Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(94)

Chase often says, “Why can’t he just hurry this whole thing up?”

But it can take anywhere from three to ninety days for someone to show symptoms of the disease, and the center must by law wait four hundred days to know for sure whether the agent manifests itself.

Of course they do not have forever—with the election looming.

“So it’s settled, then,” Augustus says. “You’re coming. We’ll arrange a plane ticket. Make sure your passport is up-to-date.”

Neal shares the lab with three thirty-something postdocs who address him as Dr. Desai no matter how many times he tells them it’s perfectly all right to call him Neal. They are all hovering around a laptop in the corner of the room. One of them turns to look at Neal. Adam. Carrot-orange hair and a wispy beard that grows mostly along his neck. “Something’s happened,” he says.

“In a minute,” Neal says and rubs the bridge of his nose. “I really don’t want to go.”

“Come on,” Augustus says. “It’ll be a hoot.”

“It’s cold there. I hate the cold.”

“Dr. Desai.” Adam calls out his name again, and Neal says, “Yes, one moment.”

Neal scribbles something into a lab notebook on the benchtop. He and Augustus peel off their latex gloves and soap their hands and remove their safety goggles and walk past the incubators and the fume hoods and the centrifuges and join the grad students.

“Dr. Desai, you should see this.”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

Adam steps nervously away from the laptop. Augustus squints at the black rectangle in the middle of the glowing screen. “What am I looking at?”

“It’s everywhere,” Adam says. “CNN, AOL, Facebook. Look.” He toys with the mouse and taps a button and Augustus realizes the black rectangle is a paused video that now comes to life.

A face fills the screen. An old man’s face. His head is not shaved or misshapen. His skin is not ravaged by scars or tattooed with skulls or snakes or barbed wire. His voice is not booming and poisonous. He looks like a nice old man. The light is dim and his eyes are mostly lost to shadows and his face hidden beneath his long silvery hair, parted in the middle and curtaining his face. His dagger of a nose is otherwise his most definitive feature. When he speaks, his voice is calm and strangely accented, some mix of singsong Swede and boarding-school British. “The United States has fed on us long enough,” he says. “Now we feed on the United States.”

One of his eyes, Augustus can now tell, is discolored like an eggplant. The old man breathes heavily, as though on the verge of hyperventilating, a serrated whistle sharpening every exhalation. There is nothing else to hear except the faint electrical whine of the recording. His head shakes. His mouth trembles. The breathing, the breathing, in and out, so pronounced it seems sexual. The old man leans forward and his face goes momentarily out of focus.

Then he lurches back. The camera wobbles and readjusts. His face is creased with wrinkles. His eyes blink rapidly, tearing up with blood. He shows his teeth in a damp red scowl. He blurs away from the camera and the camera refocuses. A poorly lit room. A pitted concrete wall. At the base of it lies a soldier in cammies. A young man with his buzz cut grown out and his skin darkened by bruises. His wrists and ankles bound, his mouth taped shut. He is struggling like a worm to move away from what is moving toward him, the old man, the lycan, visible again at the edge of the screen.

There might be a growl. There might be a short-lived scream muffled by duct tape, but it is hard to tell. Soon the soldier stops struggling and the only sound is the sound of feeding.

“Balor.” Then Adam brings his tremoring hand to the mouse and pauses the video. “They’re saying his name is Balor.”





Chapter 40



PATRICK ROTATES onto knock-and-talk and then rotates again onto patrol. Sometimes they would drop off crates of Volpexx in the barrows. That’s what they called the outlying tenements, the barrows—where the welfare cases lived—the rows and rows of concrete apartment buildings with trash stacked up on the curbs and music thumping behind windows and figures shrinking back into doorways and corpses lying frozen in alleyways. Every two weeks, on street corners, the convoy unloaded several dozen shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes, each filled with one hundred bottles rattling with one hundred pills. The lycans are given the choice—that’s what the commanding general says—they are given the choice as to whether or not they will control their disease. The military enables that choice. And the choice, for some of the lycans, is to crush and snort the drug and drift off into fog-filled dreams and become hollow husks of the people they once were.

As far as Patrick could tell—from his mother, from Claire, from many of the locals here in the Republic—lycans can control their symptoms just fine without the help of meds. Sometimes his unit would drive through the fishing villages and visit with families. Meet-and-greets or knock-and-talks, they called these trips. They would crouch down and hold out Kit Kat bars to cautious children and say, “Come here, come on,” as if they were dogs. They would accept invitations into homes and stand sweating in their gear and watch women with big pillowy arms rolling dough in the kitchen and old men smoking pipes and mending fishing nets and young children playing dominoes on living room floors. Eating sandwiches and drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Their houses are small, sometimes one big room, lumber and pipes and sleds and skis stored in the ceiling beams. The smell of grease and fish hanging in the air. Tools and belts hanging near the door along with jackets. Fishing poles hung from the walls like artwork alongside dreary gray-smeared paintings of the sea. They would eat cookies that seemed made of nothing but butter and flour and that sucked all the saliva from his mouth. They spoke Finnish. They spoke French and Russian and German and Chinese and Spanish and English. They said how thankful they were for the military, for the mine. “You keep us safe,” they said.