Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(128)

Outside the window she can make out a browned-grass ditch and then miles of shorn wheat fields punctuated by the clustered lights of farms. The state is so divided, like Oregon, the high desert soon giving way to rain forest, where mushrooms and ferns press upward from the mossy earth. She looks forward to getting there, the greening of a world otherwise gone dun and gray. She reaches out and takes his big hand in hers. “Tell me things are going to turn out okay.”

“Things are going to turn out okay.” He squeezes her hand—and the pressure seems to send all the blood to her chest.

It is then, in a white flash, that the horizon explodes.





Part III





Chapter 52



PATRICK IS LOOKING for the woman named Strawhacker. Her eyes are scarred with cataracts, so gray they might have been spun by spiders. But she can see—that’s what people say. She can see things others cannot.

This is March—along the Idaho-Oregon border—where Patrick has been stationed the past few weeks at an FOB devoted to cleanup. Nearly five months have passed since, in the Republic, he came staggering back to Tuonela with his boots full of numbing snow, only to find most of the soldiers already departed. “Pack your ruck,” the guard told him. “We’re going home.”

“What?”

“The war is at home.”

His first assignment: a Nebraska tent city, outside Omaha, one of hundreds set up to accommodate the newly homeless and to quarantine the newly infected, many of them jeweled in sores and vomiting blood. Then the dead bodies started piling up. Then the riots began. For obvious reasons he hated it there, but the Nebraska sky bothered him more than anything. With no mountains to interrupt it, he felt blotted out, weighted down by its enormous size.

He requested a transfer into toxic cleanup and got it. It was the assignment no one wanted. They sent him home, to Oregon, to the place everyone else had fled, to join more than a hundred thousand cleaners already there. That’s what the military called the microbiologists and doctors and botanists and cleanup and construction crews: the cleaners. Many of them—some ten thousand—have since died from radiation poisoning, the gamma-ray intensity and the long-term exposure about as healthy as a shot of mercury to the jugular. Many more have vanished beyond the perimeter, presumed dead from lycan attacks.

This is where he needs to be. This is where he will find what he is looking for, what his father was looking for.

Tonight, in the high desert, the temperature hovers above freezing. Rain falls. Mud sucks at his boots when he tromps the streets of the FOB. The three-acre base was built around a deserted community center outside Ontario—fortified by Hescos and wrapped in hurricane wire—and he is headed outside the gates to a bar called the Dirty Shame. This is where he will find the woman, Strawhacker, who deposits herself there every evening to nurse whiskey and tell the fortune of any who seek her out.

Patrick feels like a fool but cannot help himself. Along I-84, near the security checkpoint, there is a gray-slatted barn that has become a billboard for the lost. Thousands of sun-bleached photos have been tacked to it. They streak in the rain and they flutter and tear away with the wind. People have written across them, in neat block letters, Need to find my daughter or Have you seen me? or Worked for Nike with emails and phone numbers listed. Patrick stapled a note there, too. Missing, it read. Beneath this are two names. Susan Gamble is one, Claire Forrester the other.

He has scanned the faces of the survivors—many of them lycans, sick from radiation or disenchanted with the Resistance after several months of living off the grid—who day after day still stagger through the checkpoint. He has tried calling his mother but only gets a recording that says, “This number is no longer in service.” He has tried emailing them both, but his messages go unanswered. He is not surprised. With few exceptions, once you step inside the Ghostlands—that’s what the media are calling it, the Ghostlands—you can no longer rely on electricity or phone service.

The wind rises and the rain blows sideways and he ducks under the dripping eaves of twenty plywood structures of the same boxy design, workspaces of the clerks, liaison officers, battalion, and company staff. SWA huts, GP tents. Then he passes the mess hall, as big as a barn, built as an extension off the community center kitchen. He can hear the KBR contractors inside, clattering pans, tocking their knives across cutting boards, getting ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. He holds his breath when he passes by a long row of Porta-Johns. They are stacked next to a tan tent the size of an RV, lit up from within, rowdy with laughter. He hears the snap and riffle of playing cards. Most of the sleeping quarters are like this, canvas topped with rows and rows of racks inside them, rucksacks and weapons littered everywhere. Generators groan. Lights sputter in the community center, home to the labs, offices for tactical planning.

He signs out at the gate and splashes a quarter mile along a heat-cracked county highway to the Dirty Shame, a tavern built into the side of a hill, a long windowless rectangular box of railroad ties with a sawdust floor and a mirror behind the bar with a bullet hole in it. The electricity here can no longer be relied on, so the meager smoky lighting comes from lanterns and candles that sputter and dance when he creaks open the door and peels off his poncho and shakes away the rain and hangs it from an iron hook.

Shavings cling to the mud on his boots. The oven-warm air smells like the creosote and formaldehyde the ties were treated with, the smell powerful enough to make everyone dizzy, along with the beer foaming out of mugs and curling down wrists, the whiskey shots lined up on the bar and slammed back with a gasp. There are thirty or so people drinking tonight, some soldiers, some civilians, who in this tight space give off a lot of heat and noise. He works his way through them to the bar, where he orders a beer and pays without any trouble. ID doesn’t matter in a place and time like this.