a half-dozen men screaming on the Caesars roof. There were shadows on four-wheelers and motorcycles speeding across the twilit parking lot. And there were Bellows that had finally navigated through the maze of tanks and Hummers and were now only fifty paces away from the Walgreens storefront.
“FAAAAALL!” the monsters called.
Yes, fall back. Oh, awesome idea. Oh, put on your boogie shoes, Michael. “Scoot, Bub,” Michael said, desperately pawing backward into an aisle, afraid of standing . . . and finding he was unable to stand. In this same moment, Holly was crawling toward him, using bins of discount DVDs and water bottles as barriers. She reached Michael and, her face very close to his, looped an arm around him to help him stand.
She said, “Upsy baby.”
Patrick said, “Michael got hurt?” Genuinely surprised.
Oh Jeezus. Oh shit. “Nah,” Michael gulped nickel-plated adrenaline, “takes more than that to—”
“Oooooh NOOOOO!” Patrick squealed, for he saw Michael’s blood.
Just a little blood on the floor, but Patrick’s eyes popped. The color shocked out of his flesh. His hands flew to his cheeks, pulling and pinching. It was the look of a boy who has watched Superman enter the ring and get his head knocked off his shoulders. It was the face Michael had seen in his own nightmares: his little brother’s horror as the last shreds of his world disappeared from under him, leaving only the abyss.
Michael, this isn’t how you promised it would work!
Patrick burst into tears. Oh God no no no no no! “I’m fine, buddy,” Michael said.
“It’s the cheaters, isn’t it? It’s them!” Patrick tried to punch himself in the leg; Michael grabbed his wrist, feeling sick.
“FALL BACK, I GODDAMN SAID!” Jopek hollered—but all the same he also laughed as bullets stitched across the counter and sent wood-chip shrapnel flying around his face. His expression burned with insane good humor, his eyes alive like black fire ignited by the chaos. “Got a wound, Mike? Suck it up before I give ya one to grow on!”
The barrel of his gun bladed to Michael’s face.
Michael, shot with terror, managed to scramble to a stand.
Jopek’s gunslinger furnace-face laughed and laughed and winked.
“Got this ’un covered, so you know.” He cocked a casual thumb over his shoulder, indicating the battle.
He loaded a new clip, spat out tobacco.
And then Jopek trampolined, leaping up, landing two-heeled on the platform of the checkout counter. He blew out the last of the window glass with a machine blast from his gun. And standing there while war swept closer across the parking lot, the captain hollered with huge, wordless joy. Captain Jopek looked, for all the world, like the king of this apocalyptic land. Not just a Gamer, but the Master.
“Do you need help?” Holly asked Michael. She was looking at him—and at his furious expression—with a kind of horrified awe, as if she had seen him take off a mask, show a hidden face.
No. No, he didn’t need help. He could get going just fine now.
With his sobbing brother’s hand in his own, his leg barking every step, Michael stamped a fast course up the aisle. Eff you, he thought, not just at his leg. Eff you very effing much. Ignoring Holly’s questions as she followed him into the shadowy stockroom of the pharmacy, he stepped over a Bellow with blue trousers that the captain had killed. Set in the far wall was a red exit door and Michael rammed his shoulder against the closed door with anger rocketing in his blood, acidic and hideous and good.
And Patrick said the thing Michael had, for the last few weeks, most feared: “M-M-Michael, I want to quit!”
Sounds of building battle, the captain firing, roaring at invading men. Not too long before the Rapture got inside. Poor Captain.
“Michael,” Holly said uncertainly. Whamp!—He slammed his shoulder against the door. “I don’t think we should go outside—” Whamp!
Screeching rust, the door flew into the snow-blinding alley. Fearing another volley of arrows, Michael yanked the door closed; a moment later, cracked it again. He heard men running past the end of the alley:
“Where is the boy? Rulon swore the captain would bring the boy.”
“Rulon swore we’d be saved after the sacrifice last night. Rulon can lie. . . .”
“Don’t say that. God, please don’t say that. . . .”
“The boy”? Rulon thought Jopek was bringing “the boy”?
Me?
Oh my God, Michael realized. Jopek knew the Rapture were going to come here!
But—if he and the Rapture were supposed to meet here for Michael, then why were the Rapture attacking?