Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(108)
Chapter 45
PATRICK IS AWARE, first, of the sphere of pain in his right shoulder. If he stays still, its heat remains focused, but if he moves—if he so much as sighs heavily—the sphere cracks open and sends hot, nauseating knife twists of pain into his chest, down his arm.
He lies on the floor of a one-room gray-wood house. Wind rasps through the cracks. The roof creaks under the weight of snow. The floorboards are soft and squawking beneath him. The logs in the woodstove collapse into embers. The whole place struggles to stay upright. The air reeks of fish and onions. Herbs and jerky hang from the rafters. Old dusty spiderwebs—jeweled with the husks of flies—thread the corners. Pots bubble on the woodstove.
He does not notice this all at once, but in one-eyed glimpses as he rises intermittently from a sleep that won’t let go. He feels out of focus, outside of himself. He can’t tell whether he keeps fading in and out due to his injuries or whether she has drugged him. She, the lycan woman.
Her back is hunched, her breasts flattened by age. Her neck is as thin as a wrist. A cluster of long white hairs hang off her chin and tremble when she sucks at her toothless mouth. When at first she does not respond to the English or the little Finnish and Russian he uses on her, only stares at him with that mummified face and those eyes dulled by cataracts, absent of any curiosity, of any emotion altogether, he figures her deaf or senile. Or maybe he never says anything. Maybe he speaks to her in his mind, his tongue unable to find traction enough to form words.
He dreams about his rifle shuddering in his arms. He dreams about a lycan staggering back and hitting a rock wall and smearing it with a frond of blood. He dreams about the old woman standing by the window, her pale mottled skin appearing translucent so that he believes he can see her blood and sinews coursing and surging, like some dark presence living beneath the surface of her. He dreams about her sucking on a pipe, the smoke coiling around her, as she studies him sharply, with suspicion glowing in her foggy eyes. He dreams—or maybe he is awake?—about a wolf watching him from a shadowy corner.
Then she crouches next to him with a pile of rags, a pan of steaming water, and a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Your fever won’t break and your skin is going dark,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “Need to get that metal out of you.”
She speaks. She holds a knife between them. He does not agree or disagree. He just turns his head away so that he doesn’t have to watch her work. He supposes, if he were on an operating table, he would be strapped down. But he doesn’t have the energy to arch his body, to flinch away, when he feels the probing sting that turns into a hard jolt of pain. The sphere explodes. He hears the tock and pick of shrapnel hitting the floor and feels a hollowed-out relief in his shoulder—and in the flash before he passes out from the pain he thinks of his father and finally makes the connection.
He wakes in a daze, not knowing how long he has slept but knowing it has been a long time. It is dark outside, but it is dark so often here that the hour could be four in the afternoon or four in the morning. Outside he can hear the chattering and howls of wolves, whether natural or lycan, he is not sure.
He feels better, somehow lighter, as if the shrapnel weighed so much it was pressing him into the floor. He sits up for the first time and realizes he is naked only when the pelts that cover him roll away from his chest and pool in his lap.
His shoulder is sticky with a mudpack that smells fungal. A woodstove roars in the corner, giving off waves of heat, but the air is otherwise cold enough to crystallize his breath. On a three-legged table small enough to be a stool, a candle sputters, its dim, flickering glow the only light in the cottage. He is alone. A few feet away, his uniform is folded neatly next to his boots.
He rises naked from the floor. The room spins, then settles. His muscles are tight and unused to movement. He keeps his bad arm tight against his side when he creeps to his clothes. He finds them clean, smelling of pine soap. He almost pulls them on and then remembers his final thoughts before passing out.
He fingers through his pockets until he finds it, the sheets of paper—some printed in the MWR, some pirated from the toolshed. He unfolds them clumsily with his one hand and carries them to the candle.
He was being poisoned by the metal, infected by it. The old woman saved him, as if knifing away a bruised section of peach, by excising it from his body.
In the flickering light of the candle he flattens the wrinkles from the paper. Some of the ink has splotched and warped, but he can still read the words. The protection of cells, the regulation and detoxification of metal, such as silver. Silver. One of the principal components in Volpexx was silver. Some of the old mythology was true: the metal was septic to a lycan. The two largest suppliers in the country come from Alaska, he remembers reading, the Red Dog Mine and the Greens Creek Mine producing somewhere around three hundred metric tons a year, with Pfizer as their majority stockholder.
Keith Gamble lost his wife more than fifteen years ago, but all this time, he was still trying to save her. He knew he couldn’t kill the wolf, but he thought he could kill the drug. The metallothioneins would somehow detoxify the Volpexx, Patrick guesses, allowing for a positive blood test without the emotionally deadening side effects.
He wonders in how many different ways and over how many years his father has been chasing some kind of cure. At home, his father often worked in his shop, built onto the garage, a room with a sloping floor and central drain, stainless-steel tables scattered with vials and tubes and decanters, like some mad scientist’s laboratory in the midnight movie. He kept it locked except when working in it and allowed Patrick to observe him only if he didn’t speak and remained seated on a stool in the corner. He said he was working on home-brew recipes. But Patrick can clearly recall the gleam of syringes on the counter—and can remember, too, the many dogs he had as a child that died so often of “cancer” he stopped making up new names and just called them all Ranger.