Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(124)
If the safety were engaged, Patrick would have been dead. But Austin is no longer subject to protocol. The trigger snaps. The rifle quakes. Orange light spits from the barrel. Two rounds knock the lycan back just as he reaches the end of the muzzle. The cave fills with a thunderous crack that bottoms out into a fluttering rush that Patrick at first mistakes for the blood rushing to his ears.
But he is wrong. It is the bats.
They have been startled from their slumber and now darken the air and make a wind with their wings. Their high-pitched screeching is all around him. They are everywhere, an unstable shadow fallen from the ceiling, and he tries to fight his way through them. They batter his body and scratch at his skin and he ducks down and hurries forward. In his panic he nearly hurls the jug and fires the rifle wildly into them. He thinks he is headed for the bridge but feels lost in a black current, uncertain which way to swim to find the surface. The cave floor is uneven with bones and bedding and the occasional ankle-turning stone. He can hear the scuffling and low-throated screaming of the others and guesses that they pursue him and knows that if he faces them they will no longer be men.
He nearly steps into the chasm. At either end of the bridge, two ironwork poles jut from the stone and anchor it in place. He walks directly into one of them, the impact like a fist to the gut that sends him reeling sideways, and there it is, the edge, the yawning darkness beyond it. He steadies his balance and clambers onto the bridge and though it pains his shoulder he hurls down the jug and it shatters and splatters its foul contents across the boards.
Somehow he has managed to keep the cigarette nipped between his lips this whole time. He steps back to the swaying center of the bridge and, with the bats now swarming above and below and to either side of him, he hurls the cigarette and prays, prays, prays for the spark and the foomp that finally comes and spreads with a great gasp of blue flame that sends him staggering back. The bats churn away with a collective shriek, some of them too late, their bodies alight and crisping to ash even as they try to outfly the burn.
At the far side of the bridge, Patrick turns back just in time to see that the timbers and the ropes have caught and risen into a chest-high door of fire. Through it crashes a lycan, Austin. One hand is pressed to his chest where blood pumps and the other steadies his balance against the blazing ropes that he seems not to feel. Fire creeps up his legs, up his torso, but the anger or the adrenaline masks the pain and he continues forward until Patrick empties a round into his face. He collapses and the charred boards crumble against his weight and his flaming body continues downward with a comet’s tail into the chasm that turns out to be four times as deep as it is wide.
*
This evening a pile of dead dogs burns on the central quad. Three men wearing pillowcases over their heads unloaded the carcasses, splashed them with gasoline, and set them aflame before tearing off in a pickup with no plates.
Claire can see the heap of blackened remains—and the groundskeepers surrounding it—from the dormitory laundry, a first-floor room with six machines lining the walls and a tile floor slippery with spilled soap and two windows looking out into the darkness with snow falling like translucent shreds of rice paper.
She has her earbuds in and listens to an NPR podcast about how the lycan demonstrations will affect tomorrow’s presidential election. Darrell West, a political analyst, predicts record turnouts and a rout for Chase Williams. “He’s got it. I think he’s got it. And I also think we need to be very, very careful about the backlash that could come of this—from both sides. Some lycans may be pushed into aggression—and some nonlycans may feel they have been granted permission to, to, to—let’s say—behave unkindly.”
She does not understand people—whether infected or clean—for their capability and appetite for violence. No other organism besides a virus seems so hungry to savage everything in its way. Violence defines humanity and determines headlines and elections and borders, the whole world boiled down to who hits whom harder.
She hates how poisonous she has become in her thinking. But these past two days, since she received the package, she has felt her vision blacken at times to a level only the blind would comprehend. Everything seems overwhelmingly dark, as if her side of the world has spun away from the sun and paused in its orbit. She might go mad if not for Matthew.
He will not let her go unless he goes with her. To this she has agreed, with reluctance but also with the sweet relief of someone starved biting into a pie. He needs this day to get his affairs in order. They will leave the next morning. Now she is doing their laundry on the lower floor of the dorm. Only five thirty and already full night. It gets dark so early now. She misses the sun. Despite the ugliness of her circumstances she finds herself smiling slightly at the sight of their colored clothes mixed up in the wash with a scoop of detergent sanded over the top.
She lets the lid to the machine fall with a bang and at that moment a shadow slides by the window. She only catches a sideways glimpse but it is enough to make her put a hand to her mouth.
Slowly she approaches the window. Behind her the washing machine hisses full of water and then gurgles and lurches alive. Through the weakly falling snow she sees him, maybe ten paces away, his back to her. Spotlighted by a cone of yellow light thrown by a security lamp. He is watching the groundskeepers as they chip and dig at the dogs with shovels, load their remains into black plastic bags.
It is him. She knows it is him. She doesn’t understand why—she can’t understand what she has that he wants—but after all this time, he has found her. In her mind’s eye, she sees him where he stands—wearing a black knee-length peacoat dusted with snow along the shoulders, his hatless head an inflamed pink—and as he was more than a year ago, a lean black outline stenciled against the night her parents died.