Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(80)
Beyond the brightness of the floods, the valley is dark except for the half-moon peeking over a ridgeline and the faint glimmer of lamplit windows in the town of Hiisi and the hellish radiance of the Tuonela uranium mine. From here, several miles away, it appears encased in a globe of light. It operates day and night, a city of giant metal sheds. Red lights blink and black clouds cough from its smokestacks. He doesn’t want to ruin his night vision, but if he glassed the mine, he would be able to make out the railcars and tankers, the freight elevators and conveyer belts. And if the wind was right, he could hear the dump trucks beeping and grumbling, the big booms of dropped loads and the screech of metal against rock, the faraway thunder of dynamite. A train departs the mine, rattling up to speed, and releases a mournful whistle that gets mixed up with the wolves crying in the distance.
The mine is the reason the base is here. The mine—and others like it, nearly a dozen of them strung throughout the Republic, all owned and operated by Alliance Energy—are the reason, some say, the U.S. is here at all. Some call it a war. Some call it a conflict, and some an occupation. Some call it a mistake and some call it necessary. Some call it endless. It is what it is—as it has been since 1948, when the Republic was established as a paramilitary lycan-majority state, and all the labels and opinions in the world mean nothing, Patrick knows, because nothing will change. The Republic needs the U.S. and the U.S. needs the Republic. They can no longer exist without each other, like an inoperable tumor that has fingered its way through a brain.
The population is estimated at 5,507,300, all infected, a number that does not account for the 64,000 U.S. personnel stationed there, these twenty thousand square miles bordering Finland and Russia and the White and Barents Seas, a place no one wanted. During the short-lived summers it is pocked with lakes and strung with silvery rivers and bearded with forests of pine and spruce that during the long winters are invisible beneath the snow and ice and the shroud of many sunless days. It is a place of bracingly low temperatures and winds that can blacken skin within seconds of exposure. A wintry ruined mantle of a country with a hot, poisonous core.
A space heater glows orange in the corner, giving off some but not enough heat. The thermostat on the wall reads fifteen degrees and the wind probably shaves it down to five. They aren’t far from an inlet, and when he first arrived, when the weather was warm and the wind was right, he could smell algae and mudflats, hear seagulls screeching overhead. Whenever the snow seems too much, when his lip splits and his nose bleeds on guard duty, when he has to knuckle the icicle off the showerhead before stepping under it, he reminds himself that in a few months, when it gets warmer, things will get better; everything won’t seem so forbidding. He imagines standing on a pebble-strewn beach and watching the wind whip the water into white crowns and wading out into the slow breakers and breathing in the salt air and knifing forward into the water.
Now he wears a watch cap under his helmet and a wool sweater under his winter fatigues. Every now and then he flexes his knees and stamps his boots to shake the blood back into them. A stack of creased porno magazines sits in the corner. Some of the men use the women inside them to warm up.
Every time he thinks of himself with a woman he thinks of Claire. She hated him for enlisting. Called him a hypocrite. Said he disgusted her. He tried to explain, tried to tell her about his father, but nothing he said could leaven her temper. There was only the unavoidable truth that he was going. It was a betrayal—to her, to his mother. She would not respond to his emails for months, until one day she did.
Sometimes the two of them fire back and forth dozens of messages a day—and sometimes there are long silences between them, punctuated by some point of disagreement, often the differences between the infected and the uninfected. She would not let the argument drop. Just when he thought it was over, she would come back with another email about that guy who killed the old folks and stole their social security checks or that experiment where people happily electrocuted others or the child prostitution rings in Thailand. “But psychotic disorders are not contagious,” he would write, and she would write, “What’s that got to do with anything?” and he would write, “Everything,” and she would write, “All I’m saying is, there’s no difference between you and me,” and he would write, “I don’t bite people!”
They moved through cycles like this often enough. Somebody would get too close or too mean or too something, and the other would say, I need a break—this is too much. Sometimes a week would go by; sometimes a day would go by, usually with Claire writing an email that began with, “Okay, I’m weak.”
He tries now to put her out of his mind, but sometimes that is impossible late at night, when he is awake in his bunk, staring at the inside of his eyelids and making a game out of the images he sees in them: a thousand blinking fireflies, a stone dropped in a purple pond rippling outward, a red mouth—hers—opening for him.
Trevor is still talking, sitting cross-legged on the floor and spitting sunflower seeds into an empty Coke can. The wind moans and snow skitters. When Patrick stares too long, when the night grows long and exhaustion overtakes him, he sees things. Darkness can have the same effect as the sun. When you look at it too long, it scorches into you. Blackened shapes play across your retinal screen. He imagines rock outcroppings into lycans, a pocket of shadow as a pool of blood. He imagines tunnels beneath the drifts and terrible things moving through them, burrowing toward them. And he imagines his father. His father, out there in the darkness, watching him.