Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(116)

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Later, at William Archer, after the students disperse, after the six o’clock news airs, after rolled-up rubber-banded newspapers thump onto front porches, a long line of pickups come barreling up the hill and through campus, revving their engines and blaring their horns and flashing their lights. They hurl eggs and beer cans out their windows. They slide around corners with blue smoke rising from their tires. They rock over curbs and do doughnuts in the grass. They run students off the sidewalks before tearing down the hill again, the smell of exhaust lingering like a fired gun.

Claire watches this from the patio of the union. The tables are empty and barnacled with ice, a black cavity at their center from the sun umbrellas long ago tied off and toted to storage. She and Matthew, drawn outside by the noise of revving engines, hold paper cups of coffee steaming in their hands. They watch the fleet of pickups, jacked-up Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s with floodlights along the roof, until their coffee has gone cold, the bitterness pronounced.

They return inside to gather their things, to return to the dorms, and Claire says she wants to first stop by the PO. They pass a few students wearing HUMAN shirts and whispering harshly to each other—otherwise, they are alone, their footsteps echoing down the marble hallway.

She kneels at the bank of mailboxes and spins the dials and hears the tumblers fall into place. She yanks her box open. Above her a light flickers on and off with an insectile buzz. Her mind is elsewhere, so it takes a moment to register the manila envelope crammed into the slot. It catches and tears when she draws it out. She fits her finger into the tear—noting the postmark, noting the name, “Hope Robinson,” in letters that look slashed by a sword—and rips open the package. There is an odd weight to it and a bulge at its center. When she reaches inside, she does not understand at first what she has, a quart-size ziplock bag rolled up, and within it, something red and familiar.

And then she understands. And then she begins to scream.





Chapter 48



PATRICK HAS NO CHOICE but to do as they tell him. Right now that means kicking through ice-scabbed snow that sometimes softens and rises into belly-deep drifts. They have been trudging along for more than an hour. The sun makes everything a blinding white. His legs throb along with his shoulder. He feels feverish despite the cold. Every now and then he scoops a handful of snow to his mouth and chews it down to water.

This morning, when the sun flamed pink rafters across the sky, when his father called out to him, the lycans wrestled away his pistol and patted him down and then left him to stand there dumbly while they gutted and quartered and skinned the moose, severed the head and tossed it aside. This took more than an hour, and during this hour, he and his father sat on a log and looked at each other, simply looked at each other. At first his father smiled, marveling at their reunion, and then the smile died and he took on the startled, resigned expression of a man leaning over his own child’s coffin. “I’ve wished all this time to see you,” he said. “And now I wish I hadn’t.” In the clearing the carcass steamed and the blood stained the snow and made it appear as though they were wading through a red pond. The steaming pile of viscera, purple and red and green, drew crows that cawed and busied the ground with their spinning shadows.

Now the lycans drag two sleds made of branches lashed together with rope and sinew. They use their spears as walking sticks. One of them carries an M57 over his shoulder. Another carries Patrick’s father. They wear their uniforms, but they are not soldiers, not anymore. They do not walk in formation, but in a huddle the shape of a dog’s paw, with Patrick at the center.

Eventually, along a wooded hillside crowned by a granite and gneiss cliff, they enter a bombed-out village made mostly of stone and cement houses with the roofs collapsed in. The snow here is packed down, threaded with footsteps, stained with urine and blood and feces.

From the base of the cliff grows a church, square and built from blocks of granite. A broken cross rises from its roof. A crow roosts on it and departs when they draw near. A splintered door rests against the entryway, no longer hinged, and they drag it aside and then pack snow onto the meat and heave up the sleds to carry inside.

A stone cistern for holy water lies cracked on the floor. The pews are gone—smashed up for kindling, Patrick guesses—and the roof has collapsed in places and snow has fallen through these skylights and made slick the slate floor. Roots break through the walls and cling to the stone.

They walk past the pulpit and through a doorway that leads to a rectory with candled recesses in the walls and a skeleton in the corner with a moldering Bible in its lap. The light is dim and the lycan carrying his father sparks a Zippo to an iron-handled torch and continues down a hallway and Patrick hangs back and watches the light swirl away like water down a drain before somebody gives him a nudge and he starts forward.

They walk through a crypt stacked with skulls and femurs threaded with cobwebs and rotten gray cloth. The tunnel then opens into a wider passage and they pass over a chasm on a wood bridge with iron trappings, maybe ten feet long, that Patrick can feel bow in its middle.

On the other side, they enter a high-ceilinged chamber with a small skylight far above and with some heathen altar at its center and with bedding along the floor made from animal skins and pine boughs. A fire pit glows orange with embers and the lycans throw more wood on it from a tall stack along the wall. The flames soon rise and pock their faces with shadows and make their expressions seem to move even when still.