The Games

Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT



Ignoring the pain in his fingers, Evan twisted the last wire tightly. He was finished. For better or worse, the link was made whole again. He dropped the cord to the floor and stood, easing the kinks out of his thighs with the palms of his hands.

When he looked up at the screen, Pea was lying back on his elbows in the sand, gazing out over the water into the gloom. He hardly seemed godlike anymore. The long black hair showed streaks of gray, and the body had wasted, becoming thin and frail. Ribs stretched the skin at his sides, and dark crescents arched under each eye.

The light had gone out from those eyes, and Evan couldn’t put a name to what had crawled in to fill the space.

Even the world behind Pea had begun to dim, as if the energy to exist was seeping away. The gliders sank in slow circles, losing altitude on the withering updrafts. A few had fallen to the beach and lay flopping like fish, dying. The waves of the sea had lost their will, becoming anemic versions of their former selves. They lapped softly against the sandy shore, like the soft kisses of a dying man to his children. The place was winding down, coming to rest; any fool could see that.

Pea simply sat in the sand, looking out at all that he had made. All that he could not save.

A brief puff of offshore breeze blew the hair away from his face. Lying there, he looked like any man, preoccupied, his mind elsewhere, on his troubles.

“It’s finished,” Evan said.

Pea turned his head suddenly, as if surprised at being spoken to. “Finished?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose it is a good thing.” Pea turned his head back to the skyline. “Was I good?”

“You were.”

“No, I don’t think I was.” He shook his head sadly. “And my greatest sin still lies before me.”

“What are you going to do?”

For a long while, Pea didn’t answer, and Evan thought perhaps he hadn’t spoken loud enough. But then Pea turned and the fire was back in his eyes. “Tell me,” the god said. “Do you think there can be forgiveness?”

“For some things. Not for others.”

“I think you are right. Papa, I think you are right, but I do not care.” He stood, brushing the sand off his naked flesh. “It is almost over. The threads are coming apart.”

“It was a fine tapestry.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” The god’s eyes were on the horizon, narrowing to slits.

What was he looking at? How far can a god’s eyes see? Into the next life?

“It’s time,” Pea said. He gave Evan a last sorrowful look. “They’ll never hurt anybody again. All for you, Papa. I do this for you.”

“What are you doing?”

“The lines of power go both ways. I can follow the lines to the source. They have no defense; they never expected. Now they will pay for what they’ve done.”

And then the god closed his eyes and put his hands to his face. There was a flash of light, and the god burst out across the sea in a plume of frothy wind, and what he left behind was just Pea, collapsed at the shoreline, a boy again. Just a child.

Evan didn’t understand why it had happened, but he knew the threads of Pea’s personality had unfurled, split somehow, leaving Pea just a lonely child crouching in the sand. Out on the flat sea, the new wind raised huge gouts of water as it headed for the horizon. There was a flash of light, and the swirling wind was gone. Evan knew that the other part of Pea, the god part, had left this place forever—had traveled out through the lines of power on a final terrible errand.

He didn’t know where it went, but he knew they had run out of time. “What have you done?” he wondered aloud.

Evan looked back to the boy. He was seven years old again, and he was crying. The boy lay crumpled on the sand, barely conscious. His dark eyes rolled blindly. “Papa, are you there? Where are you?”

“I’m here.”

“I can’t see you.” The boy’s voice cracked as the tears slid down his cheeks. “I’m scared, Papa. What’s happening?”

“I’m here. It’ll be okay.”

Evan picked up the headset he had assembled and adjusted it to fit around his skull. In his hands, it looked like just so much ruptured wiring twisted together at odd angles. Blood still stained the linkages. He vaguely wondered if it would electrocute him. Carefully, he stuck the leads to his temples, finding the old dish-shaped scar tissue.

There were no tetherings to hold him in an upright position this time, so he thought it best to lie on the floor. He cleared a place near the screen with his foot, wiping away the shards of wire that had accumulated.

He sat and made a final adjustment to the headset. Then he lay down. The floor was hard and flat against the roundness of the back of his head. Above him, the ceiling spread away in panels.

He placed the visor over his face and one last time willed the world away. Willed it to never come back again.

The shoddy wiring turned the trip into something he experienced rather than a simple transfer of consciousness. It was not the gentle slide into nothingness that he remembered. He felt the inward fall like a burning in his brain—a frying of neurons that he could almost smell. His soul conducted through the wiring. Eventually, black faded upward to gray, and colors swam. Night fell in his head, then out of it. He opened his eyes and looked at Pea, crouched in the sand. Recognition blossomed in the child’s dark eyes.

“Papa.”

Evan tried to move toward the boy but couldn’t. The interface was crude and uncoordinated; his legs spilled him into the sand. The boy ran to him and wrapped his thin arms around his shoulders, planting cool kisses on his cheek.

Evan’s strength gradually returned, and he rolled over and sat up on the beach. He pulled the boy into his lap and squeezed, feeling the tiny body tremble in his arms. He looked down at himself, and he wasn’t rage a hundred feet tall. He was himself. Evan. Flaws and all.

“Papa, I’m scared.”

“Shhh, Pea. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Everything has to die, Pea.”

“What’s going to happen, after?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there a heaven?”

“A wise man told me that there is no heaven here.”

“Then what will happen?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll be with you.”

“You’re not going to leave me again?”

“I’ll never leave. I promise.”

“Papa, it’s coming.”

In the distance, a sound came like the emptiness between atoms. It was a sound Evan heard equally with every part of his body. Though he couldn’t see it with his eyes, his mind sensed the hole, the vast nothingness that rushed toward them from across the water.

To his left, he suddenly perceived a twist of light, and when he turned his head, he was looking out through a portal into the tech chamber. It wasn’t a screen on this side, just a rectangular gap, and through it he saw his body lying on the floor. Above his fallen shape, the ceiling lights flickered. The city power was coming back on. Which was why this place was losing the energy to exist.

The sand began to tremble under him, and the boy clung tightly to his neck. The sound in the distance grew louder, rushing toward them, sucking the sea into blackness as it approached across the water. The soft air currents reversed direction, falling back toward the black that swelled from the horizon, lifting the sand off the beach in horizontal flows that whispered past their ankles.

A glider squawked as it tumbled across the sand. The world shifted. Evan squeezed the boy harder, locking his arms around his narrow back.

The sound revved into a deafening roar, and the beach shook violently, sliding away beneath them.

Evan dug his legs into the sand, trying to hold on, but it spun past him in a swirling river, pulling them upward toward the black sky. In the last moments, the boy whispered, “Thank you for staying, Papa.”

Evan clutched at the boy’s small form as they lifted free, falling upward toward the howling darkness, and then light flashed—an afterimage like a detonating sun, illuminating the entire universe in a single glorious, scorching blast of incandescence.

Then the screen went blank.

The lights in the anteroom shined bright and strong.

Then went out again. The city went dark.

On the floor, Evan’s body forgot itself, and his heart ceased beating. Evan and Pea were no more.


THE ENGINEERS in the control room jumped to their feet and cheered at their consoles. The screen on the far wall told the story. Phoenix was alive again. The boxes were all lit, representing eleven million fully functioning units. They’d won. Whatever had been sucking away the power had been cut off.

The supervisor, Brian, smiled broadly. He looked at Mr. Sure, who was also smiling. They had managed to shunt all the power away from that thirsty grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino. Problem solved.

“What the hell do you think that was?” the supervisor said out loud to no one in particular. Already, it had moved into the past for him. His smile was straight and wide and relieved.

“I don’t know,” the technician answered.

As Brian looked at the gauges, his own smile began to fade.

The gauges were all normal, except for one. He glanced up at the cheering crowd and saw that nobody else had noticed. He considered not bothering, not saying anything. Let them cheer. Instead, he motioned to Mr. Sure, pointing to the console with his other hand.

Mr. Sure eyed the gauge. “What’s this?”

“The heat dump,” he said.

“I can see that. Why is it doing that?”

The dial continued its upward swing, climbing like the tachometer of the world’s most powerful muscle car. It climbed steadily through orange. The supervisor looked down at the men in the chamber. The cheering stopped as, one by one, they took notice of the small display in the far-right corner of the wall screen.

Whatever it was they thought they’d beaten had come back to strike a final blow. Mr. Sure thought of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. Fukushima. Precautions had been taken. It could never happen again, that’s what they’d said. What they’d promised. This would be worse. The needle climbed toward red without slowing. Nuclear cascade.

“Why is this happening?” Mr. Sure’s voice was small, almost childlike. The supervisor sensed the question wasn’t directed to him but to God.

The needle slid into red. “Phoenix,” said the supervisor.

The explosion moved quickly, reducing the room to atoms before he could even register the pain.



THE LIGHTS came on in Baskov’s room, battering him awake through his eyelids. He’d never been able to sleep without total darkness, and this new light was an irritant.

Groaning, he looked at his watch: four-forty. The power was back on. He did the math. That meant the city had been without electricity for a grand total of nine hours. Ridiculous. Heads were going to roll, he was sure. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, cursing himself for not having the foresight to make sure all the light switches were off before he went to bed.

His mouth tasted like cotton gauze, so he reached for the half-empty drink on the night table. It burned going down but settled into a nice warm glow in the pit of his stomach.

He’d met with the president and several other state heads earlier in the evening. It hadn’t gone well, and he’d retreated into his bottle afterward. There would be another meeting tomorrow.

He reached for the wall lamp above the nightstand and clicked it off. The room darkened somewhat, but the bathroom light spilled across the floor to his bed. He looked toward the bathroom, weighing his options before giving in to the inevitable and angrily throwing the covers off. The room was cold; without power, the heat had shut down. Phoenix might be a city in the desert, but at night a chill could still seep into the air.

He walked across the carpet, stepping onto the bathroom tile. He reached for the switch, but just before his fingers made contact, the light went out by itself.

He clicked the switch, anyway. Up, down—nothing happened. He left the switch in the down position and walked blindly back toward the bed, arms groping in front of him. He found the wall lamp, clicked, and nothing. The power was apparently out again after being on for only a few seconds.

“Like some damn third-world country,” he grumbled into the darkness.

A red glow in the window caught his eye. He turned, and the glow grew brighter. Curious, he walked to the sliding glass doors. He found the handle, slid the door open, and stepped outside into a warm breeze. His eyes widened.

He saw his death. A huge wall of fire rolled toward him from the east, engulfing the dark shapes of buildings and swallowing the city in its giant red maw.

He had time enough to hope it was a dream, and then the warm breeze turned into an oven blast that singed the hair from his body and let him know how awake he was. His skin burned. The red wave crested overhead, pushing a molten, hurricane wind before it.

He shielded his eyes and careened backward, crashing through the plate glass to the floor of his room. He writhed, screaming, on the smoking carpet as the blast slammed toward the building.

He looked to the light, and the heat made ashes of his eyes. The maw closed around him.


“TURN HERE.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, a left,” Ben said.

The taxi barely slowed as it took the corner wide, throwing Ben against his seatbelt. The cabbie had four minutes left on the deal they’d struck, and he was taking it personally. Inside the running wash of the taxi’s headlights, the road skipped by in a pattern of gray asphalt and yellow dashes. At this speed, the cabbie apparently thought the center of the road was the safest bet. The car’s headlights provided the only illumination as far as Ben could see. The power was still out, and the world flew by in darkness.

“Left at the next intersection,” Ben said.

“How far is that?”

“Should be coming up.”

The cabbie eased back slightly on the accelerator, checking his watch for the tenth time. Ben had already decided that the guy had earned the extra money, but he didn’t want to tell him that. The tires squealed as they rounded the turn.

The driver hit the gas and they roared along a high chain-link fence.

“Stop!” Ben shouted. He’d almost missed the opening.

The anti-locks mooed as the cab shuddered to a stop.

“Back up.”

The reverse gear whined, and the driver looked over his right shoulder. The car sped up, slowed, stopped.

“Through there.”

The cab pulled up to the gate. Ben craned his neck for the guard, but the gatehouse was dark. He rolled the window down and began reaching for the electronic pass from his wallet when he saw that somebody had already pushed the gate open enough to slide a car through.

They were here.

Ben smiled in the darkness of the backseat.

“Drive on through.”

“We’re not going to have any problems for this, are we? This looks like private property.”

“It’s actually publicly owned.”

“You mean government. That’s worse. I’ll just drop you here.”

“You’re getting the three C’s. Plus an extra fifty if you take me all the way.” It was one hell of a long driveway. He wasn’t in the mood to walk.

“You got it,” the cabbie answered, fast enough that Ben knew he’d been bluffing for more money.

The cab slunk through the gate with inches to spare on both sides.

“Follow the bend to the left, then take the right lane all the way to the back.”

As they neared the building, Ben scanned for any sign of his coworkers. There was nothing out of the ordinary. No car, no broken windows, nothing.

“Let’s go around back.”

They rounded the corner, and Ben immediately saw the car up against the wall. At first he thought it had crashed there, but then he saw the broken window above it and understood. They’d stood on the hood to reach the window.

“Stop here,” Ben said. The cabbie hadn’t noticed the broken window, and Ben didn’t want him to be more nervous about this than he had to be.

Ben was reaching for his wallet when the lights came on. Everywhere. Just like that. After so much darkness, the building seemed to absolutely glow.

“About time,” the driver said.

Ben took the bills from his wallet and passed them over the seat. “Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure,” the cabbie answered, as he took the money and folded it into his breast pocket.

The sound of breaking glass caught his attention, and Ben turned his head.


SILAS FELT the gladiator like an elemental force, a cresting wave rushing toward him in the small room. Time slowed, and Silas knew assuredly that he was about to die. But it’s strange how the body works, what it refuses to accept.

In the darkness, his eyes still caught the swivel of the arm, and his body leaped instinctively. Even as his body did these things, his mind did the calculations and knew he would be too slow. The creature’s blow would kill him.

Then the power came on.

Blinding white light deluged the room, and instead of taking his head off, the blow struck him squarely on the shoulder.

He heard the bones snap like branches, and then he was flying. He hit the wall upside down and slid to the floor headfirst. Color rose up in his vision, and he blinked against brightness. He looked up, and the light had driven the pupil of the gladiator’s single remaining eye into a thin slit. Silas tried to stand, but something wasn’t working right. He looked down at himself and saw jagged bone extending from the mash of hamburger that used to be his shoulder. His arm was still connected, technically, but the thin shirt he wore did little to hide the dent in the side of his rib cage. He felt no pain. Shock, he diagnosed himself. I’m dying already.

The gladiator spun around, and its eye had opened slightly, looking for him. In the light, Silas could see just how much damage the acid had done. He looked at the gladiator in awe of what one liter of sulfuric acid was able to do to a living organism.

The single gray eye found him. Silas didn’t move. The creature was on the other side of his desk, and it reached down with one thick arm and, ever so casually, flipped the wooden antique across the room. It broke apart against the wall near the door. Silas felt an irrational wave of outrage. That had been a good desk.

The gladiator seemed in no hurry now. It moved slowly toward him, its goal assured. There was a crash in the corner, and the creature stopped and turned. Vidonia froze against the wall, looking down at the picture frame she’d bumped to the floor. She slid along the wall to the corner, crouching down, making herself into a small ball. The gladiator looked back at Silas, as if deciding he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and turned back to Vidonia, baring its teeth. It took a long step in her direction.

Silas reached his good hand deep into his pocket. “Hey!” he shouted.

The gladiator turned at his voice. Silas held up the shining black egg. “You want this?”

The gladiator growled.

“Go get it.” Silas bent his arm at the elbow and threw the egg from over his shoulder like a baseball pitcher. It crashed through his office window and disappeared into the darkness.

The gladiator’s reaction was instantaneous.

It sprang across the room and plucked Silas from the floor by his throat with one huge, long-fingered hand. Silas’s feet dangled a foot from the bloody carpet. He struggled for breath, beating at the iron hand with his good arm, but the grip only tightened, cutting off his air supply as neatly as a kinked hose.

The gladiator pulled Silas close to its face. The tips of their noses almost touched. Its remaining eye burned into him, the pupil a sharp vertical lance. The mouth came open, and Silas waited for the bite. Instead, it spoke: “You die.”

The world darkened as Silas slipped toward unconsciousness. Then muscles bunched in the iron, a quick jerk, and he was flying again. He gasped for air and felt the glass rake across his skin. Then he was tumbling. The sea of thick green sod rose up to meet him.

Above him, the room went dark again.


BEN WATCHED the small black object bounce to the grass and roll into a stand of bushes. It was smaller than a baseball but rolled as though it was heavy. He glanced toward the broken window, but the angle was wrong for a good view. Dark shapes moved behind the bright spiderweb of glass. Someone had thrown the small object through the window on purpose; he was sure of it. He stepped out of the cab and shut the door.

“Wait here,” he said.

“Sure,” the cabbie said, hitting the fare button again.

Ben stepped off the pavement and onto the grass. He counted the windows along the wall of the building. Five down from the end, second floor. He had just time enough to realize which office that window belonged to when Silas exploded through the glass and fell like a stone to the turf. He bounced and came to rest on his side. And then he didn’t move. Even from this distance, Ben could see the bones and blood. Arms and legs went in several directions. A moment later, the lights went out in the building again.

The squeal of tires behind him turned his attention back to the cab. Through the windshield, the driver’s face was a mask of get-the-hell-out-of-here. He backed the car up onto the parking block.

“Hey, hold on a minute!” Ben screamed. “Wait, he’s hurt.”

The driver shifted into drive and peeled away. Ben tried to get in front, but only managed a solid kick along the side of the cab as it sped past him.

“You f*cking a*shole, don’t leave!”

The cab didn’t slow. Its taillights fled into the darkness.

Ben cursed under his breath and ran toward Silas.

He knelt at his friend’s side and grasped his hand. Silas seemed to feel the touch and turned his head toward him. A deep gash marred the side of his face. He whispered something. Ben couldn’t understand. He looked toward the window Silas had fallen from but could see nothing but the ceiling from this angle. Baskov’s goons would take a few minutes to get outside. Maybe there would be enough time.

“C’mon, Silas, we’ve got to get out of here. Do you have the keys to the car against the wall?”

Silas spoke again, and Ben saw his jaw working in several directions at once. It was broken.

He leaned his ear closer.

Silas mumbled something, gripping his arm tightly.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Ben said. “I’ll get you to a hospital. But we’ve got to get out of here now.” Ben tried to pull him to his feet, but Silas resisted. His bloody hand curled in Ben’s collar, pulling the side of his head almost against Silas’s mouth.

“Run.”

Ben heard that clear enough.

The ground thumped behind him. A trickle of fear ran down Ben’s spine. He suddenly understood that he’d been wrong about something. It hadn’t been Baskov’s goons who threw Silas through the window.

Ben slowly turned. The gladiator sat on its haunches, head cocked to the side. Ben looked back sadly at his friend. “Oh, Silas.”

The gladiator pounced.