was so stupid, I should’ve figured it out somehow—”
“GOD!” Holly shouted.
Michael flinched.
“Michael, do you know what your problem is? You think the whole world is ‘your problem.’ You think that you can fix everything.”
And, flinching again, for a different reason, Michael said, “So—what? ‘Michael, don’t try to help people. Don’t try to save your mom. Don’t try to save Patrick.’”
“You should try,” spat Holly. “But what the hell is the point of feeling so sorry for yourself? You didn’t take Patrick; they did!”
“But I didn’t stop them.”
Holly shook her head. “So, congratulations. You’re not God.” She raised her palms, as if in exasperation. “Look, you said you left your mom? Even if she had gone with you on Halloween, how long until she would’ve wanted to go back for Ron? Even if the world hadn’t ended and your mom did talk to the police, how do you know that she wouldn’t let him come home later anyway, and everything would have gone back to the way it was? I know you said your mom’s ‘good,’ Michael. But God, people are a lot of things. Her life doesn’t suck because you ‘didn’t save her.’ Michael, her life is like that because she’s weak.”
His heart twisted. What she was saying sounded true . . . but it sounded true like The Game sounded true: it would just be him trying to make himself feel better. Holly went toward the passenger door, Michael to the driver’s seat, getting ready to drive back to Coalmount.
Wait. Wait.
How long until she would have made you go back? Holly had said.
The idea set off something else inside him.
Go back . . .
Cady Gibson, though unbitten, had died in the mine.
There are some viruses that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on Earth where the virus originated, Holly had said on their “date” in the Capitol.
The mine. Oh my God, the mine.
The reason Cady Gibson had returned from the dead without a bite mark from a Bellow—the reason he had changed into a Shriek before any of the others—was that Cady had received the virus in some different way. The little boy who wandered into a mountaintop mine had stumbled upon something dreadful in the dark, and so he had become the first human on Earth to be given the disease.
Then how did it spread?
Maybe Cady bit someone else before he died, Michael thought. Maybe a miner; perhaps the very miner that had been tied to the altar in the Rapture’s church; Coalmount’s “First.” And with that first poisoned bite, a diluted form of the disease had passed from its first son out into the world.
Maybe.
But with horror threading up his spine, Michael knew something for sure: the disease hadn’t originated in Iran, or some terrorists’ lab. . . . And those were not the places the Bellows had been marching toward.
“I know where the Shrieks went,” Michael breathed.
“What? Where?” Holly shut the passenger door behind her.
How had Cady gotten the terrible virus? What had given it to him in that mine? I don’t know.
But Michael remembered looking into Cady’s eyes and seeing something ancient peering back at him, like a beast blinking from inside a human skull. And Michael was afraid.
“They went home,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
COALMOUNT
MOUNTAINTOP QUARRY
MINE #1337
!!! DANGER CAUTION DANGER !!!
BLASTING AREA—NO TRESPASSING—NO SMOKING!!!
(SAFETY, ITS OUR #1 RESOURCE!)
Spray-painted below:
TELL IT TO CADY (BEAUTIFULL BOY), U CORPRAT BASTERDS!
Michael drove over that rusted sign and parked the Hummer on the top of the world.
How much time had passed? He didn’t know.
Sightless windows of skyscrapers had flashed past. The silvery trails of the Rapture’s tire tracks and the Shriek’s footprints in the headlight-lit snow. And then the on-ramp to the abandoned highway, which climbed out of the city, taking him back into the dark fortress of the West Virginia mountains.
’Cause nothing changes, Michael. The past doesn’t really die; it just comes back to life, his mind had hissed as he drove into the black hills. You’re looking for Patrick in the mountains, like when you woke up in the woods and you couldn’t find him. But you can’t just pull him out of the trees this time. He fell off the end of the world.
It’s not a game, but it’s still over.
Patrick. Patrick.
“Do we have, like, weapons?” Michael had thought to ask only as the city vanished from their sideview mirrors.
“What about the pistol?” Holly had replied, paling. “The one you took from Jopek?” He tried not to mentally add “you retard?” to the end of her