought
the world was really coming to an end, that they couldn’t do anything else. And I
did, too, you know? But the thing is: the captain found me and Hank, and he’s taking
care of us, and we’re gonna be rescued soon.

“Therefore. In conclusion. This isn’t The End. The world isn’t over.”

Michael almost said,
Hey, about the soldiers . . . 
But he couldn’t bring himself to spoil the moment. “So what
is
the world?” he asked instead.

Holly shrugged, smiling. Michael was again struck by how big her grin was, how open
it made her face look. “Just paused, man,” she said.

A couple more gunshots from inside the garage. A moment later, the captain emerged,
flush faced, changing out his machine-gun clip with an almost liquid grace. “Clear
and clear, by God! Pile back in, platoon. We’re wastin’ daylight,” he called.

As they returned to the Hummer, Holly said, “May I say, for the record, how fab it
is to have you guys here now? New friends rawk.”

“Totally,” Michael said.

Friends,
Michael thought.

Daaaang.

It’s hard to describe any moment on a planet rife with screaming corpses as “carefree.”
But that afternoon came close.

Because as Captain Jopek led them on the methodical Humvee expedition of the downtown
grid, Michael felt like he wasn’t just being driven through the city.

He was also being taken through a Postapocalyptic Greatest Hits Collection.

Finding Food.
Check.

Collecting Medkits.
Check.

Accumulating Bullets.
Check.

Searching for Fellow Man.
Check.

He found himself relishing the tasks, which were so awesomely familiar from almost
Every Video Game Ever. It couldn’t have felt more different than The Game did, and
in no small part because somebody
else
was shaping the day, which—true fact—was awesome.

The captain stuck to the (landmine-free) main roads, going building by building deeper
into downtown; Hank
X
’d off each successive searched street on his map (and Hank also, for no discernible
reason other than it was Totally Badass, often requested to hang out on the machine
gun-equipped roof of the Hummer whenever the captain went into the buildings). The
captain did pick some semi-weird places to look for people, Michael thought, like
a pileup of silver Red Cross trailers, which he insisted on exploring compartment
by compartment, not satisfied with simply shouting into them. But mostly the afternoon
passed with a pleasant rhythm of driving, finding, and talking.

Michael was relieved that he didn’t feel “normal”—that he didn’t feel like the person
he’d been before Halloween, as he’d feared he would after his brief stare down with
Hank. He’d had a fantasy, as a kid, about going to summer camp, someplace where nobody
knew who he was, where he could reassemble himself and become something other than
The Poor Kid or The Skinny Kid. It had only taken the rising of the dead to make this
an affordable option for the Faris family, ha-ha-ha, but this afternoon trip through
the “paused world” really was the closest he’d ever come to it. Michael told everyone
his story of the Rapture confrontation. Holly
oooh
ed, which he pretended, all cool-guy, not to notice. Hank actually “bumped knucks”
with him. (“Respect,” Hank said.) It wasn’t the
attention
that felt good, exactly. It was: Michael could see the pieces of him adding up in
their eyes. He’d thought that up a long time ago, how people are really just puzzles,
this final image that was composed of all the different moments and pieces of them
that you’ve seen. Most people didn’t seem to realize that
you
were a puzzle, too: if you were careful enough, you could choose the image other
people put together. Holly and Bobbie and Hank saw the post-Halloween him, and it
made that (kick-ass) him seem
real
to Michael himself, in a way that felt almost dizzyingly wonderful. And as much as
he loved Bub, he had to admit that it was nice to be seen as something other than
an (admittedly awesome) older brother.

The only thing that could have made it better, Michael thought, was if he could see
the captain’s expression beyond that sliding plate. He hoped the captain was smiling
at his story, astonished and impressed by the new kid in town, and saying under his
breath, “
No shit
. . .”

By the time they found the third ammo cache of the day—in a sniper post beside a McDonald’s
PlayPlace—the sky was burning with the pale fire of late afternoon.

“Goddamn, this light leaves fast,” the captain said, his back to Michael. “Just a
couple more stops.”

Michael checked out the sky, too. “I don’t know. Maybe we better call it a day, though?”
he asked.