Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(136)

“How about you? You ever been in love?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

In the barracks, in her private quarters, a square concrete cell with a sink and a bed and a bookshelf, she lies on top of Patrick, naked. He is bigger now, strapped with muscle, and he jokes that he might put her in his mouth like a piece of candy. She fingers the gummed-up scar along his shoulder. She lays an ear to his chest so she can listen to his heart. “Everybody always says they want life to be like in the movies,” she says and rakes her fingers through his chest hair. “Now it is. Now life is like a movie. But it’s the wrong movie.”

He says, “You said it,” but he isn’t really listening. He is too busy with his own thoughts, all mangled in his mind. He runs a finger up her spine, into her hair, then back down to her lumbar vertebrae, where her shoulders narrow into her neck. He circles the spot and she hums and says, “I like that.”

He wants to say, “You shouldn’t,” but doesn’t. This circle he traces is a sort of bull’s-eye. Here you put your knife if you want to paralyze someone. As much as it horrifies him, every part of her body he considers both a soft, curved, perfumed thing—and a target. Which gives him a sick feeling at the bottom of his heart he recognizes as both the beginnings of affection and the opposite of it.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got this filter, and all the stuff that’s supposed to go in and out, between the world and me, it gets muffled.”

He has never told anyone this before, but it is true. He doesn’t know whether it is the death of his father, his time in the Republic, the impossible devastation of the Hanford explosion, or some combination of them all, but emotionally, he hasn’t felt anything in a long time. A song on the radio that might have nodded his head, tapped his foot—or a scene in a movie that might have jacked up his heart rate—nothing. Food is filling and sex is emptying.

Malerie traces a fingernail around his nipple until it hardens into a point. “I need you to do something for me,” he says.

She pinches the nipple and he swats her hand away and she says, “Anything.”

Normally, in a combat zone, he only gets nights and weekends off, but to keep morale up, the brass is handing out liberty time. “I’ve got a few days libo coming up. I want you to sneak me into the Ghostlands.”

She sits up in bed; her breasts swing. “What on earth for?”

“That’s my business.”

“Fuck you, it’s your business.”

“Hey, you owe me, right?”

“I don’t owe you that much.”

“You owe me. You said it yourself. You owe me.”

“You’re going to end up dead or we’re both going to end up in the brig.”

“You owe me.”





Chapter 56



OF COURSE THERE ARE other ways into the Ghostlands besides the perimeter checkpoints. Looters have cut the wire fencing. Undocumented Mexicans too. Like pioneers following a trail west to begin anew and take whatever there is to take from the place, mine the ground, plant their crops, hammer together structures to protect them from the elements, to shelter them when they bear their children.

Then there are the freedom fighters—like Max and the Americans—who have tunneled under the perimeter so that they can go hunting. Max writes a blog called AngryAmerican. On it he posts music videos by Toby Keith, rants about closed borders, the effectiveness of torture, the need for lycan internment camps, the worthlessness of the dollar next to the euro. His bio reads, “I’m pissed.” His contact info is listed and every now and then he will receive an email calling him a villain or a hero. Some want to know how to join the fight. Some want to prove him wrong, to convert him. He loves how violent the liberals can get with their language. “I want to see you hang,” one wrote, “alongside the president. And as your faces turn blue and your eyeballs burst and dribble down your faces, I will laugh.”

Then comes the message from a man who wishes to remain anonymous and who works for the government and who wants to help Max in any way that he can. “I know,” he writes, “that you abhor the government for its interference and legion inefficiencies. As do I. I am not a politician, nor am I a bureaucrat. I am more like a missile or a handgun. I come to you as a weapon. And as a friend.”

Now, a few weeks and a few dozen emails later, here they are, in an abandoned Methodist church in the small town of Dorris, along the Oregon-California border. This is where they have been headquartered for the past two months. There was a time when Max believed that writing a letter and handing out flyers and speaking at farmers’ markets and marching on Washington made a difference, but that time is over. He believes in action. He believes in doing.

He has a dozen men who believe the same. They sit in the pews around him. Their heads are shaved. Their shirts are white, their pants khaki, their boots polished black. They do not cuss. They do not drink or smoke or befoul their bodies. They spend several hours a week throwing weights around and riding stationary bikes to thicken their bodies with muscle and ready them for the long-distance running and hand-to-hand combat sometimes necessary in the Ghostlands. The backs of their hands are inked with silver bullets.

A homemade banner hanging from the wall reads FELLOWSHIP. The stained-glass windows glow faintly with moonlight, all their fragmented colors reduced to blue. A kerosene lantern shines on the communion table. The candelabras—lit and set about the room—sputter.