Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(122)

He keeps a penlight on his key chain and he clicks it on now. It gives off a weak white glow. He hoists himself into the container and works his way forward. He walks sideways, sucking in a pillow-size gut, and still barely fits, his body rasping against the cardboard. As he guessed, the container has a false wall, maybe ten feet short of the end. He knocks his fist against it and it makes a hollow bong and again he says, “Hello?” He doesn’t like how big and tinny his voice sounds in here, like it belongs to somebody else. He jogs the flashlight along the wall and peers around the boxes and spots to his left a slight square recess, what he believes to be a sliding door.

Part of him feels creeped, but another part of him feels convinced that on the other side of that wall he’s going to find a cabin full of sluts like he sometimes chats with online, all tattoos and purple lace underwear and dark roots showing beneath their blond dye jobs and stretch marks marbling their doubleD implants. This is enough to motivate him through the next five minutes of hoisting boxes—each at least twenty pounds and rattling with what sounds like pills—to the open end of the container. He breathes hard, soaks his shirt through with sweat, and scolds himself, as he does every day, for not getting more exercise. Maybe with the rest of the money he’ll buy one of those Bowflex things from the infomercials, set it up in front of the new big-screen, rip out some sets while watching SportsCenter. He imagines himself with the etched, veiny body of one of those actors on TV and he imagines next to him, staring at his new figure admiringly, one of those Russian sluts in purple lace that might be waiting for him beyond these few inches of metal.

A space has been cleared; the waist-high door has been revealed. He can hear his breath whistling through his nostrils and tries to calm it. He slaps the door twice, waits. When he hears no response, he crouches down and presses his ear to it. The metal is cold against his cheek. Maybe he hears something, but maybe it’s just the wind gasping outside.

He gives the door a tentative push. It gives way and creaks open. He smells something feral, like deer pellets and wet dog hair and ditch water gone stagnant. At first he can discern only a black square. He holds out the penlight and tries to battle back the shadows. Then he hears a shuffling as something advances, a figure that looks, moving from darkness into light, as if it is emerging from a half-developed photograph.

“My God,” he says. It is the last thing he ever says.



The light sputters out. Thunder mutters. Wind hisses. It carries the smell of Puget Sound, the reek of algae glopping the docks and the seaweed strewn along the rocks like clumps of hair pulled from drains. Somewhere, a rusty hinge cries out, a door slams. A plastic bag twists by, skittering along the gravel and then hurled into the sky, where clouds churn. The world seems to be vibrating.

A black Ford Expedition has pulled into the gravel lot and Jonathan Puck and Morris Magog have stepped out of it. Puck stands with his arms crossed and Morris holds by the hook a freshly tailored suit that next to him appears as if it might fit a child. His long red hair and his black leather duster sway with the rising wind.

They can hear a noise. The noise of something moving in the container. Footsteps that against the metal floor bang like hooves. And then the figure appears—a man, an older man—naked and painted in blood. But he does not grunt wildly or cover himself modestly. He appears perfectly in control of himself when he drops down and walks toward them with his posture erect and a smile beginning to form on his face. One of his eyes is ruined and the other unused to the light, the pupil dilated, black like a speck of ash. “At long last,” he says.

Puck bows his head slightly when he says, “Master.”





Chapter 50



PATRICK SITS upon the skull, as solid as stone. A few minutes ago he finished eating the gamey meat cooked to a char by Pablo and now he can think more clearly. He did not come halfway around the world and sign away his life for four years to die or become indentured to a mutt like Austin. His father is not capable of helping him. He is broken in more ways than one. That is clear to Patrick, and for now their roles have been reassigned: he will make the decisions.

So though he might want more than anything to shrink himself down to a black speck absent of any thought or will and let the wind carry him away to some other location where he might take root and start over, he knows he needs to act. He thinks about running, bolting from his seat, seeing how far he can make it, but he realizes that beyond the reach of the fire, inside the cave, where days become one endless night, other senses take over—smell, touch, especially hearing—and these men know the dark and know this space and will pursue and overtake him readily. So he will have to find another way.

“Dad?”

His father does not shift his gaze from the fire when he says, “What?”

“I know about Mom.”

“I figured that might happen.”

“And I know about what you were doing.”

His father looks at him then, and his eyes seem to brighten, though it could simply be the fire’s reflection.

“How far are we from Tuonela, Dad?”

His father’s voice hardly registers as a whisper, and Patrick isn’t sure if he says, “Not so far” or “Not so fast.” He reaches into his breast pocket then and fumbles out a black moleskin notebook. “Here. Take this.”

Patrick tucks it into the same pocket that holds the printed, folded-up sheets he brought from the base. “If I could help, Dad. What else could I do? What should I do? To help?”