Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(151)

He sees corn growing in straight rows, sees men in the fields with hoes, sees a woman riding a horse, sees a tractor trundling along with a gray scarf of exhaust trailing behind it. At the perimeter he interviewed lycans who spoke about living off the land, who claimed no allegiance to Balor, but this is the first he has seen of it.

He sits straight backed at first and then learns to yield to the road, feeling the asphalt as if he were walking along it, bending his body around turns, the handlebars like an extension of his body. The bike—its beetle-black sheen, its rounded muscular frame, its snarly muffler, its engine humming between his legs, its rich oil smell commingling with the swampy richness of Western Oregon—is a beautiful machine.

He softens the throttle when he enters Eugene. He sees everywhere the face of Chase Williams—on billboards and posters, tacked to trees and telephone poles, taped to the sides of buildings—sun faded and wind ragged and rain blotched. Bits and pieces of his smile fluttering along the gutters. Patrick drives the streets and kicks up behind him mud and leaves and sticks now littering the asphalt as if his bike were a horse divoting the earth with the pounding of its hooves, the neigh and nicker replaced by the Harley’s pop-pop-pop and grumble.

He consults his GPS one more time before finding the center and parking his bike on the wrong side of the street in front of a fire hydrant. Sometimes it feels good to be so wrong. He kills the engine. In the parking lot he spots the rag bundles of a few bodies he cannot decipher as male or female, gray-skinned skeletons.

Beyond the gate there is a mess of rubble from an office building carved out by what appears to be a bomb blast. From where he stands he can see into the building as if it were a rotten piece of honeycomb—gray, pockmarked—with birds buzzing in and out and with papers and desks and chairs spilling out of ragged niches and caverns.

He hears a ping. Something metallic—struck. He sees nothing and guesses it is a bird or the wind, a pebble knocked onto a car hood. Then he hears the noise again. And again. Coming together into a song he recognizes. He spots the man sitting at the base of an oak tree fifteen yards away. The man appears to grow from the nest of roots and he holds in his lap a guitar that looks as if it has been buried and then unearthed years later, the strings rusted and creaking like barbed wire strung across salt flats. He plays another minute, some country song, maybe Cash. When he stops strumming, when the notes still hang in the air, he stands.

“You don’t look like one of us.”

“What do I look like?”

“Like a big American hero guy.”

“I’m not that either.”

Patrick remembers his mother—he remembers Claire—he remembers the old woman who took pity on him in the Republic—he remembers that being a lycan does not automatically qualify someone as a threat. But this man’s smile cuts through his beard like a razor blade. The guitar, dangling from his hand, falls with a hollow bong that trembles around the edges. He begins to shudder all over and rolls his head back and emits a groan.

Patrick does not wait around for him to transform. He tugs the pistol from his belt and fires a bullet into his throat. The man’s hands rise to dam the blood pumping from him. An arterial spurt escapes his fingers. Patrick fires again, this time striking him in the chest. His body falls in a heap next to the guitar.

It is not Patrick’s first, nor will it be the last. That is the way of things now.

When he walks through the gates, when he follows the rubble-strewn pathways and pokes his head into the burned and bombed buildings, the urgency and purposefulness drain out of him. He’s too late. The air reeks of charcoal. And he cannot help but feel—with the heat of the Harley’s exhaust pipes still clinging to him—that he might be smoldering along with the rest of this place.

Pointless. He has come all this way—risked his life, court-martial—for no reason. It’s no wonder that vaccination, once a dominant headline, no longer makes the news or informs any political debate. They lost everything, probably the result of some institution remaining secretive with their intelligence so that they might secure a patent. His body aches from the long ride, his legs shivery, his lower back cramped. A fat black fly orbits his head and he waves it off in annoyance. He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Not a vault harboring some ready-made syringe. But not this either. Not ruins.

Another fly finds him, landing at the corner of his mouth, and he spits it away. More appear, dozens more, buzzing lazily around him in the shape of a net. One lights on his skin and he swats at it. He looks back the way he came—brick buildings, overgrown grass with a narrow path cutting through and edged by maples—nothing that would attract so many flies.

They buzz around him and drown out every other noise in the world. He can feel the vibration of their wings just as he could feel the four-stroke engine trembling through his bones. The day is cloudless, the sun bright and at that afternoon angle that blinds. He holds up a hand to shade his eyes. He rounds the corner of a building and sees the body at the same moment he smells it.

Twenty yards ahead, in the knee-deep grass, in the shadow of a round-roofed building, Patrick can see a splash of dried blood the size of a quilt. In the middle of it lies the body, mangled, recently dead. When Patrick approaches, he smells the blood and the rotten matter of intestines and feels bile rising in his throat and tents his shirt over his nose.

The birds have disturbed the body. The face is gone, as if peeled off, to reveal the gleaming bone beneath. His throat has been torn open, and ligaments, like piano wires, remain taut in their place even as the flesh has been stripped away around them. His button-down shirt is spread to either side of him like wings, revealing the carved-out place beneath his rib cage where something burrowed its snout or claws. Patrick does not brush away the flies that have tasted the body and now taste of him, even as they crawl along his skin with their prickly legs. Instead he kicks the corpse.