Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(79)
For this same reason she can hardly abide her roommate, Andrea. There is a clear line that runs down the middle of the room, the floor on the other side barely visible beneath chip bags, lace bras and sweatpants and T-shirts, crushed cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi. Andrea has never made her bed, not in the two months they’ve lived together, the duvet always peeled back like a sneering mouth. The wall above it is a collage of magazine clippings from US Weekly and photos of friends on beaches or around campfires or at house parties, always with lips pursed, cheeks sucked in, always with arms draped around shoulders and beer bottles raised to the camera. It is this wall, more than anything, that makes Claire feel alone.
She is absent of pictures. Absent of history. Whenever she thinks about her parents and starts to feel sorry for herself, she tries to make the choice not to feel that way any longer.
She digs through her backpack and shreds open the envelope. The inside is a shadowy mouth that at first appears empty. She drops her hand in and her fingers close around something hard, a DVD that flashes when she pulls it into the light.
She slides the DVD into the slit on the side of the television. The screen goes dark. There is a click and a whir as the disc begins to spin. She has no idea what to expect, her mind as empty as the envelope she tosses to the messy floor. She crosses her arms and steps back and nearly trips over a tangle of clothes.
The screen brightens. She is looking at a building. The outside of what appears to be a motel, though she sees no sign. The camera shakes, a handheld. She hears no noise outside of the wind whistling against the mike. She can see very little besides the motel and its crumbly parking lot. Then she recognizes, with an intake of breath, the front end of a silver-and-black Ramcharger. It is parked before the last room at the edge of the brown one-story building. She can barely make out, above the roof, the green blur of trees. Then the camera zooms in on a door. From it hangs a silver number seven. The recording continues for a long time—what turns out to be five minutes but feels much longer—before the door jars open and Miriam steps out. Her hair is longer, pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears sunglasses, but Claire recognizes her stiff posture and locked jaw. She swivels her head, scanning the parking lot, before locking the door and climbing into the Ramcharger and barreling away. The camera lingers on the empty parking space another thirty seconds and then the recording ends.
Chapter 33
THERE ARE PLENTY of ways to stay awake, the corporal told Patrick. He could drink coffee and crunch caffeine pills. He could concentrate on his muscles, hardening them one at a time, maintaining the flex for thirty seconds. He could recite the Marine’s Hymn in his head: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli; we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land, and sea.” He could recall his orders as a sentry—memorized from the handbook—to take charge of this post and all government property in view, to report immediately to the corporal of the guard every unusual or suspicious occurrence noted, to halt and detain all persons on or near the post whose presence or actions are subject to suspicion. He could go on, but as tired as he feels, he is in no danger of falling asleep when on sentry duty with Trevor.
Trevor is a nineteen-year-old private, a wiry redhead from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, whose talking never ceases and whose pale skin is darkened by freckles and whose jaw is always humped with dip that flavors his breath wintergreen. He talks about being a kicker for Tuscaloosa High and how nobody respected a kicker but they ought to respect a kicker because a kicker was quite regularly the difference between a win and a loss. He talks about Archibald’s, the best barbecue in the world as far as he’s concerned, though you couldn’t find it in the white pages and you couldn’t find so much as a sign out front, because it was a house, just a house, with all sorts of people waiting in line, people driving a twenty-year-old Buick and people driving a brand-spanking-new Lexus, all waiting in line for a pile of Wonder Bread and those ribs that would give your mouth an orgasm. He talks about the mile-wide tornado that went ripping through Tuscaloosa not so long ago and how he used to joke about the city having a church on every corner, but by God those churches stepped up and provided all the food and shelter anybody without a roof or a hot meal needed and how he was working at the convenience store when the tornado hit and the whole place collapsed around him and he hid under the register and managed to crawl out of the rubble on his own and spent the rest of the day digging other people out of their destroyed homes and apartments. That was something else.
Patrick half tunes in to the endless stream of words. The night has his attention. The night that grows longer and longer, darkness outlasting daylight by many hours. The night that spills beyond this guard tower that rises thirty feet in the air like a gargoyle looming over the base entrance. Their post is unlit, but along the perimeter, floodlights cast a harsh glow that makes the snow sparkle and the barbs of Constantine wire gleam.
Their M4s rest on a concrete shelf stacked with sandbags. The rifles are held in place by carbine bipods with a forty-five-degree swivel. Between them sit three bricks of ammo, a two-way radio, and a bag of frozen sunflower seeds. Patrick sometimes squints into the darkness and sometimes glasses it with his binoculars. The base is located on a hillside barren of trees and undergrowth, of everything but snow, a white expanse that drifts off for a square mile before running into the piney woods that channel cut through the two ridges walling this valley, fifty miles long, seven miles wide.