Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(107)
He straightens up as quickly as he can, thankful the photographers remain inside. The lieutenant watches him curiously. Chase can’t tell if it is a smirk or if the scar makes his lip naturally upturned. “You all right there?”
“Fine.”
“How long has it been?”
“Near eleven years.” In his pocket he carries the pocketknife his father gave him, the one he carried through all his time overseas, and he squeezes it now.
“Not so long.”
Long enough for the anchor-and-eagle tattoo on his shoulder to fade to the color of a bruise, but not long enough to shake off memories as vivid as last night’s nightmare. He remembers the tracer rounds and mortar explosions, the thunderous pulse making his ears pop, the dripping chandeliers of white and yellow and red light making him pause and marvel at the beauty of it all. He remembers the rattle of a chain gun and the rotor wash of a Blackhawk and the hushed air that seemed to hang around bodies zipped into black bags. He remembers attacking a cave system—a hive, the CO called it—and the lycans that came rushing out of the dark at them. He remembers lighting up a woman with a flamethrower—the same woman who visits him sometimes at night—and the way she kept coming even after her eyeballs burst and her skin crisped to ash so that he had to unholster his pistol and drop her with a shot to the head.
He takes a deep breath and can hear his cigarette sizzling at the tip and flicks it away in a sparking arc and nearly gags on the smoke.
He realizes, when the convoy starts down the hill, that he doesn’t know the name of anything here. He knows the valley, the mine, the base all share the same name that now escapes him. He eyes a stunted evergreen, a bush bright with red berries, a deer as big as an elk darting between the trees. He likes knowing the names of things. Without them, he feels lost, as though he hardly knows who he is.
Ten minutes later, when they push out of the woods and into town, they brake next to an apartment complex under construction. A forklift drops a pallet of rebar with a boom. A welding torch glows blue. A saw whines. The workers, in orange hard hats, stare at the convoy until it departs. A few blocks away, they pass a building carved out by a bomb. It was the same old story when Chase was here—their mission unclear: building and destroying.
They drive through an alleyway busy with murals to commemorate a World War II battle in which hundreds of Nazis were killed by lycans—and then the convoy parks at a nearby square, where a crowd has gathered. “Check it out,” the lieutenant says. “Some unfriendlies are hosting a potluck.” A gnarled leafless tree rises in the middle of the square and a straw effigy draped in a U.S. flag hangs from it. A group of young bearded men stand around it and stab it with pitchforks and then cut it down and finally throw it on the fire they have kindled nearby. The smoke darkens and the flames lick upward and everyone lets out a cheer. In the weak sunlight, a lamb is spitted and two teenage boys crank it around and around over the fire. Men roll cigarettes and drink hard cider from jugs, while women arrange plates of sausage on a folding table. Children run among their legs, playing tag and pretending themselves into wolves.
Chase tries to smile off the pitchforks—but can feel, with every thrust, an imagined prick scraping between his ribs, into his heart. Neal sits in the seat behind him. He leans forward and rattles a container of Tic Tacs in his ear. “I think you need two of these.”
They aren’t breath mints at all, but Volpexx. The doc is here to make sure he chokes them down when needed. He rattles some into his palm and dry-swallows.
“Hey, my breath stinks,” the lieutenant says. “Can I steal one of those from you?”
“No,” Neal says and tucks away the bottle. “They’re ours.”
Chase will need every one of them. Just as he needs Neal to dole them out slowly. Because the first pill leads to a second and then a third and then he tends to lose count and sometimes slips into the black fuzz of those beer benders that defined his twenties, after which he would rise feeling as though he had sawed himself in half.
The mine grows larger and larger with their approach, its smokestacks and blackened metal making it look like a factory where nightmares are made. The fence line begins a long way out—reaching on for miles and miles and miles—surrounding a strip mine so cavernous that the dump trucks trundling along its bottom might be toys. He imagines the millions of tons drawn from this crater, bored by drills and chewed by dynamite, and can’t help but think about the tunnels within his own body that house a poisonous ore.
They pass through a security checkpoint with undercarriage mirrors and tire shredders and a reinforced steel gate and after a brief questioning drive for several hundred yards before they arrive at a parking lot, the distant fence line necessary so that no RPG fired or bomb detonated at the checkpoint can damage the facility.
The escort for the reporters is held up another ten minutes as the guards search and chemical-reactant test their bags and camera equipment. Chase can feel the Volpexx deadening him—the equivalent to a three-beer buzz—and closes his eyes and rests his chin on his chest and watches the clouds of colors play across his retinal screen.
When the reporters arrive, when their Humvee parks alongside his, he takes a deep cleansing breath and climbs out and approaches the Alliance Energy representatives who now wait on the sidewalk edging the parking lot with smiles on their faces and hands extended for a shake.