Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(143)

Chapter 59



THAT MORNING, before the sun breaks the sky, Patrick creeps out of his bunk and shoulders his backpack—stuffed with a poncho, canteen, a few MREs and Snickers bars, GPS, satellite phone, waterproof matches, iodine tabs—and hurries to the vehicle lot. Yesterday, outside the mess hall, Malerie confirmed her assignment and plate number. She and another nurse would be in a medical supply van crushed into a long line of Humvees and FMTVs, a cleaner convoy headed into the Ghostlands. In the vans, Malerie said, there is a hollow beneath the bench seat for extra storage. A hollow big enough for him to cramp his body inside.

He told her thank you and she said he better not f*ck up and he said he wouldn’t.

They stood in silence awhile and then he said, “Well, I guess that’s that.” It was as close to good-bye as he could get. He blew her a kiss.

“Missed,” she yelled, like he was far away, not ten feet from her—and then, unsmiling, she crossed her arms and walked away.

It is here, snapped under the seat with a crossbar pressing into his forehead, that he waits for the next hour, until the sun rises and the trumpet calls and everyone climbs out of their rack and voices busy the air and the doors chunk open and closed and someone settles onto the seat above him and the vehicles all around the lot roar to life. He cannot fill his lungs completely—that’s how tight the space is—and his neck is already cramping from having stared to the right for so long.

The van makes a series of turns, braking at the checkpoint with the rest of the squad, then rumbling up to speed as they head into the Ghostlands. Patrick cannot see out the window, but he knows the drive and can imagine it clearly as they cross the sage flats, the blacktop edged by red cinder, rabbitbrush rising from sandy washes like so many broom heads. Clouds wisp the sky. Turkey vultures ride thermals. Juniper trees twist upward like skeletons in torment. Black-and-red cinder cones hump the desert. Canyons are lined with basalt columns like ancient churches.

He counts off the seconds as they pass and imagines a clock inside him, a clock with many red and black wires curling out of it, that will eventually click its way down to zero and explode. He wishes they would hurry. Already he feels like he is too late.

The convoy stops in Prineville, where they have been ordered to sweep the east side of town for bodies, kill any insurgents, detain any illegals, and torch all markets and grocery stores. He mouths, “Come on, come on, come on, come on,” and waits an interminable amount of time as the van parks and the engine quiets and the nurses climb out and Malerie double-taps the door to give the all clear before he clicks the seat upward like a coffin lid and snaps his neck left, then right.



He hurls the brick into the display window of the Harley dealer and stands there with the glass all around him like the thousand jagged possibilities waiting for him in the Ghostlands.

The Night Train is a big bike, sixty-three horsepower. He wants to hurry but can’t help but pause a moment to run his hands along the curves of it, smear his fingerprints and fog his breath along the metal. He scores the keys from a hook in a locked office. There is a generator in the corner. He guns it to life. The shop has its own gas pump and he tops off the tank and fills four canteens he stores in the saddlebags.

Patrick left his hazmat gear back at the base. The full-body suit, gloves, and boots—made from a nano-composite material called Demron—shield him from gamma rays and radiation particles but slow him down, make him sweat. He will be gone only two days and he will pop iodine tabs every few hours to fight the radiation and he will stay away from the northern half of the state and hopefully the overall effect will be no more severe than him standing in front of a microwave for a few hours.

He rolls the Night Train into the lot, turns on the fuel supply, pulls out the choke, hits the ignition, sets the kill switch to run, releases the clutch. The growl of the engine has enough thunder to turn heads all over town. The cleaners will know someone is here. He has only a few minutes before someone comes hunting for him.

He wobbles onto the street in first gear—nearly stalling out—and then throttles forward. Once he gets onto Highway 126, he kicks his speed up to seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, and the world blurs into a smear of colors and makes him forget, just for a second, who and where he is.



Outside town, he can see weeds creeping through the cracks in the asphalt, deer bedded down in an overgrown golf course. Nature thrives. Patrick has heard it all. How at night Multnomah Falls glows a faint red, as if the earth is bleeding. How raccoons, as bald as babies, overturn garbage cans and clamber through cupboards. Mountain lions slink about with tusks like sabers. Pterodactyl-like birds silhouette the open guts of the moon. An albino bear as big as a garbage truck sharpens its claws on a telephone pole.

Then there are the dogs. They run now in packs. They live in the woods and in the abandoned houses, cozying up to the couches and beds they were for so long forbidden to dirty. They come for him now, outside Prineville, at the bottom of a canyon, his engine’s noise drawing them from the juniper forest—ears perked, heads cocked—as if summoned. They give chase, wailing like demons, their dark shapes surrounding him. They pop their teeth and he kicks at them and nearly loses control of his bike. They keep pouring out of the woods—close to forty of them. He dodges their bodies like a halfback and zooms up and up and up the switchback highway that rises from the canyon, until he reaches its plateau, a viewpoint overlooking the dry basin of Crook County. He parks and gets off the bike, and sure enough, several hundred feet below him, gray and black and brown, the dogs race along the highway, following his scent.