Black Moon (17 page)

Chase wandered the town and found himself staring up at the stuffed bobcat. Yes, this was the place where they had seen the dirt-covered man, where the bartender had essentially kicked them out. Where that waitress, Macy, worked. He scanned around for the bartender, realizing he could have drifted back into the biker’s sights. He was tempted to turn around and walk out, but the thought of seeing Macy again drew him forward. He sat in a booth. There was another waitress serving sandwiches and beers to the diners. The bartender Rollins appeared and, though he took in the room with a sweeping glance, he didn’t seem to recognize Chase, or to have an issue with his being there. After all, it was Jordan who had offended him. That’s who he probably imprinted in his mind—Jordan, the kid with the fucked-up eye. The kid with the boner was okay.

Chase nursed along a plate of onion rings and some Diet Coke. The server, a heavy-set girl with tattoo sleeves, was diligent with the refills. She asked him where he was from. When he said California, she smiled. She had a sister out there, in Fresno.
Chase said he had never been to Fresno and the woman found this hard to believe. “I suppose it’s a big state,” she said. “Not as big as Texas,” she added.

“No,” Chase had to agree. He shifted uncomfortably and adjusted himself under the table, where his erection was lancing at his belly.

He waited another hour, putting off ordering dinner. Then he saw Macy appear, tying on her waist apron. She was stony and serious as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She could definitely be Felicia’s older sister, he observed. It wasn’t just a beer-goggle impression. Thankfully, it seemed Macy was relieving the other waitress. They were conferring about the transition, looking over at each table as the tattooed girl explained the status of service. Chase looked away as their gaze arrived at his table. Then he watched the chunky woman go behind the bar, draw herself a beer, and press against Rollins. Rollins gave her a firm spank on the ass.

Macy eventually made her way to him. “How we doing here?” she asked, distractedly, he couldn’t help but note.

“I think I’m ready to order dinner,” he said. “What’s good?”

“I’ll bring a menu,” she said, then walked away. He watched her go.

Damn. How was he going to get past this strictly business bullshit? He thought about telling her how much she looked like his girlfriend—his former girlfriend. He could even show her a picture on his phone. But wasn’t that probably the lamest way ever to start a conversation? Maybe the California thing would work. Maybe she has a relative there. Or maybe she’s been there and loves it. Probably not where he’s from—what was there to love?—but the beach maybe, like San Diego or Malibu.

She came by and handed off the menu without a word.

He looked through it and settled on a cheeseburger, then
closed it as a way of summoning her back. He was repositioning himself under the table when she suddenly appeared, pad at the ready for his order.

“I think I’ll have that cheeseburger,” he said.

“Fries?”

“I just had a bunch.”

“So no fries?”

“Hey, what was with the guy last night?” he suddenly blurted.

“Guy?”

“There was a dirty old guy behind the bar. I mean, he was covered with dirt.”

Her wince turned into a vague, wistful smile that quickly faded. He thought this was an unbelievably pretty thing to do. There was feeling behind his extruded physiology all of a sudden. “Yeah,” she said, “that was Wells. He owns this place and he hasn’t been feeling too good.”

“It was cool how you were taking care of him,” Chase said.

“Someone has to,” she said flatly. “So, no fries?”

Back to business. Fuck.

“Sure, bring fries,” Chase said, feeling defeated.

When she came back with his food, he was ready. “Any chance Wells is an insomniac?”

She looked at him and frowned before turning and walking off.

Two minutes later she was sitting across from him. “How did you know that?” she asked.

WHEN
he told her it was an epidemic, that the story was about to break, she put a hand over her mouth, but he still caught the wobble of her chin. And above this mask, her eyes, stricken with an emerging awareness as pieces fell into place. It wasn’t that she
was scared, or even that she fully believed him. But the possibility of it all was enough to send her inward. She said, “I thought I caused this. By pulling my hand away that time… it started happening around then.”

She wasn’t really talking to him, and when she realized the volume was on, she hit the mute button in her head. Her shift had ended and she had led him to a table in the kitchen area. Wells would be up soon, she explained, for food.

“Up? I thought you said he wasn’t sleeping.”

“Up from under,” she said.

When she offered no further explanation, Chase went on, parroting Jordan’s warnings, citing his obscure Internet evidence. He claimed he didn’t believe any of it at first. Sure, lots of people couldn’t sleep, but that was always the case. His own mother had trouble, sometimes waking at four in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. That’s how she got so much reading done. Insomnia was a common topic all along. But stuff he had seen added up to something strange: his boss prancing around with a cello in the music store, his ass and balls exposed to the world. The weird behavior of the cop in Utah. His ex-girlfriend, she worked with sleep researchers at the university, and all communication had been cut off. What was that about?

“It’s like they discovered something, and someone, the government probably, quarantined them,” he said, sounding more convincing than he expected. Really, this thought hadn’t occurred to him until now, but maybe there was something to it. Would Felicia really just shut him out like that? Not on her own.

“Okay, you think that’s weird, come on,” she said. She led him to the venue’s small banquet room and showed him the excavation Wells had dug into the floor. The hole was like a grave, cut right into the middle of the plank wood floor. Macy explained that Wells used an old outhouse door on a pulley to winch up
the mounds of dirt. He carted it outside and spread it under the pines at the far edge of the parking lot. “He claims he sees a light down there,” Macy said. “He won’t stop tunneling toward it.”

Chase could hear him in there now, beyond their view in the tunnel, grunting as his shovel, or maybe a pickax, hacked at the wall of dirt in the darkness.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to a dark stack of something, maybe firewood, against the wall. Macy had not turned on the lights, so the room was dim. Wells had ordered her to keep it off at all times, she told him, since it made the light in the earth harder to see.

“Bones,” she said. “He keeps bringing them up. Rollins says they are buffalo bones, that he must have hit an old Indian dump site.”

Chase went in for a closer look. Yes, they were like dumbbells.

“Wells thinks it’s an extinct animal, a deformed beast that no one has ever seen,” Macy said. “He probably hasn’t slept in almost three weeks.”

Wells could not confirm this when he finally appeared and Macy led him to the table. He was too far gone, holding his spoon in his fist like a caveman. His knuckles were scraped and the soup Macy gave him was soaking his beard. He stared just beyond Chase’s shoulder as Chase talked, telling them both how he and Jordan had come up from California, how they had enough serious meds to get them through this, and they were willing to share, for a price. Wells didn’t seem to grasp any of this.

Macy tried to explain. “He’s saying it’s an epidemic, Wells. That other people have it and it’s going to get worse for all of us.”

Wells said, “A long time before I stopped then too. I came up on the ridge with rainbows slapping on a string at my leg and lightning had killed a bear like a grave mound with smoke in
its fur and the eyes like hard-boiled eggs. There was another eye in the hole staring up at me and I couldn’t sleep for weeks and weeks after I saw it down there big as a softball I thought oh a puddle until it blinked.”

Macy grabbed Wells’s hand. She said, “I thought you couldn’t sleep because you were thinking about me. But it turns out it’s something else. So much for romance.”

Wells looked at her as if she had just spoken in some alien tongue.

It was difficult for Chase to get up from the table without putting his anatomy on display. He was sure Macy caught sight of it, but he almost didn’t care. He told her where she could find him. “We’re willing to share,” he said again. “But not for money. It has to be something that has value after all of this is gone.”

He hoped that wasn’t too direct, yet just direct enough.

FELICIA WAS SEEING THINGS – CHASE, FOR
example. First, out on the deck, staring at the indifferent ocean, shirtless and skinny. Then a glimpse of him sitting at the edge of her bed, head bowed as if reading something in his lap. Or she could just hear him peeing in the bathroom, his little allergy cough revealing his identity and disrupting the noisy stream.

She saw her mother and her orthodontist down on the beach, peering into the tide pools and strolling at the edge of the water, their footprints fading behind them in the silvery gloss. A pelican too, with a laugh identical to the horsy guffaw of her childhood piano teacher. It sat on the railing no more than three feet away, winking at her as if they shared a scandalous secret.

It was worse for some, since they all had succumbed to the symptoms and progressed through the phenomenon, as the researchers insisted on calling it, at different rates. There were people in the Sleep Research Center talking to shadows and others who were only now starting to slur their words. The doctors—Kitov, Lee, Porter—were showing signs but not publicly admitting to it. Porter appeared to be the furthest gone, but maybe that was just because Kitov and Lee were generally harder to read. Even before the sleeplessness hit, the old goat-faced genius Kitov had rambled nearly incoherently, peppering his speech with Russian and shuffling down the laminated corridors not unlike the insomniacs on the streets.

Meanwhile Lee had largely persisted with his robotic demeanor, at least in public, though Felicia thought she had heard him scrambling his grammar at the last morning meeting. Then again, she was also hearing strains of music emanating from the ocean, as though a sea monster were playing a giant cello just beyond the continental shelf.

Whatever they were going to do, these researchers, they had better do it quick. This implant scheme of theirs. They had briefed everyone. A wire in the head. It sounded like a workable plan, until the Q&A, when Warren—one of several grad students who had gravitated to the lab to work with the famous Soviet-era exile—pointed out that none of them were surgeons, let alone neurosurgeons.

“Is not exactly brain surgery,” Dr. Kitov tried—the joke being that it was. “But serious,” he insisted, “is not so complicated. Two holes drilled in skull, electrode leads threaded into brain, then wired up to stimulator that is put under skin, here in chest.”

Dr. Porter, now like an angry drunk from lack of sleep, took a swipe at the principal investigator. “Maybe when we’re in there, we should go ahead and stimulate the place where fucking articles are stored.”

Felicia, and the handful of others still operating within a framework of cultural norms, felt obligated to laugh in an attempt to undermine Porter’s weird venom. But it was a losing battle, this effort to uphold manners—let alone common decency—in the face of the ravaging epidemic. Emotions were raw, nerves exposed by exhaustion, and the morning meetings, lunches, gatherings of any kind were becoming increasingly hostile and unpredictable.

The irony of their situation inflamed matters. After all, here they were, the staff of one of the world’s most famous sleep research facilities, and they were just as clueless as anyone else. Much
of the anger and disappointment was directed at Kitov, since he was the world-renowned expert in the field of sleep and insomnia who had drawn millions in grants to the university over the years yet claimed to be completely blindsided by the phenomenon.

“It is,” he proclaimed, “attack on cathedral of human mind, perhaps of alien origin.”

His eccentricities were no longer endearing quirks in the eyes of the sleep center inhabitants—a group of two dozen researchers, lab techs, undergrad assistants, and a small security team. Instead, his slightly askew worldview, along with his attempts at humor, was seen as a diversion, drawing the eye away from his incompetence. People had begun to look to Dr. Lee, but he deferred to his master, publicly supporting Kitov’s implant scheme. Indeed, he had indicated to Felicia that he thought this mechanical fix was their only hope at this point.

FOR
a while, before the meds stopped working, they had had to separate the sleepers from the sleepless and security was an issue. Now no one was sleeping so there was no need for lockdown. People strolled the hallways at all hours, some verbalizing their delusions in mangled sentences or crashing into the walls on wobbly legs. Felicia felt compelled to guide her fellow residents safely through the labyrinth of corridors, to be useful while she still possessed the presence of mind to navigate the center. They, in return, projected their visions upon her.