Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(127)

Everyone talks about Balor. Balor this, Balor that. He isn’t sure what to believe, but he likes to believe it all. That Balor punched a hand through a chest and tugged out a heart and took a bite of it like an apple. That Balor could rip a tree from its roots. That Balor could see things with his dead eye that others could not, could see right into your soul and know whether you believed or did not believe, so you had better believe. And he, Marvin, believed.

The engine whines and the propeller spins in a gray blur. He cruises along at eighty ktas with his hands tight around the yoke, trying to hold steady and correcting against light turbulence, keeping his eye on the directional and elevation, everything thrown off by the heavy payload he’s carrying. Yesterday, they unbolted the seat and filled the belly of the plane with C-4. A postdoc chemist made the C3H6N6O6 in their basement lab, where they mixed the powder with water to make a slurry and then polyisobutylene to bind it and then they sucked out the water by drying and filtering and then added a plasticizer to make it gummy and the end result wasn’t so different from a bunch of gray Play-Doh. Marvin watched all this and understood it because science is something he understands so much better than those dumb novels and poems and plays his dumb English teacher is always assigning and talking about breathlessly as if they mattered and people didn’t spend all their time watching TV anyway.

At the moment of ignition, the C-4 releases nitrogen and carbon oxides that expand at more than twenty-six thousand feet per second and knock flat and rip to pieces anything and everything within its reach. Less than a pound of C-4 can reduce several people to meat. A little more than a pound can open up a truck like a soup can. In the fuselage behind him, he has more than five hundred pounds of clay. That’s a lot. That’s enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe.

They taught him all of this. They taught him so much. They taught him how to veer off his flight plan—from SeaTac to TriCities—after about twenty minutes, when he neared the Columbia River, the timing such that the explosion ought to correspond roughly with the execution. They taught him to cut his lights. They taught him to ignore air traffic and snap off his radio. They taught him to bring the plane down to ten thousand feet and then five thousand and then two thousand feet and press the nose downward and aim for the black mouth of the Columbia Generating Station, at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

They taught him to ignore the fear that might take hold of him—his heart crashing, his body like a drum—and to remember that it would all be over soon. And then he would be in the newspaper. Then he would be a hero. Everyone would know his name. Even Tiffany.

The explosion will have two phases. First, the gases will expand like a terrible wind, but in doing so they will suck everything out of the heart of the explosion, which makes a vacuum. Second, after the initial blast, everything will rush back and create another energy wave. He likes the idea of that. He likes the idea of everything rushing toward him. All that energy channeled inward. For the next few days, months, years, he will be the center of the world.

He asked if many people would die, and they said yes. And he asked if even babies would die, and they said yes. “Sometimes,” they told him, “terrible things must be done.” Did he understand? He did.

He banks left and makes a yawing motion with the rudder and tries to eyeball the red blinking lights of the power plant over the nose of the plane. Once east of the Cascades, the rain lifted and he can clearly see the Columbia, a great black snake, and the gridwork of electricity next to it, the TriCities, and then, closer by the second, the tiered stacks of buildings and the six steaming cones of the reactors that squat like giant mushrooms. He pitches the nose and reduces power and steadies the throttle as he heads toward them.



*



They are headed toward darkness. A black bank of clouds piles up on the Cascades. Though it is a moonless night, Claire can discern them from the way they blot out the stars. This is November 6, Election Day, and the clock reads 7:50 and a crumpled Burger King bag lies at her feet and she and Matthew are a few hours out of Spokane, just north of Yakima, crossing the scablands of eastern Washington on their way to Seattle. When she thinks about what is ahead and behind her, when she thinks about Jeremy’s execution, the burger she ate goes sour, and she fights the urge to empty the surge in her stomach.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’re in trouble. I want to help.”

“Is that your thing? Girl in danger?”

“Maybe.”

She makes a show out of rolling her eyes, though he can’t see her except by the glow of the dash.

She remembers one time, on a road trip to northern Minnesota with her parents, along Lake Superior, she squatted behind some dunes to pee. After she zipped up she noticed that three white butterflies had already drunk from the moist spot she left in the sand. They were beautiful, but as they drank greedily she wondered if their wings shuddered from pleasure or from poison. She cannot help but feel this way about the two of them, about whatever it is they have, which can’t possibly be sustainable. She is toxic. No good comes to anyone close to her.

He keeps jogging through the radio stations, mostly sermons and country songs, hunting for something about the election or the execution. She feels torn in too many directions at once and can only concentrate on the road ahead, on Miriam, on the possibility of finding her. She hears something over the radio, the buzz of a horsefly. Somehow it has survived the cold and stubbornly clings to life. It drones past her head, a greenish blur, and batters the windshield, looking for a way out. Matthew leans forward in his seat and swats at the windshield, missing, sending the fly into a wild buzzing panic. “Leave it,” she says.