Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(152)
The flies rise in an angry swarm. In that moment, Patrick can clearly see the lariat around his neck and the security badge that bears the name, Neal Desai.
He tries to move quietly. Whatever killed Desai killed him recently. Maybe the lycan with the guitar, maybe not. But no matter how softly he depresses his boots, they still crunch through the thousands of shards that once made up the glass entry to the Pfizer building. The interior is cool, high ceilinged, draped in shadows.
He checks all the rooms on the first floor and finds them empty. No chairs, no tables, no equipment, no clutter on the counters or in the cupboards. The facility is so new it hadn’t been inhabited. In researching Desai, Patrick vaguely recalls a photo popping up of him smiling, leaning on a shovel, some groundbreaking ceremony that must have taken place here.
He creeps down the central staircase. The sunlight dims. He pulls a mini Mag light from his cargo pocket and snaps it on and uses its beam to hollow out the darkness, to guide the bead of his pistol. A hallway stretches to either side of him. He can smell something down here—something that distinguishes itself from the smoke-scented air. A whiff of body odor.
He tracks the walls and doorways with his flashlight. Shadows move and lurch and he keeps waiting for one of them to come alive.
Ahead he spots an open door. He notes the keypad, notes the steel frame, a safe room of some sort. The smell is so tremendous he must breathe through his mouth.
He plays his flashlight around the room and spots a rumpled jacket in the corner—and then a laptop, a binder, a pile of manila folders and loose-leaf paper on the counter. He flips through them, noting dosage information, progress charts, chemical compositions that might as well be in a foreign language.
And then the beam of his flashlight reflects off a silver-topped glass container, something that sparkles like a tiny star.
Patrick is flying—he is nothing but air. The road twists through the Willamette Valley, toward the Cascades. With the bike humming beneath him and the wind like a woman’s fingers hurrying through his hair, bearing the smell of pine resin, damp loamy soil, he feels exhilarated. Everything he found in the lab is now in his backpack—including the vial, a vial full of powder, now wrapped up in his watch cap. The label on it reads: LOBOS VACCINE SAMPLE #342, 5ML, 10 DOSES.
Then he notices a gray cloud of smoke rising in the distance. Too big for a campfire, too indistinct for a burning house or field. And the cloud, Patrick realizes, is moving toward him.
He brakes and rolls onto the shoulder with a slurred crush of gravel. “Something’s coming,” he says to himself. Up ahead the road elbows into the trees. He focuses his eyes there, as if through the crosshairs of a scope, and the rest of the world falls away.
He senses, in a certain vibration of the air and the asphalt, engines. Lots of them.
His throat constricts, a lava-hot rush of blood makes his heart do a backflip, and deep inside him big chunks of black matter, stuff that has been lodged there forever, begins to melt away and infect him with a sick feeling. He has been numb for a long time. But this is fear. Unmistakable, remarkable fear.
Not for him, but for what he carries.
He blazes off the highway—into and out of the drainage ditch, its swampish bottom slippery, the bike almost sliding out from under him. He zigzags through the trees. Stiff weeds and clumps of scrub oak claw at the bike, screeching on its metal, and about thirty feet off the road—which seems too, too close—he brings the bike around a fallen tree and lays it on its side and starts covering it with branches.
The fallen tree is a Douglas fir, its needles a crisp brown, its bark interrupted by a jagged black vein made by lightning. When he pushes his way into its nest of branches, getting right up against the trunk, his hair prickles, his veins tighten. It is as if he can feel the residual electricity.
By now a faint reverberation is audible and he ducks down and listens to the noise get louder and louder still, and then around the corner comes a train of vehicles: motorcycles, jacked-up pickups, Cadillacs with red flames painted along their sides. All of them cough up oil like outboards, their ruined shocks and cracked mufflers and shrieking brakes rolling together to make a musical noise, like some junkyard circus, surrounded by a mystically blue exhaust that rises and joins the sky.
On top of one Cadillac, bodies are tied down like trophy stags. If they are not dead they are near it. Blood runs off the roof, down the windshield, where the wipers wipe it away. Patrick can see the man behind the wheel, hunched over and squinting through all that redness, smiling. A rosary swings from his rearview mirror.
Just five minutes ago the world seemed weirdly clean and calm. Now, in the drifting fog of smoke, engines mutter and horns beep and heavy metal blasts from CD players and tattooed men grin into the wind and for a second it’s as if the meltdown never happened.
The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Metal—maybe Pantera or Slayer—blasts from a boom box and nearly overwhelms the noise of the diesel engine. Five men circle a woman in a green bikini and dance—slightly off-kilter from drink or turbulence—their hands outstretched like Halloween scarecrows. They are dirty and they are excited. Several are in a state of transformation.
At the rear of the flatbed a shirtless man swings logging chains above his head. With his pistol, Patrick sights the man’s chest, where excess flesh ripples down his rib cage, surrounding his guts, as if he has begun to melt after too long an exposure to Hanford’s furnace.