Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(17)
A parade of semitrailers motored by and she could feel the drivers’ eyes on her. Twenty yards ahead, one of the trucks pulled over with a chirp of air brakes and clicked on its hazards. The passenger door kicked open, and when she walked by it, a man was leaning out, a thin-faced man with a gray goatee, asking if she needed a ride.
“No,” she said automatically. She looked down the road as though her ride might come around the bend any minute now, then back at him. The cab of the truck, high above her, was brightly lit and seemed as big as a house. She imagined it was warm too. “I don’t know.”
He regarded her and chewed at his lower lip. “Look. I got a daughter about your age, and if I saw her walking around a place like this, middle of the night and all, I’d want her to get home.”
When he said that, she felt at once horribly depressed and comforted. She wanted to tell him everything, to let it out in a sobbing gush. Instead she said, in a small voice that barely carried over the noise of the engine, “I can’t go home.”
He dropped his head in consideration and then looked at her sadly from under his eyebrows. “Then I’d want her to get herself someplace safe.” He laid his hand on the door handle and pulled it inward an inch. “Your decision.”
She knew she could overpower him if she had to—assuming he didn’t have a gun—though she couldn’t imagine her body suffering through another transformation. She decided to trust him. She needed to trust somebody right now. She took a deep, steadying breath and climbed into the cab.
It smelled like chewing tobacco and stale French fries. He gave her a long look that at first disturbed her, until he said, “You okay?” He tapped at his own forehead while looking at hers. She pulled down the visor and flipped open the mirror and gasped at her reflection. Her face was purpled, bruised from the transformation—she expected that—but not the blood, the smattering of scabs along her cheeks, the raised wormlike gash on her forehead.
“I fell,” she said and spit on her thumb to wipe away what she could.
He put the truck into gear and the truck groaned forward. The CB radio was busy with jabbering conversation, and he clicked it off, its noise replaced by a country song playing quietly from the radio. He cranked up the heat and said, “Here,” tossing his jacket onto her lap.
When he asked where she was headed, she said she didn’t know. He shook his head but didn’t say anything more as they drove on—along a series of narrow roads, through a maze of warehouses, under a graffiti-painted bridge, finally pulling onto a ramp and grinding up to speed as they filed onto the interstate, surprisingly busy for the hour. The dashboard clock read 3:03. Her wrist throbbed. She felt weighed down with exhaustion. She felt safe in the truck, surrounded by so much steel. She liked being up so high. From here, if she squinted her eyes, the lights of the city glowed like stars, the strip malls and neighborhoods like distant galaxies, and soon her eyes shuttered closed completely and she fell asleep.
He made stops all through the early morning, at grocery stores and drugstores and gas stations, leaving her in the cab with the engine idling, hauling up the rear door, yanking out the gangplank, dollying crates of milk. She examined her wrist at one point—swollen an angry red and run through with a blackened stripe—and then she blearily peered out the window and fell back into her empty dreams. Eventually the sun rose and reddened the sky and they parked behind a Mega supermarket, and when the man climbed out and slammed the door, she woke with a start and remembered the envelope.
It was wrinkled and warm from its time in her pocket. She ripped it open and found money. Two hundred dollars in twenties. And a letter. If you could call it that. A lined piece of paper dotted with pencil marks, hundreds of them, in a seemingly random design. Her father loved puzzles and games and she knew immediately this was one of them. Not out of playfulness, but because he believed someone else might come upon the note. The men in the black cars. Her skin tightened and her hair pricked. She could feel them out there—hunting her. She wondered for how long.
She studied the paper and moved her lips as though trying to sound something out. But her mind was too gummed up with panic and exhaustion, and in the few minutes before the man returned she couldn’t make sense of its cipher.
His name was Elwood, he finally told her. “Tenaya,” she said, and they shook hands, which felt so silly after the hours they had already shared. She didn’t know why she lied about her name—but the lie felt right and she had once read a book by a woman named Tenaya and liked it.
They stopped at a McDonald’s and he bought two breakfast meals, and she chewed through her egg sandwich and hash browns so quickly that he offered her his as well. She thought that sadness was supposed to ruin an appetite, but she felt terribly hungry and wanted only to stuff herself as if to fill some gulf inside her. She tried to save her crying for when she was alone in the cab, but sometimes she couldn’t hold the tears in, so she turned her face to the window. He never said anything, but at one point she noticed on the console next to her a box of tissues where none had been before.
By noon she had cried herself dry and her thoughts sharpened into questions. Why her parents? And Stacey’s family? And however many other lycans? They had done nothing. They had no connection to the plane attacks. They belonged to a co-op. They drove a Prius, for God’s sake. They were talkers. They hated the government—they hated the U.S. occupation of the Republic—but they had never taken any action outside of circulating petitions, holding protest signs on downtown corners. And then she remembered her father’s words: “There are things you don’t know.”