undead hopes and let them devour them. But hope was a weak wish, Michael knew now: a dream from which you wouldn’t let the real things wake you.
People say they have hope for the future, but no they don’t. Because hope wasn’t about the future, not truly. Hope was: make me feel better now. Hope was: tell me, this second, that I’ll be all right. Hope was: tell me I don’t have to be different, but things will be. Hope made you feel better by letting you feel a false future.
Michael forced himself to think of Patrick. He looked away, back down the street, at the nearing Bellows—now almost a dozen of them.
God, where was the Rapture?
“When the captain asked me today how to take the antidote to make it work,” Holly said, “I said I’d only tell him if he gave you a dose first. I’ll tell you how to make it work, right now, but please—promise me something.”
Michael whispered to the dead.
They heard it. They echoed the message: the next Bellow picking it up, casting it to the next and next, carrying it away like a series of undead tin-can telephones strung across the city.
Heeeere! The sooooooldier heeeeeeere! Baaaannnk!
—Shooooot soooooldier!—
“Promise what?” he said.
“That you were lying last night. About there being no other soldiers that can take us to Richmond. Right?”
She touched him again, looking at him like she had in the middle of the night, watching the Kanawha River, that bare and desperate confession of want for Before.
He did not say: I never saw soldiers.
He did not say: Jopek told me we’re alone.
If she needs hope to get her through this, fine. The hope’s false, but without it? She won’t trust me to get through this, and we won’t get any future.
He said: “Y-yeah. There are soldiers.”
Holly’s brow knitted, and she nodded, and tears of relief shimmered to her eyes, and Michael remembered then, from the pure unhidden gratitude on her face, how much he liked her. And as she looked at him with trust, he pretty much hated his life.
Am I doing the right thing? Michael thought. Am I?
“Thanks,” Holly breathed shakily. “You’re a good guy.”
I lie for the same reason as you, said Jopek’s voice in his head. Because I want to.
And now Jopek was coming out of the plane. Michael put the hood of his space suit back on.
“You have to inject it at the site of the wound,” Holly whispered to Michael urgently, and spun around to face Jopek.
“You said you’d be right back,” Jopek growled from the airplane door.
Blocking the view from Jopek with her body, Holly grabbed Michael’s hand and gave it two squeezes.
Michael thought, with a painful ache in his heart: Facebook update—Michael is IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH A GIRL HE CAN’T STOP LYING TO.
“I lied,” Holly replied.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They both did, easily enough.
Jopek asked what the hell was taking so long and they told him what he needed to be told. By now the Bellows’ imitations of Michael’s message had blended into each other, and there was only a sound of fire in the alley where the mines had blown.
Through the airplane and out the cockpit, Jopek kept the gun on Michael.
Back in the lobby of the First Bank of Charleston, with the gun still aimed at Michael’s belly, Jopek approached the tunnel and spied down it. Holly stood halfway between the two of them, as if still on neither team, her eyes nervously cast down. The last of the day streamed in through the high, stained-glass windows.
When are the Rapture people going to come?
Michael stared at the sun-struck colors in a window to his right. Words began to form inside him. Please, just let us get out of here. Let me out of this. He realized that he was praying . . . and as he did, the glass darkened. A shadow had passed over the window—a movement so momentary it might have been imaginary. Until it stealthily moved again.
Michael’s mouth became cotton.
The sniper setting up, he saw in his mind.
The human form in the window shrunk, lying down. Hold B to enter Prone Position, he thought wildly.
Michael was going to kill a man.
The idea slit him, and thoughts he could not stop rushed through. It wasn’t him pulling the trigger, but Michael was going to cause Jopek’s life to leak from him. He had to, he knew that. But the idea still made him sick.
The shadow on the glass grew a line: the dark limb of a barrel.