Something flickered on and off in Michael’s mind like a busted sign: REAL. NOT REAL. REAL. NOT REAL.
Real breath curled out from the gas mask that disguised his face, and Michael thought wildly: it’s Jopek! Jopek had beaten death. Jopek was gonna live forever. But no—this man was way too short.
Patrick had been sitting perhaps fifteen paces away, halfway between Michael and the tunnel and the man who had come from it. Patrick sat up from the floor now. He turned to Michael, his face raw and streaked . . . but filling with a little amazement.
“Did we win?” asked Patrick.
The camouflaged man raised a gloved hand and beckoned Patrick with one finger.
Other soldiers crawled out of the tunnel behind the first. Michael heard Holly laugh a little in relief, perhaps in joy.
But in that moment, as Patrick stood and looked cautiously to the soldier, a memory arose in Michael: a memory of a circus Mom had taken him to when he was four. He remembered the big-top acrobats that seemed to dangle from the very dome of the sky; he remembered the rich and wondrous kid-smells of cotton candy and salt and animal dung. But mostly, as he watched these men emerge one-by-camouflaged-one from the debris passage, Michael remembered a car speared inside a spotlight’s ring: a tiny car floating out in the dark that opened its door and vomited forth an endless parade of men with false, blood-bright grins. Michael had screamed, but the crowd’s roar had consumed his own, and Mom, not realizing his terror, had asked, “Isn’t this just fun, baby?”
No, it wasn’t fun. And it was not right. Those clowns weren’t really happy people.
They’re just wearing the suits! Michael thought now.
“Don’t move, Patrick!” Michael shouted as he finally broke his paralysis and ran toward Patrick. “Don’t go near that guy!”
Holly said, “What—what—”
“Won!” Patrick crowed, voice croaking with a kind of terrible, desperate joy. “Michael, it’s soldiers! We won The Game! Mom! Mommy!”
Patrick ran away from Michael, toward the soldier.
The soldier peeled off his mask.
Rulon.
The leader of the Coalmount Rapture stood there, as obvious as anyone, but it took Patrick a few seconds to really see.
He cried out, a high, ringing note.
Patrick tried to pedal back, but Rulon was quicker: his hand shot out and seized Patrick’s shoulder.
Patrick bit the man’s fingers.
Rulon drew back his free arm and struck Patrick, hard, across the face.
Patrick’s head rocked backward. But he didn’t even scream.
No, no, no.
Holly cried, “PATRICK!”
“Don’t you touch him!” Michael screamed, and he was still running even as Rulon raised his rifle.
Michael experienced what happened next only as a blast of light and sickly pain flowing through the core of his arm up to his elbow. The world vanished, shimmered out in a reddish fog.
Michael shook his head, trying to clear it. He was on his ass, about ten feet out from Rulon. Blood pulsed through the hole in his space-suit glove. Shot, Michael thought. Rulon raised his gun again, and Michael could not move, and the only thing he could think was: not in front of Patrick.
Holly stepped in front of him, her arms spread like a shield.
“My name is Holly Bodeen. My father is Dr. Gordon K. Bodeen with the Centers for Disease Control. He’s embedded with a special military unit tasked with retrieving the CDC’s cure from Charleston. According to his latest radio transmission, which we received three minutes ago, he and his unit are less than two miles away.”
Rulon smiled pumpkin teeth. “Child. Don’t you know the liars’ punishment?”
“Rulon,” someone said calmly, “stop.” A “soldier” stepped forward from those dozen or so ranged behind Rulon—the only Rapture people, Michael supposed, who had survived the lunatic sacrifices Rulon had conducted.
When Michael realized who the soldier was, he felt a wave of wonder: It was the heavy woman with the sweet, dimpled face who’d spotted him while he tried to escape the Coalmount office of Southern West Virginia Coal and Natural Gas. “Hammy,” he’d called her. She looked so strange, squeezed in the military uniform.
But she also looked worried.
“Oughtn’t we let the older boy go?” she said carefully. “Rulon, shouldn’t we just take the young boy and leave the others?”
Rulon kept his poisonously glittering eyes, and his gun, trained on Holly. “Perhaps more than one sacrifice would be finer. . . .” he said dreamily.
“But didn’t you say earlier that we only need the ‘most innocent blood’?” she said. “Isn’t that what you