Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(54)
His title is professor, but aside from a few lectures a year, he does not teach, his primary duty research. The center houses five barns and ten acres of pasture, and today he is supervising his graduate students and postdocs as they inoculate calves. They are sedated with xylazine, a midline incision is made in the skull and a hole drilled through the calvarium, and then the inoculum is injected into the midbrain via a disposable needle. The incision is closed with a single suture, and the surgical instruments, including the drill bits, are disposed of in a hazmat bag. You can’t be too careful when you’re deliberately infecting an animal with prions.
This is his specialty, prions, and as interested as he is in mad cow and chronic wasting disease, most of his research over the past ten years has concerned lobos.
His daughter, Sridavi, is a lost girl. That’s how he thinks of her—though really she is not so much a girl anymore at twenty-two. Her eyes swim with drugs. Her skin always has a sheen of sweat to it. Her bones press against her skin so harshly he fears they might cut through. The black smears beneath her eyes darken her otherwise yellowish complexion. Looking at her makes him feel scraped out by something sharp, a wound that no suture can help heal.
Ten years ago, he heard a crash in her room followed by a banshee scream. Her door was locked and she did not respond when he knocked or called her name, so he splintered the hinges with his weight. He has always been a big man, though not as big then as he is now, drinking gallons of sugary coffee, regularly peeling open candy bars for the rush that keeps him going all these long hours.
He barged into his daughter’s room and found the bookcase overturned and a pair of pants poking beneath it so that at first he thought her crushed. A growl rose from the corner. He spotted her then, at the head of her bed, curled up in a ball nearly curtained by her long black hair. His relief was short-lived. When he called out her name again, her hair parted and a demon’s face emerged from it, the eyes and mouth pocketed with blood.
He knew immediately what had befallen her even though he did not want to believe it. He should have retreated from the room, drawn closed the broken door, but he ran to her instead, stumbling over the mess of books, saying, no, no, no, as if to chase the demon out of her.
She sprang off her bed and he held out his arms to greet her. The impact knocked them both to the floor, where she clawed at him, parting the buttons of his shirt, flaying the skin from his chest, as if to tear the heart from him.
Though Neal outweighed his daughter by more than a hundred pounds, he could barely hold her down, her body rigid and humming with power, as if he were wrestling a sprung diving board. His wife stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, and he told her to hurry, damn it, call 911.
And while he waited for the sirens to wail, for the police to tromp down the hallway with a tranquilizer syringe, while his daughter bucked against him and he strangled away her snapping jaw, his chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the shredded skin and blood pouring from it.
He strips off his booties and hazmat suit and tosses them in a bagged bin. He punches his personal code into the keypad and the light flashes green and the door unlocks with the shunk of the automatic deadbolt and he enters a white-tiled room and strips off his shoes and socks and underwear and undershirt and tosses them in another bin before standing under a blistering shower and scrubbing off and toweling dry and then heading into the locker room, where he spins his combo and yanks the lock and pulls out his gym bag and dresses in jeans and a long-sleeve collared Izod, a birthday present from his wife, not that he has any time or desire to golf anymore. His jacket he drapes over his arm.
He signs out with the night secretary, a woman named Beatrice, whose pink scalp glows through her thinning red hair. She buzzes him out of the lab and into a short gray hallway, undecorated except for a plastic ficus tree, its leaves leavened with dust. At the end of the hallway, a metal detector and X-ray machine. He says hello to the security guard, one of several posted at every building, then empties his pockets and tosses his bag on the conveyer and picks it up on the other side and says so long. He gets buzzed through another door and heads not into a reception area—they rarely see visitors here—but directly into the chill of the night.
He knows the Willamette Valley is temperate compared to the other side of the state, where he hears a snowstorm is dropping several inches tonight, but even after thirty years of living here, he can’t get used to the temperature dropping below fifty. The air is misting, a hesitant rain. He zips his jacket so quickly that the metal bites his neck, what his wife teasingly calls his second chin. He checks his fingers for blood when he walks a winding concrete path that takes him to the gate.
He can hear the electricity humming in the fence when he approaches. The guard here sits behind a sliding Plexiglas window that he opens to hand Neal a clipboard and pen. He smacks Nicorette and makes small talk about the Trail Blazers sucking it up again as Neal signs out. On his desk, a mess of log sheets and several television screens that offer fish-eye views of the center. The gate buzzes open and the two men wish each other good night.
He pulls out his keys and shakes them away from the remote clicker and punches the autostart on his Honda Accord to get the heater and butt warmer going. In the lot ahead of him, a scattering of cars and SUVs lit by lamps, the asphalt running up against a gully tangled with blackberry vines, plastic bags caught up in them like spider eggs.
The space behind his eyes throbs with the exhaustion of the day and the anticipation of what awaits him at home, his daughter likely glassy-eyed and catatonic and soiling herself from some combination of snorting too much Volpexx and smoking too much of the medical marijuana she’s prescribed. The last thing he wants to do is talk to someone—the gauntlet of security was bad enough—so he loudly sighs when he hears his name, “Dr. Desai?”