Endgame: The Calling

by James Frey

  “Good.”

  “So we kill the others.”

  “Until none are left.”

  “But you.”

  “And you.”

  They are a mirror.

  A mirror of death.

  Baitsakhan pulls the glove from his left hand with his teeth and slices a cut across his palm.

  Blood drips to the floor.

  Maccabee turns to the table. There is an old knife there, older than old. Passed down through 500 generations of his people. He picks it up and unsheathes it. He draws the blade along his left palm.

  Blood drips to the floor.

  They grasp hands.

  “To Endgame, brother,” they say.

  The game is played, but how will it end islxii

  AISLING KOPP

  Lago Beluiso, Lombardy, Italy

  Aisling stares at the cave’s wall. She is cross-legged. A small fire burns behind her. A skinned rabbit roasts on a spit. The sniper rifle rests across her thighs. She closes her eyes and meditates on the images on the wall, just as she has every day since arriving. She wonders if this is what her father did. And for how long. And if these images drove him mad, or if he had always been mad.

  This is not how Aisling imagined her Endgame, studying ancient paintings. The painting she is seated before depicts 12 human figures standing among a primitive circle of stone monoliths. The stone shapes look vaguely familiar, but she can’t place them. Her eye is drawn to the 13th figure as it descends from on high. This 13th wears a helmet studded with lights and a thick suit. It holds something that looks like a star.

  The 12 stand in a circle, their arms stretched skyward, toward the visitor and the void he emerges from. Their arms are stretched toward everything. Toward nothing.

  “Spaceman visits naked people,” mutters Aisling.

  The 12 have exaggerated genitalia. She noticed that right off, had to learn to discreetly avert her eyes or the meditation wouldn’t take. Six men. Six women. All have swords or spears. Warriors. All, except for one, have their mouths open, singing to the heavens or crying out or screaming.

  The one with her mouth closed—a woman—stands in the center of the circle. She holds a round object. A disk. She appears to be fitting it into a rock or a rise in the earth. Or perhaps she is removing it.

  A disk. Like the one that kepler 22b had at the Calling.

  Above the 13th figure—the one in the helmet, the visitor, the Maker—is a giant red ball in the sky.

  Below them all is a black gash. The 12 seem to be sinking into the darkness, slowly. Or perhaps those are just the shadows cast by Aisling’s small fire.

  There is another painting farther into the cave. Aisling has meditated before that one too, but gained no insight. In it, the woman from the first painting, the one with the disk, stands in a small oval boat. The boat looks as if it is made of stone. Aisling wonders why it doesn’t sink. Maybe whatever savage painted it all those millennia ago didn’t know crap about sailing.

  Anyway, the woman in her little boat is adrift on an endless ocean. Her face is serene, but Aisling can’t figure out why. It doesn’t look like a pleasant voyage. The ocean is steaming—or maybe smoking—and there are dead fish floating on the surface. The woman doesn’t seem bothered by all this. She holds the disk in her hands and drifts along.

  For whatever reason, the woman with the disk reminds Aisling of the mute girl from the Calling. Chiyoko. The Mu.

  Maybe she has the disk? Maybe kepler 22b gave it to her?

  Or maybe the Mu is chasing the disk?

  Maybe . . . one of the others has the disk. . . .

  The fire cracks; the rabbit roasts.

  Aisling breathes, concentrates on the air passing through her nostrils, waits patiently for a revelation.

  What will be will be.

  SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC

  Renzo’s Garage, An Nabi Yunus, Mosul, Iraq

  The Peugeot 307 is ready. Sarah and Jago will leave Mosul in the morning. They’re on opposite ends of the couch. The TV is off.

  They have barely spoken since they woke up on the couch next to each other. As they slept, their arms and legs intertwined. Neither of them knows what to make of it. Sometimes Jago thinks that Sarah is warming up to him as more than just a temporary ally. He catches himself thinking about her like one of the beautiful American tourists he would take dancing and to the beach and to his bed, and he kicks himself. She is not one of those silly girls—she is beautiful, yes, but dangerous and crafty. They are Playing together now, but when the end of the game comes they will not be able to be together. Unless they can figure out some way around the rules, only one of them can win.

  But that time is not now, and for now Jago cannot tell if Sarah is playing him or being sincere. Either way, he only wants her more.

  Sarah swings between wanting Jago and not wanting Jago. She remembers the speech she gave at her ill-fated graduation. She thinks if she is happy she will have a better chance of winning Endgame. She fears despair; she fears grief; but above all she fears being alone. No Tate. No Christopher. No Reena. She sees Jago as a friend more and more. Being more than a friend with Jago might complicate things but it would also make her happy. Happy won’t win her Endgame, though. And that is all that ultimately matters.

  I am happy and able because I allow myself to be happy, she remembers saying to her classmates.

  What foolishness.

  Naïveté.

  Jago is reading the 307 manual and pretending to ignore Sarah. She turns to him, setting down the Middle Eastern fashion magazine she found stashed in Renzo’s things.

  “Jago?”

  “Hm?”

  “You talked about it a little before, but what was your life like before this?”

  Her question surprises him. He sets down the manual. “What does that matter?”

  She eyes him playfully, can tell immediately that he doesn’t want to share. So she’ll start. “Like I said, I was normal. Normal high school with regular kids.”

  “Yes,” Jago says, waving his hand. “I remember. And you had a normal boyfriend.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Sarah says, quickly changing the subject. “My dad’s a lawyer and my mom works for the parks department.”

  Jago laughs. “Are you kidding?”

  Sarah raises an eyebrow, not understanding what’s funny. “No. Why?”

  “That is—what’s the English word, hm? Simple and cute? Quaint. Such quaint lives for former Players.”

  “Why? What do your folks do?”

  “Run a large criminal organization. Control a city.”

  “Oh.”

  “You still think in terms of normal, Sarah Alopay,” Jago says, staring right into her eyes. “As if that’s something we can go back to. As if that ever applied to us. We are not normal, or descended from normal. We’re special.”

  Sarah knows exactly what they are.

  Assassins.

  Acrobats.

  Puzzlers.

  Spies.

  Jago’s fingertips spider gently across hers. She doesn’t move away.

  “The rules do not apply to us,” he says.

  He’s right, Sarah thinks. She realizes, at that moment, why she felt more comfortable with Jago in that airplane bathroom than she ever did with Christopher. It’s because Jago is like her. They are the same in ways that Christopher could never understand.

  She feels a pang of guilt for Christopher, her abandoned, sweet, normal boyfriend. But in that moment, Sarah Alopay does not want normal. She wants Jago.

  “Are you going to feed me some line about the end of the world next?” she asks, her voice low.

  “Would that work?” he asks.

  “Don’t bother,” she replies.

  Sarah reaches up and gently traces the scar on the side of his neck.

  Jago smiles and the 307 manual goes tumbling to the floor. He leans forward, crossing the empty couch and pressing himself onto her body.

  “This better not be part of
the game,” he says.

  “It’s real, Jago. It’s as real as anything in the world.”

  And as she says that, a part of Sarah hopes it isn’t true. She hopes this is just a wild teenage whim and that she’s not actually falling for Jago. Falling in love with a rival would be about the worst thing that could happen. But then they kiss.

  And kiss.

  And kiss.

  And Sarah forgets.

  27.338936, 88.606504lxiii

  CHRISTOPHER VANDERKAMP, KALA MOZAMI

  Bardi Turkish Tour Bus, Seats 15 and 16, on the D400 7 km from Kzltepe, Turkey

  Christopher can’t stop thinking of Sarah. Of her hair. Her bare shoulders. Watching her run. Looking into her eyes. Her laugh, lacing their fingers together, playing footsies under the table at the diner down in the Old Market.

  He can’t stop.

  He is with Kala and they are two hours from the site in southern Turkey.

  The site of her clue.

  Her mysterious clue.

  They’re on a tour bus surrounded by people their age. People drinking and laughing and cuddling and dancing. Kala did some sleuthing on the internet in Dubai and found that a band of self-styled “Meteor Kids” from Ankara and Istanbul were risking their necks to stage some kind of unsanctioned laser-light rave in honor of the unknown ancestors who constructed Gobekli Tepe—and they were doing it at Gobekli Tepe. Tonight.

  The post on their Facebook page said, Come party to the end of days where it all began! Lights and transcendence and dance trance in the desert. Wuck the Forld!

  Christopher is listening to a group of girls giggle and gossip in Turkish. He can’t understand a word. Sarah used to giggle. He wonders if she still does. He rolls his head to Kala, who sits next to him in the aisle seat. “You’re sure she’ll be there?”

  “For the thousandth time, yes. I spoke with her at the InterContinental.”

  “After you knocked me out.”

  “Yes, after I knocked you out.” She turns her green eyes to his. “Why don’t you be quiet so I don’t have to knock you out again?”

  Christopher looks away from her. “Okay.” He sounds fearful. He is scared of Kala, but he’s also playing it up. He wants her to believe he is like a puppy or a lamb. Utterly defenseless.

  But he is not.

  He hates her too much to be afraid of her. Hates what she did to the mother and the girl on the raft. Hates that Kala is a Player, charged with saving some sliver of humanity. He feels sorry for her people, that they have such a lunatic for a representative.

  She can’t be allowed to win.

  And if he can help her lose, he will.

  But she can’t know this. Not yet. Not until Christopher has a chance to strike. Not until Christopher finds a way to neutralize her superior speed, training, strength, gear—superior everything.

  The road goes on. The kids on the bus are getting excited, rowdier. A boy blunders past them and knocks into Kala’s shoulder. He gets a look at her—young, smooth, beautiful—and tries to say something clever. She ignores him.

  He speaks again and Kala looks up at him with her green eyes and smiles and reaches out and grabs his hand and twists it. The boy yelps and drops to his knees and he’s face-to-face with Kala. She says something in Turkish and the boy whimpers that universal acknowledgment: “Okay, okay.” He gets up and scampers away.

  Christopher pretends not to have noticed the exchange. Still facing the window he says, “Tell me again what Sarah said.”

  Kala’s annoyed. “No more questions. You’ll see her at this party.”

  “All right.” He doesn’t say anything else. It is late afternoon. The countryside around them is rolling and dry but not bleak. It looks like western Nebraska after the harvest, only without any trees.

  Kala frowns.

  Kala knows that she is lying. The Cahokian has not returned her call. Not yet, anyway. She hopes she will. Maybe Kala has misjudged the situation and the Cahokian is a coldhearted bitch who doesn’t care for her precious, pining, nuisance boyfriend. Either way, they are going to Gobekli Tepe to seek Kala’s clue. If she hasn’t heard from Sarah by the time Kala finds it, she’ll kill him.

  Christopher smiles to himself. He believes his ruse is working. Kala doesn’t know anything about him. He remembers going knife hunting for boar with his uncle Richard in the Texas panhandle. He thinks of the chase and plunging the blade into the wiry hide.

  All he needs is a blade and an opportunity.

  CHIYOKO TAKEDA, KALA MOZAMI, CHRISTOPHER VANDERKAMP

  Bardi Turkish Tour Bus, on the D400 7 km from Kzltepe, Turkey

  Five rows back, in a window seat on the other side of the bus, is a small girl in a red wig. She’s been bouncing her head to the beat inside a pair of bright blue oversized headphones for the duration of the trip. She has on heart-shaped sunglasses with gold rims. She has pouty blue-lipsticked lips and perfect skin.

  Chiyoko knows Kala is there, and that Kala is with a non-Player boy who looks American. An tipped her off—sent her an email about the plane crash, how a Player was on board, how the two mysterious survivors should be investigated. In the days when Sarah and Jago were stalled in Iraq, Chiyoko kept tabs on the Sumerian.

  And now, as luck would have it, the Sumerian is heading in the same direction as Jago and Sarah. According to the tracking chip, the Olmec and the Cahokian have been on the move, but are currently stalled at the Turkey-Iraq border. Eventually, all things will intersect, and Chiyoko will be there.

  She pinned a bug on Kala’s shoulder and can hear every boring thing she and the American say. They are saying nothing now, so Chiyoko is enjoying her music.

  And then, over the guitar, Kala’s phone rings.

  Chiyoko mutes the music and turns up the transmission.

  “Yes, this is she,” Kala is saying into her phone.

  Kala stands and moves into the aisle. Chiyoko can just make out the boy asking, “Who is it?”

  Kala doesn’t answer and walks down the aisle. “Yes. Again, I am sorry—”

  Kala approaches Chiyoko, looks directly at her, doesn’t recognize her. Chiyoko smiles to herself, keeps bouncing.

  “He is with me, yes.”

  Pause.

  “We are going to Gobekli Tepe. Have you heard of it?”

  Pause.

  “You’re where? What a coincidence. Though I suppose there aren’t really coincidences in Endgame.”

  Pause.

  “We’ll be there by evening.”

  Pause.

  “That’s right. I only want what the Olmec stole from the Calling.”

  Pause.

  “I swear it to you on my honor, Cahokian.”

  Chiyoko has never heard more false words. Kala oozes with dishonor. If Sarah could see her, she would know not to trust her.

  “There will be a party there tonight. When you arrive, call me. I hate to have to say it, but no surprises. Your friend will not survive a surprise, understand?”

  Pause.

  “Wonderful. I look forward to seeing you too, Cahokian. Blessings.”

  She hangs up. Chiyoko is about to turn her music back up when she hears Kala say something in Turkish. Her tone is impatient.

  Chiyoko looks toward the window, away from Kala, who is behind her. She eyes a thin sliver of mirror on the inside of her heart-shaped sunglasses, which allows her to see what is happening.

  The aisle in front of Kala is barred by two large young men. One of them points at Kala, and Kala holds up her hands in front of her. Chiyoko opens a small bag in her lap and removes a small white straw. She sticks it in her mouth and wraps her tongue around it. She adjusts the angle of the mirror and sees two other men behind Kala. One of them is the boy who offended her, the one whose thumb Kala nearly broke.

  Chiyoko pities the four fools.

  The offended boy moves on Kala. She raises a leg and kicks hard into the boy’s stomach. People begin to look at the commotion. Chiyoko kneels in her seat and pivots. She n
otices the American boy walking down the aisle.

  He’s not scared, Chiyoko thinks. He’s faking. Interesting.

  Chiyoko looks back at Kala and sees her kick the man behind her square in the jaw.

  Chiyoko doesn’t smile but is pleased to see martial arts practiced so expertly. Before anyone can act, Kala kicks into a handstand and away from the two flummoxed men in front of her. There is barely enough room between the floor and the ceiling, but Kala flips and lands on her feet, cracking both men across the shoulders with the sides of her palms. One goes down. The other, who is larger, does not.

  He grabs Kala’s forearm with both hands and yanks her forward. He tries to head-butt her, but she angles her neck at the last second. The man doesn’t lose a beat—he starts dancing with his feet, trying to break a toe or an ankle. She is faster, though, and gets her feet up on the armrests behind her. Kala tries to jerk her arm free, but the large man grips her too tightly.

  Behind Kala, the insulted boy is now brandishing a small knife.

  As the large man continues to wrestle with Kala, the playacting American boy sidles up behind him. “HEY!” he shouts, and the man turns slightly. Christopher lets him have it hard on the eye with a right cross. Ocular bones shatter and the man cries out.

  In the same moment, the insulted boy raises his knife. Kala doesn’t see him coming.

  Chiyoko parts her lips and blows out her cheeks. Without waiting to see what happens next, she turns to the window and pulls the emergency release.

  A dart zips through the air. No one sees it. It strikes the boy in the neck. Chiyoko knows how immediate and how painful it is. She had to endure the same kind of dart in her training many, many times.

  The boy screams as he seizes in pain, grabbing his neck. Kala wrestles herself free from the man with the broken face. The commotion is big enough now that the bus is slowing down. Hot air from the desert wafts into the cabin as a window is jettisoned onto the road. Kala looks behind her. The boy writhes on the ground. The other attackers are holding up their hands like they don’t want any more trouble.