Free Reap by James Frey

werden Sie verhaftet.”
    The cop turned his back to us to speak to the paramedics, and John pulled out his gun.
    â€œNo!” I cried out, but my voice was covered by the sound of three gunshots. One for each paramedic and one for the cop.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Kat screamed.
    â€œI’m finishing Endgame,” he said, walking up to the bodies. The Sumerian watched us through droopy eyes. John took the cop’s gun—a Sig Sauer—and held it out to me.
    â€œWhere are the others?” John asked the Sumerian.
    â€œFighting,” he said. “I have lost.”
    I noticed now that he had a new injury—there was a half-bandaged wound on his torso.
    â€œWhere did they go?” John insisted.
    The Sumerian shook his head, coughing up blood. He raised his hand slowly and pointed. “That way. They will be close. Neither is wounded, and they want to fight. Are you the pacifists?”
    John stood up, shaking his head. He walked to the end of the narrow street.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Kat asked.
    â€œThree Americans visited me this morning. They told me to stop fighting. They said all I had to do was walk away and never Play.”
    Kat nodded emphatically. “Yes. That’s us.”
    â€œI will walk away.”
    Kat stretched the bandage around his side. “It’s deep,” she said. “I think you’ve got a punctured lung.”
    â€œMove,” John said, returning. “I think they’re just a few blocks away. You can hear a crowd to the west.”
    Kat stood up and reached into the ambulance for a box of bandages. I helped her, since she couldn’t use her right hand.
    BANG!
    I spun around to see John pointing a smoking gun at the Sumerian. There was a bullet hole in the kid’s forehead, and he began slumping over onto his side.
    â€œWhat the hell was that for?” I shouted.
    John looked back toward the cross street. “We’re killing all the Players. No mistakes.”
    Kat threw the box onto the road. “He said he was going to walk away. He said he was going to stop.”
    I pointed my gun—the cop’s gun—at John. “What happened to all of our rules? What happened to trying to talk to the Players?”
    â€œOf course he would say he was going to stop. We had him defenseless and injured. He was saying what he needed to say to survive.”
    â€œYou’ve made me a murderer, John,” I said. “I was just a college kid. I just wanted to make a difference. I wanted to protest the war. I wanted to get out from under my dad’s thumb. And this is where we end up? Shooting a wounded teenager in the street?”
    â€œYou’ve known what we were about since day one,” he said, tucking his gun into the back of his pants. “You just pretended that we could do this without killing.”
    â€œI pretended? I pretended? You asked me to write the dialogues. You had me train the others on how to sell, how to build a relationship of trust with the Players. You told me to do that, and now you’re saying I was pretending?”
    â€œWe have to stop them all,” John said, looking back over his shoulder.“They’ve killed enough of us. They killed Mary—didn’t you see that? And now we outnumber them again. Three on two, and soon it may be three on one, if the Harappan and the Nabataean are really trying to kill each other.”
    â€œWe don’t know what they’re trying to do,” Kat said. “We don’t know where they are.”
    â€œFollow the sirens. Speaking of which, we need to get out of here.”
    I was fuming. “Yeah, because of your gunshot.”
    â€œYes,” he said, turning back to face me. “Yes, because of my gunshot. We’re killing them all. Every Player. And if you don’t like that, then you should have damn well said it three months ago. When you killed that sheriff, you knew what you were in for.