Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(59)

She turns around in a circle. Something is wrong. She senses it in the air, like the echo of a scream, some disturbance she can’t quite hear. The snowbank pulses again, as though breathing—and then explodes upward, making a small blizzard. She cannot seem to move, and a vast stretch of time—enough time for her to feel her breath leaving her, her eyes widening in terror—seems to unfold before a massive set of arms encircles her.



*



Patrick is at the kitchen table, his head full of fog. He spent most of the night with his back against the locked door of his bedroom, a baseball bat resting across his lap. A few minutes ago he woke and tromped downstairs when he heard the pipes clanking, the downstairs shower spitting on.

Now he spoons into his cereal and sips a Mountain Dew and turns to watch his mother clatter down the hall in her high heels. She wears a black pantsuit with a cream collar that matches the pearls strung around her neck. “You look good,” he says, and she curtsies and then winces.

“What’s the matter?”

She rubs her knee. “Just my joints. Getting old, I guess.”

He tells her he thought he heard something last night. He does not tell her that he searched the house with his baseball bat cocked and ready to swing, that he found her room empty and the back door open, breathing in and out slightly, snowflakes fluttering into the house to perish on the floor.

He unlocked his phone then, ready to punch 911, when he saw her old text message and remembered that she hadn’t come home that evening, that she was staying over with a friend who was “having some trouble,” and that she would see Patrick the next morning. In his dream-addled state, he had forgotten.

She ceases her rubbing, her body frozen for the space of a breath. Then she is on her way to the kitchen, where she opens a drawer, rattling with silverware, and closes it without pulling anything out. “Well, like they say in the movies, it was probably only the wind.”

“They’re always wrong in the movies.”

She gives him a rigid smile and pulls a carton of orange juice from the fridge and a glass out of the cupboard and fills it and drinks it in a gulping way. “Something has come up. Not going to be here tonight.”

Again. She is gone so often these days, at least two nights a week. He thinks about the thin man stepping out of his house, nodding at him. He thinks about spotting his mother’s car heading toward his home in the middle of a workday. “What’s come up?”

“A convention.”

“Another one? But it’s the Sabbath.”

“Uh-huh.” Her eyes are on her hands, not him, picking at a hangnail. “Busy, busy, busy.”

He notices then the black bruise along her cheek that not even her makeup can hide. “Who gave you that?” He brushes a knuckle along his cheek and she raises a hand to touch the purplish swelling.

“Nothing. Nobody. I was doing a showing the other day and walked into an open door. Stupid of me. Really embarrassing.”

A twenty-inch TV sits on the kitchen counter. She picks up the remote and punches the power. The volume kicks on before the image. “What’s the worst part?” That’s the voice coming out of the darkness—the voice of Anderson Cooper, it turns out, reporting live from the Lupine Republic, wearing a down jacket and holding out a microphone to a soldier. His ears are bright red and his face appears windburned. Beyond them, the snow-covered landscape matches the sight seen out their kitchen window.

“Worst part?” The soldier wears winter cammies patterned with white and black and gray blotches. His face could be anyone’s, obscured by goggles and a helmet. “Carrying your buddies on a litter to the birds. To the medevac. That’s the worst.”

Cooper gives a brief history lesson, talking about the Republic as a melting pot of cultures, all of them united by their infection. “The world’s biggest leper colony,” Chase Williams, the governor of Oregon, recently called it. Virtually everyone, besides the U.S. personnel stationed there, is infected. Some have lived there for several generations, but families who want a homeland they can’t find elsewhere immigrate every day.

The segment then cuts to Tuonela, the largest uranium mine in the Lupine Republic and a major U.S. supplier. Cooper dons a hazmat suit, readying for a tour of the facilities, while his voice-over describes the codependency of the U.S. and the Republic—and how a small militia of extremist lycans continues to threaten that relationship.

His mother hits the remote again and the TV goes dark. She mutters something about nothing but bad news anymore and then says, “Your father is fine, you know. If anybody can take care of himself…Your father is fine.”

Patrick almost says, What about my mother?

She pulls her jacket out of the hallway closet and digs around in the pockets until she jangles out her keys. “So long,” she calls over her shoulder when she closes the door to the garage behind her.

He doesn’t respond. He’s still looking at the black rectangle of the TV. He pulls out his handheld. He hasn’t heard from his father in three days; the last email Patrick didn’t understand. “Breakthrough!” it read and nothing more. Whether he meant success in a military campaign or something else, Patrick doesn’t know, and the reply he sent—“???”—remains unanswered.

He shoots his father another email: “You okay? Tell me about this breakthrough thing.” He hesitates, his thumbs hovering over the keypad, before writing, “Nothing new here,” when of course the very opposite is true, but his father has so much already to worry about, like staying alive.