Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(144)
Christmas is the last time he saw his mother. This was before he deployed for the Republic, and he spent a good deal of his holiday eating. Everything from cinnamon rolls to meatloaf to asparagus casserole, everything he could get his hands on and knew he would not taste outside a mess hall for a long time.
“Come back to me,” his mother kept telling him. His last day before climbing on a plane to Los Alamitos, California, she pumped his hand furiously, as if to distance her affection, and then couldn’t stand it anymore and drew him into a hug. When they pulled apart, she smiled a sad smile and touched his face. “Aren’t you scared?” she said, and he said, “Course I’m scared.”
And he was, but not anymore. That nerve seems to have been excised from his body. As much as he checks and checks, and keeps on checking, as far as he can tell, ever since he came back from the Republic, he has not been scared, not sad, not excited, not feeling much of anything, his numbness like armor.
Which is why he feels so surprised by the sour twist in his stomach when he roars up to his mother’s home in a squall of gravel. He is—no other word for it—afraid. For a long time he stands at the front door, not knowing what to do, studying for clues in the wood grain. When he finally steps inside, he does so with care, to honor the tomblike stillness of the place and also to keep from stirring the dust.
He tours each room, certain he will find his mother in one of them, and when he doesn’t, he feels no relief, only assent to his prolonged suffering, like a patient whose nurse cannot find a vein while repeatedly stabbing a needle into the crook of an elbow. He climbs on his bike and drives through Old Mountain, past the dump, to the wooded subdivision, where he discovers her at last.
They have been hanged, the doctor and his mother, his mother recognizable only by her clothes, her skin otherwise black or stripped from the bone by birds. The noose knotted around her neck rises seven feet to the thick branch of a juniper tree. She sways in the breeze and so does the doctor’s head. It hangs beside her, like some ghoulish ornament, but his body has long ago rotted away from his neck and fallen to the driveway, an angular pile of bones draped in weather-aged khaki. The smell of decay still clings to the air like some terrible perfume.
Across the garage door, in black block letters, someone has spray-painted Go to hell lycans. And beneath it, in smaller script, Sincerely, The Americans.
Patrick tries to sob but can’t pull it off, managing more of a cough. Then his face splits open as rocks do when water freezes inside them, and he begins to cry. He touches the corners of his eyes as if to push the tears back inside him. He hates how weak and helpless he feels. He hates it so much that he charges the juniper tree and kicks it and a loose branch falls and strikes his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that will take a long time to shrink and pale and vanish.
Chapter 60
THE LYCANS are not alone. There are others—Mexicans mainly—who live in the Ghostlands. Like Claire, most are here because they feel they have nowhere else to go. At the perimeter, once the military discovers they are undocumented, they will be jailed and then deported. They could always return to the States by following a coyote through a dirt tunnel and across the desert. But why? The invisible threat of radiation, the sores that fester on their skin, mean nothing compared to the overcrowding, the joblessness, the anemic economy, found everywhere else.
They do not have access to iodine. Their hair is falling out. They are covered in radiation burns. But they also drive Mercedes and BMWs and Land Rovers. They shop at the abandoned Nordstrom and Macy’s. Some live in gated subdivisions, in five-bedroom homes furnished by Pottery Barn, but most have stuck to the farms where they once worked, where they know the land from which they can harvest their apples and filberts, lettuce and grapes, raspberries, carrots, eggplant, sweet potatoes. A sustainable life.
A week ago, Claire and Matthew happened upon fifty people hoeing and seeding fields. The way they were dressed, you would have thought it was a cocktail party. At the edge of the field an old man in a tuxedo rocked in a rocking chair, his beard as white as corn silk. When they turned off the highway and biked down the long clay road that led to the fields, the old man rose unsteadily from his chair, lifted what appeared to be a cane, and fired. A yellow carnation bloomed from the front of the shotgun, followed by the roar and spray of buckshot that from a good fifty yards’ distance only stung their skin. They turned back the way they came.
This is where the girl comes from—a farm, she says—a farm outside Salem. Her name is Roxana. “Roxana Primavera Rivera,” she says in a proud, careful voice like she might have once used in a classroom. She is nine and a half. She was in the third grade before the sky caught on fire, before everyone abandoned this place. She hates math but loves reading. That is all there is to do anymore, she says, is read. Besides work. She has the whole library to herself and loves sexy vampire books especially. Her parents are dead—shot by soldiers when on a supply run. Her uncle takes care of her now. He is a pretty scary man, she says, her tío. Everyone is afraid of him. “But he’s nice to me.”
She talks breathlessly while they ride their bikes along the back roads, Claire on her eighteen-speed Trek, Roxana on a Huffy with pink streamers that sizzle in the wind. They found the bike in Bi-Mart, along with a grandpa-style pocketknife, a box of bullets, candy bars. They have pedaled maybe ten miles when the girl asks why they can’t just drive a car, and Claire tells her what Matthew once told her: “Because gas is hard to come by. And because in a car you can’t hear what’s coming.”