Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(5)
The lycan moves so quickly it is difficult for Patrick to make sense of it—to secure an image of it—except that it looks like a man, only covered in a downy gray hair, like the hair of the possum. Teeth flash. Foam rips from a seat cushion like a strip of fat. Blood splatters, decorating the porthole windows, dripping from the ceiling. It is sometimes on all fours and sometimes balanced on its hind legs. Its back is hunched. Its face is marked by a blunt snout that flashes teeth as long and sharp as bony fingers, a skeleton’s fist of a smile. And its hands—oversize and decorated with long nails—are greedily outstretched and slashing the air. A woman’s face tears away like a mask. Ropes of intestine are yanked out of a belly. A neck is chewed through in a terrible kiss. A little boy is snatched up and thrown against the wall, his screams silenced.
The plane is shuddering. The pilot is yelling something over the intercom, but his voice is lost to the screams that fill the cabin. Some people are weeping. Some are praying. Some are climbing out of their seats, pushing their way up the aisle, where they bang at the cockpit door, slam their fists and feet and shoulders up against it, desperate to get in, to get away from the terror working its way toward them.
Patrick remembers watching television the other night, flipping through the channels, coming across one of those talk-show pundits. The program featured a round-cheeked man who looked more like a boy with a gray flattop. He was talking about the lycans, about the protests in D.C. and the situation in the Republic. “To hell with us all being equal,” the baby-faced man was saying, staring intensely into the camera. “Nobody’s saying my dog has the same rights that I do. Biology made these decisions, not me.”
His father took the remote and punched the power button, and the image collapsed upon itself. “That guy makes me lose my appetite,” he said and forked at his spaghetti, not eating it, stirring it up into a red mess. His face was pale and bloated from all the injections, the temporary immunizations that could help ward off infection in case he was bitten. He would be leaving in a few days—with his Bay Area unit, the 235th Engineering Company—first to the Petaluma Armory for a week of intensive briefing, then overseas to the Republic, where his primary objective was route clearance, removing and diffusing bombs from roadsides. The IEDs—and the ambushes, the firefights—had increased lately. The lycans fought with their guns and claws alike—they wanted the American forces to leave; they wanted their country back. His father’s rucksack was already packed and waiting by the back door, swollen and green and reminding Patrick of an enormous gut sack pulled from a deer carcass.
The war is the reason this is happening. It is the reason he is on this plane and it is the reason the lycan is tearing the plane to pieces. Patrick curses the war and curses the lycan and curses his father, who he wishes were with him now. His father, who would ball up his fists and fight. He wouldn’t piss himself, as Patrick does now, his jeans hot and soaked, the Coke finally finding its way out of him, sheeting his legs, filling his shoes.
The rear of the plane is splashed with blood that oozes from the walls in strange cave-painting designs. Bodies are strewn everywhere in various poses of death like a garden of ruined statues. Up to this point, the woman next to Patrick has not moved or said a word, frozen in her fear. Her laptop remains open, one of her hands still on its keyboard, pressed down so severely that the open document scrolls continuously, its pages filling with the letters of one long word no one will ever read. But now, as the lycan makes its way toward their row, she tries to stand and can’t, held down by her seat belt. She whimpers as she fumbles with it and then abandons her seat and hesitates in the aisle, turning back for her laptop, snatching it off the tray table. At that moment the lycan lunges forward and claws away the laptop and brings it down on her head, with a wet thunk and a smoking spark. Pieces of plastic rain to the floor. Wires dangle like veins from around her neck, where part of the screen still hangs. The lycan pulls her close, as if to embrace her, burying its triangular face in her neck.
At that moment there is a scream that rises above all the others. An Asian man—one of the flight attendants—is hurrying up the aisle, his progress slow and stumbling due to the carnage. He has come from the rear kitchen and he has in one hand a steaming carafe of coffee and in the other a can opener with a curved silver tooth.
The lycan tosses the woman aside just as the man underhands the coffee in a sloshing brown arc. The woman’s body impacts Patrick before he can see what happens, but he can hear the lycan crying out, unmistakably in pain, its voice pitched high.
He is knocked back against the wall. He does not push the woman away. He allows her to press him down between the seats, to shield him. The smell of her perfume is mixed up with the smell of her blood. It is hard to tell with the turbulence, but her body seems to tremble and he thinks she might still be alive. He hugs her close. He closes his eyes and in his own private darkness tries to imagine himself back in bed, back in California, waiting for his father to wake him up, to tell him it is time to go. He wishes that he could close his ears, too, to the screams that continue for the next thirty minutes, the longest of his life.
Chapter 2
AUGUST AND ALREADY it is snowing. Fat flakes brush past her window. She sits at her desk, a desk her father built from an old cherry tree, the legs carved to look like an animal’s, etched with wavelike fur and clawed at their bottom. It doesn’t match the rest of the room. The white four-poster bed with the stuffed animals marching across it, the matching white dresser with vines stenciled along its drawers, its top a mess of makeup and perfume bottles. The wobbly bookshelf weighed down with fantasy novels, collections of fables and fairy tales. The rank heaps of clothes, the orange throw rug, the purple walls decorated with posters for Cats, Wilco, The Wizard of Oz. The corkboard plastered with homecoming photos, a drink coaster, a smiley-face key chain, yellowed comic strips, track ribbons, an old corsage rose from some boy she couldn’t care less about that now looks like a shriveled-up heart.