Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(121)
Claire smiles, but the smile dies, any good humor distracted by a yellow ignition within her no different from lightning. Everything suddenly feels like a double: the two fingers, the two videos, the two names she answers to, the sun and the moon, the infected and the uninfected, the United States and the Republic, the president and his contender, Matthew and Patrick, Reprobus and Miriam. She feels—the world feels—split down the center.
Chapter 49
PETER DRIVES TRUCK. Most of the time he works for Amazon, hauling containers packed tight with books and DVDs and clothes and whatever junk people buy online, but sometimes he does independent contracting and sometimes that means hauling from the trains or the docks. A few years ago, for forty-four grand, he bought his own truck, a 2007 Freightliner, a Columbia 120, big white dinosaur—dwarfs his house when he parks it out front—with gray smoke tendrils stenciled along the side. Ten-speed transmission, air-ride suspension, double-bunk sleeper, 515 horsepower, and rear-axle capable of hauling forty thousand pounds. He’s got more than half a million miles on the odometer, mostly statewide miles, but the thing looks brand-new. He waxes it, even talks to it sometimes when running a rag along its monstrous grille, picking the bugs out of its teeth.
They called him. Said they found his number on the independent truckers site. Said they wanted him to haul a container due on the docks November 1, day after the trick-or-treaters scuzz up the streets with their candy wrappers and the pumpkins on porches sink inward like old toothless men. Drop-off point, an Olympia address, maybe 120 miles roundtrip. Yeah, he could do it, no problem.
It was an easy job, they said, and they were right. Funny thing was, they didn’t pay like an easy job. Three Gs for three hours’ worth of work. He was quiet after he heard that, and the voice on the other end of the line, as high-pitched as the shriek of an air brake, said, “We would appreciate your discretion.” He knew not to ask questions. He could use the green. That’s why he got into the independent contracts after all, sometimes putting in sixty hours a week or more. He had his eye on one of those HD LCDs at Walmart. The picture on those things, better than real life.
But a part of him can’t help but wonder, when he latches onto his rig the orange rusted container still smelling like the ocean, when he raises a hand through the open window to wave at the controller, when he grumbles up to speed and passes the squad cars always waiting outside the security checkpoint for random screenings, if he might be in over his head. His GTW was under ten thousand pounds, a light load. He could be hauling a bomb; he could be hauling whores; he could be hauling a hundred bricks of black-tar heroin for all he knew. And if he got pulled over? His ass.
He snaps off the CB so that he can think and lays down the hammer, hoping to get this job done and the bird home to roost before Monday Night Football. This is the end of the day—just after five, just after the docks close down for the night and the union foams up the bars with their beer pitchers and whiskey chasers—and the sun has already sunk from the sky. The wind picks up, and when the wind picks up, he feels it, the truck knocked around by the big gusts so that his wrist starts to ache from constantly readjusting the wheel.
He’s got GPS in the rig but called up the address on MapQuest earlier, a gravel lot near a wrecking yard out in the boonies. The voice warned him about the chain-link fence but promised him the gate would be unlocked—and it is, the deadbolt yanked open, the hook of it like a talon. The place is maybe a quarter acre, the wrecking yard to one side, thick woods around the rest of it, trash caught up in the fencing, empty except for a few trucks and cars parked with the weeds growing up around them. He bumps through some puddles from yesterday’s storm and decides here is as good a place as any.
He kills the engine, climbs out of the cab, shoves his fists into the small of his back and massages the hurt, like a bunch of watery marbles shoved between the chinks of his vertebrae, that grows steadily worse year after year and sometimes makes getting out of bed in the morning a goddamn curse. A sodium-vapor lamp buzzes over near the wrecking yard. The air is unseasonably warm, fine for a T-shirt, maybe even a little sticky. The pressure system has shifted; something is blowing through, which usually means trouble.
It’s then that he hears—or thinks he hears—a shifting in the container. Though it’s hard to tell, with the wind gusting and the weeds rattling and the gravel crunching under his boots. He pauses where he stands and leans toward the container and waits a long minute.
There it is again, a rasping, like a file drawn across metal.
He’s read stories in the papers about sex workers shipped over from Russia asphyxiating into a tangle of swollen blue bodies. He hopes he’s not part of something like that. He hopes he hasn’t gotten himself into some shit.
He knows he should gun his way out of here, put the container in his rearview, but his curiosity gets the best of him. He makes his way to the rear and unbolts the lock. His hand grips the handle for a long, white-knuckled thirty seconds and then he says f*ck it and swings open the door and inside finds tall stacks of cardboard boxes.
Their labels, from a medical supply company, read IODINE. A narrow corridor inky with shadow runs down their middle. He calls out, “Hello?” and feels like one of those idiots from the horror movies who ends up descending into the creepy basement when really they ought to be running to their car, slamming the locks, smashing the accelerator.