Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(81)
One of five MIA, the other seven in his squad killed. Lost to an ambush. Gone since November. Seven months. Seven months is a long time. Too long to hold out hope. This was his base, Combat Outpost Tuonela, same as the mine, same as the valley. Patrick requested to be stationed here, among the five platoons that inhabit the armory and hangar and dorms and latrine and maintenance bay and sump building and medical hut and laundry station and chow hall and Morale, Welfare and Recreation center (MWR), where they can lift weights and box and play hoops and poker and pound out miles on treadmills and Skype and check their email, all of these concrete buildings encased behind concrete walls encased in Constantine wire sharp enough to cut to the bone.
Some call him Patrick, but most call him Miracle Boy. He couldn’t escape that, and with his shaved head and his uniform and his constant supervision, he cannot help but feel lost, known by another’s name, another’s clothes, another’s orders. His father is the only thing that keeps him centered.
Movement.
He goes tense as he spots something beyond the floodlights, moving toward the base. He says shut up and Trevor goes quiet. “What?” he says and when Patrick doesn’t say anything he scrambles upright from his place on the floor and nearly knocks his rifle from its purchase as he takes position. “What?” he says. “What?”
There are more than one of them, a small black wave of them coming up the hill. Patrick has been here four months and during this time the base has been attacked only once by a single lycan who strolled up with a grin on his face and stood outside the gate and would not respond to their commands to halt. He wore an explosive belt and the blast ripped through a jacket lined with stainless-steel balls that peppered the concrete perimeter. There wasn’t much of him left.
Patrick lines up his rifle and tries to glass them with his scope, but they’re moving too fast and he keeps losing them in the dark. He peers over his scope and adjusts an inch to the right, an inch down, and there they are. Wolves. A pack of them. He can hear them chattering now, as they close in on a white-tailed deer that stumbles through the snow, slipping and clumsily righting itself.
He hears the click of Trevor thumbing off his safety. “Don’t,” Patrick says, but it’s too late. Trevor rattles out five shots and lets out a whoop. Patrick instinctively closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the deer is bounding away and the wolves are scattering, leaving behind one of their own, panting and bleeding in the snow.
The radio crackles to life. “Post Number Three. We hear fire. Report.” Then another voice talking over the last, “Corporal of the guard, Post Number Two, we hear fire. Report.”
Patrick shakes his head, knowing that the CO and half the camp are sitting up in their bunks right now, knowing that his squad will be punished for this, knowing that instead of rotating into patrol and heading out past the wire, they will be in for a week of bitchwork, washing dishes and burning the shitters. “Fire, Post Number One. That’s us. No alarm. Nothing but wolves. Wolves at the door.”
Chapter 34
CLAIRE IS LATE. Ten minutes late already for her nine o’clock class. Normally she wakes at dawn without any need for an alarm and goes for a run and drops by the cafeteria for a bagel or bowl of peaches and cottage cheese, but last night Andrea stumbled into the room after midnight wanting to talk about some boy and then ended up vomiting in bed, and by the time Claire stripped the sheets and cleaned Andrea up and Febrezed the smell of bile and rum from the air, it was after two.
She pushes through the entrance to Carver Hall, a three-story concrete structure with tall, slitted windows, and tries to calm her breathing and quiet her footsteps when she approaches the open doors of the auditorium.
This is Lycan History, a three-hundred-student lecture, mandatory for all freshmen and offered in the fall and spring by Professor Alan Reprobus, who calls himself an old hippie and refuses to use email or PowerPoint. There is a chair and desk onstage, but he never sits at it, instead marching back and forth with his hands seemingly cuffed behind his back. He wears jeans and faded T-shirts and motorcycle boots. He is broad shouldered and potbellied, with a trailing white beard and a wispy bit of hair ringing his spotted bald head. Over the past few months he has lectured, only occasionally glancing at his notes, on the origin of lobos, the intersection of biology and culture, the early communities and rituals and folklore, the genocide and near extinction of the race during the Crusades, westward expansionism, and World War II.
The course meets as a lecture twice a week and then on Fridays breaks out into thirty-student sections led by a TA, hers a senior named Matthew Flanagan. He’s tall and thin and goateed and wears his hair spiked in front. When in class, his expression is brooding and he wears khakis and collared shirts with the sleeves rolled up, but she’s seen him around campus looking less formal, one time playing Frisbee on the central green, and when he reached up to snatch the disc from the air, his shirt lifted and she could see his stomach, the way it dropped between his hip bones in a muscular V.
Today he is stationed by the door, handing out photocopies. “You’re late,” he whispers, and she says, “I know,” and hates him a little for scolding her. From the very first time they met as a section, she has resisted the authority of someone only three years older than she, never challenging him outright but never raising her hand and only reluctantly answering questions when he cold-called on her.