Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(115)
“Did he have anything to do with organizing this?”
The student goes silent for a beat before saying quietly, “No.”
Through the wall of reporters, on the steps of the union, with the bruised banks of clouds gathering overhead, Claire spots the blond boy from her class. Francis. He is more than sixty yards away but easy to recognize with his standard uniform of a collared shirt and chinos. He is looking in their direction with a cell phone pressed to his ear. His mouth is moving, the hole of it black, as he tells someone about them.
*
At a protest in Berkeley, on the central green of the campus, the police gather in a long line. They wear riot gear—black body armor that exaggerates and squares their musculature—and they hold their batons two-handed, at their sides and aimed forward, like the spears of some ancient army. One of them lifts a bullhorn to his mouth. It squawks. His voice booms through it when he says everyone in the area must immediately disperse and anyone who remains will be arrested and anyone who resists arrest will be dealt with accordingly. Then he drops the bullhorn and waits. One person gathers up his backpack and takes off running. The rest of the two dozen protesters remain in place. They hold homemade signs made of cardboard boxes and wobbly poster paper that read ENOUGH! and ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL and THIS SHIT IS FUCKED. They cross their arms. And they remain in that posture even when the police begin, in a line, to march toward them.
At a protest in New York, in Central Park, near the zoo, one hundred people have set up a tent city. They—lycans and nonlycans alike, many of them twenty-somethings with ratty beards and wool caps and army surplus backpacks—will occupy the park until their demands are met. “What are your demands?” a reporter asks them, and they say, “An end to second-class citizenship,” and when the reporter asks them to be more specific, one of them says, “I haven’t seen my family for seven months because I can’t get on a plane,” and another says, “I’ve been told to look for new work in the New Year,” and still another says, “I ordered a burger and a beer at a bar the other day, and when they saw my ID, they asked me to leave.” When the squad cars roll up, flashing their red-and-blues, the protesters form a seated circle around the tent city and link their arms. The cops give them a thirty-minute warning, and when it expires, they pull on their goggles and shake their cans of pepper spray and calmly walk around the tent city and soak the faces of those seated along its perimeter—one by one by one—until their bodies wither and the air sharpens with screaming.
At a protest in Oxford, Mississippi, in the shadow of city hall, two groups assemble: demonstrators on either side of the issue. They yell at each other, spit, shove. The police have laid construction cones between them but otherwise remain separate from the gathering, leaning against their squad cars, their thumbs hooked into their belts, watching. And they continue to watch even when someone lobs a brick, a bottle, when a fistfight breaks out, when the crowd surges one way, then another, when a man falls underfoot, when blood is spilled.
On C-SPAN, a Democratic congressman from California speaks on the House floor about the precedent of the past. “Have there been unprovoked lycan attacks? There have. Every year there are a few. Usually someone who is unstable. Off their meds. They bite somebody. And then? Does that person, once bitten, go wild and bite somebody else who bites somebody else who bites somebody else? Of course not. We do not live in a world where some crazed wolfman is going to jump out of the bushes. The infected seek help. They solve their problem. They control the disease that can lead to harmful impulses. Nothing needs to change. The system is not broken. A few terrorists have made us believe otherwise. They are the problem. We need to hunt them down and bring them to justice. That should be our focus. Not these measures we are taking, which will not increase our safety, which will instead provoke an otherwise nonbelligerent, law-abiding people.” He pauses here, waiting for applause that does not come.
And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an older woman named Mattie Spencer scratches out a grocery list on a slip of paper and puts on her favorite purple jacket and gathers her purse and punches the garage door opener and there they are. Maybe twenty of them. She clutches her keys and they spike between her swollen knuckles like a weapon. The figures are wearing black ski masks and they are scattered across the driveway and the lawn and the sidewalks and the street, as still as statues.
She feels her expression shift along with her heart as she feels confusion and then recognition and then horror. A trembling runs through her body and her voice when she says, “What do you want?”
One of the men—they are all men as far as she can tell—says, “We saw you on the website. Saw you on the registry.”
She thinks she recognizes the voice and the build of the man and says as much, “Joel? Is that you, Joel Rawlings? You’ve seen me most days of your life and never had a problem.”
The man takes a step back and looks up and down the street.
She shakes her keys at them. “You come after me, threatening me, and what does that change?” Finally she says, “Well?”
They don’t know what they’ve come for—except to lash out at something—but maybe seeing her now, with her round face and shivering dimpled chin, makes them realize she isn’t what they are looking for after all.
“Bunch of fools,” she says.
Slowly she retreats to the back of the garage and hits the button and the door jars down, and when it does, none of the masked figures make a move to stop her.