Shut up! Just freaking run! Just run and you will figure it out, the future you will figure it out!
But the future Me is probably a Bellow—
Feel—feel—feel your bl—
Tears scorched his throat and eyes, and Michael wanted to scream but heard himself just saying, “Please, please, please, please,” thought, Do you pray? No, I run, and the blood ramming inside was not his blood, it was not the blood he’d gotten from Mom and it was not the blood he shared with Patrick, it was not the blood that saved anyone any pain: it was the blood that was going to kill him—
Michael saw a door, slammed it open.
Michael skidded, stopped no more than inches from the hands and faces shooting through the chain link: the Bellows were thirty-deep against a single final double layer of fence. I’m outside. From the sound, there were thousands surrounding the Capitol, thousands and thousands that had surged through all the buffer zones of the bridge or entered through the Kanawha River, as if the resurrection of Cady Gibson had ignited some riotous undead beacon.
And the instant of danger, amazingly, made Michael realize:
I’m behind the Capitol.
He could see the Hummer (useless to him without the keys still on Hank’s dead body) stationed in the clear lane between the fences.
But another transport was back here, too.
The balloon!
The jack-o’-lantern face lolled, grinning, perhaps one hundred yards away, aglow softly, inflated, its butane burner readied by Hank for Jopek’s night patrol. Michael could just see the top of it past the camouflage gas tanker beside him, but yes, it was there. Ready to fly.
Where? Oz?! he thought wildly.
Virginia!
What!
Other people—cure, cure—
What about Patrick?
I’m saving him—
By leaving him?
Yes! Only way!
Was that true?
He told himself to shut up.
And ran.
In the thin and deadly lane between the fences and the steps of the Capitol, electric over crumbled concrete, the green smell of death overpowering, every step aware of an image: Jopek coming out the grand double doors like an insane senator exacting revenge on his would-be assassin.
Michael gripped the wicker and he leapt into the basket. He tugged the silver lever on the burner. The flame ignited to life, carnival-colored.
Slowly, slowly, the balloon began to rise.
Hurry! Please freaking hurry!
The fire filled the pumpkin face, roared.
The double doors to the Capitol opened, and when Michael spun, he did so already feeling a phantom bullet in his back.
“Patrick?” he gasped.
Patrick stood waving at the top of the grand steps to the West Virginia State Capitol, smiling. And there was no one else with him.
How did he get out here by himself?
Doesn’t matter, just get him, you—you probably have time to get to Richmond—you can still save him—
Extra life. The thought was a sunburst. Another chance!
“B-B-Bub!” Michael swallowed, tried to control his voice. Patrick was moving down the stairs already, with the careful-footed caution of exactly what he was: a five-year-old who is afraid of slipping on ice. “Hurry!”
“Trick!” Patrick said, delighted, leaving the bottom stair. “It was all a trick, huh?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Trick”? What was Patrick talking about? Doesn’t matter! Michael suddenly thought of that night they’d spent in the woods. Eighty Bellows versus one gun. Easy Mode. “It was a trick. Pretty cool, the way I—Patrick—” he interrupted himself, “—ya-ya, I ya-ya.”
Patrick smiled, held his arms up in the air.
The basket was hovering a couple feet off the ground.
“Crap, sorry!” Michael said. He considered simply jumping out of the basket himself, grabbing Patrick and climbing back in, but the image of the unoccupied aircraft hovering away across the Kanawha River stopped him. Though everything within his brain cried not to—though there was no time to do it—Michael dropped his hand from the burner.
The flame sputtered, fwoop, to a small blue ring.
There was a moment of stillness while the two brothers watched each other, unmoving, as the snow fell around them. And despite everything, Michael thought that moment tasted holy.
“It was all a trick!” Patrick repeated, whispering with bright, coconspirator’s joy. “It was such an awwwwwesome one, Michael!”
Michael leaned over to grab his brother, and Patrick bounded into his arms, hugging him fiercely. And wild joy was what Michael felt. And that moment would haunt him forever, because it was, in so many ways, the final moment—the endgame—of everything he’d imagined his life would be. “Freeze, sucka!” Patrick giggled. And as Michael set him back down, Michael thought: What the?
There was something, huge and dark, in Patrick’s pale fingers.