Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(77)

The Christmas lights—big red and green and blue lights the size of bell peppers—explode, two pops, then six pops, then fourteen in rapid-fire—filling the air with tiny clouds of glass powder, sparkling and seemingly motionless.

In less than a minute the flames have overtaken the entire tree, now a towering cone of fire that breathes heat that sends the survivors scurrying from the square and melts the glasses and wristwatches and rubber-soled boots of the corpses left behind. A black cord of smoke coils upward, beyond the reaches of any skyscraper, to bring a tremendous black cloud to an otherwise clear sky.





Chapter 30



PATRICK PARKS HIS JEEP and sits with his hands on the wheel and the engine idling for a long time. The strip mall in front of him houses a Shopko, Supercuts, Pizza Hut, Old Mountain Liquor, and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center. This is December, six days since he turned eighteen and nearly a month since the three of them emerged from the caves, filthy and bloody and bleary-eyed, but alive. They drove down the mountain together, silent in the cab of the Ramcharger. Claire sat in the middle of the bench seat, her head resting on his shoulder. He remembers how he felt then, trembling with relief and excitement, so utterly alive.

Night had given way to day during their time underground. The rumble of the engine and the tick of cinders in the wheel wells and snow falling off a tree branch in a crystalline scarf and the sun flaring in the blue dome of the sky with little puffs of clouds hanging under it and the weight and warmth of Claire’s head on his shoulder came together to give him an overwhelming sense of peace and relief. The worst was over and new things were coming. A knot inside him seemed to loosen, unravel.

Until they pulled up to his house and discovered the sedan with military plates in the driveway. He did not say anything. He did not think anything. A dark instinct sent him leaping out of the Ram and storming toward the house. He pushed open the front door and stood in its dark rectangle and called out for his mother even as he saw her on the love seat with the two men seated on the couch opposite her, the CNO and chaplain in military dress with their hats in their hands and their biceps darkened by black bands.

His mother stood at the sight of him. “What’s happened?” they said at the same time. She was referring to his black lump of an eye, and he was referring to what really mattered, the reason her tears washed away her makeup. When she didn’t respond, he looked away from her, looked to the street, where through the glare of the Ramcharger’s windshield he saw the faint image of Claire looking back at him.

Just as he is looking now at the windowed door of the recruitment center, glazed with a cataract of ice, so that in a few minutes’ time someone outside could barely see a figure—whether a boy or a man, it would be too hard to tell—approach the reception desk and shake the hand of the officer sitting behind it.





Chapter 31



THE TALL MAN STANDS at the base of a mountain lost to the clouds. A long stream of footprints runs from the woods to the open mouth of the cave, the trail hard-packed from the weight of so many men. The ice-stiffened drapery has been torn away and tossed aside. Three agents in watch caps and Kevlar vests are stationed in this clearing, three more at the power station down the hill. The rest of his team, two dozen of them, stormed the lava tubes more than an hour ago and have maintained radio contact. “Clear,” they tell him. “There’s a lot of blood, but nobody here. Over.”

He holds the walkie-talkie to his mouth, close enough to lick it. “Nobody,” he says, not a question.

A burst of static and then, “They’ve gone and vanished on us.”

“No one vanishes. They’ve just blown off somewhere else.” His voice is soft and meditative, not meant for the walkie-talkie, which is already at his belt. “We’ll find them,” he says to himself. Something catches his eye and he crouches to pluck it from the stamped and polished snow at his feet. A twist of hair, bleached an unnatural shade of white. He kneads it between his fingers. Bits of skin dangle from the roots. He brings it to his nose for a sniff and then tucks it into his breast pocket and pats it. “And when we do, they’ll be dead.”





Part II





Chapter 32



HER NAME—rather, the name she goes by these days, Hope Robinson—is written in bold black capital letters on the manila envelope, a rumpled nine-by-twelve, folded in half to fit into her campus mailbox. There is no return address. The same as last time, the postmark comes from Seattle. The same as last time, quotation marks surround her name.

She knows people often punctuate incorrectly. “Employees must wash their hands,” a notice will read in a restroom, as if quoting someone, maybe the germ-phobic manager. But quotation marks around a name? That’s different, too strange to be anything but purposeful.

Last time, she opened her mailbox to find a standard business-size envelope, and when she ripped it open she found and unfolded a lined piece of paper that read Boo! Nothing more.

Now this. Claire holds the envelope with the tips of her fingers. When she flips it over, to see if anything is written on its back, she hears something solid slide around inside with a rasping noise.

She stands before the bank of mailboxes, a few thousand of them altogether, each numbered and decorated with a tiny window and brass knobs tarnished from so many years of fingers twirling combinations. Normally the mailroom is busy with jostling bodies and student organization booths requesting signatures and volunteers, but at this time of night, the space is dim and empty. She can hear voices and music filtering from another part of the student union, beyond the marble arches and down a hallway, where the Stomping Grounds coffee shop remains open until midnight.