Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(106)

A part of Augustus cannot help but wonder about the soldier Balor tore to pieces. He was not a person—he was food, though not even that, since hunger was secondary. The man was an implement and Balor was using him. He does not see Chase in quite the same way—they are friends, after all, the closest of friends—but the connection does not escape or bother him.

The wall behind Balor appears paneled with wood. There is no overhead light, what must be a table lamp throwing shadows sideways across his face. An insectile hum, maybe a generator, nearly swallows his voice. A hint of a smile plays across the corners of his mouth. He is smiling at Augustus. He is smiling at everyone who stands in his way as if ready to swing a scythe through them. “Do you know how much money it would take to destroy the United States? I do not mean to interrupt or injure the economy. I do not mean to blow up a bridge and make people feel sorry for those who died or blow up a landmark and make people feel hot with patriotic fever. I mean destroy. Do you know how much money it would take?” Here he runs a tongue across his lips. “It would take thirty thousand dollars. I will show you. Soon. Soon.”

“Bring it on,” Augustus says and starts the video again.



*



Chase doesn’t eat much for lunch, not because the chow hall is serving Jell-O and green beans and gray mushy chicken cubes, but because his nerves have left his stomach in a twist. He excuses himself and waits outside, next to the convoy of Humvees parked and idling in the mud like prehistoric beetles. The cold air hones him, chases away the nausea.

He knows what the media are reporting. The Patriot Act amendment, the vaccine hearings. The hard-line, no-compromise rhetoric. The pending trial of Jeremy Saber. The good-gosh down-home campaigning of his running mate, Pinckney Arnold, who drives from small town to small town and gives stump speeches and kisses babies and shakes hands and sings “God Bless America” with his hand over his heart. The publicity photos of Chase and Neal roaring across the Atlantic on a Curtiss Commando transport with several hundred newly deployed soldiers. All of it has worked. Just like Buffalo promised.

Every smear campaign has failed—because Chase admits to everything, the groping, the drinking, the fighting, none of it illegal, all of it tied into his platform: brutal honesty. The election is a week away and every phone poll lists him as the front-runner. Chase doesn’t respond to the soldiers calling him Mr. President, doesn’t feel as excited as he ought to, the Republic distracting him from every emotion except fear, sometimes alternated by remorse and guilt-absolving defiance.

That morning, when he arrived at the Tuonela Base, when the CO invited him into his office, he made an offhand comment about the weather, saying how nice it was, how warm. The CO—a gray-haired toad of a man with no neck and a broad, fleshy mouth—said he’d take negative forty over this any day. “Keeps the mutts in their pens.” Two days ago, an ambush wiped out an entire platoon. “A real dick up my ass. And now you’re here.” He sipped his coffee and choked a little on it. “Don’t think they don’t know. They know. Which means some shit is bound to happen.” The CO mentioned Balor then. Chase asked what they knew about him. He has seen the videos, he has read the articles, he has been briefed by Buffalo—but what does the CO know that he might not?

“What’s there to know you don’t already know? Might say he’s the alpha of the pack. Been in the computer for years, more than two decades. Worked for us—bet you didn’t know that—though you might soon. Some f*cker at The New Yorker has been sniffing around about us supplying him and a few other mutts with arms in the eighties to drive out the Russians. Now he’s turned the crosshairs on us. Now he’s gone from low level to big shit. He says something, the rest do it. Whoever gets his head on a pike will get so many medals pinned to them their tit will fall off.”

“What’s wrong with his eye?”

“Fuck do you care? Fuck am I supposed to know?”

“Just curious.”

Now Chase scoops up a handful of slush and packs it into a ball of ice that he lobs like a grenade toward the high wall of the perimeter fence. It falls short. He is joined a minute later by the lieutenant who will be serving as his PSD escort to the mine. Nathan Streep, a twenty-four-year-old with a boyish face that doesn’t look like it’s ever needed a razor. A scar curls from his upper lip like a worm. He pulls out a pack of Marlboros and knocks out two cigarettes and offers one to Chase and they light up and smoke in companionable silence.

The day is bright but the sun seems to warm nothing. A shadow slides across the ground and a few seconds later Chase hears the boom of a jet streaking overhead. He knows they are always overhead, easy to hear and hard to spot, as gray as the surrounding hills, their missiles sometimes giving them away, sun silvered at the tips. But he can’t help it: he covers his head and lets out a whimper. Most people, he knows, are unable to imagine their own death. They can worry over a grandparent, choking on a half-chewed bite of ham sandwich or slipping in the shower and snapping a hip; and they can worry over a child, imagining a pigtailed girl toddling after a ball and being crushed by a passing car, the bloodied tread of the tire imprinted on the asphalt until the next rainstorm—but their own death remains a denial, and then a vague possibility, and then, only in those final foggy-eyed years, an inevitability. He is not sure quite how this happened, but ever since he was bitten, he has felt age settling over him like a black blanket, and for the first time he feels death is not only foreseeable but also imminent.