Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(134)
Five months later, an estimated five million are dead.
Everything has gone splendidly. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. Because of him. Because of him, a new nation has been carved out—with November 6 its Independence Day. It does not bother him that he is surrounded. Fencing, studded with military bases, corrals the borders of Washington and Oregon. Battleships patrol the coastline. Drones knife across the sky with a cut-paper whisper. Bombs sound like distant thunder. They reduce water towers, power stations, to smoldering craters. This is to be expected. So is the economic crisis—the S&P double downgrade, the stock market diving more than four thousand points—that will soon enough result in the retraction of the military. The Ghostlands, they must realize, are a lost cause. The Ghostlands, they will accept, are his.
He debated a long time where to headquarter. The capitol building would be too obvious, a mall or skyscraper too difficult to defend. They considered the Rajneesh compound in Central Oregon but decided it was too far from any resources. They considered a correctional institute in Salem, a squat, mustard-colored building, but he did not want any of his men to read into this a metaphor for what their life had become. He needed them happy. And he needed a city to loot. And he needed a defensible position. And that is why they chose the Pittock Mansion.
It is a twenty-three-room chateau—built in 1914 by Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian—in the West Hills of Portland. Forty-six acres surrounded by wrought-iron fencing that contains the sheep and goats and cattle that now wander the grounds. The walls are made from sandstone and will withstand gunfire. The fireplaces will keep them warm in the winter, the high ceilings cool in the summers. The outbuildings serve as storage for the gasoline they have harvested, for the iodine pills they crush into their meals and water to fight the radiation that brings sores to their skin.
He rolls down the hill now as part of a convoy—three black Expeditions tricked out with brush guards and bulletproof windows followed by a semi hauling a trailer. Despite the heat, he wears a tailored charcoal suit from Brooks Brothers. No tie. His long silvery hair carefully parted down the middle and tucked behind his ears. Next to him sits the giant, Morris Magog, crushed behind the steering wheel. The backseats have been folded down and upon them rest flats full of beans, rice, salsa, candy, granola bars, bags of chips, piles of fresh muskmelons to be distributed to all those who attend this afternoon’s gathering at Pioneer Courthouse.
He knows what they say about his eye. That he was wounded by shrapnel, that he was bitten by a snake, that he was poisoned by the military, that he was shot and the bullet passed through his cornea and nested in his brain. The truth is, when he was a boy, his vision began to fog over. Headaches plagued him daily. His mother took him to a doctor in his village, who examined him and told them it was a tumor and he did not have the ability to operate on it. His mother took him to a military hospital and begged their services. They turned her away, and when she would not leave, they struck her face with the butt end of a rifle and then kicked her when she fell. “But he will die,” she told them and they told her, “We know.” That was when his mother began to pray. She prayed when dawn broke and when night fell. She prayed before meals. She clasped her hands together and sometimes held him against her breast when whispering words he could not decipher, some desperate incantation to fight the nosebleeds and then the darkness that eclipsed his eye. One night he woke to find a white figure standing over his bed. There was only a smear where a face should have been. There were only tendrils where fingers should have been. It reached for him—it reached into him, into his face—and there he felt a needle jab of exquisite pain. When the hand retreated, it gripped something black and squirming. He believed this an extraordinary nightmare until the next morning when he woke and could see. Not perfectly, but he could see, his left eye like a dirty window. The doctor told him the tumor was gone. “I do not understand,” he said. “I must have been wrong.”
“By the will of God,” his mother said. By the will of God he lived. He was the will of God. He does not share this with others. He keeps it hidden, like the statue of a saint buried upside down in a backyard. It does not matter that his men believe in God—it only matters that they believe in him.
The Expedition follows the road down the hill and out the gates and through neighborhoods of tightly clustered bungalows, their yards waist-high with weeds and grass gone to seed. He spots snakes sunning themselves on the blacktop, bees swarming out of an open mailbox, a red-tailed hawk picking apart the purplish remains of a cat. He has helped make this happen: the world returning to its natural state.
When a deer bounds out between two houses and skitters to a stop in a driveway, he lays a hand on Magog’s wrist and tells him to stop. “Slowly.” He unholsters the 9-millimeter at his belt. The window hums when he opens it. He rests his elbows on the sill and closes his dead eye. The deer, a buck with the mere beginning of two velvety horns, stares back at him, twitches an ear, then startles backward when he fires. It makes it ten feet before collapsing. Its legs continue to kick as if dreaming their way to escape. He watches the animal until it goes still. “Throw it in the back,” he says. “We’ll spit it over the fire.” The giant swings open his door and climbs out and the vehicle shakes with his abandoned weight.
Balor holsters his pistol and closes the window and cranks the AC. He feels a pleasant heat spreading through him, a rush of endorphins that makes his mind buzz and his skin prickle. The equivalent, he supposes, of sex. He does not hunger for it the way the others do. He has never visited the woman they keep in the basement, though he is glad she is there to satisfy the others. He gratifies his appetite in other ways. The letting of blood, for him, like the letting of semen. An impulse that satisfies his hunger and his need to dominate and infect, to multiply.