Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(165)

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How many have been killed?—what happened to Claire?—is he being followed? Patrick doesn’t know; he doesn’t know. He can see some way into the woods, but no farther, the air still dim with dawn and everything thickly tangled, draped in moss, ornamented with fungus.

He pops the clip, checks to see how many rounds remain in the Ruger. One. One bee sting of a bullet. He tries not to think about all the different kinds of f*cked he is right now. The ground slopes beneath him into a bowl-like depression with a long-dead fire ring at its center, someplace teenagers used to come to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and get lucky. Cigarette butts, faded chip bags, the dried husks of condoms. He steps on an empty can of Busch Light and startles at the metallic complaint.

He sees, carved into the bark of a tree, names and hearts and promises, and among them, in huge block letters, someone has scratched out FUCK YOU AND YOUR LOVE AND HAPPY HANDHOLDING HORSESHIT. Patrick listens to the gunfire still shouting behind him and feels a brief but profound surge of hate, hatred for people in general, their destructive urges.

This is who he wants to hand the vaccine over to, the same sort of creature that sprays down a campsite with an M4, that guns down a pack of lycans and then collects the scalps, that defaces a tree garlanded with declarations of love.

Amid the trash on the forest floor he spots a shattered pink cell phone. It hits him then: this is how they found him. He throws down his backpack and digs around until he finds the satellite phone. He sets it on a log and claws up a sharp-headed rock from the fire pit. He holds it aloft for a long moment. This phone is his tether to the other world. He imagines what awaits him there, the gauntlet of photographers, the cell where he will face interrogation. He cries out when he brings down the rock and shatters the phone into hundreds of glittery pieces.

For a moment he considers doing the same with the vaccine. He unrolls the watch cap and studies the vial in his hand.

It is then that he hears a branch snap. Behind him.

When he spins around, he sees only the graffiti-riddled tree. It has died and rotted from the inside out, its base hollowed like an empty eye socket that seems to follow him when he shoves the vial in his backpack and throws the pack over his shoulders and approaches the tree. He circles the trunk with his Ruger ready, his finger off the guard, on the trigger.

Then a man—helmeted, dressed in a utility uniform—steps from behind a tree.

Patrick falls back and raises his pistol just as the man brings the buttstock of the rifle to his shoulder. They stare at each other through their sights before slowly letting the noses fall and point at the ground. “You know who I am?” the man says. “Hoo-ah?”

It takes Patrick a moment. To see past the beard. To make sense of him in this context. And then it clicks, the voice, the face he has observed so many times on the television, the newspaper. “Yes, sir.” He wonders whether he ought to salute. “Hoo-ah, sir.”

Chase Williams. His president.

“We were supposed to have that photo op in the Republic, but you didn’t wait for me. You took off. Sort of like yesterday at the recon site. And sort of like ten minutes ago when we were trying to extricate you. You have a habit of not being there when people need you.” He is smiling without humor. “You got the vaccine?”

It takes Patrick a long time to nod, but he does.

“And you have the papers. Desai’s papers. And his laptop? You said you had them.”

Again he nods.

Chase smiles so broadly that he squints. “I’m grateful to you. I am. And you don’t need me to tell you this—you wouldn’t have come all this way if you didn’t know—but your country will soon be grateful to you; the human race will soon be grateful to you.”

The gunfire has ceased. The forest is silent and so is Patrick.

“You’re worried,” Chase says. “You’ve broken some rules. But know what? I’m a rule breaker myself. And I’m going to make sure nothing bad happens to you. I’m going to make sure only good happens to you. You’re going to be rewarded. We’re going to get you in front of some cameras. You and me. That’s what people need right now. They need somebody to cheer for, and you’re somebody to cheer for.”

Sunlight breaks through the canopy and lights up this pocket of forest. Patrick does not cry. Nor does he run. Though he wants to. To forget, if only for a moment, he closes his eyes. The sun backlights the blood vessels in his eyelids so that he sees a wash of red with dark roots creeping through it.

That’s it, he thinks. That’s how it ends. Quietly. No gunfight. No fistfight. No yelling and pleading. He can see it all so clearly, him handing over the vaccine. He could end it. He could end it all right now. As easy as that.

“How about you let me see the vaccine?” Chase says in a voice with cracks running through it. “How about you give it to me?”

Patrick then notices his skin trembling, his muscles jumping. The president looks like one of those old stop-motion movies, moving too quickly and jerkily. A drop of blood gathers at the corner of his eye and streaks down his cheek, vanishing into his beard.

Patrick is stepping back—he is shaking his head—when he says, “You’re one of them?”

Chase seems not to hear him. “You’re already a hero.” He lifts a palsying hand from the stock of the rifle and reaches for Patrick. “You can remain that way.”