nightmarish world were drawing tighter, tighter, tighter. And if just a couple more things went wrong for Patrick, Michael knew his brother was going to break.
“’Morning,” said Holly. Her arms were folded across the belly of her blue hoodie. The skin under her eyes was puffy and red; she wouldn’t quite look at him. Her voice sounded small: he didn’t know if it was just the faceplate, but Holly had never sounded so far away.
“H-hey,” Michael replied.
Not: I’m infected, help me, help me.
Not: Holly, why the hell did you have to tell Jopek about The Game?
Not: Why didn’t you just leave with me yesterday?
“Damn, Cady had one hell of a midnight snack,” Jopek said to himself, high-stepping over the corpses. The Bellows nearly carpeted the road, at some points stacked two or three on top of each other: Michael saw a bloated old woman on top of a priest.
He wished he could ask Holly for an explanation of why this had happened. If what she’d said before about viruses was true—if they only changed in ways that helped them survive—the idea of Cady slaughtering carriers of the same disease . . . it didn’t make sense.
Michael didn’t like it. Oh man, he didn’t like it at all.
But what exactly do you know, his mind hissed at him, about things working out the way you thought they would?
“No sign of Cady this mornin’, but there’s a few reg’lar Bellows left roamin’ around,” said Jopek. “And I bet that those Rapture folks are just a mite pissed at us after our little shootout with them yesterday. The Bellows riotin’ and all that last night might’ve kept them off for a little bit, but I doubt for too much longer. Let’s get going.”
“Get going where?” asked Michael.
“You ain’t figured it out?” Jopek said. “The only place left to search in the city.”
You still want to “search”?
Jopek pointed up the road.
The ruins of the passenger jet lay shattered and enormous and grim with snow. It was the same jetliner that had attempted to escort one hundred souls, including Bobbie, to salvation, but been betrayed by its own pilot and fallen from the heavens. The jet lay on the ruptured landing strip of the road, its nose disappearing into a building labeled FIRST BANK OF CHARLESTON, its fuselage and wings pointing at the building like an arrow.
Jopek said, “The last place that ol’ secret lab could be.”
“In the plane?” Patrick murmured.
“Inside the bank, Bub,” said Jopek, and Michael cringed at the use of Patrick’s nickname. “We’re gonna go make a withdraw.”
“Wait—what? What do you mean ‘lab’?” Michael said, looking up at the face of what had survived of the front of the bank above the point where the crashed plane’s nose had burrowed in, like a dog’s snout in a hole. It was an old building, with three stories of faded, flat-red brick—the kind of building that seemed to say, And this is where we put our especially boring adults.
But then two ideas crashed together in Michael’s head: his suspicion about why Jopek seemed so intent on his “rescue missions” in the obviously empty city . . . and Holly saying that the Centers for Disease Control were working on a cure, with a hidden lab located in Charleston itself.
Brain-stunned, Michael said, “There’s a cure.”
“Could be,” said Jopek.
“You want it.”
“Sure do! Hey, sounds like a real nice way to end The Game, don’t it? Mean ol’ world. How else can you really be safe, huh, Patrick?”
“So . . . why don’t you get it?” Michael said.
I mean, you’re brave. You’re smart. You’re . . . you’re better than me.
Then Michael said, realizing: “You don’t have that many bullets left. And you don’t know how dangerous it might be.”
“What do I look like,” said Jopek, throwing his head back, barking laughter, “some kind of idiot who thinks they see the future?”
Cure.
Dimly, Michael understood that he should have been blowing kisses, tap-dancing, singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” But the shock wouldn’t let him.
I didn’t see this coming, he thought. Idiot. Stupid. Why didn’t I see this coming?
“And we can go to The End after we get it. Really, right? It can make the Bellows go away, right?” Patrick asked Jopek anxiously.
Michael tried to calm himself. If a cure is in there, he told himself, I get to CONTINUE. For the first time, that felt so stupid, imagining his life through the lens of a game.