Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(39)

Beneath it is a flushed pink face, as hairless as an eraser. A man. No matter what kind of monster he first appeared, he is just a man. And a man can bleed. Patrick lashes out, striking him once, twice, mashing his lips against his teeth—and then realizes, too late, why the man is not holding up his arms in defense. He is reaching for something, a rock as big as a fist that comes whistling toward Patrick, a blow to the side of the head that he hears more than feels, his vision momentarily black.

He is on the ground—he knows that—choking on the dust thrown up by their struggle. His vision wobbles into focus in time for him to see the man scramble into the truck and drag the door closed behind him. There is a hiss and a chirp as the brakes release.

Patrick shakes off the pain and struggles to his feet, but the ground seems to be shifting beneath him. He claws up a rock and hurls it after the semi—not even close, twenty feet wide, thwacking the blacktop. Before he can find another, the engine is bellowing and the trailer is shuddering off the shoulder, onto the highway, the red taillights like the eyes of some retreating beast. He watches until it vanishes around a bend, the muggy smell of sheep the only proof it was ever there.

He touches his fingers to his forehead—blood and a loose flap of skin—hopefully nothing serious. At his feet he finds the mask. The red hair frizzes around its head; the red lips stretch around its grin. Where its eyes should be there is only blackness, the kind of black encountered at the bottom of a well too deep to draw a bucket from. He kicks it away in disgust.

The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That’s how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.

“I have a hammer,” she says and holds it up for proof.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I didn’t think so. But I want you to know, I have a hammer.”

He almost asks if she is okay and then stops himself. Of course she isn’t okay. Is she hurt? That’s what he wants to know.

“I’ll be okay,” she says. Her clothes are intact. She isn’t bleeding. That might not be the case, Patrick guesses, if he had arrived even a minute later. A minute later and the man might have carried her into the cab of his truck like a spider scuttling to his burrow.

He holds out his hand and she takes it and he hauls her up and for a moment they are too close. “Do you have somewhere to go?” he says.

She takes a step back. “Yes.”

“Can I take you there?”

“Yes.” She hurries out her answers. No matter what he asked, she would likely say the same, yes. When she follows him to the Jeep, she does so slowly, as if trying to remember how to walk.

Her hand goes for the door handle and misses it. He opens it for her, and when she crawls inside, he asks if she wants to call the police. He didn’t catch the license plate, he says, but if they call now, the man won’t be able to get far. It is only then, with her teeth bared, that she says, “No.” He darts aside when she reaches out and slams shut her door. “No police.”

He climbs in the driver’s side and grinds the engine to a start. The radio blares—some pop song that comes across as mockingly sweet—and he hurries to snap it off. He checks his reflection in the rearview. His hair hides the wound. The skin is swollen and pouchy, the blood already tacky. His eyes seem all right, no dilation. He’ll live.

It’s only then that she says, “Thank you,” so quietly he almost misses it.

“Forget about it.” His fingers close numbly around the steering wheel and he sees his knuckles are torn up. “Where to?”

She hands him a crinkled piece of paper and he studies it a moment. “I don’t even know where we are, so this doesn’t mean much.” He pulls out his handheld and plugs in the address, and a map appears with a red pin tacked in the center of it and a route from their current location. He holds it out to her and the glowing screen chases the shadows from a face that seems at odds with her clothes. She’s his age, maybe a little older, and pretty, not the type he’d peg for a runaway or drifter or whatever it is that brings a person to the side of the road in the middle of the night clutching a hammer. “Not far.”

They drive. The crowns of the trees are silvered with moonlight and their bottoms skirted with an impenetrable blackness. He steals glances at her often—whatever her name is, he is afraid to ask. Her eyes spill tears, but she doesn’t appear to be crying, not in the standard sense. She is so still, sitting ramrod straight, hugging the backpack in her lap. She hasn’t even blinked.

What is the proper response in a situation like this? Should he offer a comforting touch or reassuring word? Curse the man for his wretchedness? Crack a joke to ease the tension?

“Hey,” he finally says, touching her wrist. He can’t find the words—words never come readily to him—but he hopes touching her tells her okay, everything is going to be okay.



*



She is tired of this nightmare. And now it is almost over. The boy drives her to Battle River, glancing back and forth between his phone and the road, slowing to peer at the mailboxes staked at the end of every driveway. Moonlight falls through the trees in blue patches that tremble at their edges when the breeze blows. He almost misses the driveway, no mailbox, the reflective numbers 1020 nailed to a tree. “There,” he says and cranks the wheel hard. Gravel ticks and pops as they shoot down a tunnel of trees several hundred yards long that opens into a clearing.