Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(161)
He finds his backpack then, and another body, another gun, a pistol this time, a .22 Ruger, good for a range of only twenty or thirty yards, which seems to be the distance of the advancing soldiers. He nearly tells them to hold their fire, nearly calls out his rank and squad number, but at that moment a stare seals between him and Tío.
The man is lying behind a log, a shotgun cradled against his chest, and he pats the stock and points to Patrick, as if to say, for you.
Their gaze breaks when something clunks off a nearby tree and falls to the ground like a heavy pinecone. Fog fizzes from it—tear gas. Another clatters through some branches and falls among them. A man cries out and brings his hands to his eyes.
A bullet passes between Patrick’s fingers with the furious buzz of a hornet. He checks the skin there, a scorched red. It couldn’t have gotten any closer. He won’t be that lucky again.
His eyes are beginning to water and his throat to blaze. He shrugs on his backpack. He needs to escape this place. He tries to account for Claire but can’t see, as if someone has smeared an onion across his eyes and he cannot focus on anything more than a few feet from him. He pops off a few rounds and hunches down and stumbles away.
*
Miriam has difficulty walking. She trips twice on her way out of the basement cell. She has to will her legs forward, her feet to rise and fall. Her joints feel rusted, her bones brittle, hollow, as if a hard step could shatter them. Her tendons seem to have shrunk. Her calf muscles bunch up like fists and she sits down to massage them, trying not to cry out. She drags herself up, leans against a stack of boxes that rattle. IODINE, the label reads. All throughout the basement, she notices stacks and stacks of the same boxes and wonders whether she has been housed all this time at some sort of medical facility.
The thought doesn’t last long, gone once she clambers up the stairs and cracks open the door as slowly and quietly as she can. She spots, hanging from the wall, a tapestry and two oil paintings with gilded frames. She opens the door wider and takes a quick inventory of a marble-topped table bearing a porcelain lamp, a fireplace mantel with a three-faced ornamental clock, a leaf-patterned wooden chair blackened from so many years of polish, an oriental rug that spans the length of what appears to be a sitting room, and assumes she is in some sort of museum.
She leans hard on the doorknob when she steps into the high-ceilinged room. The wainscoting is dark slatted wood. The windows are framed by thick curtains, and through them she can see untamed hedges, knee-high grass in the steadily brightening dawn. She does not have time to wonder at her surroundings. Escape is all that matters.
She tries to imagine the seeming size of a house like this, the rooms stretching on and stacked up all around her, like some vast honeycomb in which barbs and venom lie in wait. The hardwood groans with her every dragging step and threatens to give her away. She is weak, naked, unarmed, but her temper is as hot as blood in the vein when she thinks about anyone stopping her after she has made it this far. She goes to the fireplace—her bare feet cold on its soot-stained tiles—and grabs a poker to serve as a weapon and a cane.
She can see down a short hallway and into what appears to be the foyer. Her way out. She starts toward it and then midway across the room stops short. From this new vantage point she can see a wide spiral staircase reaching upward—and she can hear what sounds like footsteps shuddering down it. Her first impulse is to sneak beside the doorway and raise the poker like a sword—ready to swing its prong into the skull of whoever passes by—but she knows her body is too ungainly to fight, her muscles too weak to even hold the poker wobblingly overhead.
There is a swinging door beside the fireplace. She uses her back to push her way through it, into the kitchen, with its black-and-white rubber-stamp floor and its walls and cabinets painted a blinding white. Something is cooking. Meat. Her body aches at the smell—only for a moment.
In the center of the kitchen is an island. And upon the island lies a naked body. A thin, pale-skinned man with a beard wisping along his cheeks and neck. His mouth and eyes are open and she might think him alive if not for his hollowed-out belly, the skin scissored away beneath his sternum, guts gone. A large metal bowl—the same as the one Caliban used to clean her—sits beside him. Flies orbit the air above. One of them vanishes into his mouth.
She hears a creak. It comes from the sitting room, the hardwood floor depressed by the weight of someone walking. She must hide. She goes first to the pantry, but when she opens the door, she is greeted by another body, a man hanging upside down and bleeding out into a mop bucket. She nearly cries out in surprise. She spins around and sees a square of space beneath the island where someone might stack pots or bowls. It is empty now and she slides into it the moment the kitchen door swings open.
From here, she can see only to his waist but knows him immediately, his trunked legs, his boots big enough for a child to climb inside, the giant Magog. He never visited her in the basement, his one grace, for his weight and size would be an unimaginable torture. He wears black jeans that disappear behind an apron spattered with blood. She hears a tick-tick-tick-tick that she at first believes to be the radiator across the room. Then she notices that the poker is tapping the wall of her hiding place, jarred by the slamming of her pulse.
She wants to look away but cannot. She needs to know where he is, needs to know the moment his body stiffens at the sight of her so that she can try to uncurl from her hiding place and stab the poker into his knee or groin. He goes to the counter near the sink. He runs the water, and under the noise of it she shifts her body to better observe him. His red hair spills down his broad back. He picks up a cleaver and sharpens it—fifty times on one side, fifty times on the other—the scraping of the blade, the steel-on-steel sound so tangible that he might have drawn it along her bones. He tests it with a thumbnail and the razor edge peels away a curl.