Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(155)
CHASE WATCHES the fights from the concrete bleachers. This is at the fairgrounds outside Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an open-air building normally used for showing farm animals. The roof is steel; the floor is dirt. Some of the lycans grow their hair long and spike it into Mohawks. Others keep it short and shave lightning-bolt designs into the sides. Some grease-paint their faces into skulls, sneering demons. They wear outfits made from leather or spandex or polyester jeweled with rhinestones that catch the light and sparkle when they explode from doorways, hurrying through the applause, the jeering voices, the concrete bleachers and aluminum folding chairs, toward a dirt ring awash in fluorescent light.
It is a pit more than a ring. There are no ropes and there are no posts. There is only a concrete perimeter, a ten-foot-high wall that encases twenty square yards of dirt scratched and pitted and muddied with blood. Five black house-party speakers carry the booming voice of the announcer introducing the pit fighters with names like Wolfsbane and Hooded Justice.
The fights are hosted by Combat Zone, an indie circuit that promises ultraviolence. Chairs, ladders, thumbtacks, razor blades, light tubes, and barbed wire are standard weapons of the trade. So are teeth and claws.
The lycans leap into the air as if flying. They grapple with each other upright and on all fours. They crunch windpipes with their fists and snap arms behind backs and rip out clumps of hair and bite out hunks of flesh and seem to pleasure in the pain, both given and received, because the pain feels good. That’s what Chase thinks. The pain feels good. Because it reminds you you’re alive. Unlike the numbing fog of Volpexx.
A few weeks ago, he visited a lycan detainment center, one of a dozen established around the country for those accused or suspected of terrorist activity. Voices echoed down cement hallways. In the cells paced shirtless, hollow-eyed men whose ribs came together like claws above their sunken bellies. They pressed their faces against the bars and pleaded and spit and muttered nonsense. He felt bad for them. But he feels good for the lycans in the pit. Jealous even.
Chase cheers along with the rest of the audience. He wears jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a ball cap pulled low over his face. He has not trimmed his beard in days and it has a mossy quality. He is flanked by two Secret Service agents who do their best to appear as civilians—wearing Redskins Windbreakers—but they are so obviously wooden and watchful that Chase has to nudge them with his elbow every few minutes and tell them to relax, lighten up. They did not want to bring him here. But he demanded it, threatened their jobs if they didn’t do as he said. Special agents Trice and Houston. Those are their names. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, he calls them. He can barely keep anyone straight outside of a nickname. Secretary of the interior, secretary of commerce, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the cabinet secretaries, the administrator of NASA, the Joint Chiefs, the court justices. Too many faces, too many names, all of them unified by their desire to get him to do something he doesn’t want to do.
He has been working out three hours a day. Hitting the treadmill, hefting weights. His whole body feels like it is throbbing with pleasure every time he clips another hundred pounds on the bench press, every time he slams a fist into the speed bag, his body surging, exploding with the feeling of power.
Watching the men in the ring gives him a similar sensation. His hands open and close into fists. He pants more than breathes. His muscles jump. When he feels himself on the verge of losing control, when he tastes blood coppering his mouth, he leans in to one of the agents and says, “Time to go.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the two agents say.
*
The recon site is south of Salem—a spread of pasture used regularly as a drop point for ground troops. A county highway runs alongside it. During the night, fog spills from the woods and ditches, filling up the world, making the air seem full of ghosts. The recon task force is scheduled to arrive at dawn, their point of contact now delayed until visibility clears.
For hours, Patrick waits. Moisture gathers on the Night Train like sweat. His clothes and hair dampen. The excitement and resolve he felt through most of the night have given way to paranoia. Sounds travel strangely in the fog, and at times the breeze breathes in his ear and makes him spin around. A pinecone falls. A squirrel chatters. A snapped stick makes him think of a charged rifle.
Earlier, when he drove slowly through the fog, a mule deer bounded across the highway and sprang into the air, so impossibly high, hurdling a barbed-wire fence with a white swish of tail, disappearing into the fog, where a milky hole appeared and then fused together.
“Did you see that?” Patrick yelled and then realized no one could hear him. “That was beautiful.”
He felt so good then. Confident. Purposeful. He wishes he could bottle that feeling. It is unavailable to him now as his watch ticks its way toward noon and the fog disperses to filaments wisping around his legs. Last night he spoke apologetically to his lieutenant and then the CO. He did not barter a deal. He did not feel the need. They cussed him out, called him a damned fool, as he expected. What in the f*ck he was thinking—following a hunch, risking his life, disobeying every rule in the book—they did not try to understand.
“Sir,” he said, “with deference and with respect, I apologize, sir.” He explained what he thought he had in his possession, and there followed a long silence, after which he was told the coordinates by which they would meet the next day. They were bringing him home.