Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(135)
Several hundred of his children will be in attendance today. He knows there are thousands of others spread across the Pacific Northwest and more trying to sneak their way past the border every day. He knows they are afraid. He knows some of them are sick. He knows that they are uncomfortable and inconvenienced by the lack of electricity and running water. He will tell them that their discomfort is only temporary. He will tell them his plans. He will shake every one of their hands and he will look into every one of their eyes and he will tell them not to worry for this is only the beginning.
Chapter 55
THIS SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS, in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, dogs roam freely, broken glass sparkles in the streets, front doors swing open and shut with the wind, freezers leak lines of blood, bodies lay about in various states of decay, as rounded and wooden as their own coffins. As a cleaner, in a radiation suit straight out of Buck Rogers, Patrick and his squad clear roads of abandoned vehicles, drag corpses into piles and light them up with flamethrowers. The reasoning is unclear, the area uninhabitable. But orders are orders.
As is the case with Chernobyl, a concrete sarcophagus now encases the Hanford site, but the damage has been done. Radiation will cling to the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Whether a hundred or a thousand or a million years, the president says, it doesn’t matter: the United States will reclaim Oregon and Washington one town at a time.
Nobody wants to go out on the wire. Everyone wants sentry duty at the Ontario checkpoint. Keeping the curious and the crazies and the lycan sympathizers out, treating with chemical showers all those who travel within. Hurricane fencing stretches off into the distance. The interstate leading up to the checkpoint is stacked with concrete blockades so that cars must crank their wheel one way, then another, then another, slowing to a crawl before reaching the first security post, twenty yards out. Exiting the Ghostlands takes four stages. First, every vehicle is searched, and then everyone, after which time they are photographed, fingerprinted, questioned—then sent to a dosimeter crew for radiation and blood tests—followed by several hours of detainment in a chain-link pen while their case is considered.
There was a time when the line of cars stretched off into the desert haze, but these days, most everyone who wants to flee has fled, except for the occasional lycan disenchanted after living too long without restaurants, Internet, electricity. Sometimes two or three days go by when no civilians pass through the checkpoint at all.
Everyone likes it this way, likes how peaceful and predictable sentry duty has become, with plenty of time for bullshit and magazines, darts, card games, almost like a vacation, the world so empty here, with the sagebrush flats stretching off into the distance. It is a stark, beautiful landscape, untroubling because it is composed mostly of nothing.
This has made the soldiers on sentry duty lazy, so Patrick is certain he can get away with his plan. And Malerie is going to help him, though she doesn’t know it yet.
From his father’s email account, he patched together hundreds of pages of correspondence with Neal Desai. He already knew they had gone to college together at UC Davis, both biochem majors, but that was the extent of it. He learned that his father had enlisted around the same time Neal began applying to graduate programs, that his father had taken the job at the brewery around the same time Neal accepted a postdoc fellowship. His father had been experimenting on dogs in his garage while Neal was training a lab of technicians how to inject prions into the brain of a rat. Their children—Patrick and a girl named Sridavi—were around the same age. And both men had a personal stake in their research: they loved the infected.
In one of their emails—which dated back almost two years—his father wrote, “I was thinking about that time we tried to buy beer. You remember that? We glued on beards we bought from the Halloween store. The guy at the liquor store took one look at us and said get lost. We were so depressed. We were so sure we were going to be able to pull it off. I can’t stop thinking about those beards. Those stupid glue-on beards. What if the body doesn’t have the same careful eye as that guy at the liquor store? We know it doesn’t.”
To stimulate an immune response, to get the body to recognize lobos as an infection, his plan was to develop a vaccine that attaches prion proteins to a live modifier, an altered and attenuated strain of salmonella.
Neal took it away from there, and Patrick saw that the “Breakthrough!” message his father sent him corresponded directly with the first successful inoculation of an infected dog.
The vaccine is ready. It has not gone through human trials, but it is ready. Waiting for him in the Ghostlands.
Malerie has that special shade of hair, sometimes red and sometimes brown, depending on the light. Back in high school she was good to look at, but out here, with nothing but men and wild dogs to keep everyone company, she is beautiful. She has apologized to him endlessly over the past few days. “I’ve done a lot of growing up since then,” she says. So has he. Those were different times, and he can’t help but feel inclined to forgive her and enjoy the hard bud of her body, her Eastern Oregon drawl like a mouthful of honey, their conversations about everything—about love. “I thought I loved Max,” she says, “but I was wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love. Like, movie love. Like, can’t-think-straight head-over-heels love.” She has not seen Max since graduation, and good riddance. After the courthouse square bombing, she says, he became even more dangerous, obsessive.