Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(130)

“God.”

“He won’t be able to save you. Not where you’re going.” Then her expression softens and her head tilts, as if she hears something. “What’s that book you’ve got in your pocket?”

Patrick can feel the weight of it now at his breast, his notebook, the one salvaged from the Republic. His father’s. He keeps it always in his breast pocket, over his heart, to touch now and then. It seems to pulse, as if made of nerves and muscle. He has always turned to his father to know what to do. Now the book tells him what to do.

“There’s something in that book, but I don’t understand.” Strawhacker holds out her hand, the fingers long and bony, the nails rimmed with dirt. “What’s in that book?”

“Shut up about the book. I came to ask you about two people.”

“Tell me what’s in that book and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Patrick pulls out a wadded-up five-dollar bill and lays it on the table and it vanishes into Strawhacker’s hand. “These two people. You want to know if they’re alive or dead. One of them is, one of them isn’t. That’s all I know.”

“Some fortune.”

“You’re planning something. You are. You’re going to do something incredibly stupid, aren’t you?” She reaches out a hand for Patrick. “What is it you think is waiting for you out there? Beyond the fence? Tell me. Please.”

Her hand scrabbles closer and Patrick slams his fist down on it as if it were a spider.

Strawhacker cries out and the tavern goes silent and so many faces swing toward them and the bartender yells, “Hey!” Before anybody can ask a question, Patrick stands and snatches his poncho and shoves his way out the door and allows in the wind that extinguishes all the candles in one rushing breath.



The storm is stronger now. The rain lashes at him, pattering his poncho and needling his skin. He looks over his shoulder often, seeing if anyone follows, half expecting to see the long silhouette of the blind woman loping after him, the silken orbs of her eyes hatched, spiders spilling from the sockets.

He reaches for the book twice, reassured by the weight and pressure of it, as if it might have been snatched away after all. He has learned much from it. First that his father was experimenting with more than a neuroblocker for Volpexx. There are slips of paper printed from websites full of passages about neurodegenerative conditions associated with prions—everything from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to fatal insomnia to lobos—and how they are spread: the consumption of meat, the administration of human growth hormone, and sexual intercourse. There is no cure for prion infection and the pathogen is difficult to destroy, resilient to heat and enzymes.

And there are pages crammed with his small, square handwriting about stock cultures and select agent organisms and the CDC and sodium hypochlorite and on and on, like a language Patrick didn’t speak.

And then there was the very last page, ripped almost entirely, only a frayed sleeve of it remaining, on which is written half his Gmail address. His father, he knew, was paranoid. He wouldn’t correspond with Patrick through his military account because he thought someone would read their emails. And he constantly changed the passwords on his credit cards, frequent-flier programs, and other accounts because he was certain someone would hack him.

At first Patrick thought nothing of the email address, but something drew him back to it. Then one day, after peeling off his rain-soaked clothes, he noticed that his socks left the red imprint of their stitching on his clam-white foot. He stared at it for a long time before retrieving a pencil and opening the notebook to its second-to-last page and rubbing the graphite softly across it. There were the words already printed there, and then there were other words scarred over the top of them, the residue of what his father had scribbled on the other page. Patrick at first thought this hopeless, the graffiti twist of letters, but then he made out a stack of words with Xs through them: beer, yeast, California. Passwords. His father couldn’t remember his passwords, so he wrote them down. The final word in the column, the only one not crossed out, was his name, Patrick. Patrick was the password.

He had tried to email Neal Desai after he returned stateside, without success, the doctor missing, presumed dead. And he had tried to get the military and Google to hand over his father’s email accounts—but they wouldn’t until he was confirmed dead and Patrick named his inheritor.

Now he had the password—and it told him what he needed to know. It told him what he needed to do.

He turns again to check the road behind him and this time sees headlights cutting through the rain and steps off the road so that he won’t be struck. The vehicle—a van, he can now tell, one of the vans the nurses and EMTs have been using for medevac—slows as it nears him, and he throws out an arm, sticks up a thumb.

Lightning flashes and colors the world a pale blue. With the afterimage in his eyes and the rain pelting his face, he can hardly see a thing when he yanks open the door. He hears a woman’s voice yell, “Get in already,” and then, when he shakes off his poncho and pulls back the hood, “Oh.”

It takes him a minute. The darkness. The baggy uniform. The rain-swept confusion of the night. And then he notices her red hair, the color of a poisoned apple, chin length and tucked behind her ear. And she smiles, and he knows her, Malerie.

“You,” he says. He is halfway into the cab already, his foot on the railing, his hand on the dash, and he pulls back now and steps into the rain. “Second thought, I’d rather walk.”