The End Games

He drew up the rifle in the tarp at his side. He kicked out of the sleeping bag and
ripped his gun from its waterproof wrap and raised the sights up toward the perimeter
blindly. A form appeared twenty feet ahead. He tugged the trigger; it would not give.
He cursed himself, clicked off the safety, resighted the shape. But the form was nothing
more than a tree, a yew, arthritic and leafless. So dark: God, so dark out here. By
the gunmetal moonlight, the ring of trees around their camp was all but invisible.
But that was impossible. Unless—

Their fire had died.

He gasped, “Ohcrapno.”

A crimson bed of cinders popped in the circle of stones. A spindle of smoke twisted.

He whispered,
“Patrick!”

Out there in the night the scream went on. Human but not. Living but not.

Patrick didn’t stir.

Michael knelt unsteadily in the snow. He felt for the Pokémon sleeping bag, torn and
patched and torn again. “Patrick, get up!” The lining swished. “Bub! Let’s go!”

Only when he tossed it open did he realize the bag was empty.

His heart rammed his throat.

But the lining was still warm. His brother hadn’t been gone long.

Michael risked everything and shouted, “Patrick!”

Several seconds of silence, then a call reported through the darkness.
“Paaaatriiiick!”
But the echo was not his own. It was a voice without depth or dimension, choking
on earth. A dead, elongated roar. The Bellow, mimicking him.

Heavy feet changed direction and dragged through the brush, maybe one hundred yards
away, nearing.

Stay—frakking—calm
.

Don’t let Patrick be sleepwalking again. Jeezus, why did I say we could camp outside?

Concentrate. Think, like Mom
.

I swear, please don’t let him be out there—

Hey a-hole: Feel. Your. Blood.

Michael closed his eyes against the dark cold, and there was that moment, that ever-repeating
instant, when everything inside him hissed that it wouldn’t work, that he didn’t have
time. Then he thought of his breath, and emptied his brain.

His focus aligned on the quick warm creek within his veins, the powerful flex against
his ribs, the deliberate drumming inside his ears. It felt like every fiber and thought
of himself fusing into one another, until his mind and his movement merged to a single
thing, seamless and bright, like a glowing radar dot.

It felt like:
yes-yes.

His eyes leapt open, and he moved, focused, fine.

He tore open the duffel bag next to him.

“Paaaatriiiick!”
said the Bellow, closer now.
“Paatriiiick!”

Michael grabbed a safety flare from the bag and stood and punched it on his thigh—a
whoosh
. Sparks fanned a molten dandelion.

The forest conjured orange before him, their camp and the rotten deer stand and their
car ahead on the dirt road. He spun on his boot heels, wafting away flare smoke.

New-cast shadow lunged in the trees.

He saw no one.

An image jumped into his head:
Patrick, hiding behind a tree as a joke. Patrick, laughing into his elbow, until he
heard the Bellow coming . . . then froze, afraid.

“Patrick, good one! You—you got me!” Michael stepped over the sleeping bags, nearer
the trees. His voice wavered as he shouted. He cleared his throat, calmed, continued,
“Bub, come on out now; I’ll let
you
shoot this Bellow! A hundred points!”

“Youuuuuu got meeeee!”

Michael whirled.

Fifty feet away, he could just make out the creature: staggering, hitching wild legs
through the woods. Its limbs hung at impossible angles, a dozen times shattered. Its
clothes were stripes of rot. What skin still clung to the skeleton was in some spots
the color of mushrooms and in others that of wax and mostly it was as pale as the
bones that jutted through it.

But a moment ago it had been coming from the other direction.

There are two of them.

“Buuuuuuub,”
it said,
“pooooooin—”

“Cheating . . .”

The whisper was small: so small that it could have been the voice of the flare. But
Michael knew the sound too well. It was the same excitement as when he and Patrick
had beaten
Halo 4
on Legendary Mode, their headphones plugged into the TV so they could stay up all
night without anyone knowing; the same giddy, too-many-Sour-Patch-Kids,
One more level, c’mon puh-lease
excitement at a new part of The Game.

As the Bellow bayed once more, Michael flung himself into a nearby cluster of pines—and
his knees went weak with relief.

Patrick sat on a snow-slick log, hunchbacked in a down coat and two hoodies, looking
at something on a steep hill slope. His hands kneaded his hair—not in terror, in annoyance.
He looked like precisely what he was: a five-year-old kid getting equal parts ticked
and thrilled by what was happening.

“They’re not playing right,” Patrick said.

A skeletal hand shot through the needle thickets above Patrick’s head. Michael automatically
raised the gun, discharged a round, exploded a branch. A body fell in the shadows
and slid down the hill. Michael’s hands shook with adrenaline, but that did not stop
his smile.

Patrick covered his ears, whined, “Hey, watch it.”

Then he pointed at the twitching shadows down the steep hill by the bridge.

“THEY’RE NOT—THEY’RE—RIIIIGHT—NOT PLAAAAAY–ING!”

Michael’s heart frosted.

There weren’t two Bellows. There were ten, at least.

“There’s so many. Fourteen, I counted ’em up,” Patrick said, bewildered. “They’re
never in groups. You know?” And stood, suddenly furious. “Hey, cheating! You’re cheaters!”

“Patrick, shut up!”
Michael hissed, and seized him back from the edge of the overlook.

“But they’re bein’ buuuutts!”

Michael smothered Patrick’s mouth, gently, beneath his fist. “Right and it’s not that
I don’t agree, Bub, but just this sec we need to concentrate on getting
our
butts outtie here.”

Because holy hell, where did all those Bellows
come from
?
Why why why are they moving in a pack?
Michael thought.
The Game Master never said they would!

“PATRICK—UPPPP—SHUUUTTTT, PAAAAATRIIIICK!”

Images burned into Michael’s head:

Bellows, in greater number than his bullets, would surround him and Patrick.

Block the bridge.

He and Bub would be trapped. Among the dead trees. And dead screams, and claws—

Stop it! If you lose it, it’s Game Over.

The car,
he thought.
Like now.

“You don’t get it?” Michael said. “Seriously?” He chuckled and then stopped—as if
trying not to mock Patrick.

“What?” Patrick said.

“They’re not cheating.” Michael stood and strapped the rifle over his shoulder and
took his brother’s tiny mitten-hand in his own. He led him back through the pines.
“It’s just a surprise, that’s all. Like a surprise attack.”

“Surprise attack?”

Michael nodded.

They got back to the clearing.

The Bellow with the shattered arms stood fifteen feet away.
“ATTTAAAAAAACK!”

Michael swallowed a shout and instinctively hurled the flare at the creature. The
flare landed two steps in front of it and the Bellow raised its broken arms, trying
in vain to block the dazzling light that tortured its never-closing pupils. The Bellow
staggered backward, the illumination driving it momentarily away, like the crack of
a lion tamer’s whip.

At least five more Bellows than there had been a minute ago screamed in the forest
beyond the creature, imitating the pain of their fellow.

A finger of terror crawled up Michael’s throat.

Go move quick move quick go.

He grabbed his pillow and their duffel. He jammed a box of raisins into Patrick’s
hands and pocketed their small cardboard box of .22-caliber rifle rounds.

“Aw,” Patrick said, “we leavin’?”

Michael rushed Patrick to the dirt road and the car. He slid his hand through the
tire of the bicycle bungee-corded on the back, popped the trunk, shoved the bag and
food in there. He felt his blood. Calmed.

He pulled the square ammunition box from his pocket.

Patrick said, “What about our beds?”

The bullet box was upside down: its cardboard flap came open. The little missiles
fell into the snow: wet, ruined.

Michael slammed the trunk. “What, our what?” he snapped.

Patrick pointed at the sleeping bags back in the clearing. The flare had landed on
top of the bags, and the bags had burst into flames. Past the bags, held temporarily
at bay by the flare light but still visible, were a dozen Bellows.

Michael said, “Uh, we’ll get new ones.”

“NEEEWWWWWW OOOOOOOONES!”

Bellows screamed this almost as one over the hill down by the bridge. Michael jogged
to the hill. Fifty:
fifty
of them. Down the mountain, in front of the bridge, the mass stumbled nearer on the
dirt road that curved up toward their car.

The terror-finger grew another knuckle, nudged his Adam’s apple.

No. Why? How the hell are we supposed to fight them? What are they
doing
?

Having a rave. Beginning a shindig. Doesn’t matter. Plow through them.

That many’ll crack the windshield!

Then you shoot. You shoot as many as you can.

“Get in the car, Bub,” Michael said. “Go ’head and start it, then lay down in the
back.”

The prospect was candy to Patrick. “Okay! Really? Wait, in the trunk?”

“What?”

“Do you want me to lay down in the—”

“Just the backseat, Patrick! Go!”

Michael jammed the keys into his brother’s hands and watched him go to the car.