Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(163)

It is then that she smiles. Only for a second. Her face quaking with happiness. The expression does not come easily. And it feels alien to her and the horror of her circumstances. But she cannot stop herself. She is going to make it after all. She is going to live.



*



When the bullets spray their campsite, Patrick bolts in one direction, Claire another. She has her revolver in one hand and her backpack slung over her shoulder and she isn’t sure how long and how far she runs, but by the time she stops, her throat is ablaze, her side is cramped, and she is alone. In the distance she can still hear the crack of gunfire, the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter. At first she is in a fury, her body shaking with the dynamite of the moment.

She doesn’t understand how they found the campsite, and she doesn’t understand why they are here, but it must be because of Patrick. For this she might have shot him if given the chance. He has betrayed her again. She should not have trusted him. She should not trust in anything, not even herself, weak and forgiving as she seems to be.

She keeps going—to where, she doesn’t know. Away. For the moment, movement is all that matters. She is used to it. It is what she is best at. Running. She tries to hurry, but the ground steepens into a hillside tangled with vines and spongy with deadfall. With every step, her anger lessens, replaced by worry as she wonders whether Patrick is all right.

She clambers up battlements of basalt and finds herself in a dry riverbed and follows it up and up. She remembers his surprise, his panic. The way, when the gunfire began and they sat upright and blinked away sleep, he put a hand protectively to her chest, the way her father did when he was driving and had to stop suddenly. It was the same hand, as rough as a hunk of pine, that touched her all last night, combing fingers through her hair, tracing the outline of her jaw and neck. He loved her neck, he said. It was the most delicate thing about her. She touches the place he touched, just above her collarbone, and feels there the beating of her pulse.

She tries to make him ugly. Knobby knees. Big ears. Flat butt. His face spooned. Too much white around his eyes. But it doesn’t help. His rightness, that electrical feeling, engulfs everything else. She wants him. Right now she wants him more than anything in the world.

All of her running has made her mouth cottony, given her a headachy, dehydrated feeling. She climbs up this dry riverbed, what feels like an immense rainspout, and eventually it peters out and she clambers through a notch and discovers that she is at the top of the hill. She stands on a shelf of rock overlooking a hundred-foot drop. She gets that feeling she sometimes gets. The fall would be long and terrifying—followed by serenity.

For a moment she wobbles there with a sensation not unlike vertigo. Then she climbs down another way, onto a slippery wash of red clay that takes her eventually to an asphalt trail. It is strewn with leaves and half-hidden by mud, but she can still see what appear to be yellow paw prints painted onto it. Though she should have noticed them long ago, she was too caught up in her thoughts and only now observes the buildings rising out of the woods, many of them mossy and vine strangled. The air smells curiously sweet, fecund. Above a glass entryway hangs a sign that reads, in white lettering, EAGLE LANDING.

The zoo. She is at the Portland Zoo of all places. She remembers, yesterday, when studying the map with Tío, seeing it on the other side of the Hoyt Arboretum. She is so far from where she thought she would be, only a day ago.

She tucks the .357 into her hip holster. She wanders the trails and passes by replica ice floes and snow caves, artfully stacked logs, a miniature train rusting on its tracks with seven cars to haul red-faced children and camera-lugging adults. She sees, beyond the fencing and moats, the faded orange coat of a dead tiger, the sunken hummock of a grizzly. A giraffe that died with its body on one side of the fence, its head on the other, trying to reach the leaves of a nearby tree, its long neck rotted through and spiked with white vertebrae. Behind a plate-glass window she spots a stuffed mountain lion unendingly roaring, the only thing here that appears alive. She wanders over to a pond and finds it full of flashing color, orange and red koi that come boiling to the surface when she tosses a handful of pebbles into the water.

“Have you seen this?” someone says. “You should really see this.”

For two years she has imagined him always behind or beside her, like a shadow she can’t shake. For two years she has not so much as taken a shower without a weapon in arm’s reach. For two years she has dreamed of him and what he will do to her when he finally finds her. She will try to run, but her legs will feel entangled in mud. He will strike her. She will stumble. He will strike her again and she will fall. “You’ve made me angry,” he will say. “You’ve made me so, so angry.” She will close her eyes and whimper and there will be a crackling sound and the smell of smoke and when she looks at him again his terrible melted face will have been set aflame by his anger and his volcanic eyes will regard her as dry tinder.

And now here he is, the Tall Man. He wears a black suit despite the heat of the morning. A Glock dangles from one of his hands, gripped as casually as a closed umbrella, but there in case he needs it, there for her to see. His bald, ruined head is spotted with sweat. He withdraws a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and runs it across his brow. He stands ten yards away, next to a short fence past which the ground slopes to a pond with an island in its center. On the island is a chaotic wooden structure with ropes and tires hanging off it, the grass below it littered with bones.