Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(166)

“Not interested,” he says.



*



Somehow Patrick finds her. He sees the smoke obscuring the sky, the ash tumbling from the cloud of it, and he walks until the hill rises into a point to find some vista, to get some perspective. He discovers her there. She stands on a lip of basalt overlooking a crevasse. The sky is behind her, and her windblown hair curls in every direction, as if she were floating in a big blue spread of water.

He has pored through the notebook and all those old emails—and his father and Desai have conducted their exhaustive research—each of them longing for interpretation, believing in their own way that they might find some answer to the impenetrable and make right the world. But when Patrick looks at Claire, when he feels that high-pressure need, it all seems suddenly beside the point, every pharmaceutical formula and utilitarian equation irrelevant.

She does not seem to notice him approach. Her eyes are on the crevasse. The tops of trees spike toward her. The wind, a mere breeze moments before, now gusts. If he had been wearing a hat, it would have blown off. She tips toward the open air before catching her balance. He says her name twice before she glances his way.

“Can you get away from there? Please? You’re making me nervous.”

She squints at him for a long moment before doing as he says, taking one step, then another, away from the long drop.

These past few months his heart has all but disappeared into a dark corner of his chest, a tiny flickering speck, but with her before him, the wind now feels as though it is fanning an ember, blowing it into a spark.

She calls out a question to him, but the wind rises and dashes her words away, and Patrick does not hear her. “What?”

“You should go.”

“What if I want to stay with you?”

“We’re different. Don’t you remember? That’s what you wrote to me once.” There is a mixture of assault and resignation in her voice, and she looks at him, then looks away, as if she regrets what she said as soon as she said it. “You were right.”

“No,” he says. “I was wrong.”

He holds out a hand to her then. Along the forearm, in the shape and color of a lipsticked kiss, is a bite mark.

Patrick had only one bullet. Killing Chase would accomplish nothing. His body would fall. Within a minute, drawn by the gunfire, soldiers would appear, knotting around him, knocking him to the ground and flex-cuffing his arms and legs, transporting him to the perimeter, an assassin.

So he lifted his pistol and fired it into Chase’s foot. The bullet punched through the leather and blood instantly welled from it. Chase widened his eyes and howled and fell backward and cradled his foot. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said, heaving a breath between each word. “I can’t believe you would do that.”

His entire body began to shake. He brought his hands to his face and stared at Patrick through the fingers. When his hands fell away, it was as though he had snatched off a mask, his face different, his mouth bloody and too full of teeth. He seemed not to notice his injured foot when he rolled forward in a crouch—and then launched himself at Patrick.

Their bodies became a mess of limbs, rolling over and over, so that Patrick could not distinguish up from down except when his face crushed into dirt. His backpack jabbed into his spine. Somehow he managed to short-punch Chase in the throat. The president coughed and choked and lost control of his body so that Patrick could knee him in the groin. His body went limp and Patrick shoved him away, separated himself, crabbing backward in time to hear voices and footsteps crashing through the forest.

He spied the rotten tree and scrambled into its dark entry. He barely scraped into the space with his backpack, shimmying upward, not caring what spiders or bats might wait for him, only wanting to be out of sight.

He was not sure what happened next. He heard the soldiers screaming their commands and Chase snarling in response. He heard a single gunshot followed by a cry of pain that trailed into a whine. He heard Chase struggling with them as they secured his wrists and ankles. He heard the helicopter hovering overhead and the trees moaning when they swayed and dropped cones that thudded the ground like grenades.

And then he heard nothing, and when he heard nothing for long enough to feel safe, he crawled out of the tree. Except for a few spots of blood, the ground appeared swept clean. As though nothing had happened.

He swung off his backpack and dug into it. He wanted to make certain that he still had the vaccine, that the vial had not been crushed, the bottom of his pack a mess of glass and powder. His hand closed around it—unbroken—but when he pulled it into the light he did not feel any sort of relief.

He was too distracted by the sight of his forearm. The gash there. Stamped with teeth. He had been bitten. Chase had bitten him. He stared at it for a long time.

Now his arm is extended toward Claire, and she reaches for it, not to take his hand, but to touch the gash with her fingertips. They come away tacky with blood.

His whole body is leaning toward her. As if he is asking for a blessing. She looks into his eyes. He is waiting for her to say something, but she only brings her mouth to the wound—and kisses it tenderly.



*



Then he says he has something else to show her—and her face hardens, betrayed from the possibility of a happy ending.

She does not ask any questions—she has no energy to do anything but follow him down the slope and into the zoo, past the dead animals in their cages, past the cool, still body of the Tall Man, to the color-coded, vine-strangled map. Patrick puts his finger on the veterinary offices and says, “There.” A few minutes later he kicks down the door and rips through the cabinets until he finds what he is looking for—two syringes and a container of diluent labeled STERILE WATER.