Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(139)

He hurried his way outside again. When he plodded along the pathways that snaked between the buildings, the vials clinked and jingled. He realized he was sweating heavily, despite the night’s chill. He could not seem to get enough air—and his chest ached in time with his pulse. He leaned against a building as long as he dared.

He wanted to lie down in the grass and rest. It looked so soft and he was so tired. But he couldn’t. The cranberry glow of the sky reminded him of that.

On trembling legs, he started forward, not jogging, walking, knowing he would collapse if he wasn’t careful. A cold wind blew and the bare-branched trees shook like things half-alive. He was twenty yards away from the Pfizer Lab when he heard the roar of engines, saw headlights smear across the glass-doored entry. He tried to turn and as he did so his knee popped, buckled. He fell into a heap.

He felt a sharpness and heard a sharp chiming at his side. He had crushed some of the vials. He lay there a moment, willing himself to move, gulping air down a throat that felt blistered, as if he had been sucking on a hair dryer. There was something wrong with his knee. It felt loose, unbound. And when he tried to move it, he felt a sting, as if a wasp had burrowed into the joint. He struggled into a seated position and then managed to stand upright. His knee nearly gave way, but he had no choice except to put the pain far from his mind. He dragged himself forward—a few feet at a time—lurching and resting, lurching and resting.

He heard glass exploding. He heard wood splintering, metal banging, plastic shattering—and he could picture clearly the desks overturned and file cabinets knocked over and computers hurled against walls, their wiry guts spilling everywhere. Then he heard footsteps padding along the concrete pathway.

He groped for the revolver at his waist. It was slick with sweat and lost in the fat of his belly. By the time he retrieved it, the lycan was almost upon him. A woman. Her hair dreadlocked. A hemp necklace the only thing she wore. He did not get a closer look than this because she did not pause in her approach, a blur of hair and muscle. He fired. The bullet shouted. She squealed and fell and curled up on herself.

Once the gunshot faded, howling replaced it. They would close in on him soon.

Somehow he managed to shoulder his way into the building—to thud down the stairs—to drag the steel door closed behind him—before they found him. But find him they did. He put his hands over his ears when they threw their bodies against the door, again and again, a thundering that seemed like it would never stop. Until it did.



That was five months ago. Sometimes he doesn’t know whether he is waking or dreaming. Sometimes he talks to himself. Sometimes he shits and pisses freely on the floor. Once he woke and thought a lycan crouched over him, its face only inches away, its mouth open to reveal the serrated edge of its teeth. Neal issued an animal cry and scampered to the far corner of the room and huddled there in a ball. “Stay away from me,” he said. “You stay away from me!” But of course he was alone.

Still, he can’t help but keep his revolver close, tucked into the back of his pants, so that the skin there is thick with callus. The generators are still humming, but the lightbulbs burned out a week ago and now he spends his days alone in the dark, the pace of his breathing the only conversation.

Only one of the vials survived; the rest shattered in his escape. It sits on the counter, along with his laptop, his papers. Waiting.

There is a sink in the corner. This is Neal’s toilet, washbasin, and drinking source. He tries to fill up his belly on the water from the tap. His hands shake when he fumbles for his glass, a beaker. He fills it and brings it blindly to his mouth and starts with a thin swallow. But that is not enough. He swings it back. The water sloshes and bubbles. His neck convulses when he swallows. He drinks and drinks until he chokes and coughs and vomits and then drinks some more.

Many years ago, he went on a no-carb diet and lost fifty pounds in a month. His skin sagged off him as if he were melting. “I don’t recognize you,” people said. That was because he was no longer himself. He was meant to be heavy. And now he is moving further and further away from what he is meant to be, the fat gone from his body, his bones pressing through his loose skin. He is now at the point where he has nothing left to lose.

He remembers, what feels at once like ten minutes ago and ten years ago, watching a show on the Discovery Channel. It was about identity. At one point in the episode, a scientist posed a question about what made you feel like you. Suppose, say, he was to steadily replace every cell in your body with a cell from Ronald Reagan. When would you cease to be yourself? Could a single cell, somewhere in the middle of the transfer, make all the difference? What if you retained your body but your brain was transplanted? What if you descended into a coma or succumbed to dementia—when do you cease to be? What is the line that distinguishes you from not-you? With his daughter, he could point to the precise moment when everything changed, when she was and was no longer his little girl. As for himself? There is a stainless-steel paper-towel dispenser above the sink. Before the lightbulbs burned out, he would study his ghostly reflection in it. Toward the end, he did not recognize himself—bony and sallow skinned as he is—but he wonders if the stranger he sees might have come to life some time ago, long before the day the world exploded.

He opened the door once. The hallway was pitch-black and he coughed at the smell of smoke and when he thought he heard something shuffle and scrape toward him, he slammed the entry shut and pressed his back against it.