Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(150)
*
At the center of the fountain is an elevated platform on top of which stand stone figures holding hands. Their faces are morose but resilient, chins raised, mouths pinched. Normally their empty eyes would gush tears and splash full the pool below them. But the memorial went dry a long time ago. This is Pioneer Courthouse Square, where the Christmas tree once burned like a torch and dozens lost their lives and where a few hundred lycans now gather.
Magog shakes bags of charcoal into the fountain until it is heaped full. Then he empties three bottles of lighter fluid and sparks a match. A circle of flame rises with the sound of a hundred fists striking a pillow. The high flames lick and blacken the legs of the stone figures before retreating to an orange glow among the whitening coals. Magog uses a shovel to stir them. Then he arranges several grates, upon which he lays venison and mutton and beef, steaks and chops, seasoned with a dry rub he scoops from a metal bowl and applies liberally. Meat sizzles. Smoke spices the air.
The courthouse square is edged by a long line of folding tables. Here are stacks of plates, cups of silverware, bowls of chips and pretzels and candy. Soda. Beer. Apples. Muskmelons. Some of the lycans sit on benches or along the tiered steps. Others huddle in groups. Mostly men dressed in T-shirts, denim, their hair and beards long, their skin as tough and hard as roots. They wear backpacks slung over their shoulders. Their teeth gnash down on chips and snap into apples. Their throats surge when they guzzle Coors and Cokes. Maybe it is the hour of the day—with the sun directly overhead—or maybe it is the bodies all pressed together or the coals brightly burning in the fountain, but the square seems to grow warmer by the second. Their clothes darken with sweat. They drink and then they drink some more. Their conversations grow louder, tangled up with laughter. It has been a long time since they felt normal, since they stood in the open air without worrying about a plane rushing overhead or an arrow whistling from an open window.
All around them stretches downtown Portland, the streets like silent, empty canyons walled in by skyscrapers. The windowsills are mudded with swallow nests and the sidewalks spotted with bird shit. Pollen streaks windows. When the wind blows, dirt flies from sills and awnings like brown banners.
In the square, a drink is spilled, words exchanged. Two men circle each other with their arms out and their backs hunched. Their beards are as black as oil. They tremor into a state of transformation. They leap, drag each other to the ground. Fists thud. Teeth bite. Claws slash. No one makes a move to interfere. It ends soon after it begins, with the winner clamping his mouth around the neck of the other and chewing his way through it, the dying body quaking beneath him as if in a state of frantic sex. The quarrel is over. Laughter and conversation resume. The body remains among them, bleeding out on the bricks.
Balor knows that the Ghostlands are pocketed with good people, with farms and communes run by those who do not want any part of what he has built. And he knows they are not here today. He is surrounded by criminals, animals. Here for food and here for trouble. Which is why he feels no remorse for what will become of them. Soon.
By the time the meat is ready, the lycans are loose and drunk, nearly frenzied with hunger. They eat with abandon. Balor walks among them, shaking hands, grasping shoulders, laying his palm flat against cheeks. They ask him, won’t you eat? And he says soon, soon, but he wants first to make certain everyone is satisfied.
Eventually he situates himself at the heart of the amphitheater and waits there with his hands held before his heart until everyone goes silent. He thanks them. Not only for coming today, but for making such sacrifices, for serving a cause larger than themselves.
A spearhead of geese glides through the skyscrapers that surround them. Their reflections glimmer along the windows and their shadows stream across the square. Balor squints after them and smiles and then says that he is reminded of a story. The story is about a mother goose and her goslings. They were paddling across a pond one day when an osprey circled overhead. It began to dive. At that moment, the mother goose separated herself from her brood. She splashed and cried out noisily, crooking her neck and beating her wings unnaturally so as to appear injured. The osprey changed its course and bulleted into the mother goose and tore her to shreds. The water went red. The goslings lived. The goslings lived because of her sacrifice.
He speaks slowly, letting each word hang in the air before moving on to the next, and by the time he is finished, the coals in the fountain have reduced to ash and most of the lycans in the square now lie silent in various postures of death. They clutch their bellies or their silverware or the meat-speckled bones they gnawed on only moments before.
“Thank you,” he says, so quietly he can barely hear the words himself, “for your sacrifice.”
Magog rattles open the door to the semitrailer, revealing its empty black bed, and they begin to gather and load the bodies.
Chapter 62
PATRICK BLASTS down the middle of the highway, following the meridian through Bend, Redmond, Sisters. He swerves to avoid a dead horse, abandoned cars, fallen branches, mud and scree the spring rains dragged down chutes and across the road.
He guides the bike up and over the Cascade Range and eventually the road levels out in the Willamette Valley, where streams cut through the woods and pool in lowland marshes that give way to blackberry tangles, birch thickets, farmland overgrown with alfalfa and vineyards tangled with weeds, busy with birds that delight in the grapes.