Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(95)
Occasionally Patrick would ask, on his own or through an interpreter, a question about his father, but no one knew him—they could only shake their heads and hand him another cookie and ask him whether he liked the snow. Rarely did their squads encounter any young men, and when Patrick asked about this, Sergeant Decker looked at him distractedly and said, “Because, you f*cking idiot, they’re the ones we’re fighting.”
And sometimes they would, when on patrol, drive into a fight. The sky was often heavy with clouds and the air thick with snow, and when machine guns rattled and RPGs blasted, the orange-and-yellow flashes and the thunderous explosions that followed gave the impression that a summer thunderstorm had descended upon them.
He misses this.
After a couple of two-week rotations on the base, he feels like the concrete and cinder block and Constantine wire are contracting, closing around him, and soon he will have nowhere to go; soon they will rip through his flesh. He feels like he is getting soft. He feels like time is slowing down. He feels like he has lost another month to what he realizes is a failed hunt for his father. The lycans win. He might as well accept that. It’s no use.
He has just finished sweeping and mopping the National Guard bunkhouse. He slops the mop into the brown-watered bucket and stands over his father’s old bed. He has been here many times before, but this is his first time alone. Gray light comes through the windows. The air smells of bleach. A spider crawls from under the mattress and across the sheets and comes to rest on the pillow. Patrick hurriedly flicks it off. His hand hovers above the pillow a moment, and then he strokes the hollow where a head has rested.
He sits down. The frame creaks. He waits a minute in silence and then swings back his legs and lies where his father once did. He wonders if a part of him is still there, dissolved into the sheets and floors and walls of this place, watching him.
He stares at the spring slats of the bed above him. A honeycomb design. He notices something then. What he first thinks is a tag, the kind that you see stapled to mattresses, the kind that warn of your arrest, or something, if you scissor them off. But the quality appears more brittle and yellowed along the edges.
He reaches up, and sure enough it slips against the pressure of his fingers, slides through the grating. A piece of paper folded once and once again. He sits up in such a hurry that his boot hits the mop bucket and it rolls a few paces away and sloshes loudly and he checks the room to make certain he is still alone.
He doesn’t know what he expects. Certainly not this. Not a paper scribbled over with hieroglyphics. He recognizes the blocky slanted handwriting, but he can’t make any sense of the notes about cell concentration, viability, vitality, yeast strain, yeast propagator, hemacytometer, methylene blue, pH, yeast slurry, flocculation, dissolved oxygen, yeast nutrient, or the word that comes up most often, metallothionein.
Then he sees a sentence that makes him blink hard and remember the pit full of blackened bones. Lobos subject #14: two days of improvement and then death.
The platoons rotate again, and Patrick is assigned to the QRF. He will be out on the wire soon enough. Finally. He has been working nonstop with the glass cleaner and floor polish. After an eight-hour shift, no matter how hard he scrubs off in the showers, he can’t shake the ammonia and bleach smell. Nobody knows when—the schedule classified for security reasons—but presidential candidate Chase Williams will be visiting the base at some point in the near future and the CO wants the place photo-op ready.
But that’s no longer Patrick’s problem. Yesterday he sat through a briefing. In a clearing next to the armory, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Bennington, an ash-haired West Point graduate, stood before a vast diagram constructed from snow, mounded and carved to mimic the surrounding landscape. It was twenty meters in circumference and captured one hundred klicks of territory. He used food coloring—blue for water, green for military, red for enemy—and stepped over hills and trudged through valleys as he indicated various problem areas they would likely attend. Chief among them: Ukko, a combat outpost seventy klicks from here and home to a company of soldiers from the 1/167th Battalion. They had come under repeated mortar attack and expected more trouble in the coming week. “The pressure system changes tonight. We’re in for a warm spell,” Bennington said. “And warm weather means trouble.”
This morning, Patrick wakes to the sound of water dripping from the eaves. He pulls on a fresh pair of camo pants, olive-drab shirt, shoulder-patch knit sweater. He clips a radio to his belt, mandatory for all assigned to QRF, so that when the call goes out, everybody comes running.
The ground is a sticky mix of snow and mud when Patrick heads over to the MWR. The line for the computers is always long, and this morning it takes him more than thirty minutes before he’s stationed in front of a Dell with a gasping fan. All around him keyboards tick and people yell and cry and joke their way through Skype conversations with their families. Every now and then they glance around embarrassedly, knowing they are being overheard. More than they know, Patrick thinks. He once talked to his mother and later that afternoon received a visit from the lieutenant. She was a registered lycan and communicating with her so freely compromised base security. No matter if she was his mother. He could send her letters.
He checks his email first and opens a message from Claire. “Just wanted you to know,” she writes. “These emails matter to me. They mean that I matter to someone. And that means I actually exist.”