Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(38)

She removes the hammer from her backpack and holds it against her leg. The distance closes between her and the semi, and soon she can hear hooves tocking against steel, can hear a waterfall of piss splash through the grating and onto the asphalt. She walks the length of the trailer, and, now ten yards ahead, the passenger door yawns open and emits the faint orange glow of a furnace. She stops and says, at a yell she hopes will carry over the noise of the engine, “I didn’t have my thumb out.”

No response. The engine idles. She can feel it inside her, a trembling. She doesn’t know whether to run away or run toward the open door and beg a ride. She knows five miles should feel like nothing after two thousand, but the night is cold and she is tired and her aunt—is that possible?—might be waiting for her. She can’t picture a face—it’s been too long—but she imagines a straight-backed woman in a kitchen, pulling mugs from the cupboard, setting a kettle on the burner and looking toward the front door expectantly, anticipating her knock.

Her grip on the hammer tightens. Her feet make chewed-ice sounds along the shoulder when she creeps forward. She half expects to recognize the driver, the man from Minneapolis here to rescue her once more, a kindly smile on his face, his hand outstretched. But of course it is not him.

He is wearing a clown mask. That’s the first thing that goes through her head when she steps into view: he is wearing a clown mask, why on earth is he wearing a clown mask? He perches on the passenger seat, backlit by the overhead light. The mask’s eyes are black hollows, the hair a wild red color that matches the too-big lips stretching around a too-big grin.

The sheep bleat and the engine hums and he says, “Come here. Come here right now.” He speaks in the tone of a man commenting on the price of gas—quietly terse—and this is what scares her most, his calmness. Before she can spin away, he launches himself off the seat, onto her.

They crash to the ground. Her backpack digs painfully into her spine. He lays an arm across her chest, pinning her. She must be dreaming. Isn’t that what people always think when faced with the impossible? And what could be more impossible than this: her parents are dead—her house is riddled with bullets—and now, after traveling halfway across the country, she will be raped by a stranger in a clown mask who crushes her with his weight, the shape of him blotting out the stars above, erasing the constellations that brought her this far.

But in dreams you wake up when the worst happens. In dreams you cannot feel as she does now: the cold of the cinder at the small of her back, the heat of his sour breath on her face, the scrabble of his bony fingers working their way under her shirt. The sheep whine and stamp their hooves.

She should transform. She knows this. And for one moment she thinks she might—when an electric tremor runs through her, when her body tightens like a fist—and then she swings the hammer and it glances off the man’s shoulder. “You’ll pay for that,” he says and strikes her temple with his fist. She hears a sound like a pool ball dropped on a wooden floor. Now she is adrift, swimming between two worlds, and loses her will to do anything but close her eyes and try to find some dark closet in her mind to hide in, latch the door.



*



Patrick needs to drive, windows down, the night air cold, as sharp as a slap in clearing his head. He leaves behind Old Mountain and the glow of its outlying neighborhoods, preferring the company of darkness, not knowing where he is going, only wanting to get away. Moving is what matters. And being alone in the only space that really feels like his, this shitty Jeep.

The roads are empty. For a good minute he drops his foot to the floor and the engine screams and the speedometer trembles around eighty—and then he eases up, knowing the Jeep will rattle apart if driven too hard.

It’s close to midnight, but he doesn’t feel the least bit tired, hopped-up as he is now on adrenaline, thinking about Malerie leaning in to kiss Max and then addressing Patrick like a stranger, holding up her hand—the same hand she grabbed him with, now unfamiliar. He was scared of the Americans before she walked in the door—and now they have cause to hurt him if Max ever learns what happened.

“What kind of game are you playing?” he says.

Only the wind replies, whistling through the cracks in the nylon shell. He has his arm out the window, flattening his palm and cutting through the cool air that drags against it so that his hand looks like a pale fish struggling against a dark current.

Some movement catches his eye, and he glances past his hand and nearly jumps at what he sees. At first he mistakes them for wolves, the dozen or so coyotes that pour out of the forest and move as a pack along the shoulder of the highway. He slows, and for a while the coyotes keep pace with him, a rippling wave of gray. Then he accelerates and watches them fall away in the rearview mirror, their eyes reflecting the taillights, glowing red.

Later, he will wonder if they were summoned by the smell of sheep, and if he was driven wild by the full moon, but now, when he rounds a bend and comes upon the parked semi and the two figures struggling in the anemic wash of its headlights, his mind is empty, his body seemingly separate and acting on its own impulse when he stomps the brake and jumps out of the Jeep and races toward them—a man struggling to hold down a woman.

“Hey,” Patrick yells, and at the last second the man lifts his head and reveals the powder-white face and red toothy grin of a clown. By then it is too late for Patrick to reel back—he is already arrowing through the air. Someone cries out, maybe Patrick, when their bodies impact painfully. Then they are rolling down the shoulder, into the ditch’s weedy bottom, where they come to a rest with Patrick on top, the man below him. He snatches the mask and rips it off with a damp, sucking sound.