Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(10)

“Whatever you have to say I don’t want to hear.”

“You’ve been watching the news? You have, haven’t you? You know what we’ve done, don’t you?”

As if in response, the newspaper in the living room snaps and riffles, a page of it blowing off the coffee table and onto the floor. “I know what you’ve done,” she says.

Her covered porch opens up between two pine columns to a stone staircase that sinks into a pea-gravel path that coils into the driveway. On it—she is not surprised to see, the two of them rarely apart from each other—stands a beast of a man, Morris Magog, more than seven feet tall and seemingly half as wide. The only parts of him visible, beyond the mess of his long red hair and long red beard and long black leather duster that the wind whips around him, are his empty blue eyes and his hands, enormous and pouched. She has heard him speak on only a few occasions—once to ask Puck if he could have a bit of candy, please—his voice like shifting stone.

“You’ve had your time to grieve,” Puck says, “and we’re glad for that. We’re surely glad you’ve had that time.” Though he continues to smile, his voice has a severe edge to it. “But that time is done. Because we’ve got plans. Big plans. And you’re a part of them. And we’ve come for you now. And you’re to come with us now. And that’s the end of it.”

She knew this day was coming. She knew, when she left her husband, when she walked away from the caves, when she abandoned the Resistance, that they would allow her only so much time. These past few months she has sensed their presence, glancing often to the woods and the nighttime windows that gave back nothing but her reflection. She has discovered, on several occasions, signs of their trespass, a footprint pressed into the mud beneath her window, the lingering smell of cigarettes in the cab of her unlocked truck. They wanted her to know she was being watched.

“I won’t,” she says.

They stare at each other, Puck blowing a pink bubble that breaks with a hiss. “You really don’t have a choice, you know.” He throws a glance behind him, and—as if he has issued some silent command—Magog takes a step forward and leans his huge body toward the cabin, as if ready to break into a run. She hears a huff that could be his breath or could be the wind. “You can’t be hiding any longer. Not in times like these. Every hand on deck. That’s what your dear husband says. That’s why I’m here. To fetch you.”

She chooses this moment to reach behind her back and withdraw the Glock. Not to point it. Just to show it off.

For the first time since she opened the door, Puck stops smiling. His eyes are on the pistol when he says, “We’ll keep coming back.”

“Don’t bother.”

The light now streaming through the trees makes a series of yellow slashes across the porch. Puck wears a gold watch and it catches the sunlight and spits it on the ground like a tiny fluorescent bug. “Hey,” he says. “Look at that.” He rotates his wrist and makes the bug slide across the porch boards, where it momentarily settles on Miriam’s foot before traveling up the length of her body, zeroing in on her eye. The pupil contracts.

She lifts the Glock and stares with her good eye down the line of it. “Stop that.” She knows how fast he can move, has seen his body blur into action.

The refracted sunlight drops from her face, leaving behind its afterimage, so that for a few seconds she sees Puck surrounded by a red aura. He chews his gum slowly, considering her. “Fine. Okay. You need some time to think it over? I understand.”

Perhaps her husband sent them. Perhaps they came on their own. Puck has always wanted her, has tried to make her his—that’s why his body is gummed over with scars. Regardless of why they are here, it is based on some man’s desire, not her obligation to or importance within the Resistance. “I’m done, Puck. I’m done. And if you step onto this porch again, I’ll put a bullet in your mouth.”

He retreats from her, his feet sliding along the porch, scraping the wood—and at the top of the steps he pauses to turn over his gum a few times with his tongue. “Not unless you’re dead you’re done with us.”



Later, she ties on two ankle scabbards and stabs into them a matching pair of Gerber serrated combat knives. To cover them she yanks down her jeans and shoves her feet into steel-tipped cowboy boots. She straps on and tightens the shoulder holster for the Glock and pulls on a black denim jacket. She steps outside and waits on the porch for a good five minutes, listening, the wind gone now, the forest a whispery hush interrupted by the occasional bird calling, twig snapping.

She then clomps down the steps and crunches down the gravel path and circles the Ramcharger, peering in its windows and quickly under its hood, before climbing into the cab and locking the doors and keying the ignition.

Her eyes dart between the mirrors and the road when she drives the quarter-mile driveway that leads to a pitted strip of county two-lane that snakes down the mountain before connecting up with a highway that takes her to La Pine, Oregon. Along the way her foot feathers the brake and her eyes scan back and forth across the road as if something might burst from the woods that wall her in.

At the grocery store she fills her cart with canned vegetables, dried fruit, bags of jerky, boxes of cereal, and granola bars; and at the pharmacy she collects some gauze and disinfectant, a needle and thread, an Us Weekly; and at the Ace hardware she buys an electric drill, an electric handsaw, a steel entry door, ten sheets of plywood, three two-by-fours, four motion-sensor lights, four Magnum flashlights, five packs of D batteries, three boxes of four-inch screws, and two empty five-gallon water bottles. On her way out of town, she swings into the service station, one final stop, where she picks up two five-gallon gas containers and fills them with unleaded.