make a deal, Michael: if you get me a week’s supply of food, a gun, and a charger for my iPod Touch, I am in on this road trip.”
Michael nodded, wanting to push for a more serious Yes, but Holly looked out the window, and he saw her face become that same, strange—hurt?—faraway thing that it had been after she’d mentioned her father.
“Do you think,” she asked, in a soft voice, “that things happen for a reason?”
“Huh?”
“Do you think that they work out ‘like they’re supposed to’? Bobbie thought so. Even though the world is so messed up, she told me she really felt like things would be okay, if you held on to hope, that Something was in control. When I couldn’t sleep, she’d, like, pray for me. She said praying could . . . not control things, but help them. Sometimes I felt like her praying did help me sleep, so I gave prayer the old daughter-of-an-agnostic-scientist try. But I never heard any voice or whatever. This sounds crazy, Michael, but I just wish, so bad, that I could know if Bobbie still believed things happen like they’re supposed to, after she got bit. I wish she could tell me that she did, that even though the worst possible thing happened to her, she still felt like there was a reason to hope. I . . . I think she would. I don’t know about God or anything, but I definitely believe in hope. Because even if awful-awful stuff happens, sometimes out of nowhere, there’s okay stuff, too. Good stuff. Kind-of-great stuff.”
Holly looked at him. The river chopped. Michael’s heart thudded.
“Like . . . what?” he said.
And although the truth burned from her eyes to his, Holly only shrugged.
Michael took his second shower of the day. This one cold. Very. As arctic as he could fuh-reaking stand.
And against the pelting freeze of it, his mind spun, clocking like a magnetized needle on a pool of oil seeking out its North.
The first yes-yes truth came to him at 11:47 p.m.: some part of Holly still wanted to believe in Captain Jopek.
Why?
For some reason, Michael suddenly thought of Jopek’s eyes flashing in the darkness of the Magic Lantern, so much like those mannequins in the pews and aisles of the Coalmount church.
First escape plan, 12:03 a.m., thought up en route to the Capitol Senate: Since Holly might not want to leave Charleston, we can just hide somewhere in the city. Yeah, Michael and Holly and Patrick (and Hank, if Michael could convince him) could find a building and barricade themselves, and wait for the soldiers to return from Richmond and rescue them.
There’s a whole city out there, Michael told himself.
But his blood sped in his excitement and he sensed, immediately, the lie in that.
The Capitol was moated by gates and locks and the Kanawha River; all other roads apart from the main ones were tacked with mines; there was not a whole city for him.
There was this building.
There were these blood-splashed, echoing halls.
How the hell did I not realize that?
That thought felt frightening. Good. Michael focused on the fear.
And stood at the starlit windows of the hall and gazed across the empty city. He imagined the city and the mountains around him as a vast electronic pixilated videoscape, its surface teeming with countless characters . . . before being cleared with an apocalyptic swipe of a virus’s god-hand.
Reset.
Michael thought of the wasteland gamescape, where two sprite figures—he and Patrick—encountered a man, a huge-rendered soldier: a man whose mere existence seemed to promise to keep them safe. He was, after all, a guardian, in the old world. He was a protector, a good guy, by all the old rules. He was, after all, supposed to be The End.
And suddenly, Michael understood:
The eerie magnetic hold that Captain Jopek of the First Division of the Crapocalypse had over the others came not from their stupidity, not their fear, but their empty idea of the future. It came from not realizing that they were clinging to an endgame—“A soldier will save us”—from a world that no longer existed.
Michael had once believed there were two West Virginias, one composed of coal towns, the other of cities.
But the truth was that no West Virginias existed anymore. The state from Before was simply gone, and in its place there was only a blank slate, a void.
That was a truth that Michael had known, somehow, since the Halloween moment when he saw his first Bellow, and took the