Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(16)
They stand and Patrick glances again to the window. The skinheads are gone. When he looks back, Wetmore has his hand extended for a shake. Patrick says, “Sorry,” and raises his own, bloodied and trembling, in an apologetic wave.
Chapter 6
CLAIRE DOESN’T LIKE wide-open space. It makes her feel exposed and untethered, as if she might float off with a gust of wind. From where she stands—in the weed-choked parking lot of a Shell station in Frazee, Minnesota—she can see three different weather systems at the same time: a mushrooming collection of thunderheads that appear bruised and intermittently veined with light; an enormous cloud that reminds her of a gray jellyfish trailing its poisoned tentacles; and an anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud that sponges up the light of the sun. She knows its name, cumulonimbus, because her father taught her all of them, along with the different types of trees, knots, birdcalls, constellations.
She can remember lying on the driveway with her father, every light in the house extinguished, the stars sprinkled across the black reaches of the sky—this is how they spent so many summer evenings. And as the constellations wheeled past, he would test her, her eyes tracking his finger when he pointed there, and there, and there. The stars would web together into designs that seemed to glow brighter. “Carnia,” she would say, spotting the keel of a ship floating in a midnight sea. “Leo. Gemini. Hydras.”
Now she imagines her father’s upraised hand becoming translucent, the stars glowing through it, and then vanishing altogether. She pushes the thought from her head and tries to concentrate on something small and good. The endless night taught her that. If she doesn’t focus on something else, she doesn’t move, and if she doesn’t move, they will find her. She doesn’t understand why, but they want her. The men chasing up the staircase—and, waiting for her on the sidewalk, the Tall Man in the black coat. Above her—for the moment anyway; she knows better than to count on anything anymore—is a broad patch of blue sky. That is something to be grateful for.
The wind hasn’t stopped blowing since the Twin Cities, like a draft from an open door. It rises now and kicks up a tiny whirlwind of trash and grit that dies a moment later. She sinks into her Carhartt jacket—given to her by a trucker—two sizes too big and the color of the hard-packed soil and browned grass that stretches to the horizon. In one pocket rest a Snickers bar and a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, and in the other, a wad of cash and the letter from her father. She wears sneakers and jeans and a long-sleeve, blood-spotted shirt. Otherwise she has nothing—hardly even a memory of last night, so much of it a blur.
She remembers transforming, the fury and adrenaline turning over inside her like a big black dog. She remembers crashing through the glass and tumbling through the night and staggering off into the woods. She remembers the Tall Man.
In the distance, dogs bayed. Flashlights cut through the falling snow. She hoped that the wind would blow away her scent, that the snow would fill up her tracks. Her friend Stacey lived only a mile away, and Claire raced there with the intent of pounding at her window, begging for help. In her panic she almost did exactly that, stopping short, sliding in the snow and bracing herself against a tree, when she noticed, at the last minute, the black cars parked in the driveway. Every window blazed with light interrupted by moving shadows. They had come for her family too. She watched them escort Stacey and her mother out the front door and lock them in the back of a car. She watched them drag the father’s body down the steps and roll it into an open trunk. And then she watched the house grow bright with fire that reached through the windows and made the snow steam.
She had run then. Run without thinking—through the night, the skeins of snow—gnashing her teeth and trying to ignore the pain in her wrist and her heart. It wasn’t her plan to jump the train—she had no plan except the single-minded impulse to escape—until she heard the banshee cry of its whistle.
Tracks cleaved through the center of town, and she could see the freight cars snaking darkly through the trees. The ground tremored—even the air seemed to shake—when she burst from the woods and scampered slantingly up the gravel berm. The train was long and she could not see the engine, but she heard the faraway blast of its whistle and guessed it was nearly within city limits. The cars slowed. The wind tried to push her back. The wheels kicked up ice. The clattering roar took over every other sound in the world. She raced perilously close, reaching out with her good hand—its knuckles furred over, its fingers curled into pointed tips—and snatched hold of a short steel ladder. Her feet dragged behind her, skidding across the snow and gravel, until she hooked her other arm onto the ladder, bracing her elbow against a rung. She used her last bit of energy to haul herself up and crawl to the rear platform of a freight car, where she curled up on herself, trying to create a pocket of warmth, and only then, when she retreated into her human form, did she cry.
Deep in the night, the train lumbered into Minneapolis and came to a screeching stop at a grain elevator. She rose wearily from the freight car and wandered away in a daze, her ears aching, her body humming. She was in an industrial area. Factories. Storage centers. Big metal warehouses stained with murals of rust. Machinery hummed. Steam rose in arching columns like bridges to the moon. There was no snow here, or if there was, it had melted, but it was cold all the same and she crossed her arms against the wind and the pain nested in her wrist. She found a road with no sidewalk and walked along its grassy shoulder. She had no plan. She just wanted to feel as though she was moving, putting distance between her and whoever she felt still pursued her.