Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(154)

“Yes.”

“But you’re a wolf.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not all the same.”

Claire approaches her and reaches out and combs some pine dander from her hair. “No, we’re not.”

“Some are good and some are bad.”

“Same as people.”

“You’re one of the good guys, right?”

“I think so.”

“I ran away from them when they were drunk, when they were sleeping. But I wish I hadn’t. Run away. I wish I had stayed. And killed them.” The candles reflect off the girl’s eyes, little gold sunbursts mixed into the brown pools. “I hope you blow all their guts out.” Roxana says this point-blank, without a trace of humor or pity, and then takes a few steps back, as if to escape the memory attached to her words. Thunder grumbles overhead. Tío barks out something in Spanish and the men clack their bones.

Claire’s father used to read westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. In those wrinkled paperbacks, the heroes spend a lot of time seeking revenge. If somebody, usually a guy with a black mustache, kills a friend or a family member, it is your duty to pay him back in lead. It is the just and courageous thing to do, the only thing to do. Right now she feels this way about Balor, about the Resistance. Putting bullets and blades into them feels like the only thing to do. Tearing into them, one by one, reciprocating the pain they have caused. Even if she is outnumbered, even if her head ends up on a pike, she feels she owes it to Roxana, she owes it to Matthew, she owes it to Miriam, she owes it to her parents, she owes it to the hundreds of thousands displaced and ruined by the meltdown, herself included, seeking some sort of absolution.

She looks to the sky. The clouds have torn open in places to reveal stars. Some look to the sky and see wishes, heavenly possibilities. She sees a morgue bright with the glinting white of bones. She is ready to kill. She is angry, and the anger is good. It means there is something still flaming inside her. It means she hasn’t yet gone to ash.

Inside, Tío’s voice grows louder and the men clack their bones faster and faster until the sounds merge into one terrible war cry.



*



The low-slung sun smolders through the clouds as if they were a shriveling purply brown piece of hot plastic. Twilight rises from the mountains like smoke, fingering its way across the sky. Thunder sounds. Lightning flares. Patrick zigzags along some side roads and discovers, down the end of a long driveway, hidden in a thicket of trees, a cabin made of peeling gray logs. One bedroom, one bath. Only a few windows. No place anyone would ever want to live. Safe.

There is a stream nearby. The water is white with minerals and comes from the old glaciers way up in the Cascades. He strips off his clothes and climbs into it and grinds his teeth against the cold. When he bathes, when he dunks his head and scrubs his skin with sand, huge trout curl around him and dart all up and down the river, their rainbow scales glowing beneath the water. Sometimes the fish taste Patrick, taking his toes or fingers into their prickly mouths, chewing, and he finds the sensation strangely pleasant. For a moment he worries whether the water is cleaning him or dirtying him—the radiation washed right off the mountains and into his skin—but then he stops worrying. He has room in him for only so much.

Before locking up the cabin and dropping the blinds, Patrick stands on the porch to survey the night. Especially at this time of day, when darkness settles in and the towns no longer glow, the broken streets and empty buildings and burned-out cars as black as charred wood, the bats swooping and the frogs peeping and the Cascades a cutout against an ink-wash sky, it is easy for him to believe that all other human life has been extinguished.

He lights up the cabin with flashlights he finds in drawers, a propane lantern he finds in a closet. He eats an MRE, guzzles a canteen of water. A shelving unit in the living room is loaded with books—westerns, romances, science-fiction stories—and though he has never liked reading much, he paws through them now not just for entertainment, but also for the comfort of following smart people who say all the right things and in the end figure stuff out.

Fifteen minutes later he hasn’t made it more than a few pages. Every time he tries to read a word, the letters scramble away from him. He ends up tossing the book aside and staring at the wall. There is too much in his mind, too many possibilities branching before him depending on what choice he makes.

A long time ago, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a great job, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need has become an abstraction and he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness. Not just the want to go back to California—the want to spin the globe backward like a clock and rediscover that moment in life.

In the vial lies that very possibility. A cure for a sick world.

Any anxiety Patrick might have—about getting court-martialed, about handing over the vial—is laid to rest now. The world needs to move on, to heal.

He kneels beside his backpack and pulls out the satellite phone and hesitates only a second before punching it on and dialing the base. “This is Patrick Gamble,” he says. “I am contacting you from beyond the perimeter. And I have located what I believe to be the lobos vaccine.”





Chapter 64