seat. He heard and felt the fire, a hot cloak unfurling above, then it was gone and he was moving like a pinball between the standing Bellows, feeling sick and smiling, both, as he watched them burn.
Michael cocked the wheel at the bottom of the hill, fishtailed, barreled down the length of the dogleg road parallel with the creek. He shot them onto the bridge and across it and only then slowed to under sixty.
Patrick asked, “Did we win?”
Michael looked in the crooked rearview.
“ZOMGosh, we won, didn’t we?” Patrick bumped his butt up and down in his seat. “Vic-tor-ee?” he said in his computerized RoboPatrick voice. “Ach-eeved? This eeeeve?”
The night air squealing through the cracks in the windshield was blinding cold.
And he drove himself and his brother from the torching woodland.
CHAPTER TWO
Twenty-two days.
Michael lifted his finger from the Sharpie’d tally in his journal. Wow. Man. Twenty-two days since Halloween. Twenty-two days since Michael followed the Game Master’s Instructions and carried Patrick through a door into the night and saw their first Bellow. Twenty-two days since that moment, since the world seemed to end, but then instantaneously resurrected to a frightening and beautiful life.
Five hundred and twenty-eight hours of The Game, Michael figured. And grinned.
Pretty good for a seventeen-year-old nerd, his five-year-old brother, and a crappy rifle.
He tossed the Sharpie into the station wagon’s cup holder. Patrick murmured in the back but didn’t wake up. Michael pulled out a map from the glove compartment and spread it on the passenger seat.
Outside, the predawn sky was the shade of a bruise. The station wagon sat parked on a half-paved road that was not much more than a path in the woods. A rotten-wood fence ran along the roadside, separating them from a valley. Automatically, Michael scoped it out, taking brain snapshots of the world around him.
The valley: an ugly crater, its flat walls sheered into the rock face.
The small coal refinery: a gray factory, spired with stout smokestacks that made it look like the final castle of some ambushed kingdom.
The refinery’s doors: well padlocked.
But a double-wide trailer (probably the refinery’s “office”) sat in its shadow, about fifty yards from the Volvo. The trailer had been knocked off its cinder blocks, probably by nothing awesome.
The erratic holes puncturing the trailer’s door: shotgun.
And for just a moment, looking at this scene, Michael could almost see someone running in there, finding themselves cornered. Maybe the Someone had been caught by the sunset, which comes almost supernaturally fast in the mountains. Or maybe the Someone was exploring the trailer during the day, thinking they’d be safe . . . and Someone didn’t bother to check the dark of the closets first. Seeing the evidence of people’s Game Over was sad, of course. But it was also, at this point, pretty ridiculously predictable. That was just what happened, right? You did the things the Game Master said or you were out.
Or . . . maybe they just got surprised, Michael, he thought, his smile fading a little. Like you did last night.
Suddenly, the trailer’s door slapped open, and a Bellow lurched from the shadow: an old woman with one ear, her nightgown snapping, flaps of skin coming off her face like soggy wallpaper.
Michael reached under the map for the rifle and thumbed off the safety. No bullets left, dude, he thought. A little thread of fear made him consider driving off.
Man, no. One little Bellow doesn’t get to make me run.
The Bellow began staggering toward the car. Patrick snorted in the back but still didn’t wake, even as the Bellow began its shapeless moan. Michael waited for an idea—an image—about what he should do. Followed his breath.
Then he checked his watch. And felt his small smile come back.
He returned to the map.
COALMOUNT, 13 MILES, read the sign on this country mountain road.
Michael found the state capital of Charleston on the map, then traced outward. This was a regional map, taken from the cabin where he and Bub had ridden out the first few Game nights. The map’s Pennsylvania and Virginia were thick with cities, but most of West Virginia was simply grayed out, with patches darkened to indicate rising mountain elevations. Thick black lines symbolized the interstate; a couple of reds marked the highways; a long blue marking, the Kanawha River, shot north to south through