Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(156)

Perhaps, he thinks, his efforts would not be commensurate with his rewards. Perhaps he was about to land his ass in the brig. Perhaps the vial was nothing but a vessel of glass and ash, nothing of value. He glasses the horizon with his binoculars. Clouds hang here and there in cottony clumps, but otherwise, the sun has the sky to itself. Hills roll over and become mountains, the sharp white tips of Hood, Jefferson, stabbing the blue. The choppers will come from the east, he guesses, two Blackhawks, maybe more. He runs his vision along hillside ridges, mountaintops. Nothing.

He drops the binoculars. The wind races through the forest and shakes the trees, hushing through the trunks and branches. And then it hits him, a warm wave that carries grit in it and blows away the last traces of fog. He closes his eyes and lets it play across his face. When he opens them again, it is just in time to see the line of trucks and Jeeps pause on the road that runs along the edge of the field, ten yards away.

The wind dies and he hears the engines, like the grumbling of a big animal. The doors swing open. Out step twenty men with glowering faces, Mexicans.

There is no point drawing his pistol. They already have several shotguns trained on him. He stares into their black bores and waits for the buckshot to come. He wonders if he will hear the gunshot that kills him. He hopes not. He hopes death will come quickly, every sensation wiped clean at once, silence, darkness, peace.

He flinches when he hears a word, “Patrick,” as if it were a trigger’s snap.

She pushes her way through the men. He recognizes her immediately, but the image of her standing before him now and the memory of her sitting beside him in his Wrangler come together in his brain like a constellation he can’t quite figure out. They have a conversation with only their eyes. Their eyes speak of their confusion and delight. Their eyes say that she looks older, and he does too, as if the collapse of the world has knocked the youth from them, rushed them into adulthood. Their eyes say, I can’t believe it’s you.

“It’s you,” she says.

“It’s me.”

Before they can say anything more, the air grows busy with the stuttery whir of helicopters, and their eyes swing to the sky.



*



Chase has not yet reached for the light switch—and the door has not yet clicked closed behind him—when a lamp snaps on across the room. In its orange nimbus sits Buffalo. His glasses are aflame with the reflected light. For several seconds his hand remains on the pull chain while Chase stands with his jacket half off. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been out.”

“Where?”

“Out.”

Minutes ago, when he walked through the buzzing metal detector, when the usher approached him and asked for his jacket, Chase said to screw off. He could hang up his own clothes. Now he peels off his jacket and tosses it on the floor. “I had to get out.”

Buffalo does not raise his voice when he says, “You are the president of the United f*cking States. You don’t go out.” Chase hates him then. Hates the way his stern expression and forbidding eyes match the portraits hanging in the East Wing—all of them watching—all of them supportive so long as he behaved in a particular way, performed a particular job as they saw fit. He can’t go anywhere alone—he can’t make any decisions on his own. He wouldn’t be their flunky; he wasn’t their Mr. Smith. “I assume you’re here for some other reason than to lecture me.”

“Something has happened.” His stillness is unsettling. “Something big.”

Chase doesn’t wait around to hear it. In the bathroom, he unzips, pisses, makes Buffalo wait for him or talk over the noise of the bowl. He takes his time washing his hands.

When he emerges from the bathroom, Buffalo remains in the chair, legs crossed, hands folded over his knee. He asks if Chase remembers Miracle Boy, the punk kid, the sole survivor, the one who made news for playing dead and later enlisting.

“How could I forget? That’s when this whole mess began.”

“He just pulled a stunt that could be a publicity dream. Or nightmare.”

Buffalo tells him what he already knows. At the same time the Hanford site detonated, the Resistance torched the vaccination labs. Everything was lost. Other private facilities picked up where Desai left off, but they remained a year away from inoculation, and inoculation is precisely what this presidency needs. Miracle Boy claims to have found it. He went AWOL, snuck into the Ghostlands, discovered a safe room in the research facility. He found Desai, his papers, his laptop, and what he believes to be the vaccine.

“What exactly is the problem? This sounds like a wet dream.”

“He’s gone missing.”



*



At first they do not move, as if the choppers might not notice them, should they stand as still as deer. The two Blackhawks circle the meadow once, twice. The grass flattens and the trees shake with the gusting rotor wash. Grit bites their faces. The choppers hover like wasps, black bodies with lean, long tails. Their stammering roar is such that Patrick can barely hear the voice that screams in his ear, “These your friends, GI Joe?” Before he can respond, someone grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks his pistol from his holster and shoves it into his throat.

All around him the Mexicans swing to the sky their rifles and shotguns—among them an AR-15—and begin to fire. Bullets spark the underside of the choppers. Glass shatters and falls in a sparkling rain. One of the birds banks hard and rises steeply. Its rotor blade clips the rear stabilator of the other Blackhawk. There is a sound like a fork caught in a garbage disposal. The four-blade rotor snaps, and one of its blades swings wildly through the air and impales a truck with a deafening screech.