Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(167)

It is then that he unzips his backpack and withdraws the silver vial and sets it on the counter between them like a dare, like a bullet, as if this were some game of Russian roulette. Slowly she reaches out a hand to twist the vial until she can read the label. “That’s why you were here? In the Ghostlands?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you came for? A vaccine?” Her hand lingers on the vial—and she fights the competing desires to hurl it against the wall and swallow it whole.

“That’s what I thought I came for. I found something else.” His hand joins hers, and the vial vanishes from sight and she feels some fleeting relief. “You know what it’s like, having something inside you you can’t control.”

“On many levels, yes.”

“Here’s your chance to put a stop to it.”

She thinks for a long time, tugged one way and then the other, and then remembers some long-ago joke her father told her, about how even the best marriages are the result of overlooking the things you hate and focusing on the things you love. He said this just before dragging his wife, her mother, into an embrace and nuzzling her neck. It was and was not a joke. And when Claire looks inside herself now, past the fatigue, past the temptation and convenience of being fully human, she sees the two writhing forms at the heart of her, and she knows who she is and cannot betray that marriage.

She slides the vial toward Patrick. “I want you to take it.”

His hand pushes back, but she resists him and he does not battle her further. “There’s enough for us both.”

“I want you to take it.”

“Think how much easier things would be. Do you really want to side with these people?”

“I hardly recognize them. But I know who I am.”

He takes a long time to nod his agreement, but when he does, she helps him mix the powder with the diluents and reconstitute the vaccine and dose the syringe and find the vein. She swabs the blood that wells at his elbow. Then she kisses him again, this time finding his lips.





Epilogue



HE IS A small man. Maybe that is why no one seems to notice him. He wears safety goggles, a white jumpsuit with a General Mills logo along the breast, and a matching ball cap under which his fluorescent hair is nearly hidden. He holds a clipboard and pen and walks along a steel gangway with a chain railing. To either side of him, in this dry milling facility outside Des Moines, conveyors grumble and choppers mash and ovens process corn into flakes, flour, grits, meal, that will then be outsourced.

Yellow dust fills the air. Wide-blade fans, built into the walls, suck it outside. The roar of their blades and the crackle of the corn and the cranking of the machinery make it nearly impossible to hear. The noise doesn’t bother him. He feels perfectly at home here, as he should, since this is the twentieth facility—some dry millers, some wet millers—he has visited this month under the false pretense of quality control. Beside him, a seemingly endless stream of shelled corn sizzles down a chute.

His hand is missing two fingers, but he doesn’t have any trouble unzipping a custom-sewn compartment at his sleeve. From it falls a white, flaky dust. First one arm, and then the other. As if he is crumbling to ash or performing some funeral rite. He can fit a surprising amount into each sleeve, four liters’ worth of seed. That’s how he likes to think of it, as seed. The processed remains of the infected. Balor is dead, Magog is dead, but the mission is not: Puck set out weeks before with a pickup stocked full of ziplock containers they prepared for him.

He dusts off his hands once the last of the seed has fallen from him.

Prions, the widely read research of Neal Desai explains, are extremely resistant to standard inactivation methods, including boiling, irradiation, dry heat, and chemical treatment. At best, the prions reduce their infectivity but remain alive, waiting to swarm into a new system and take it over. It takes four and a half hours to kill the infection at 132 degrees Celsius—and even then it must be doused with hydrochloride and hypochlorite. Compared to that, the dry millers are the equivalent of a tanning bed. From here the infection will be processed into everything—toothpaste, yogurt, juice, cereal, chips, crackers, beer, beef, bread—truly everything.

When Puck makes his way out of the facility, the assistant manager, a man with a squat, square body, chases him down in the parking lot. The sky is a dying shade of purple. Puck keys open his pickup and pulls off his hat and tosses it inside the cab. The manager asks if everything looked okay.

“Everything was great,” Puck says and checks his hair in the side mirror. “Just lovely.”

“Will you be sending me a report?”

Puck climbs into the cab and keys the ignition and says over the engine, “You’ll be hearing from me.”

And he will. Everyone will. One night or another, likely when the moon is full, they will shut off their televisions or set down their forks or pause in their lovemaking, their heads cocked, before going to the window and staring through their warped reflections and wondering at the sirens that steadily fill the night with their howling.





Acknowledgments

Thanks to Katherine Fausset, Holly Frederick, and all the rest of the grand old crew at Curtis Brown, Ltd.

To Team Werewolf: Helen Atsma, Kirsten Reach, Oliver Johnson, and all the good and mighty at Hachette for their editorial and marketing muscle.