Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(146)

For a while Claire just lies there, listening. Then she says, “Shut up,” her voice barely audible, a quiet curse. Then she gets up and stumbles to the bathroom and pees in the empty toilet. She checks the locks on the doors, peers out the windows into a blackness that tells her nothing. Then she stands over Roxana and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Hey? You okay?” But the girl won’t respond. She goes on moaning and Claire goes back to pacing.

After another hour of this, she wants so badly to silence and comfort the girl that she scoops her up and holds her in her arms, tight against her chest, rocking her, saying shhh. She doesn’t know if the girl wakes up or not, but her complaining softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes Claire sets her down and covers her with an afghan and falls asleep kneeling beside her.



The next day, in the midafternoon, they find the farm without too much trouble. Roxana knows it is near a river, knows it runs up against a big woods she pronounces Aching Knee. Claire consults the map until she finds the Ankeny refuge—and now they circle the roads around it until the girl says, “There!”

A gravel driveway cuts through a wall of oak trees. Beyond it are newly disked fields, the dirt as black and porous as the heart of a chocolate cake. The driveway is lined by what first appear to be decorative fence poles, every ten feet or so, with no barbed wire strung between them. These turn out to be pikes run through severed heads. Their mouths hang open. The sharp ends of the sticks sometimes peek out of their sockets or pierce the tops of their skulls like horns. Flies buzz and taste the rank flesh and explode like the spores of a black dandelion when Claire and Roxana pedal past them.

Her hand teases the brake. The bike coasts. “What the hell is this?”

Roxana says, “Those are to keep the bad people away. The wolf people.”

“Is that what your uncle said?”

“Sí.”

She did not ask for this. She did not want to help the girl. And now look at what she has gotten herself into. Everything in her body tells her to spin around, hammer away from here, but her feet and her mind spin alike when the bike carries her up a grassy rise on top of which squats the house—two stories, black shutters, white siding with the paint flaking off—like a mildewed skull. There is a faded red barn, a whitewashed cinder-block milk house, a pole shed for machinery, a woodpile, three grain bins. Claire can see people working the fields, maybe two dozen of them spread out over ten acres. Two trucks are parked in the driveway and Roxana drops her bike next to them and takes off running for a vegetable garden in which crouch two men and a woman.

She calls out to them and they stand and shade their eyes with their hands and then let out a cheer and embrace her one by one and then Roxana points at Claire and they study her and raise their hands in hesitant waves and cram together in a huddle and finally decide to approach her, slowly, nodding too much and smiling too big, as if trying to convince themselves she isn’t a threat.

They wear revolvers and so does she. The gunmetal catches the light on this sunny morning, advertising the possibility of violence, but they only want to talk, telling her thank you, thank you, for bringing the girl back to them. “How is this possible?” says one of them, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with a gap between her teeth. “Tú eres un fantasma.”

They stand in awkward silence another moment before asking Claire in their broken English what news she has from the outside, if any.

“No sé nada,” she says. Which is true. She knows nothing. No Internet, no TV, no radio, the newspapers moldering on porches and in kiosks all dating back to November 6. Which sometimes makes it hard to believe that the world continues to spin, that a thousand miles from here somebody might be drinking a latte in a coffee shop and updating their Facebook status on their smart phone.

Once they realize she speaks Spanish, they all start talking at once, their hands gesturing, flapping like brown birds, which to Claire is what they sound like.

She says, “Lento, por favor. Lento.” They are too quick and too complicated for her, but once they slow down, she can make out their halting queries about where to find food, gas, whether or not the military will hunt them down.

They don’t seem capable of evil. They simply appear trampled. One is an old man whose sun-weathered face could use an iron and whose hand rests on his revolver as if comforted by it. The other is a young man—just a teenager, really—with lamb-chop sideburns and radiation lesions on his face. His arm is in a sling and blood-soaked gauze has been duct-taped around his biceps. He says his name is Jorge and when Claire asks what happened to his arm a silence sets in like after a dish drops at a restaurant. Jorge brings a hand to the bandage and says, “I try to save Roxana. When the wolves take her.”

Roxana drops her gaze. The gap-toothed woman makes a clucking sound and pets the girl. Now Claire understands. The bruises around her neck. The whimpering nightmares.

“You are not a wolf, yes?” the woman says. “No es posible.”

Before Claire can say anything, a rumble comes from overhead and they all squint up into a sky filled with cirrus clouds that look like pale fish bones. Here they spot a fighter jet. Its sound strikes Claire as sad, something far away and going farther. A moment later the plane vanishes over the coastal mountains, its contrail dissipating behind it.

How safe and beautiful everything must look from way up there, Claire thinks, even if it’s not.