Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(132)
On the road they met another couple—Ella and Sam, who were like them; there were many like them, lycans who didn’t want any trouble, who only wanted to be left alone—and they spent the past week together, sleeping in an abandoned house, a brick ranch, nothing conspicuous. They drank gin and talked books and politics and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. One morning, while Claire slept off a hangover, Matthew and the others were sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee and reading old magazines, when a chopper passed overhead.
Choppers were always passing overhead and they ignored it. But it didn’t ignore them. It spotted the three of them—then lit them up with a chain gun. Target practice. She woke to the rattle of gunfire and then the rotor wash banging closed the front door.
She blames herself for not being beside him. She blames Matthew for being so careless and arrogant. She blames the soldier who manned the chain gun, blames the pilot who hovered the Blackhawk over the house, blames the brass for sending squads into an irrecoverable wasteland, blames the entire U.S. war machine for fencing lycans in, here and abroad, and expecting them to tuck tail. But most of all she blames the Resistance. She blames Balor. Because of him everyone believed that lycans are feral, are capable only of raw animality. Because of him her world has become one big grave.
She pops a few iodine pills and glugs them down with a long pull from her canteen. She knows the iodine can only do so much to defend her, to fight the radiation. She knows that, given enough time to work its way through her system, the radiation will bloom into yellow tumors.
There are other unmarked, freshly dug graves here in this cemetery. And there are unburied bodies, too, maybe the remains of those who dragged themselves here to expire. Again she considers joining them, opening up her head with a bullet. This isn’t a new impulse. She thinks often about suicide. A rope around her neck knotted to a garage beam. A dive from the top of a building. A long swim into the ocean. After a momentary discomfort, there would be no more hunger, no more fear, no more running and running and running.
The shovel she used still has a neon-yellow $19.99 price stickered to it. She was in a fog when she roamed the store, a Bi-Mart at the end of the block, not looking for anything except what she needed: a wheelbarrow to transport his body, a shovel to bury him. She left Ella and Sam where they lay on the porch. She could muster the energy for only one funeral. Now that is done. Now, she supposes, she needs to return to the store. Several times a day she pumps up her back bicycle tire and needs a patch kit for the leak. Ammo, if she can find any. Nuts, granola bars. A new jacket, the one she stole from REI rotted through from the toxic rain.
Finally she stands. For a long time she wavers in place, like a risen corpse, before stumbling down the hill. It feels good to have a job. A purpose. It makes her not think about killing herself. It helps clarify her mind, propel her body. She will leave the graveyard. She will collect her supplies. And then she will, to the best of her ability, find Balor and put a bullet through his eye.
She is near the gated entrance to the cemetery when she hears it—the distant noise of dogs barking accompanied by a high-pitched and unmistakably human scream.
She gave up on her Glock after it jammed twice. She prefers the reliability, the heft and power, of the .357 Smith & Wesson she pried from a corpse at a kitchen table, a suicide outside Portland, his hand curled so tightly around the stock she had to break his fingers. Everywhere she goes, she takes the revolver with her, carried in a belt holster so that she has a yellow callus along her hip. She withdraws it now.
The graves—marked mostly with crosses, rounded and squared headstones, punctuated by the occasional crypt—rise up the hill. At its summit she spots movement. Someone running. A girl. She wears a white T-shirt several sizes too big, so that she at first appears a billowing phantom. She darts between the graves, zigzagging down the hill.
The barking grows louder. Claire spots them, a tide of dogs—white and gray and brown—plunging down the hillside, chasing the girl. The distance between them closes. Thirty yards, twenty yards, ten. The girl is almost at the bottom of the slope when she risks a look over her shoulder. The dogs are nearly upon her, their barking more frenzied, maddened by the near taste and smell of her.
She realizes the futility of running any farther and clambers up the side of a marble crypt. A Doberman launches itself into the air and snaps its jaws at her dangling feet. But she is too quick. The crypt is six feet tall and topped by a crouching angel and the girl climbs onto its winged shoulders.
This whole time Claire has remained statue still, as if her exhaustion or apathy has created an unbridgeable separation between her and the girl. She came here to say good-bye. Not for this. Not more trouble. But the sight of the girl, maybe ten years old, long black hair falling to either side of her head, surrounded by yapping dogs that tense their hindquarters and flatten their ears and howl for her blood, makes her guts boil with anger. She cannot stop herself. She throws herself toward the crypt, pumping her legs, cocking her revolver.
Now that the girl is out of reach, she watches the dogs calmly, as if they are stuffed animals and not something she needs to fear—until one of them, a big standard poodle, stands up on its hind legs as if to push the crypt over. She screams.
This sends the dogs into convulsions, exciting them even more. They jitter and prance and wag their whole bodies and bawl like some kind of mob hungry for an execution. Claire counts twenty of them—Rottweilers, Dobermans, German shepherds, Labradors, even a wiener dog. Their coats are knotted and filthy and speckled with burs.