Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(153)

Patrick’s chest is a drum. Inside the drum, the fist of his heart bangs away and he feels clenched and jumpy and oblivious to the reckless stupidity of what he is about to do. His finger tightens around the trigger—in pure reflex—but before he can squeeze off a round, before the gun can jump in his hand, time seems to stop.

The music fades, replaced by several thundering cracks that make Patrick first look to his pistol and then to the cloud-swept sky, questioning their source. On the flatbed, a tiny red mouth opens below the big man’s left nipple. Then another at his temple. He doesn’t cry out or clutch his chest—he simply drops. He ceases to live. The physics of the impact work out like this: an ugly twist of limbs thrown from the flatbed, now baking on the hot pavement.

Then one of the rear tires rips apart and the rim gouges the asphalt with a fan of sparks. The semi grinds to a halt. One of the couches rolls off and spills its occupants onto the road. The woman in the green bikini somehow keeps her balance. She is screaming. She is painted with blood. One of the men near her sways in place a moment before falling at her bare feet. Another joins him. The others realize, too late, they are under attack.

Their enemy comes from behind, a dozen dirt bikes racing along the highway, their engines the high whine of a chainsaw. They are ridden by men wearing camo pants and American flag T-shirts and black backpacks. Their heads are shaved. Their outstretched arms carry pistols, shotguns. Puffs of smoke rise with every gunshot.

Patrick is not as surprised as he ought to be. He feels instead that he should have known. He should have known what they, the Americans, were capable of becoming. Their own militia.

They do not slow their speed when they approach the semi. Their formation splits and they fire from either side of the flatbed when they pass it. Bodies drop. Blood mists the air. A lycan leaps onto one of the bikes and drags its driver to the pavement and they skid and spin together for a good twenty yards before going still.

Soon everyone is dead except the woman in the green bikini. She has transformed and crouches on all fours and cries out gutturally when one of the Americans—Max, Patrick feels certain, from his bullet-shaped head and short, round stature—climbs onto the flatbed and approaches her. He runs a blade along her neck and then her hairline. Her scalp he shoves into a trash bag.

He is certain the clouds will break and the sun will glint off the Night Train’s exposed muffler and one of the Americans will point a finger in his direction and yell, “There!” And that will be it—he will be dead—the vaccine will be lost. The Americans will surround him, as they did that day in the woods, and finish the job they started then.

But no, they climb on their dirt bikes and growl off into the distance, aware of nothing but themselves.

Nearby a bird shrieks the all clear and the forest returns to its business, twittering and chattering. With a gush of air Patrick realizes he has been holding his breath.

He is not sure what he expected to find at the labs. Answers. An answer may be what he has found. But what will come of this answer only makes more questions pour through his head like cement. His first impulse is to run. Escape to safety. But once he crosses the border there will be consequences. Consequences for him. And, if the military is able to draw from the vial something of value, there will be consequences of a much larger order. Consequences for all lycans. It’s hard to know whether he is talking about wiping out a disease or an identity, what has essentially become its own race or species. Though at first Patrick felt elated, as if he found in the vial something given up for lost, his body now suffers some weird jolt—a power surge of fear—followed by a draining sensation.

The breeze picks up, and when he breathes it in, when he heaves a sigh, he can smell blood and gunpowder in the air. Plagues don’t just kill people—and that’s what lobos is, a plague—they kill humanity.

He returns his pistol to its holster and hauls up the Night Train and rolls it over to the road. He tries not to look at the bodies strewn across the highway, the blood pooling around them like oil slicks, when he gets on the bike. He lets the engine run for a minute, then guns the accelerator, spraying dust everywhere, his eyes black bagged and full of haunting questions, like the wounded who return home from a lost war. He needs to think. He needs to find a place to hole up and think this through.





Chapter 63



STORMS BREW, but no rain falls. Thunder mutters and lightning ripples and the air grows unnaturally dark and almost solid with humidity. Weather vanes and cell towers and mailboxes and doorknobs and flagpoles sizzle with blue electricity. The wind rises. On the porch of the farmhouse, a rocking chair rocks on its own. A chime dances, its reeds clattering out a skeletal song.

It is evening when Tío gathers the men in the chapel. Candles glow and sputter. Wind gasps through the cracks in the walls. The men sit in the pews and Tío paces before them, pausing only to speak in rapid-fire bursts of Spanish. The men hold bones in their hands, like drumsticks, that they clack together whenever Tío says something declarative, the same way one might offer up an Amen!

Claire watches this from outside, the ceiling of the sky occasionally lit by lightning. She hears a soft padding in the grass and discovers Roxana standing nearby, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes are prickling with tears. Her mouth is opening and closing without any sound. In her face there is terrible fear and hatred. “You’re going to kill some wolves with my tío.”