Page 46 of The Most Dangerous Games

“You don’t know that.”

“You leaving me?” Jack asks, voice cold.

Tipton’s smile is small. Controlled. Charming in the way it makes you want to punch him.

“I’m not leaving you,” Tipton says. “I’m just not dying with you.”

Then he adds, almost like advice:

“Press your red button if you start seeing God.”

And he keeps walking.

Game #2

Somewhere in Kentucky Four Days Later

Patrick Arrasmith

33.

They brought a thousand to Ohio, out of thousands more who had been considered.

Then shipped out a hundred to two ends of the world.

Fifty-five returned to the United States.

Some pushed their red buttons in Antarctica or Chile. Some were eliminated for not completing their mission. The especially foolish after trying to access their social media accounts, posting about what they’ve been doing.

Some were caught cheating by the surveillance drones, straying from their designated route up the mountain, or down the coast of Ross Island to McMurdo Station.

A half dozen were sent home without any reason being given.

Almost half were gone. The survivors had been flown in C-17 Globemasters to Louisville, Kentucky, this time, transported from there to an isolated farm on the Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains.

It is a lush, isolated property, they all see from the buses, miles from the last homes or signs of civilization. Apart from the main house, what looks like a massive combination of palace and farmhouse, there are enough two-story guest cottages on the property to accommodate all of them, together as a group for the first time since their odyssey began.

After having showered and changed, they have assembled in a ballroom inside the main house that is as ornate a place as Jack has ever been inside, art on the walls and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

Jack sits with Elena and Jimmy. Rupert’s right there, too. The boy and Jack have now become practically inseparable. They’ve been joined by three members of what Jack thinks of as the Antarctica group: Wyatt, the young guy from New York City; and two young women, Alek and Hannah.

In Chile, they had discovered that Rupert was almost fast enough to be playing for his favorite football club back home, Man City. He’s the one, out of all of them, who produced the fastest time making it to the lighthouse and back.

Fastest. By a lot.

Even after the death of his friend Luca Tommasi, to whom he’d grown as close as to Jack.

It turns out that Rupert Chadwick is more than just a brain, his slender frame much stronger and more agile than it looks. He is too modest to have told the table about that, so Jack does it for him, before recounting for the Antarctica people his own experience that day at the End of the World, first with the shark attack and then with the Chilean recluse spider on the trail.

Rupert, wide-eyed, had not heard the entire story until now. Jack had never been big on telling war stories. But the boy had asked.

“Weren’t you afraid that you were going to die the way . . . the way . . .” The boy can’t finish the question.

Jack is well aware of how much Luca had looked out for Rupert from the time they’d arrived, Luca having explained to Elena the night before he died that Rupert was the same age as his son.

He could lie. He could put on that tough-guy thing.

But he’s had enough of people performing.