Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(138)
From outside came a flash of light, as if a passing truck had clicked on its brights. Then the picture on the television lurched and froze and collapsed into darkness. Three lightbulbs sizzled, then exploded. A teacup shuddered off the counter and shattered against the tile.
He hurried out into the yard in time to see the moon lit red, like some new sun swung into orbit. The sky to the north churned with what could be clouds or could be smoke. His first instinct is to call out for his wife and daughter, but they are gone. Gone to Washington. The direction of the blast. Where Sridavi was supposed to be safe, to heal. He was alone.
By the time he discovered what had happened, by the time he shoved his revolver into the waist of his pants, by the time he packed some food in a duffel and ripped the cords from his computer and hurled them both into the car, it was too late.
The streets were jammed with cars. The night chaotic with honking, screaming. He heard gunfire. He saw pillars of smoke rising from fires lit by arson or short circuit. He didn’t have far to go—the lab only five miles away—but the streets were impassable and he had not filled up on gas, as he meant to the other day, so he worried his quarter of a tank might not be enough to get him through the gridlock. Brake lights colored the night red. He was laying on his horn—trying to blast the traffic unstuck, though he knew it was pointless—when he saw the first lycan.
Neal did not recognize him immediately for what he was. The man seemed drunk or mad or injured because of the swaybacked, loose-limbed way he moved. The streetlamps were dead, so it wasn’t until he stepped into the road, into the sweep of headlights, that Neal noticed the hair, the blunt snout, the blood-bathed teeth. He ripped open the door of a canary-yellow VW bug and climbed in to join the passengers, who flailed their arms and struggled too late with their seat belts.
Neal hit the door locks and glanced suddenly around him. He was in a commercial area and the sidewalks and parking lots were busy with people clustered in groups and hurrying along, all their faces dark and impossible to decipher. There was an alley up ahead that cut between a sandwich shop and a bookstore and he cranked the wheel and pounded the car up on the sidewalk. People dodged out of his way, some of them cursing him, throwing up their arms, knocking a fist into his windshield—and then he was in the alley, rushing past the Dumpsters and splashing through puddles left by yesterday’s rainstorm. His side mirror struck a pipe and ripped off.
When he cut through the other side, to a side street full of saltbox houses with chain-link fences, he spotlighted a long-haired lycan—whether man or woman, he couldn’t tell—hunched over a girl and feeding on the bowl of her belly. He took his foot off the brake and mashed it onto the gas and gritted his teeth against the heavy thud, the rise and fall of the left front wheel when he rocked over and crushed both their bodies.
He saw, in the labyrinthine route he followed to the lab, many more lycans tearing off their clothes and scrabbling about on all fours and tackling passersby. He cranked the radio dial and the few stations that came through told him what he already knew: this was an uprising. Later, the world would learn that many lycans were as afraid as Neal, as eager to escape, but right now there was the overwhelming sense that the world had gone feral.
The radio told him that the blast originated in the TriCities area, that by all accounts the reactors were in a state of meltdown. He accepted then that his wife and daughter were dead—lost to a blast as severe as the sun’s breath—but did not have time to mourn them, all of his energy focused on the five feet of road unspooling ahead of him.
The Center for Lobos Studies was a galaxy of light. The emergency generators had kicked on when the blackout hit. The parking lot, as expected, was empty. Even the security guards had abandoned their posts, the booth at the gates vacant and brightly lit, a paperback novel laid open to the page its owner thought he would one day return to. Neal drove into the entry lane, his grille nudging the crossbar, before killing the engine. In the sudden silence he noticed he was breathing as if back from a hard run.
Over the past few months, there had been protests staged in the parking lot. Virtually every day, security ended up hauling someone away, someone waving a gun, a knife. More than once, Neal was evacuated due to a bomb scare. Some of them were animal rights protesters and some of them lycan sympathizers and some of them lycans. If this was an uprising, then the center would be in their crosshairs. Neal didn’t think he had much time.
He had been working out of the old lab for the past few months, while construction continued on the five-million-dollar Pfizer-funded extension. It was a massive round-roofed building that looked like a whaleback rolling out of the earth. Last he heard, they were to begin moving their equipment next week, the exterior finished, the interior electrical, tile work, and painting still under way. One of its features: a safe room in the basement with coded locks, refrigeration units, a separate well, filtered air, and generators with enough fuel to last six months.
He hurried the two hundred yards, first with his duffel and computer, a stitch in his side so severe he felt as if a knife had run through his ribs. He keyed open the building and tromped down the stairs and rounded the corner to where the door was waiting for him, as unassuming as a closet except for the steel-tooth keypad. He punched in the code, his birthday, and it swung open with the cold breath of a crypt.
He dumped everything he carried and then ran back upstairs and exited the building and staggered more than ran to his lab, where he unlocked a storage cabinet and grabbed as many vaccine vials as he could fit in his pockets. He nearly took them from the fridge and then decided he couldn’t trust the power, so chose the vials full of lyophilized powder that were sterile and must be reconstituted with diluent before injection. They were stable enough to survive harsh conditions.