Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(131)
Maybe it is the way she chases after him, maybe it is the way she fiercely apologizes and calls herself stupid, the stupidest person in the world, maybe it is the torrential downpour or the grumbling thunder or his general loneliness or the sick-scared feeling that has followed him from the bar, but he finally says all right, all right, and lets her give him a ride back to the base and an hour later he has her propped up on a bathroom sink and is f*cking her while staring at his reflection hard in the mirror.
Chapter 53
CLAIRE HAS SWEAT through her clothes digging his grave. Now she sits cross-legged against an oak and stares at the hump of dirt with the shovel stabbed into it. The shade offers no relief from the heat. Neither does the canteen of water she gulps, splashes her face with. A cloud of humidity hangs over everything, like the breath of the reactor. A bluebottle fly buzzes languidly through the air and orbits her head before settling on her wrist to drink from the sweat beading there. She watches it a moment, then crushes it with her palm, a smear of blood and black twitching legs.
She could have buried Matthew anywhere—a park, a backyard—but she chose a graveyard. With all the disorder in the world—helicopters stuttering overhead, cars rusting in the streets, neighborhoods burning, birds falling dead from the sky—she liked the order of the place and the act. Burying him here, among his fellow dead and the tidy granite headstones, felt good, felt right.
She found a place on a hill, an empty spread of grass, and stomped the blade of her shovel into it. She took her time—pressing down with her foot, leaning into the handle, sinking the blade into the soil with a slow scuff. Sweat trailed down her forehead and stung her eyes and blurred her vision of the hole growing larger and larger beneath her. The loamy, overturned earth mixed up with the smell of his pungent body. Her hands first blistered, then wept, then bled. After three hours, she had gone three feet. She tried not to look at his body when she dragged it to the edge of the hole, rolled it in with a thud. But she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that he landed facedown, his arm bent at an unnatural angle behind his back. She couldn’t let him lie like that for the rest of eternity. She dropped into the hole and, with some difficulty, flopped him over, folded his arms over his chest, where his heart was hidden. The day was hot, but he was as cool as the exposed dirt, and she fought the temptation to shove a gun in her mouth and lie down beside him. She looked at him then—saw his skin graying and swelling around the edges, saw half his face missing as if someone had taken a bite out of it—and the urge passed and she only wanted to cover him up, to forget.
Sometimes Chinook choppers buzz the sky like hornets. Sometimes they drop cartons of Volpexx and sometimes they drop bombs. Sometimes soldiers spill out of Humvees and staple posters to telephone poles and storefronts and garage doors, posters about amnesty and contamination, about what will happen to those who choose to remain behind: imprisonment, a slow death from radiation, a swift death from execution should they engage with any military personnel.
She doesn’t need a poster to tell her this. The reminders are everywhere. Bodies sit on park benches. Bodies are buckled into cars. Bodies are curled up on sidewalks. Some of them with blackened skin the wind dusts away, their carcasses nothing more than dried-out husks encasing a bundle of bones. Some of them, more freshly dead, gunshot or clawed up or bright with sores and missing clumps of hair and stinking so badly that she rarely goes a day without retching between her feet.
It is because of Matthew that she is alive and it is because of her that Matthew is dead. Five months ago, when the sky lit up, he drove them directly to the Seattle REI and hurled a rock through the window and ignored the alarm blaring while he shrugged on a backcountry pack and she did the same to fill with iodine tabs and Clif Bars and knives and matches and tents and sleeping bags and aluminum blankets and rain gear. They even got a bicycle rack and two Treks, and when she yelled, “Why?” over the alarm, he said, “For when there’s no more gas.” He understood it all so clearly, as if their story were a novel and he simply flipped to the end to see what would happen.
They should have left—with the millions of others who sought escape from a ruined world and treatment for their ruined bodies—but they hesitated. Within a day, the gas stations dried up, the freeways gridlocked, clogged with cars, many of them abandoned. The whole world deafened by sirens and horns, gunfire. Soon it was too late: she could not make it through the checkpoints the military established. Matthew could have left but he did not.
Now she is alone. Now he is dead. Now he is buried beneath a mound of black dirt with a shovel stuck in it. She does not cry. Though sweating feels like a kind of crying, her clothes soaked through, her hair plastered to her forehead in damp whorls. When her hair started to grow out blond again, he touched its roots and said, “Why did you hide that from me?” He called it the color of beaten gold, and she called him an English major. When it was long enough, he helped her scissor away the dyed sections of her hair so that she looked like one person, not two.
It happened yesterday. Here in Monmouth. They came from the coast, where Matthew had the idea to steal a boat and sail it north to British Columbia. The beaches were strewn with the reeking carcasses of crab, halibut, sharks, whales thickly netted with flies, poisoned from the Columbia’s outflow, and she could see the cutters and battleships floating several miles out that would intercept them.