The End Games (23 page)

That slightly too-big smile momentarily spread over her face. That smile pierced Michael,
somehow; there was something about it that was so open, so unguarded, that it let
out a little of the heaviness in his chest.

He sat down in the chair. A window in front of him overlooked a dark alley; he watched
Holly’s reflection in the black glass as she scooted closer to remove the square of
tan tape holding the cotton to his neck. Just before she did, Michael thought,
This is the first time a girl ever really touched me. Yeah, okay, maybe this getting-scratched
thing isn’t so bad after all, ha-ha.

Except that Holly made what looked like a disturbed face. “How’s the war wound lookin’?”
he asked, trying to sound light, though suddenly distinctly insecure about his neck’s
physique.

“A little inflamed . . . ,” Holly murmured. “But it’s fine, I’m sure. I know you figured
this out already, but scratches aren’t really a danger. The virus doesn’t transmit
through anything except bites.

“Okay, mister, prepare to be zapped,”
she whispered, and pulled, fast and hard, on the adhesive. Michael grunted. “You
are welcome,” Holly said. She rooted through the first aid kit in her lap.

“So. You’re pretty good with the science-y stuff.”

“You’re pretty good with the flattery-y stuff,” Holly chuckled. “But I’m not so good.
Mostly, I just repeat what my daddy taught me.”

Michael saw Holly’s reflection smile. In the dark glass, the expression was difficult
to read, but something about it became strangely distant.

“He’s a doctor?” he said after a pause.

“Pharmacist,” Holly replied. “But, like, a fancy kind. This’ll be cold; that’s your
warning.”

She gently circled a cool, sterile-smelling cotton ball over his neck. “But, yeah,
the virus—do you mind if I geek out a second and tell you about it?”

Michael shook his head, happy to hear the eagerness, even excitement, in her voice.

“Rad! Oh Nerd Joy, you are one of the things I miss most about the world Before.”

I don’t miss anything from Before
, Michael thought.

“So yeah, the dead-people virus: It’s a
new
virus, obviously; you don’t see the dead rising every flu season. Like Hank was saying
yesterday, a lot of people think the virus is man-made—maybe in Iran, because of the
war.”

How can people do that to each other?
But after everything he’d seen at home, maybe cruelty shouldn’t surprise him. “God . . . ,”
Michael said.

Holly suddenly took a deep, nearly angry breath. “If God is around,” she said shortly,
“maybe He should be trying harder.” She breathed hard again. “Like, Christ, with this
shit with Bobbie . . .” She stopped herself, then said, “Hold this,” and taped a new
cotton square to his neck.

Her voice sounded far away, as if already mentally deciding what to put where in the
first aid kit.
Bring out the awkward: “Well, thanks” and “So, yeah.”

“So yeah,” Holly said, “we should probably get back to bed now. I don’t think the
captain really wants us walking around. You and I should totally hang out tomorrow,
though. Did that bandaging ordeal hurt as much as you thought it would?”

Michael held in a sigh. He didn’t want the respite from the crappy world to be over.
“Nah,” he said.

“Tell the truth,” said Holly.

“You’ll be hearing from my attorney.”

“Heh. But . . . thanks for this, Michael,” she said. Seriously, no jokiness at all.
“It was really sweet of you.”

Michael made a “no big deal” gesture, and bent over to move the stool out of his way
to hide his blush.

They went out the door and headed back to the Senate, and Holly was saying, to fill
the quiet: “Yeah. So. The virus. The government was working on a cure. The CDC, the
Centers for Disease Control, basically the FBI of the germ world, they even had this
lab in town. They had to keep moving the lab to different places, though; people kept
trying to overrun it and get the cure for their infected families. The CDC scientists
were supposedly on the verge of getting a working formula that would reverse the virus’s
effects on the brain. I don’t know how soon after getting bitten you’d have to take
the cure for it to work; the scientists were hopeful, though. But then Charleston
got overrun. I don’t know if the CDC even was able to get the ‘cure’ out of the city
during the crazy evacs.” Holly sighed. “Anyway—it’s hard to make a cure, because viruses
evolve and go through mutations.”

“Like how a cold changes all the time?” Michael said.

“Ex
act
ly, because a virus’s job is to survive. So it keeps changing, but on a deeper level—that’s
my dad’s fave phrase: ‘on a deeper level’—it’s not changing at all. It’s becoming
what it already is. The environment becomes hostile; maybe antibodies are introduced,
new proteins or something. So the virus does what viruses do: it adjusts. But it’s
not
re
acting, because what it mutates into was already a part of it. Coded, like a secret,
all along.”

They were walking past windows: light and shadow.

“But what’s it heading toward?” Michael asked. “Like, does it have a ‘goal’?”

Holly nodded. “I guess, sort of, it’s heading ‘home.’ Viruses do that literally, sometimes:
there are some that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on Earth where
the virus originated. Which gives me the jibblies. But even if it doesn’t do
that
, the goal of every virus is to ‘go home’ to itself: to make the ultimate, purest
form of itself. It’s why the Zeds’ behavior is changing, why they seem to be growing . . . not
smarter, but savvier. Like you said, they tore out their eyes, they’re just using
sound now—which,
holla
, dork points for figuring that out. But yeah, as with every virus, this one is evolving
to its most powerful-slash-purest form.”

Michael asked if that form had a name.

Holly said, “The endgame.”

Michael stopped, a few feet from the Senate. That odd, soaring feeling again—like
things syncing together.
Like . . . clockwork
.

“What’s up?” Holly asked. “You okay?”

And now was as good a time as any to admit how much he liked her. In the long, empty,
snow-lit hall, it would have been easy to imagine that they were the last two people
left on Earth, that he could just say good night and see Holly tomorrow, and continue
his limited-time crush at the world’s most bizarre sleepaway camp. And maybe that
was cheesy pop-song stuff, but to Michael nothing felt false about it. It was right
then that Michael understood, in his bones and heart and breath, that this moment
was what he’d wanted: to be just a normal teenager, to not have to worry about anything
other than the mystery of a cute girl’s feelings for him, to just let an adult instruct
and protect him.

And Michael could not stand it.

Now that he had reached this endgame, he realized he could not stand feeling regular,
smiling breathlessly at his own minor-league daring. Going back to his Senate bed
would be safe and not-scary, because he would be following Jopek’s orders instead
of this “what-does-she-think-of-me” feeling. Yeah, it would be not-scary, but here
was a true fact about Michael Faris: right then, he
missed
danger. He missed the type of recklessness that somehow also made him feel safe,
the kind he dashed into blindly, trusting only that he would feel his heart and breathe
his breath and smile his way out of it.

When he replied, “I’m fine. I don’t think I’m tired yet. Do you want to maybe hang
out right now?” he felt sort of terrified, because one: she was beautiful, and two:
he wasn’t, and three: Jopek, who’d seemed unhinged earlier, might catch them.

But mostly, at last, a little
yes-yes—that
was what Michael felt.

“Absolutely,” Holly said. Genuinely happy. Almost like, despite Jopek’s rules, she
had been wanting him to ask.

Which was, of course, The Best Thing Ever.

So after they ran through the marble halls that sang with moonlight and rang with
calls of Bellows, after they reached the rotunda with the ruined chandelier, after
they jokingly high-fived the rows of governor statues—after all that, Holly opened
an oak door padded with leather, identical to the one at the other end of the hall,
and whispered,
“Welcome to the Capitol Sanctuary.”
Pews and a pipe organ, and no cots or postcrisis clutter. “They used it for state
funerals and stuff. I think they sealed it after things got awful-awful. The captain
actually had to move a coffin out of here and down into somewhere in the Capitol’s
basement—that kid who died in a coal mine, remember? Cady Gibson. But it’s just beautiful
in here, you know? Anyway, what do you wanna do?”

In a movie, the hidden meaning of the question would be something like:
baby
,
let’s smooch.
But he didn’t think it was now. Anyway, he didn’t really
have
anything in mind.

Michael shrugged, his heart pounding from running and from nerves.

Holly thought a second, then she wove through the pews, to a podium at the front of
the sanctuary, flicking the microphone it held with a fingernail.

“So. Everyone,” she said in a game-show-host voice, “welcome to
The Holly Hour
! Tonight’s guest is a very special friend of mine: Holly. Holly, how have you been?

“Not so bad. Just hanging out with dead people.

“
And how is that?

“I find them beautiful.

“
Is that so?

“Especially their skin.

“
Because it’s beautiful?

“Because it’s a-peeling.”

Michael chuckled, did a rimshot.

Holly faked an awkward pause at her joke, pulling an “eesh!” face to a “camera.”

“Now, our next guest here in West Virginia is a guy who hails
all the way
from West Virginia. Please welcome Michael . . .” She gave him an expectant look.

“Oh,” he said. “Michael Faris.” Holly’s
“Come on down!”
applause echoed in the chamber as Michael walked to the front of the Sanctuary and
sat in a fancy priest’s chair, a few feet from the left side of the podium.

“So Michael.” Very “Oprah” solemn. “Tell us about yourself. How old were you the first
time you got pregnant?”

And for the next couple minutes, sitting there after curfew in this secret sanctuary,
Michael joked with this cute-hot girl. Which felt kind of enjoyably risky in itself:
he kept checking the sanctuary door out of the corner of his eye, making sure that
Jopek wasn’t coming in. And he really did want to impress Holly, to keep the conversation
light, so that she would see the purposely-and-perfectly-selected Michael.

Then Holly said, “Now, let’s get back to something we started discussing before the
commercial break: what
are
the things you miss about the world Before?”

“Um, how ’bout you first?” Michael said, keeping his tone casual.

“I miss knowing what I’m gonna do every day. I mean, I don’t miss
class
, necessarily, but I miss knowing I have class, and then I have lunch and more class,
and then I have Quiz Bowl or Mathletes or Readers’ Regime—Michael! Don’t laugh! A-hole!”

“I’m n-n-n—” Michael chuckled.

But she was laughing, herself, and her smile was somehow even more open than usual.
It was a little like a live wire. “I miss who I got to be in class,” she said, playing
with loose wood paneling on the podium. “Because now . . . okay and maybe this’ll
sound cocky, but whatever—it’s like I’m still
smart
, but who cares? Not that I want all y’all to worship at The Altar of Muh Brain, but
I liked being that girl. It’s like with Hank, though: that kid makes me in
saaane
sometimes, but I also feel sort of profoundly dreadful for him, ’cause I don’t think
he really knows how to
be
in this world. He was so cool in school, and—not that this is the world’s great tragedy,
granted—he’s kinda trying to figure out how to feel okay without coaches telling him
what to do, you know? That’s partly why we were so relieved when Jopek found us. We
had this soldier who was going to protect us, and then we’ll get to the Richmond Safe
Zone, and . . . and if the CDC did make a cure, everything will get back to the way
it was before.”

A thought hit Michael, and it hurt.
You wouldn’t have liked me in the world Before, Holly. I don’t even think we would
have ever talked to each other. My only friends were 1) people on Xbox LIVE, 2) my
mom, and 3) my little brother. And my main hobby was trying to rescue them from their
awful lives. I didn’t do such a hot job of winning that game, either, so yeah, you
could say I’m
still
a loser.

She pulled the piece of wood paneling off of the podium and flicked it at Michael.
“All right, mister, your turn.”

Just keep it light.
Michael began: “I miss being in school, too, definitely. . . .”

But the sentence didn’t finish itself.

Something odd was happening inside him: he thought, with surprise,
I—I don’t want to lie anymore. I didn’t come for that.
He’d believed, a moment ago, that he’d sneaked to the sanctuary to
yes-yes
his way out of things, to feel nervous but in control, too, with the “danger” being
the dance of what pieces of himself he let her see. But he didn’t want to look in
Holly’s eyes and just see his puzzle reflected back to him.
Tell her.

“No. I—I don’t miss Before. At all,” Michael said.

Stop, Michael. It’s going well, don’t eff it u—

“I ran away,” Michael said. “On Halloween.”

“What a cliff-hanger! More in a minute after a word from our sponsors—”

“I mean it though.”
God, what am I doing?