Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(145)
Her voice is scolding and impatient. She wishes she’d never found the girl. She is just one more thing to deal with, to worry about. If she had died in the cemetery, she would have died in the cemetery. She would have been another body. As simple as that. But now, if anything should happen, her death will belong to Claire like a diseased limb. So she must deliver the girl safely back to her family even as other thoughts occupy her mind. She sees, in the prickle of grass, in the bunching of clouds, the knots on a tree, the vision of Balor, and she imagines how she might get close enough to him to drag a blade across his neck or punch a bullet through his body.
She knows he is here—in Oregon, in Portland—feeding and supplying those loyal to him, trying to build an army, declaring this their rightful sovereign territory. She has seen GOD BLESS THE RESISTANCE graffitied across the capitol building, seen posters declaring this place Lycanica. She knows that’s why drones and choppers buzz overhead, why missiles sometimes come streaking out of the sky to open up the earth. He is being hunted.
This winter she and Matthew met someone—a man with a ratty beard and soiled North Face jacket who came out of the night to join their campfire. He held up his hands and said he only wanted some company. “I’m cool,” he said. “I’m one of the good guys.” And he was. There were many in the Ghostlands Claire knew would slit her throat, rip off her clothes—and that’s why she and Matthew always kept their guns at their waists—but the criminal element was offset by men like this—Robbie, he said his name was—political idealists and peaceable foragers more interested in lying low and living their own lives than getting caught up in a war against humanity.
He shared some whiskey with them that they drank out of tin cups. After they stared into the fire for a long time and bullshitted about their pasts, Balor came up. Robbie said he’d seen him. There had been a gathering at the fairgrounds in Salem and Balor fed them before taking the concert stage, speaking with an evangelical rise and fall to his voice about their country. That’s what he called it, their country. And their country would grow.
Another few miles and the girl’s bike begins to wobble. “My legs hurt,” she says. The sun sinks lower in the sky and retreats behind some clouds and glooms the air. A part of Claire wants to tell Roxana to suck it up and keep pedaling. She feels the need to get as far away as she can from the fresh mound of dirt in the cemetery, the town that swallowed Matthew. But another part of her knows she needs to stop, and stop soon, find a place to hunker down for the night. On her own, she might ride until her muscles cramp or her tire flattens, not caring where she ended up, only wanting to move, to sweat out her sadness, her feet spinning in circles. But she has someone else to worry about besides herself.
Soon after Roxana says, “Now my legs hurt and my butt hurts,” they find a farmhouse a quarter mile off the road and dump their bikes behind it and check the rooms for bodies, dead or alive, then sit on the porch swing and watch the sky darken.
Claire digs a Baby Ruth out of her backpack and asks if Roxana wants a bite. The girl holds out her hand and says, “Please,” and Claire breaks off a piece and tosses it to her and she eats it with smacking openmouthed chews. She smiles, her teeth just a little buck, and Claire tries to make her smile as genuine as hers and cannot.
They take swigs from a Nalgene bottle—the water soured by iodine—and it is then, when the girl throws back her head and drinks greedily, that Claire notices the raw red necklace encircling her throat, like the imprint of a leash. “What happened?”
The girl screws the bottle shut and touches her neck and says nothing. Just as she said nothing when Claire first asked how she ended up separated from her family, only shook her head, hid behind her hair.
The house is thick with dust that makes them sneeze into their elbows. Claire snaps on her flashlight. It carves away the darkness. The kitchen has an apple theme—apple wallpaper, apple dish towel, apple hot pad—that makes her imagine a woman with a silver helmet of hair clapping flour off her hands and humming church hymns. Flower-bordered dishes mucked with mold remain in the sink. They walk a short hallway, to the living room, where her light flashes off the screen of an old Zenith television and then slides across an oak coffee table, a ratty recliner, a couch with a red-and-yellow afghan draped over its back. “You sleep there,” Claire says and the girl asks why, why not on a bed?
“All the bedrooms are upstairs.”
“So?”
“Only sleep on the ground floor. Better exit strategy. Just in case.”
The floor isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why Claire can’t sleep. She can’t sleep because of Matthew. She imagines the grayness of his skin when she flopped that first shovel of dirt on him. She imagines the worms tunneling toward him like so many eager tongues. She imagines what he looked like when she found him on the front stoop, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O. She wonders what the hot rush of metal felt like when the bullets pricked his skin, and then the internal blossoming of blood as flesh gave way and bone shattered, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he have time to hurt? Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavities before he lost consciousness?
Every time she falls into dreams, the image of him emerges from the dark, and she wakes with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing her hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut little half-moons of blood into her palms. She recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs.