Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(113)
Chase says okay, okay, and asks if there is anything he can do.
“You can shove a towel into his mouth and pour the Mississippi over his face. Then you can cut off his tongue and dick with the same pair of scissors. Then you can snap his neck and toss him in a coffin and fill it with concrete and shoot it with a cannon and watch him shatter into a million pieces.”
“Why are you calling, Buffalo?”
“I’ll need audio from you by tomorrow. How dangerous it is to give a terrorist a media platform. How a dog should be put down behind closed doors.” He blows out a sigh that translates to static. “Otherwise, just checking in.”
“You miss me, don’t you?”
“Fuck you, I miss you.”
“You sound upset.”
“There’s kind of a lot on the line here. Maybe I’m the only one who recognizes that.”
The press conference will take place in a room with an angled ceiling and three concrete walls, the fourth made from floor-to-ceiling windows that glow with pale winter light and look out onto a snowy field that stretches to the chain-link perimeter. A plastic ficus tree anchors every corner, and five rows of aluminum folding chairs have been positioned before a podium.
Fifteen minutes before the press conference—after the mike check, after the Republic and U.S. flags are hung, after the video tripods are arranged at the rear of the room, after the diplomats and dignitaries, hair-sprayed and cologned and wearing dark blue suits, begin to arrive—Chase says he will be right back. He needs to hit the head, lose a cup of coffee.
One of the executives—a thick-shouldered man with a porcupine of a beard—says, “I will show you.”
“Don’t bother. I can hold my own prick.”
Sometimes Chase doesn’t know he’s made a joke until someone laughs, the laughter now uncomfortable and following him from the room and down the hall. He pushes into the bathroom, tiled yellow with two naked bulbs screwed into the ceiling. There is a sink and a stall and a urinal, all of them marbled with veins of mold. He unzips and lets loose a pungent orange jet of urine. The Volpexx affects him worse than asparagus.
The speech will roll on the teleprompter, but he has never been good with tracking, so he always tries to remember as much as he can. He recalls some of the key phrases—strategic energy planning, uranium is the new gold—and so barely registers the door creaking open behind him. He shakes off and tucks himself in and observes in the tile the reflection of a man sliding toward him with his arms out.
Chase jerks around in time for the man to impact his chest. What he sees next is like a deck of cards tossed upward. Black hair. Teeth gnashing, bubbling with blood. The ceiling tilting back, the lightbulb flaring. Sharp-nailed fingers scrabbling toward him. A tumor bulging out of a neck. Somewhere, amid this flash of images, he remembers the wet floor they skated across earlier that afternoon, the janitor clutching his mop and edging against the wall to let them pass. And somehow—as he falls, in his seemingly endless descent—Chase manages to cry out, “I’m one of you!” before slamming against the floor, his head cracking the concrete and dulling his mind.
The lycan is on top of him. He can see his panicked reflection in its eyes, can smell its bloody breath playing over his face, can feel the fingers lacing around his neck, squeezing. He feels as though he is sucking air through a straw. His vision blackens at the edges; just before it collapses altogether, the bathroom door swings open and the lieutenant comes in with his hand already at his zipper.
He keeps his hand there but does not pause in his approach, hurrying forward to swing a leg and kick the lycan in the ribs. There is a sound like sticks snapping. The lycan yelps and releases his grip and Chase drags in a few ragged breaths through a throat that feels like it has been struck by a dull-bladed guillotine.
By now the lieutenant has drawn back his boot again—and kicks the lycan in the temple. There is no yelp this time. Only a damp thud. The lycan rolls off Chase and lies still a moment before scampering to the corner, a whimpering ball.
The lieutenant is by his side now, touching him all over as if his hands could heal. “Did he get you?”
Chase tries to speak and can’t. He swallows hard. “Nope.” His voice toadish. “Good.”
The lieutenant does not say anything. His forehead is pleated with deep lines. He is studying Chase’s hand. There is blood there. The heat of a wasp’s sting. Chase brings it to his face. There, along the meaty bulge below his thumb, the clear imprint of teeth, as if he were some soft candy tested and disliked.
There is no arguing with the lieutenant. He has been bitten. He will need to be treated and tested. And when the blood work comes back positive, everything will be different; all of this will be over. He sits for a long time, staring at the wound, before rising slowly from the floor. His throat feels collared by hot iron. There is a sound in his head, a sputtery hum, like an electrical short.
“Gun,” Chase says and holds out his hand.
“What?”
He gestures impatiently. “Gun!”
The lieutenant unholsters his pistol and offers it butt-first to Chase, who holds it in his hand a moment and observes on the black barrel the vanishing whorl of a fingerprint.
Chase thinks about how easy it would be to bring the pistol to his mouth, whistle a breath, pull the trigger, and end all of this. The secret of his infection, the static that fuzzes his thoughts, and the disquieting sense that the more powerful he becomes, the less he controls and desires. He should just shoot himself. He should just shoot himself and make it all go away.