Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(85)
She was here yesterday. She has been here every day since receiving the first DVD. She hurries her green tea to a chair with a round-topped side table and splits open her laptop and taps her feet hurriedly against the floor and glances around at the few people reading newspapers and novels and chatting over a glass of wine or mug of cappuccino. She calls up her browser and logs in to Yahoo and discovers her inbox empty except for a message from Patrick. “Yesterday I saw a woman with hair the color of honey. She had her back turned to me. Thought it was you. Nearly called out your name. Were your ears warm? Thinking of you.”
What might have made her smile any other time makes her frown now. Nothing from Miriam. Four days and still no response to her four emails.
Claire punches out another message. “Another video arrived today. You in the park. On a run. It’s the little man. He’s alive. PLEASE RESPOND IMMEDIATELY to let me know you are okay!!!” She reads it over twice, making sure she hasn’t revealed anything critical, then hastily writes, “Love, C,” at the bottom. They have never used the word before, but it feels right.
She tries to make sense of what is happening. She doubts they are stalking her—what use is she to them? This is about psychological torture. Puck toying with her, maybe trying to draw her west, like the spider that plucks its web to make a song. She wonders if the same can be said of Miriam. Maybe Puck hasn’t captured her yet because he is afraid, because he is studying her habits, waiting for the right moment to strike—or maybe he is delaying his attack like a kind of foreplay to heighten his pleasure.
She remains in the coffee shop until right before the last shuttle arrives, trying to do her homework but spending most of her time hitting refresh, refresh, refresh on her browser, waiting for a response that never comes. Finally she punches out an email to Patrick. “Not doing well,” is all she says.
Two months ago, Miriam gave her a gift, a Glock, along with two bricks of ammo. “Keep it close,” she said. After Claire returns to her dorm, after she checks on Andrea—who lies in bed breathing heavily, her eyelids fluttering with sleep—she slides open her desk drawer and removes her pistol and climbs into bed with the safety on but her finger curved around the trigger.
Chapter 35
THE OTHER NIGHT Patrick dreamed about his father. He was standing outside the gates of the base. His cammies hung off him in tatters. Bruises coiled around his wrists and his ankles, and his bare feet were blue in the moonlight. A crow perched on his shoulder and when he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was the bird’s high, rusty cackle.
This was around the time when the cold snap hit, when the arctic wind came wailing through the valley, dropping the temperature forty degrees in a matter of hours. Several pipes froze and burst and shut down the latrine. A crew has been working on the problem ever since, with some luck, but in the meantime, everyone is using the Porta-Johns.
There aren’t enough of them. A dozen. A dozen shitters for the attachments and engineers and medical personnel and mechanics and cooks and five platoons of thirty Marines who at every meal stack their trays high with chow and who take great pride in the size and frequency of their waste.
Someone has to burn them once a day, and that someone is Patrick, along with the rest of his squad. All the platoons work in two-week rotations on whatever tasks keep the base running. The personal security detail (PSD) escorts the company commander and any other visiting brass to the towns and the Tuonela Mine. The quick reactionary force (QRF) is always locked and loaded, ready to react, to depart the base with a minute’s notice in case of an attack on a patrol or forward operating base (FOB) or uranium mine or battle position. The presence patrol drives around in four-hour shifts for movement-to-contacts, trying to draw out the baddies, or for knock-and-talks with locals, trying to make peace with the locals and hand out candy to the kids, most of whom are happy to see the soldiers, happy for the security, happy for their jobs at the mine.
Then there is security and bitchwork. Always assigned to the nonranks. Manning the posts. Washing dishes, folding laundry, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, polishing, stacking ammo, hauling and knifing open the endless parade of conex boxes full of toilet paper, bags of rice, cans of beans. And burning the shitters.
His entire platoon remains on security and bitchwork for the next rotation, but every platoon is made up of three squads of twelve soldiers, and their sergeant makes certain it is Patrick’s squad who get the shitters. Thanks to Trevor.
They strap four shitters into the bed of the MTVR, along with a stack of tongs and muck-encrusted rebar, a pile of welder’s gloves, several gallons of diesel. Then they drive five miles downwind from the base to a basin blackened and reeking from years of burned garbage and excrement. They unload the shitters and unhinge their back doors and tong out their depositories and splash them full of diesel and spark a match and step back as the flames and black smoke coil out of the half-frozen mess within the barrels. After a minute they step forward, into the stink, into the heat, to stir the barrels with the rebar. Day after day of this, and with the showers down, no amount of scrubbing at the sinks can get the smell from their skin.
Patrick stands there, leaning on the rebar as if it were a cane, his eyes watering, his mouth razed with the taste of charred shit, while next to him, Trevor, oblivious to their situation, blathers on and on about how he and his pals used to go noodling for catfish in the bayou. Over his helmet he wears the pelt of the wolf he shot, its head draped over his, its body and tail dangling down his back like a second skin. The smoke swirls and the shit hisses and bubbles and pops and the snow around them melts away to reveal a ten-foot circle of browned grass.