Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(126)

Francis passes by the window again, still fingering the popped zit and speaking now on his cell phone. She does not feel particularly surprised at his presence here: he has always felt to her more shadow and bone than flesh and blood. He is an informer. She can hear his voice more clearly and makes out the words imminent and campus shutdown.

That is enough to send her racing into the night. Midway across campus she observes the windmill. Even now, from several hundred yards away, she can hear the hum, along with the blades whir-whir-whirring as they cut the air. A red light blinks a warning.





Chapter 51



THE EXECUTION WILL take place at eight p.m.—the very minute the presidential polls close.

The tribunal that convicted Saber deliberated less than an hour before recommending he be put to death. The defendant’s remorseless courtroom monologue—in which he questioned who the real monster was and demanded that lycans rise up against the American war machine—only convinced the tribunal that they made the right decision. The judge was permitted to reduce the death penalty to life without parole, but he did not. He imposed the sentence—and now, on this November evening, with ice in the air and stars in the sky, with no possibility of an appeal or stay of execution, the sentence will be carried out.

After the verdict was imposed, Jeremy was transferred thirty miles south of Denver, to the supermax detention center, a white-roofed, brick-walled structure with a lake of asphalt around it that spreads into brown-grass plains.

The crowd began gathering earlier that day, soon after the president released a statement that said, “Saber met the fate he chose for himself nearly a year ago. The matter will soon be concluded, and then our country can move on.” At first a few dozen people appeared, and then twice as many, and then twice as many more, every few minutes another vehicle pulling in, until the visitors’ lot was full and the cars and trucks began to park along the road they followed in from US 67. Some wore William Archer sweatshirts and some carried signs that read RESISTANCE NOW and BETTER DEAD THAN DRUGGED.

By lunch the guards had arranged themselves in a wall between the protesters and the facility. They wear riot gear—black hard-shell armor, goggles, helmets, pistols at their belts—and they hold their rifles diagonally before their chests. And by dinner a long line of squad cars, with their blue and red lights flashing, pressed through the crowd and parked in a defensive line and asked everyone, through a loudspeaker, to disperse. No one did.

At seven thirty, they begin to stomp. One foot and then the other. As if they are trying to kick their heels through the asphalt they stand upon, as if they are trying to crack the very shell of the earth. They know the noise can be heard for many miles, can be heard through the cement walls, can be heard by Jeremy Saber when he is escorted by the priest and the two guards down the long hall to the glass-walled execution chamber, his ankles and his wrists bound by hinged cuffs. Their stomping keeps its cadence, like the drumbeats that precipitate war, and when a few minutes later Jeremy is strapped into the chair and a stream of drugs is administered through a needle in his right leg, the noise will still be in his heart.



*



He found them online. Or maybe they found him. He was mouthing off in one of those Internet chat rooms when he got the request for a private chat and then one thing led to another and here he is, however many months later, piloting a Cessna single-engine Skyhawk through a rain-swept sky. It is a little hard to process.

His name is Marvin. No one ever remembered his name. He hated that. Hated that he was so forgettable. “You look like the most ordinary person in the world.” That’s what a girl named Tiffany once told him. He remembered her name. He hated her and for a long time imagined different ways to kill her—pushing her in front of a school bus, slamming her head repeatedly into her locker, strangling her with an athletic sock. He hated her and he hated school. He hated his stupid teachers and the stupid students and the stupid books in which the letters kept moving, crawling all over each other like ants.

But they remembered his name. They treated him like he was somebody. They gave him things. An Xbox, they gave him that. They gave him a gun, a Hardballer .45. For his eighteenth birthday, they gave him a woman. That was nice. Except that she wouldn’t kiss him even though she would let him do everything else. So he ended up just putting his mouth over hers and breathing into it. There have been many since then, most recently a black-haired woman whose sharp face makes him think of a bird. They keep her wrists and ankles handcuffed to a steel frame bed. He doesn’t mind that she spits, that she tries to bite him when he lies with her. He doesn’t mind that at all.

He trained for two months—the medical exam, the forty hours of flight time—and when he learned that it cost three thousand dollars he said he couldn’t possibly pay for that and they said not to worry. They would take care of him. He would never have to pay for anything again. That was nice. He had trouble reading the books, so they read the books to him. That was nice too, being read to. It made him feel like he was their child, like they were his parents. He could remember what he needed to remember—about ground check and throttling to two thousand rpm and checking your magnetos and suction and oil pressure and all that—but he had trouble putting the letters down. They had a copy of the test and they made him practice it over and over again until he got it right. When he got it right, they told him he was smart and he liked that. It was nice. He had never smiled so big in his whole entire life.