Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(4)
His seat belt unclicks with the noise of a switchblade.
*
Patrick wishes he hadn’t ordered the large Coke. But he was tired, and he doesn’t drink coffee because it tastes like dirt, and the large cup cost only ten cents more than the medium—so he thought, what the hell. It’s been one of those mornings. A what the hell morning. His father is leaving his son, is leaving his job at Anchor Steam, is leaving to fight a war, his unit activated. And Patrick is leaving his father, is leaving California, his friends, his high school, leaving behind everything that defined his life, that made him him. Though he feels like punching through windows, torching a building, crashing a car into a brick wall, he has to stay relatively cool. He has to say what the hell. Because his father asked him to. “I don’t want to go. And you don’t want to go. But we gotta go. And it’s only for twelve months,” he said. “Consider it a vacation. A chance to get to know your mom a little better.” Twelve months. That’s how long his father’s deployment would last. Patrick has to suck it up and hang tight until then.
But now he has to pee. And he has the window seat. And there is no way he can sneak past the two women sitting next to him without making them shut their laptops, making them stand, making a big production, making everybody on the plane look up and stare at him and think, “Oh, that kid has to pee.” And they will be thinking that—they will be thinking about him peeing—when he locks himself into the chemical-smelling closet of a bathroom and struggles with his zipper and tries to maintain his balance, tries not to piss all over himself while turbulence shakes the plane. Maybe he can hold it. Or maybe not—it’s another two hours to Portland—and the pressure is so intense his bladder is beginning to throb. Just as he is about to touch his neighbor on the wrist, to tell her excuse me, he’s sorry but he has to get up, someone two rows ahead of him, a man in a charcoal suit, rises from his seat.
His face is pale and sweating. His body seems twitchy along the edges, almost as if he were humming, vibrating. His neatly combed hair is starting to come loose in gray strands that fall across his forehead. Patrick wonders if the turbulence is getting to him, if he is going to be sick. The man staggers down the aisle, yanks open the bathroom door, and slams it shut behind him.
Patrick curses under his breath. Not only does he have to wait, but he has to wait for a puker who’s going leave his chunks all over the mirror and toilet and door handle. He turns around in his seat three times in as many minutes, checking the bathroom, willing the door to open. Each time he looks there is another person standing in the aisle, all of them with their arms crossed, their faces pensive, waiting. He supposes he should join them.
He unbuckles his seat belt and opens his mouth—ready to finally excuse himself, to stand—when a ragged snarl comes from the back of the cabin. It is hard to place, with the shout of the engines, the chatter of so many voices. Patrick wonders if there is something wrong with the plane. He remembers seeing a news report about how so many planes are behind on their maintenance schedules and shouldn’t be in the air at all. Maybe the turbulence has shaken loose the screws holding the tail in place.
There is a growl, a long, drawn-out guttural rumbling, and though it is hard to place, it seems more animal than machine. The cabin is now hushed except for the creaking of seats as people turn around with anxious expressions.
Then the bathroom door crashes open.
A bald man in a Rose Bowl sweatshirt is the first in line for the restroom—and so he is the first to die. The door jars him back. He would have fallen except for the narrow hallway where he stands, the wall catching him and preventing any further retreat as the thing emerges from the restroom, rushing forward like a gray wraith, a blurred mass of hair and muscle and claws. It swings an arm. The bald man’s scream is cut short, his throat excised and replaced by a second red mouth that he brings his hands to, as if he could hold the blood in place. But it sprays between his fingers. As if to make up for his sudden silence, the rest of the passengers begin to scream, all of their voices coming together like a siren that rises and falls.
The thing begins to move up the aisle.
Patrick is reminded of a possum his father once trapped. They live on a hobby farm north of San Francisco, near Dogtown, a half acre of carrots and tomatoes and raspberry bushes, three goats, bee boxes, a henhouse. One night the chickens exploded into a panicked clucking, and by the time his father raced to the coop, his flashlight cutting through the dark, the whirl of feathers, he found broken eggs littering the floor and a half-dead hen in the corner missing a wing and a clump of its throat. So they set up a trap, a cage with a spring-loaded door that crashed closed. They baited it with hard-boiled eggs and old bananas. And by the next night they had their possum. It hissed and paced the length of the cage and threw itself against the bars and chewed at them with its needle teeth and reached forth a claw to rake the air. Patrick had once heard his science teacher say that animals didn’t feel the same way that humans did, but Patrick was sure he was wrong. The possum felt deeply. It felt rage and hatred. It wanted to kill them for what they had done to it. And though Patrick knew he was safe, knew the cage would hold, knew his father would soon slide a pistol between the bars and fire, he kept his distance and flinched every time the possum crashed its body against the enclosure.
Of course he knows what the thing is. A lycan. He has heard about them his whole life, has read about them in novels, history books, newspapers, watched them in movies, television shows. But he has never seen one, not in person. Transformation is forbidden.