Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(69)

Somehow, through the tangle of bodies, he makes out Max on top of him. His belly is soft and damp, like a pillow soaked with water. His voice pants in his ear. “We could kill you, you know. Say it was an accident. No one would know. Maybe I’d even speak at your funeral, run a hand along your coffin, which would be closed of course, since your skull would be split open like a cantaloupe.”

Somebody punches him in the ear, a hand as hard as a sledgehammer. A steady rain of black spots falls along the edges of his vision, and he ends up on his back—staring through the animal bodies looming over him—staring at the sky beyond them, where jets rumble and their contrails crisscross the pale blue like badly cast fishing lines across the surface of a lake.

He wishes them safe travels.



*



Jeremy shows her a room with a groined ceiling. Three moldy couches are arranged around an old wood-paneled television with a VCR and DVD player stacked on top of it. And then they walk past a sleeping chamber full of cots and a supply room busy with bags and boxes and crates, some arranged on shelves, some heaped and scattered on the floor. The tang of gun oil hangs in the air.

The kitchen is a space similar to the computer lab. Six mismatched lamps are staggered through the chamber to give off enough light to cook by. A skinned headless deer hangs from a rope, turning slowly, the rope creaking and knotted through its hind hock. The scent of blood comes off it and she resists the peculiar desire to slide a finger along the haunch and lick it.

Next to the deer sits a dented gas stove with a dirty propane tank hosed up behind it. And then a woodstove piped out through a crack in the wall, some other channel that sucks away the smoke. Several folding tables are pushed against the walls, their tops cluttered with cutting boards and knife blocks and cutlery jars packed with spatulas and wooden spoons like vases full of flowers. An old yellow fridge hums in the corner, surrounded by stand-alone cabinets, many of them without doors, their insides jammed with pans, pots, glasses, plates, spices.

Claire notices a trickling sound and goes to it, a spring dribbling from a hole in the wall and pooling in a rock basin the size of a bathtub. Jeremy kneels down and unhooks a ladle with a screened filter and dips it into the spring. He drinks from it and dips it again and asks, “You thirsty?”

She is more than thirsty, her lips cracked and peeling, and she nods and brings her mouth greedily to the ladle, the same place his mouth had been. She fills it four times before she nods to him and their tour resumes.

“Who’s Balor?” she says.

“Where did you hear that name?”

She shrugs. “Who is he?”

“Tell me about your aunt.”

“Your wife.”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want me?”

“Because I want her. She’ll come for you. Can you tell me about her?”

“I’m guessing she’s a whole lot of pissed off and worried sick right now.”

“I’m counting on that,” he says. “I’m hoping we’ll be seeing her soon.”

She can feel a breeze now, as they move up an incline, the floor a jumble of boulders. They hold out their arms for balance and leap from rock to rock, moving upward, the air steadily growing brighter.

“She hasn’t mentioned anything about the police?”

“Why would she?”

“Going to them, talking to them? She hasn’t mentioned that?”

“She just wants to be alone. You should leave her alone. Why do you want her anyway?”

“I need her. A wife should be with her husband.” He blinks rapidly, and then his voice grows louder and hurried as if to overwhelm what he has already said. “And she’s an important part of what we’re doing here. She’s an important part of the revolution.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

“We’re the revolution.” He slips on a slick rock and catches himself with his hands and scrambles to right himself. “We’re the leather-fringe revolutionaries fighting against the blood-coat British. We’re the blacks boycotting the buses in Montgomery. We’re the fist-pumping protesters who took over Tahir Square. This is grassroots democracy.”

Claire realizes the illogic of what he’s saying—a true democracy would leave Miriam alone if she voted to separate herself from the group—just as she realizes the brokenhearted can create any sort of justification, can make sense out of no sense. His daughter died. His wife abandoned him. He wants to fill up the emptiness he feels. Claire can relate.

But she is also a teenager, so she views everything through a cynical lens, and she finds it annoying that he is costuming his desire to regain his wife with political zealotry. He sounds like an actor reciting lines he hasn’t quite mastered. She can’t hold back the sarcasm. “Did you say democrazy?”

He frowns and stops climbing and stares until her eyes drop. “Are you making a joke?” he says and she senses for the first time how he could be dangerous to her if pushed too far.

“You kill people.”

He takes a step toward her, stepping across a black gap of air, onto her boulder, less than a foot between them, but she doesn’t back down. She can feel his breath on her when he says, “People die. That’s what they do.”

“Like your daughter.”