Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(73)
He is reaching for her now. He is reaching for her, and if he touches her again, she imagines breaking apart into so many blackbirds that would screech and scratch and peck and finally flap in a dark cloud out of this place and take to the sky. He is reaching for her with his scarred hand, the hand Miriam disfigured with a knife, and now he touches her cheek, softly. Caressing her. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, trembling breath, laced with the flavor of his strawberry-sweet gum, and realizes, by breathing in the smell of him, he is already inside her. His fingers suddenly dig into her cheek and chin, and she snaps open her eyes to see his face transformed, his teeth fanged, his eyes as red rimmed as a smoldering coal. “Everyone has their breaking point.”
It is then that she swings the scissors upward—into him.
*
The cratered cheek of the moon hangs low in the sky, soon to be overtaken by a dark bank of clouds. In the Ramcharger, Miriam drives, Patrick sits shotgun, weapons piled and rattling behind them. The road hums under their tires and a light snow falls through the yellow glow of the high beams.
She pulls off the highway into a gas station with old-time pumps and a cedar-shingle mercantile. She does not stop but drives around back, where she says her husband keeps ten vans and cars and trucks parked. This morning, three were missing. Now it is early evening, and she counts seven of them gone, the empty squares of blacktop dusted white.
“What does that mean?” Patrick says.
“That means they’re up to something.”
He asks if they would have taken Claire with them, and Miriam is silent for the time it takes her to spin the wheel and loop the Ramcharger around and head back toward the highway. “Doubt it. She’d be in their way.”
They drive another five minutes before hanging a hard left onto a road that branches several times and narrows, hemmed in by pines.
His mind is sharp with caffeine and adrenaline when they park at a power shed made of corrugated metal and surrounded by a hurricane fence and a metal sign that reads PACIFICORP. The trees here have been razed to make way for the twelve-line high-voltage high-wire utility poles that march off into the distance. Patrick can hear the electricity humming, as if the forest were alive with locusts, when he steps out of the Ram and they unload their backpacks and hoist their weapons. A lamp glows above the entry door.
Miriam tells him to wait here. He asks where she is going but she does not respond. She leaves her backpack with him but shoulders her shotgun, the black nylon strap cutting between her breasts. As quick as a cat, she scales the hurricane fence and drops to the other side and walks the perimeter of the power shed until she finds what she is looking for, a hole drilled through the metal siding, a power line the size of a garden hose snaking through it. She pulls down her shotgun, takes aim, and unloads both shells. Fire spits from the twin barrels. A thunderclap fills the night.
Patrick curses and ducks down behind the Ram and unholsters a pistol and looks around as if expecting shadowy figures to come pouring out of the woods. But the night is still and quiet except for the uninterrupted hum of the electricity overhead and the violent spitting of the severed cord.
He hears Miriam drop over the fence, her boots squeaking toward him, and when she appears next around the corner of the Ram, he says, “Now they know we’re coming.”
“They can’t see shit. That’s what they know.”
He follows her into the woods, hushed as if listening in on their every move, and it isn’t more than ten minutes before they come to the mouth of the cave system. Patrick does not recognize it as such until Miriam draws aside the ice-clotted drapery that covers the entry.
She disappears into it. For a moment he is alone, trying not to think too deeply about the necropolis he is about to enter, the risk and impossibility of the situation. He pauses, as if drawing a breath before diving underwater, and then clicks on his Mag light and plunges into darkness.
Chapter 28
CLAIRE HAD HOPED to hit his throat with the scissors. But Puck was faster than she expected and lurched back in time to save his life but not to dodge her completely. She plunged the scissors into the fleshy spot beneath his chin, knifing upward, into his mouth, the blades coming to a rest in his soft palate. He cries out, but the cry is muffled by a mouth stapled shut.
Wide-eyed, he stumbles back, a fistful of hair tearing away in her grip. He trembles his hands to the scissors and drags them slowly from his jaw. Blood gushes down his neck and patters the sand. He hurls aside the scissors and they clatter against the wall and he opens his mouth to test it and in doing so reveals teeth sharpening with his rage and fear.
And then, in a blink, the lights go out.
*
When Patrick first steps inside and out of the wind, he is surprised by the temperature difference, the cave significantly warmer. His father would sometimes take him spelunking, at Lava Beds National Monument, and he remembers strapping on a hard hat and running his hand along stalagmites and burrowing through crawl spaces and hearing some bit of wisdom from long ago, that caves and caverns year-round maintained a constant temperature, somewhere in the fifties.
The air smells sweetly fungal, some mixture of mold and guano and the sulfuric oxidation that stains the walls orange in places and yellow in others. The constant hissing of the wind and the dripping of water make it difficult to hear Miriam when she says, “Follow me closely.” They have their Mag lights in one hand, their pistols in the other. The lava tube pitches downward and he sweeps his light across the cave floor and walls, black except for the occasional crust of lichen or sulfite, a white vein of quartz that catches the light and sparkles. The stalactites dangling from the ceiling remind him of nothing so much as teeth.