Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(160)
It is not Puck who unbolts the door this morning. It is Caliban. Pale haired and slit eyed and round backed. She can’t tell if he is as old as her or old enough to be her father. He carries himself differently than the others do, shuffling about and whispering to himself, more servant than soldier. Sometimes he brings her food and sits on the edge of her bed and reaches the spoon toward her mouth, his own lips always parting just as she bites down. He will not speak to her, no matter what she tells him. And he rarely looks at her, perhaps embarrassed by her nakedness. But maybe he never talks to or looks at anyone. Maybe that is the avoidant way his mind is wired.
He is here to clean her. He carries a metal bowl sloshed full of soapy, steaming water. He sets it down on the floor and draws a washcloth from it and strangles out the water before running it along her face, her belly, her thighs and calves and feet. There is nothing sensual about the act. Nothing rough either. He is simply scrubbing her as he would a floor, spending extra time on her sores, letting the water soak into them, scraping away with a fingernail the dead skin.
He finishes with her groin and plops the washcloth into the basin and goes about stripping the bed. She has just enough slack on her restraints to lean her body sideways, to move her arms and legs enough to position a bedpan beneath her. The sheets on the mattress are rubber—in case she spills—changed every few days. He peels the sheet beneath her and she obliges him. When he leans over her, she notices the keys shining at his waist. He has not shoved them fully into his pocket and they peek out and catch the light and wink at her.
She remembers that when she was a girl, she believed if only she concentrated hard enough, she could move things with her mind. She believed it was like anything else: her mind was a muscle that needed exercise. So she would spend minutes every day staring at a red pebble or a pencil, willing it to move, sometimes staring so hard her head shook and her vision walled. More than once, when trapped in this basement, she has thought the same: that if she imagines hard enough, with the same sort of concentration, she might make something happen. She might escape this place. She thinks about her cabin. The green moss sponging the trees, the white bark of alder shining like bones. She is there. She walks naked through the mist, through a field of dew-soaked sedge, bluegrass, bear grass kissing her bare calves. Her husband is there too. And her daughter.
And now that moment has come.
Her wrists are braceleted with sores that break and bleed when she reaches for the keys, reaches as far as she can. She is an inch short. She wills her fingers into magnets. She wills her joints to come undone, her tendons to snap like rotten rubber bands, and allow her to stretch just a little farther. The handcuffs are cutting her deeply now, the skin peeling away, the blood snaking from her wrist. The blood helps. It lubricates.
Slowly her hand creeps forward and she manages to pinch a finger through the key ring. At that moment, Caliban adjusts his body to reach for the other corner of the mattress. The keys pull away from his pocket with a jangle she masks by coughing hard and shaking her restraints and making them rattle.
She has less than a minute, she knows. He will pour the wash water down the drain. He will ball up the sheets under his arm. He will shuffle to the door and close it and reach for his pocket. And by then it will be too late.
There are only two keys on the ring—one for the door, one for her cuffs—and she pinches the shorter of them between her pinky and thumb. This allows her less of a grip but a better reach to her wrist, to the keyhole. Her eyes dart to Caliban. His gaze is elsewhere, following a spider that scurries along the wall. He leaves the sheets half-undone and pursues it and mutters to himself in a language she cannot decipher.
She drops the key twice before she slides it home and twists hard and shakes free the cuff at the same moment that Caliban slaps a hand against the wall and then examines the black smear on his palm. He wipes it clean on his thigh and returns to the bed.
She lies as stiff as a board until he reaches over her again to tidy the sheet. His face hangs over hers. She can see into his mouth, can feel his breath gusting over her. She shoots her free hand into his neck and he looks at her, looks directly into her eyes, maybe for the first time. “I’m sorry,” she says before tearing out his larynx with a sound like an apple bitten.
*
Patrick is curled up behind Claire, the bigger of two spoons, when he wakes to what he initially mistakes for the snap of a pitch pocket. But the fire has burned down to coals. The woods remain as dark as night, but through the branches he can see a pink dawn spilling across the sky. Then comes the noise again, unmistakably gunfire.
He is only half-awake, and dream logic makes him think, that’s right, we were going to attack at dawn. He is staring dumbly at the face carved into the trunk of the tree when a bullet whizzes into it and opens up a pulpy gash between its eyes. Only then does he realize they are the ones under attack.
Claire rips the enormous .357 from her hip holster. He reaches for his own, but finds his belt empty. He bolts over the berm that separates their campsite from the others, his mind still two paces behind what is happening, certain he will find his pistol where he left his pack. The gunfire is constant now—thundering into a fusillade—so that he can barely distinguish the voices calling all around him. Dirt sprays, wood splinters, rocks spark, ferns shake.
Here is Tío yelling out commands in Spanish. Here is a man kneeling behind a stump with a rifle set on top of it. Here is another lying face-first in the fire pit with what looks like a mouth screaming at the back of his head. Patrick steals away the dead man’s lever-action and hunkers against a tree to check the chamber for a live round. He looks to the shadow-soaked woods and waits for gunshots to flare and then fires toward them, emptying the brass, chambering a round, until the rifle empties and he tosses it aside. He does not know who is attacking them, only that they are being attacked, and it doesn’t occur to him until a chopper darkens the sky overhead that he might be fighting his own.