Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(24)
Though she knows that’s unlikely. She has been reading the newspapers, stopping at convenience stores to scan the headlines. “Terror in the Skies,” “Lycan Terror Plot,” “The Terror Among Us,” they read. Photos of the wreckage outside Denver, the blackened metal, the scar charred into a wheat field. Photos of the planes in Portland and Boston, parked on the taxiway, the red and blue lights of dozens of emergency vehicles reflected on the fuselage. Photos of body bags organized in a long black row along the tarmac. Photos of mourners piled up against the hurricane fence, clutching it and each other, their faces crumpled like damp tissues. Photos of the boy—“the Miracle Boy”—his expression grainy, a blanket shrouding his shoulders, escorted by police. Photos of the dead, a special insert in USA Today memorializing them, their names, ages, hometowns, occupations, hobbies, surviving family. Three 737s—553 corpses.
Nothing about her.
American flags snap from every porch. Stars-and-stripes magnets decorate every bumper. And this morning, outside a McDonald’s, a man with a bucket and a sudsy scrub brush works over the brick exterior where someone has spray-painted Eye for an eye, lycans should die.
The kind of rhetoric she’s read about in books, seen in movies, heard about from her parents, but never experienced firsthand. She debates whether she should go in, the building seeming poisoned, but the smell is too good, the fryer grease making her mouth damp, and the day is so cold, chasing her into the warm, brightly lit space. She buys a large coffee—two creams, two sugars—and a Big Mac, large fries. She has never had a better meal in all her life.
She pulls from her backpack the Bismarck Tribune, found in a garbage can outside. Its paper retains the cold and carries it to her fingertips. She finds on the front page an article that makes her lean forward. “Retribution,” it reads, accompanied by a shot of the president standing before a black bouquet of microphones, talking about the “swift, severe, and immediate response taking place at this very moment.” He could not go into details, for fear of tipping off those they pursued, but the American public should rest easy knowing that several arrests had already been made and scores more would occur over the next few weeks. “This is not a time to panic,” he was quoted as saying. “This is not a time to lash out at our lycan neighbors, who live peacefully among us and who are registered and monitored and, with the help of strictly prescribed medication, have forgone their ability to transform. Remember that to be a lycan is not to be an extremist, and I would encourage patience among the public while the government practices its due diligence in pursuing those responsible for this terrible, unforgivable catastrophe.” This was followed by a small quote from a lycan-rights group claiming widespread harassment and persecution in the days following the attacks.
That was it. Nothing about a house stormed, semiautomatics barking, her parents killed. The men in the black cars and the black body armor were at Stacey’s house too, which means they were probably at other houses, maybe all across the country. She imagines a hundred doors kicked down, the noise like a hundred bones broken, and she imagines the Tall Man stepping through them all. Why wasn’t this news?
She doesn’t know where to go, so she goes nowhere, holing up for ten days in an abandoned motel on the outskirts of Fargo. The Seahorse Inn, it’s called, the paint a faded and peeling aquamarine. The parking lot is riven with weed-filled cracks. The windows are blinded by sheets of plywood. There are twelve rooms, all of them locked, but when she walks around back, she finds an open window, the plywood crowbarred off and tossed into the tall grass. She calls out, “Hello,” and hears no answer. She peers in the window for a long time, the threadbare curtain moving with the wind licking her cheek, until her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then she crawls in, stepping onto a cinder block, slinging her good arm over the sill. Her feet rattle against the many crushed beer cans that litter the floor. Keystone Light. She guesses some teenagers broke in and used the place to party. The wallpaper is patterned with sailboats and starfish. There are light squares on it where paintings used to hang. A hole punched through the drywall. A chair tipped over. The mattress stripped bare and stained with what she hopes is spilled beer. She knows sleep won’t come easily in a place like this, but it ranks better than the nights she has so far spent beneath porches and in barns, truck beds, old campers.
She can smell the mess in the bathroom before she steps into the dark cave, barely able to make out the dried fecal matter muddying the toilet. Someone has destroyed the mirror, and the thousands of shards glimmer faintly from the floor. She closes the door and wanders around the room again and shrugs off her backpack and decides to call this home for a little while at least.
She smells like herself. That’s what her father used to say after a long day of work, lifting his arm, sniffing: “I smell like myself.” She has washed daily in rivers, in rest-stop and convenience store bathrooms, but her clothes feel as oily as a second skin. And her wrist. The wrappings stink like congealed grease at the bottom of a pan after frying bacon. She continues to wrap more and more tape around it, sealing the tatters, creating a fat silver mitten. She has swallowed her way through a bottle of ibuprofen, and though the pain has ebbed, she gets a fresh jolt now and then when she bangs her arm against something.
She has learned to do everything with one hand—eating, tying her shoes, unbuttoning her pants—her other hand uselessly tucked into her coat pocket. She tries to concentrate on the letter, to break its code, but after all this time without success, her mind wanders easily. She finds herself zoned out and staring at the wall, thinking about how much she misses her phone, how she once made a birdhouse from a dried and hollowed gourd, how one September a cold front blew through northern Wisconsin and dropped the temperature into the single digits, and when she and her parents drove to Loon Lake and clambered out on the ice and augered holes and arranged their tip-ups, the ice was so clear they could see the walleye and smallmouth and sunfish whirling beneath their boots.