Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(117)

They pull off their shawls. They are all windburned, their skin darkened in patches from frostbite and brightened in others by burst capillary rosettes. Their breath floats around their heads like lost souls while the flames gather higher and higher and the cavern comes into flickering existence around them. The ceiling is blackened from the smoke of so many cooking fires and from the hundreds of bats that roost there. The walls are smeared with murals depicting men killing animals and animals killing men, battles fought yesterday and today and tomorrow, a battle that has never and will never cease, killing for hunger and killing for thirst, the special sort of thirst slaked by blood.

The floor is black sand clotted with guano. There are sitting stones around the fire pit and the bleached skull of some giant animal Patrick does not recognize, and he sits upon its crown. His father is set down beside him. His legs end in stumps at the knees, so that he appears half-buried, half-lost to the underworld.

Patrick studies each of their faces. A black man named Jessie with half his teeth missing. A Mexican named Pablo with a dent in his forehead as if somebody jammed a thumb into mud. A white guy with a beard and a flat face with bulging eyes that seem never to settle anywhere more than a second.

His name is Austin. He is the one who stripped Patrick of his gun, who laughed when Patrick embraced his father and said, “Well, isn’t that the sweetest f*cking thing.”

In the clearing his father explained what happened to them. The ambush on a routine patrol. An IED ripped through their convoy—the day bright blue one moment, red with fire the next—and before they could register what happened, out of the roiling smoke came what must have been ten or twenty or thirty lycans. “We sprayed off all our ammo,” his father said. “We made a storm cloud out of the street, but there were too many of them. They wanted to bite—that’s what they wanted. To bite us. And they bit us, some worse than others.” He unrolled his sleeve then and held out a forearm branded with scar tissue. “Mission accomplished.”

Five of them came out alive, all of them bitten, one of them without any legs. The blast shredded them, and the men cut away the remains and cauterized the ruined flesh with a hubcap they stuck in a roaring fire until the metal glowed orange.

Austin broke into their conversation. “Everybody talks about the what if moment. What if you get dog bit? Some say put a bullet in your head. Some say make do with life as an infected. We all got wives, kids. MIA or KIA and your family keeps the stipend. Go home a lycan? Then f*cking what? Discharged. Divorced. Doped up and ruined.” Behind Austin, in the clearing, the moose sobbed and tried once more to struggle upright, and he used Patrick’s pistol to fire two rounds into it and the moose dropped as if a string had been cut. “Fuck that.”

Now, in the cave, Patrick says nothing but watches the lycans and listens to their voices echoing and their footsteps hushing through sand and their knives sharpened over stone. They unload the meat from the sled and stack it on the altar and begin to carve away at it with the knives that flash in each of their hands. Some of the meat they eat raw and some of it they slice into steaks and chops to then pack with snow into a recess in the cave wall, what looks like an old tomb. The air smells of blood and body odor as tangy as sour wine.

Patrick keeps wanting to ask why. Why had his father not escaped these men, why had he not reached out to Patrick, assured him he was alive? He already knows the answer—he is no longer their staff sergeant, now their prisoner, the same as Patrick—but it’s the wrong answer.

Pablo kneels by the fire and reaches into it to light a cigarette. His hands are gloved with blood and his mouth smeared with it. The dent in his forehead carries a black shadow. He makes eye contact with Patrick and drags hard on the cigarette and blows a cloud of bluish smoke and says his father is a good man.

His voice is high and Patrick realizes then how young Pablo is, how young they all are, only a few years older than he. But the weather has scoured age into their faces. “Sorry as hell you had to find out about him like this. But hey, at least he’s living, right?”

Austin stands at the altar and thrusts and saws with his knife. He pops a ribbon of meat into his mouth and speaks around it. “Call this living, I’d rather be dying.”

Pablo takes another hit off his cigarette and flicks it at Austin and it sparks off his cheek and Austin swipes at the burn and bugs his eyes and tromps over to where the M57 leans against the wall and racks a round in the chamber and holds it to Pablo’s head. “Do that again.”

“Only got a few cigs left or I might.”

Austin keeps a bead on Pablo, aiming for the hole already begun in his forehead. Then he says, “Fuck yourself,” and lowers the rifle and returns it to its place against the wall and once again snatches up his blade and goes to work on a haunch striated with bands of fat.

Patrick looks at his father, and his father looks at him, then drops his eyes, defeated. He has no say among these men, no power to keep the peace, offer any direction, save his son.

One of the sleds sits near Pablo and he leans over and rips away a fist-size section of meat and jabs it onto a spear and swings it toward Patrick and says, “Hungry, man?”

“Don’t give him that,” Austin says.

“It’s Keith’s kid, man.”

“Don’t give him that spear.”

“Four of us, one of him. How big you think his balls are?”