Red Moon (11 page)

Buffalo. Chase can hear him, dimly. It’s a comforting sound. Like when, as a child, on long car trips, he would intermittently wake to the murmur of his parents talking in the front seat. He strains his neck to observe his friend pacing back and forth with his handheld pressed against his ear. His voice is panicked, hurried. Chase wants to tell him to take it easy, but then the darkness of sleep once again overtakes him.

T
HE GRAY-EYED BOY
named Max lives in old town. A neighborhood of Old Mountain untouched by all the new development, every house on his street a one-story shoebox with a concrete-slab porch and a mature maple tree planted left of the cracked driveway. Three cars and a truck are parked out front, all Chevys. The streetlamps buzz and telephone lines crisscross the moonlit sky. Before Patrick can knock, the door cracks and in the crack hangs the craggy face of a man—Max’s father, Patrick guesses—who waves him in, says the boys are downstairs.

The basement is pine paneled and smells vaguely of mothballs. Mounted on the wall, three trophy bucks, a lacquered rainbow trout, and a shelf busy with beer steins and age-tarnished softball trophies. A gun cabinet stacked with rifles and shotguns. Minor Threat plays from a laptop set on top of an ancient minifridge. When Patrick thumps down the stairs, a dozen faces turn toward him, some nodding along with the music, some still and expressionless. Everyone wears their head shaved, so at first it’s difficult to distinguish between them, and then one steps forward and comes into focus: Max. “We’re glad you came,” he says.

Patrick notices for the first time the tracheotomy scar, like a bright red worm nesting in the cup of his neck. The air is dry and the carpet shag, so that a spark snaps between them when they bring their hands together to shake, a jolt that makes Patrick blink fast and stutter out his thanks. One by one, the boys in the room introduce themselves—this one chinless, this one rashed over with acne, this one freakishly muscled, the tendons jumping from his neck like piano wires—and their socks sizzle across the carpet and their hands emit tiny blue balls of light.

They don’t linger but return to whatever previously occupied them, darts, foosball, something on the laptop. A wood-paneled TV set squats in the corner, the image of a soldier frozen on the screen, his teeth gritted. A video-game console nests in a black tangle of wires. Two of the boys punch their controllers and the screen comes to life. Patrick recognizes
Call of Duty: Lycan Wars
, a shooter game set in the Lupine Republic, your level-by-level mission to kill as many lycan insurgents as possible while collecting stores of energy and weapons—a silver chainsaw, a Gatling gun that rattles out ammo with a sound like a shuffled deck of cards.

A few times a month, Max says, they make an effort to get together. Nothing formal. Just a chance to hang. Feel connected. Patrick doesn’t know what to say—doesn’t know if he should ask what exactly connects them, makes them a group—so he simply says, cool. Their talk turns to school, how Patrick is liking it, how Max believes one teacher is worthless and another is smart but clouded by his liberal agenda. His eye contact is unrelenting. He taps his middle finger into his opposing palm to punctuate his sentences.

“You want a drink, by the way?” Max says, and Patrick says sure and wonders for a second if that means a beer before noticing that everyone in the room is sucking on a pop, Coke, Squirt, Dr Pepper. The minifridge is stocked full and Patrick cracks a Coke and Max snaps his fingers and says, “Before I forget.” His voice rises to address the room. “Guys. Heads up. Listen up.” The volume of the music lowers, the video game pauses, heads swivel in their direction. “Next Wednesday, four o’clock, don’t forget, we’re stopping by Desert Flower, the old folks’ home on O.B. Riley. Groundskeeping first. Then card games. And, Dan, you’re going to play the piano at dinner.”

Everyone nods and then the foosball table rattles and shudders and the video game and conversations start back up. Max raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice and says to Patrick, “Not what you expected, right?”

He’s not sure what he expected. Yelling maybe. A swastika flag. “You guys straight edge or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“We call ourselves the Americans.”

They talk about immigration. They talk about guns. They talk about the viability of Chase Williams as a presidential candidate. And when they talk, Max seems to end every sentence with “right?”—in a prodding, corrective way—as if to make sure they share the same beliefs.

They talk about the attacks, and when Patrick says he doesn’t understand why
now
, why all of a sudden the seeming escalation in the size and strength of the Resistance, Max appears insulted. “It isn’t all of a sudden. This has been going on for years. This has been going on since our parents were our age, since the Struggle.”

He holds out a finger for the failed Times Square bombing, for the anthrax scare, for the mail bombs, for the mall shooting, for the subway gassing. “All of those were relative failures. A few headlines, a few dead bodies, and then everybody moves on to the next earthquake or tsunami news tragedy. This is just the first time the mutts have actually been able to pull something off, something big. And you, my friend, found yourself in the middle of it and somehow walked away alive. Which is pretty amazing. You’re part of history. You’re a walking emblem of their failure, our hope.” Max’s voice seems to grow louder with every sentence, and his head bobs on his shoulders like a balloon on a ribbon.

Patrick hates it when people talk about him as if he were an idea. That’s why he stopped meeting with reporters. He tries to change the subject, asking Max if he thinks the average lycan is dangerous, if it’s fair to lump them all together as part of the Resistance. “I can’t say I know that many lycans, but it seems like they’re living pretty normal lives. They don’t have much to complain about. They seem pretty happy, pretty safe.”

Max shakes his head with disappointment. He puts his arms on Patrick’s shoulders. “Listen to me. They are a public health risk and a biological abomination. Don’t ever forget that, okay?”

“Okay.”

Max releases him and Patrick drains the last of his soda and shakes it to indicate he is going to get another. Max follows him to the minifridge and says, “Now I want you to tell me about your father.”

He cracks the can, slurps the foam. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

Patrick doesn’t know what to say. His father wears Levi’s, motorcycle boots, white T-shirts ripped from clear plastic packs. His fingernails always carry bruises and crescents of dirt. Every few weeks he cuts his own hair in the mirror with a pair of clippers, shearing it down to a high-and-tight. In college, he was a biochem major, a gifted slacker. That’s where he met Neal—at UC Davis—where they went by the nicknames Kirk and Spock. Keith drove motorcycles and carried a knife on his belt and found himself bored in the lab, excited more by big ideas than by carrying them out—while Neal wore khakis, sandals with socks, the detail-oriented workman who went on to make a name for himself as a researcher in animal diseases.

Whereas his father eventually put his bad grades and chemistry genius to work at Anchor Steam Brewing. He drives a Dodge Ram and an Indian motorcycle. He has a diamond-shaped scar on his forehead from when he struck an open cabinet during a Christmas party. He fell to the linoleum with a shocked look on his face and blood welling from between his fingers, one of the most terrifying moments of Patrick’s life, when for the first time he saw his father hurt and embarrassed by the group of people hovering over him.

About halfway through college—he took six years to graduate—he ran out of money and signed on with the National Guard to pay his tuition, and today he serves as a staff sergeant with the California National Guard currently stationed at Combat Outpost Tuonela in the eastern Republic. He supervises a platoon of men, twenty-five soldiers of the seven thousand deployed from California. Years ago, he served a tour—back when Patrick’s grandparents were still alive—but that was before the conflict escalated, before the marches and rock-slinging riots protesting U.S. occupation, before newspaper headlines were inked in the blood of soldiers killed in IED blasts, tooth-and-claw street battles.

His father jokes, by Skype, by email and instant message, that he didn’t have any gray hair before his unit was activated, but now it’s coming in strong. He writes that he feels like an old man among all these kids, most of them not much older than Patrick. He writes about his conflicted feelings, how he wishes he were home but how he knows they’re doing good. “It’s only a few rotten eggs over here. They get all the news. The rest of the citizens, and that’s the majority by a long shot, are happy we’re here. Remember that just because you’re lycan doesn’t mean you’re a monster. Really remember that.”

He writes that he hears small-arms fire on patrol and lycans baying outside the compound at night. He writes that a bomb exploded near the Humvee in which he was riding. The truck flipped twice, when it banked a hard right and rolled down an embankment, but somehow they got away with nothing but a few cuts and ringing ears. “Made my heart jump. Too many close calls for kids I’m responsible for. Stay safe, buddy. Love ya.”

For this he has gone on leave as an assistant brewmaster at Anchor, where he spends much of his days in white coveralls, moving among the big-bellied copper vats, the clouds of yeasty steam, checking and double-checking on fermentation, hosing down tanks, dollying barrels, jotting down temperatures and yeast-cell concentrations in a notebook, giving the occasional tour for gangs of tourists wearing fanny packs and white sneakers. His hair smells of malt. He often talks about whole grains and oaken casks and in everyday conversation uses words like
hydrometer
,
glycol
,
sparge paddle
.

There is so much to tell about his father, but before Patrick can piece together more than a few sentences, the door at the top of the landing creaks open and footsteps boom down the stairs and his voice dies away when he sees who it is—the redheaded girl,
Malerie
.

He feels, then, a hole open up in his stomach through which all his blood seems to drain.

She does not look at Patrick, not at first, but walks directly to Max and snakes an arm around his neck and kisses him loudly on the cheek. His face pinches and reddens. He shrugs off her arm and glances around, as though embarrassed by her affection. An electric guitar shrieks, the only sound in the room, until Max says to Patrick, “This is my girlfriend, Malerie.”

It is only then that she looks at him—with a blank expression—and says, “Nice to meet you.” She raises her hand in a half wave, her fingernails as red as a stop sign.

C
LAIRE IS HERE.
It hardly seems possible, after all this time, but the sign at the side of the road reads
LA PINE, POPULATION 5,799
. Its letters glow with the silvery light thrown by the full moon.

She is here because of her father’s note, because an acronym on a stupid greeting card finally helped her read what he had written. She studied the constellations he sketched and jotted down the first letter of each. From this she built the words,
Go to Miriam Ten Twenty Battle Creek Rd La Pine Oregon.

No wisdom beyond that. No clue as to why, out of all the people in the world, he chose his sister, a woman who is more a blank-faced mystery than an aunt, who ten years ago was excised from the family for reasons not entirely clear, who might not even be at the address listed, and even if she is, might not want anything to do with Claire.

She headed west, constantly studying her creased map, realizing sadly one afternoon that she had achieved her dream, making it more than five hundred miles from home. She caught rides with a lesbian couple driving a minivan with three pugs barking and snorting in the backseat, with a rancher with hay in his hair and heavy gloves and a tin of chewing tobacco on his dashboard. She slept on porches, in barns and sheds and campers, under pine boughs. She woke up one morning to hail and another to what sounded like hail but turned out to be a group of children clacking sticks together, pretending them into swords. “You’re dead, lycan monster,” one of them cried, slashing at his friend’s belly.

When she couldn’t bum a ride, she walked. Sometimes during the day and sometimes at night, the night so monstrously dark in the Plains, its star-sprinkled blackness broken by the occasional red halo of light emitted by towns with names like Snakebite, Elkhorn. Always the wind blew, flapping her pants, ruffling the oily strands of hair that hang from beneath her wool cap.

In a pole barn she found a workbench with a pegboard hanging from the wall behind it. Wrenches and screwdrivers and hammers and pliers surrounded two Craftsman toolboxes, one red, one black, with their lids thrown open. A set of socket wrenches. A ratchet. She picked up a few of the hammers, tested their weight, decided on a ball-peen with a rubber grip, and slid it into her backpack—and then her eyes paused on a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters.

She flexed the fingers of her left hand. The tendons felt tight, the muscles tender and unfamiliar, but otherwise fine. She spent the next few minutes clumsily snipping through her homemade cast, and when it finally fell away, the skin beneath was as damp and pale as something drawn from a shell.

She blows into her hand now, trying to warm it, her breath puffing between her fingers in short-lived clouds. The moon glows and casts a sickly light. Claire tries not to look at it. She hates it. She knows how ridiculous it is to hate a spinning ball of rock, but she does, she hates it, as someone can hate a flag tacked to a wall or a corporate logo emblazoned on a smokestack. It reminds her, like a grinning skull, of what she is.

She has never taken Volpexx, has never had to, her doctor a sympathizer, a family friend who falsely reports their monthly blood tests. But she saw the drug’s effects in her friend Stacey, who sometimes seemed deadened, especially when the moon fattened, when the dosage was most potent. Her words slurred. Her posture hunched. Her skin appeared yellow except for the purplish half-moons beneath her eyes. She fell asleep in class, forgot her homework.

Even unmedicated, Claire feels no desire to transform. And that’s what it’s about, desire. Letting go, they call it. Letting go, allowing the animal to take over, like an unleashed id. Most can control the change, as you might anger or desire—choosing not to swing a fist, cop a feel—but when stressed or exhausted, when pushed too hard, overwhelmed by the weight of the world, not everyone can hold back, the animal rising unbidden, invading the body and mind. The moon makes it worse. The lunar effect, they call it, for the spike in robberies, suicides, murders, births, car accidents, transformations.

The road is walled by pine trees. Her footsteps, following the white line that edges the asphalt, are the only sound. At the edge of town she passes a Burger King, its sign glowing, its windows dark. In observance of the full-moon Sabbath, restaurants close; only vital services remain open. Hotels, hospitals, police. Gas stations. The red star of a Texaco blazes up ahead, and a few minutes later, when she walks past the pumps, the fluorescent lights buzz above her like sick cicadas.

The store is empty save for the man behind the counter. Thirties. Hollow eyed. Mossy goatee hanging as low as the crucifix flashing around his neck. She asks if he knows where to find Battle Creek Road. He says he’s never heard of it. She asks if he has a smart phone she could borrow and he says if he could afford a smart phone he wouldn’t be working the late shift at the Texaco.

Outside, a semi idles at the diesel island. She can barely make out the shape of the driver, a shadow darker than the rest inside the cab, but she knows he is watching her. She can feel it. Her skin tightens. The red tip of a cigarette glows in the cab and the semi seems to expel its smoke in the exhaust rising from the bullhorn pipes. The steel trailer behind the cab is pocked with air vents. Sheep on their way to slaughter. She can hear their panicked bleating, can see here and there a bulging eye, a damp black snout.

Another quarter mile and a sidewalk and streetlamps appear. She hurries between their cones of light. Three cars are parked at the AmericInn and she guesses the purple Datsun belongs to the night clerk, a woman with dream-catcher earrings and a coal-black dye job that doesn’t match her wrinkled face. Claire tries to keep her voice calm, even when the woman looks around as if for another customer and asks if Claire plans to get a room or what, then sighs heavily when the answer is no. But Claire doesn’t move and the woman at last gives in and taps the address into Google Maps and says, “Battle Creek?”

“Yes.”

“Not Battle River?”

“The note says Battle Creek.”

“Got nothing for Battle Creek, but I got Battle River. Ten-twenty Battle River.” Her throat is corroded, her breath smelling like the ghosts of a thousand dead cigarettes. “South of town a ways. Then west. You got a ways to go. Five miles at least.” She clicks the mouse and the printer hums and spits out a piece of paper bearing a map in gray scale. “Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

She follows Highway 97 south of town. Streetlights vanish. Houses appear less and less frequently, islands of light set back in the woods. Now and then the trees break and she can make out the white glowing jawline of the Cascade Mountains. Every time she passes a road, many of them gravel, she consults the sheet of paper with her flashlight, as if the map might have shifted when she wasn’t looking.

Her feet can’t move fast enough, not out of excitement but from worry. Her father made a mistake. Maybe the street is wrong—or maybe the town is wrong—or maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe it’s all wrong, even the house number. He was hurried and nervous, after all, penning a note he knew might be his last. She can’t help but curse him. Just as she can’t help but push forward.

Her mind is so busy, she does not notice the semi until it is nearly upon her. Its headlights brighten the night to the color of an old bruise. It blasts past her, and in the air it displaces, she smells the sheep in the trailer, the shit-soaked heat of them. Another hundred yards and its taillights flash red. The semi rolls to a stop, braking with the sound of a big animal clearing its throat.

She slows her pace. She remembers the truck driver in Minneapolis, how worried she was and how kind he turned out to be. Her hand fumbles with the zipper of his coat, now hers, and draws it snug to her neck. She glances behind her—at the empty stretch of road, like a long black snake banded with black and yellow stripes—and tries to remember the last time she saw a car.

She removes the hammer from her backpack and holds it against her leg. The distance closes between her and the semi, and soon she can hear hooves tocking against steel, can hear a waterfall of piss splash through the grating and onto the asphalt. She walks the length of the trailer, and, now ten yards ahead, the passenger door yawns open and emits the faint orange glow of a furnace. She stops and says, at a yell she hopes will carry over the noise of the engine, “I didn’t have my thumb out.”

No response. The engine idles. She can feel it inside her, a trembling. She doesn’t know whether to run away or run toward the open door and beg a ride. She knows five miles should feel like nothing after two thousand, but the night is cold and she is tired and her aunt—is that possible?—might be waiting for her. She can’t picture a face—it’s been too long—but she imagines a straight-backed woman in a kitchen, pulling mugs from the cupboard, setting a kettle on the burner and looking toward the front door expectantly, anticipating her knock.

Her grip on the hammer tightens. Her feet make chewed-ice sounds along the shoulder when she creeps forward. She half expects to recognize the driver, the man from Minneapolis here to rescue her once more, a kindly smile on his face, his hand outstretched. But of course it is not him.

He is wearing a clown mask. That’s the first thing that goes through her head when she steps into view: he is wearing a clown mask, why on earth is he wearing a clown mask? He perches on the passenger seat, backlit by the overhead light. The mask’s eyes are black hollows, the hair a wild red color that matches the too-big lips stretching around a too-big grin.

The sheep bleat and the engine hums and he says, “Come here. Come here right now.” He speaks in the tone of a man commenting on the price of gas—quietly terse—and this is what scares her most, his calmness. Before she can spin away, he launches himself off the seat, onto her.

They crash to the ground. Her backpack digs painfully into her spine. He lays an arm across her chest, pinning her. She must be dreaming. Isn’t that what people always think when faced with the impossible? And what could be more impossible than this: her parents are dead—her house is riddled with bullets—and now, after traveling halfway across the country, she will be raped by a stranger in a clown mask who crushes her with his weight, the shape of him blotting out the stars above, erasing the constellations that brought her this far.

But in dreams you wake up when the worst happens. In dreams you cannot feel as she does now: the cold of the cinder at the small of her back, the heat of his sour breath on her face, the scrabble of his bony fingers working their way under her shirt. The sheep whine and stamp their hooves.

She should transform. She knows this. And for one moment she thinks she might—when an electric tremor runs through her, when her body tightens like a fist—and then she swings the hammer and it glances off the man’s shoulder. “You’ll pay for that,” he says and strikes her temple with his fist. She hears a sound like a pool ball dropped on a wooden floor. Now she is adrift, swimming between two worlds, and loses her will to do anything but close her eyes and try to find some dark closet in her mind to hide in, latch the door.

Patrick needs to drive, windows down, the night air cold, as sharp as a slap in clearing his head. He leaves behind Old Mountain and the glow of its outlying neighborhoods, preferring the company of darkness, not knowing where he is going, only wanting to get away. Moving is what matters. And being alone in the only space that really feels like his, this shitty Jeep.

The roads are empty. For a good minute he drops his foot to the floor and the engine screams and the speedometer trembles around eighty—and then he eases up, knowing the Jeep will rattle apart if driven too hard.

It’s close to midnight, but he doesn’t feel the least bit tired, hopped-up as he is now on adrenaline, thinking about Malerie leaning in to kiss Max and then addressing Patrick like a stranger, holding up her hand—the same hand she grabbed him with, now unfamiliar. He was scared of the Americans before she walked in the door—and now they have cause to hurt him if Max ever learns what happened.

“What kind of game are you playing?” he says.

Only the wind replies, whistling through the cracks in the nylon shell. He has his arm out the window, flattening his palm and cutting through the cool air that drags against it so that his hand looks like a pale fish struggling against a dark current.

Some movement catches his eye, and he glances past his hand and nearly jumps at what he sees. At first he mistakes them for wolves, the dozen or so coyotes that pour out of the forest and move as a pack along the shoulder of the highway. He slows, and for a while the coyotes keep pace with him, a rippling wave of gray. Then he accelerates and watches them fall away in the rearview mirror, their eyes reflecting the taillights, glowing red.

Later, he will wonder if they were summoned by the smell of sheep, and if he was driven wild by the full moon, but now, when he rounds a bend and comes upon the parked semi and the two figures struggling in the anemic wash of its headlights, his mind is empty, his body seemingly separate and acting on its own impulse when he stomps the brake and jumps out of the Jeep and races toward them—a man struggling to hold down a woman.

“Hey,” Patrick yells, and at the last second the man lifts his head and reveals the powder-white face and red toothy grin of a clown. By then it is too late for Patrick to reel back—he is already arrowing through the air. Someone cries out, maybe Patrick, when their bodies impact painfully. Then they are rolling down the shoulder, into the ditch’s weedy bottom, where they come to a rest with Patrick on top, the man below him. He snatches the mask and rips it off with a damp, sucking sound.

Beneath it is a flushed pink face, as hairless as an eraser. A man. No matter what kind of monster he first appeared, he is just a man. And a man can bleed. Patrick lashes out, striking him once, twice, mashing his lips against his teeth—and then realizes, too late, why the man is not holding up his arms in defense. He is reaching for something, a rock as big as a fist that comes whistling toward Patrick, a blow to the side of the head that he hears more than feels, his vision momentarily black.