Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(105)
She comes from a side channel that spits into this canyon and stands for a long time at its exit, surveying the wreckage. The Humvees and the MRAPs are still smoldering and she knows that whatever happened here happened not long ago. The canyon walls are pitted from bullets and RPG blasts, halos of black imprinted on stone. The wind shifts and the dog whines at the smell of cooked flesh, burned rubber. There are many bodies, a junkyard of broken bodies, all of them so still.
She goes to them. The snow glimmers with ejected shell casings. She withdraws a knife from some secret fold of her coat. At one body, and then the next, she does not bother struggling with buttons and snaps. She draws her sharp blade through nylon and canvas and hurries her way through pockets and belts, tossing some things aside and placing others in the sled. Bullets, matches, knives, first-aid kits, wipes, belts, canteens, binoculars. One soldier is missing half his head. Another seems to be smiling, with his belly and chest shredded by bullets. Another has tried to crawl to safety and a thick viscous slug’s trail of blood follows him to his resting place thirty yards away.
One of the soldiers lies flat on his back. The dog whimpers and huffs and paws at the snow near his head. His face is obscured by blood and soot and sunglasses. A boy. His shoulder is torn up—whether by a bullet or shrapnel, she doesn’t know. His helmet is gone. So is one of his boots. She crouches down and removes her mitten—leather, lined with rabbit fur—revealing a skeletal, leprously spotted hand. She snatches off his sunglasses. His eyes are half-lidded, telling her nothing.
She digs beneath his high collar and touches his neck to see if she can find a pulse. Right then his eyes snap open and closed so quickly that she would have missed it had she not been searching for some sign of life. She stands and looks around, looking to see if anyone is watching her. The sun flashes off her knife.
Chapter 44
NEAL STANDS in the open doorway of the toolshed. Everyone keeps saying that the day is unseasonably warm, that he should be grateful, that the winds in the Republic are sometimes so severe that a minute of exposure can freeze a finger and snap it off at the knuckle. To him, thirty-five degrees is cold enough. His eyes peer out beneath a wool hat with a pom-pom on top. Otherwise his body is wrapped completely in a down parka and scarves and mittens and boots. Chase tells him he looks like the Michelin man.
Chase is always calling him something. Tubs. Doc. Captain Curry. Neal wouldn’t mind stabbing the fool in the eye with the syringe he keeps in his pocket—capped, but ready with a 30 cc dose of sodium thiopental strong enough to knock Chase out. Just in case his emotions get the best of him and the pills can’t contain the animal. That’s what Neal is here for—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself. Everyone calls him doctor but here he is merely a nurse. It is insulting, and he would not have come except for two men he is indebted to: Augustus, his leering benefactor; and Keith Gamble, his longtime collaborator, his friend.
They arrived several days ago and his mind still hasn’t adjusted to the time change, his days feeling like nights, his nights days. He checks his wristwatch—he is always checking it to ascertain the time, as if he has trouble believing in the sun’s place in the sky. Another hour and their convoy will roll out of the base and head to the Tuonela Mine, where he and Chase will meet with diplomats and executives before holding a press conference.
He steps out of the wind and into the shed’s dim interior. A lightbulb hangs overhead, but when he pulls at the string, nothing happens. His eyes adjust and he spots the desiccated carcass of the wolf that makes the workbench above it appear like a squared shrine.
The lab conditions are laughable. But the value of Keith’s work has always been conceptual more than practical. So many conversations with him began with the phrase What if? Kirk and Spock. That’s what people called them, and that’s how they dressed up one Halloween. Keith was the dashing rogue and Neal was the wearying bore. Wearying bores did well in biochemistry. Wearying bores could tolerate the endless stream of data, the endless pile of grant applications, the political hurdles, the pompous lunacy of academics—everything Keith referred to as bullshit. When his friend first became a brewmaster, Neal told him it was a waste, a waste of his great talent. But he was wrong. This—Keith’s death in the Republic—that was the waste.
There is nothing of use to him in the toolshed. He is here to say good-bye. He pulls off his mittens and slowly fingers the beakers and vials, flips through the notebooks, the binders, their pages yellowing along the edges. Everything is coated in dust that his fingertips streak through.
“It’s just like you described it, old friend.”
*
There is another video circulating online. The second Balor has released. Augustus clicks on it eagerly. He has watched the other—with the door to his office closed and the sound lowered, as if he were indulging in some pornographic fetish—more than thirty times. He can play it in his head now—can see Balor, the tic at the corner of his eye, the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes heavily—can hear the screaming and meat-mouthed feeding—as if it is happening to him.
He cannot say why he is so fascinated, but when he stares at the screen, he grips the mouse tightly in his hand and from it a tingling signal seems to run up his arm and into his chest and rush the blood through his body. This is his enemy. This is what Augustus has committed thousands of hours to eradicating. Balor believes the video empowers him, but Augustus believes the opposite: every new hit and post might as well equate to a vote for Chase Williams. The video strengthens them, fortifies their posture.