Red Moon (12 page)

He is on the ground—he knows that—choking on the dust thrown up by their struggle. His vision wobbles into focus in time for him to see the man scramble into the truck and drag the door closed behind him. There is a hiss and a chirp as the brakes release.

Patrick shakes off the pain and struggles to his feet, but the ground seems to be shifting beneath him. He claws up a rock and hurls it after the semi—not even close, twenty feet wide, thwacking the blacktop. Before he can find another, the engine is bellowing and the trailer is shuddering off the shoulder, onto the highway, the red taillights like the eyes of some retreating beast. He watches until it vanishes around a bend, the muggy smell of sheep the only proof it was ever there.

He touches his fingers to his forehead—blood and a loose flap of skin—hopefully nothing serious. At his feet he finds the mask. The red hair frizzes around its head; the red lips stretch around its grin. Where its eyes should be there is only blackness, the kind of black encountered at the bottom of a well too deep to draw a bucket from. He kicks it away in disgust.

The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That’s how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.

“I have a hammer,” she says and holds it up for proof.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I didn’t think so. But I want you to know, I have a hammer.”

He almost asks if she is okay and then stops himself. Of course she isn’t okay. Is she hurt? That’s what he wants to know.

“I’ll be okay,” she says. Her clothes are intact. She isn’t bleeding. That might not be the case, Patrick guesses, if he had arrived even a minute later. A minute later and the man might have carried her into the cab of his truck like a spider scuttling to his burrow.

He holds out his hand and she takes it and he hauls her up and for a moment they are too close. “Do you have somewhere to go?” he says.

She takes a step back. “Yes.”

“Can I take you there?”

“Yes.” She hurries out her answers. No matter what he asked, she would likely say the same, yes. When she follows him to the Jeep, she does so slowly, as if trying to remember how to walk.

Her hand goes for the door handle and misses it. He opens it for her, and when she crawls inside, he asks if she wants to call the police. He didn’t catch the license plate, he says, but if they call now, the man won’t be able to get far. It is only then, with her teeth bared, that she says, “
No
.” He darts aside when she reaches out and slams shut her door. “No police.”

He climbs in the driver’s side and grinds the engine to a start. The radio blares—some pop song that comes across as mockingly sweet—and he hurries to snap it off. He checks his reflection in the rearview. His hair hides the wound. The skin is swollen and pouchy, the blood already tacky. His eyes seem all right, no dilation. He’ll live.

It’s only then that she says, “Thank you,” so quietly he almost misses it.

“Forget about it.” His fingers close numbly around the steering wheel and he sees his knuckles are torn up. “Where to?”

She hands him a crinkled piece of paper and he studies it a moment. “I don’t even know where we are, so this doesn’t mean much.” He pulls out his handheld and plugs in the address, and a map appears with a red pin tacked in the center of it and a route from their current location. He holds it out to her and the glowing screen chases the shadows from a face that seems at odds with her clothes. She’s his age, maybe a little older, and pretty, not the type he’d peg for a runaway or drifter or whatever it is that brings a person to the side of the road in the middle of the night clutching a hammer. “Not far.”

They drive. The crowns of the trees are silvered with moonlight and their bottoms skirted with an impenetrable blackness. He steals glances at her often—whatever her name is, he is afraid to ask. Her eyes spill tears, but she doesn’t appear to be crying, not in the standard sense. She is so still, sitting ramrod straight, hugging the backpack in her lap. She hasn’t even blinked.

What is the proper response in a situation like this? Should he offer a comforting touch or reassuring word? Curse the man for his wretchedness? Crack a joke to ease the tension?

“Hey,” he finally says, touching her wrist. He can’t find the words—words never come readily to him—but he hopes touching her tells her okay, everything is going to be okay.

She is tired of this nightmare. And now it is almost over. The boy drives her to Battle River, glancing back and forth between his phone and the road, slowing to peer at the mailboxes staked at the end of every driveway. Moonlight falls through the trees in blue patches that tremble at their edges when the breeze blows. He almost misses the driveway, no mailbox, the reflective numbers 1020 nailed to a tree. “There,” he says and cranks the wheel hard. Gravel ticks and pops as they shoot down a tunnel of trees several hundred yards long that opens into a clearing.

The headlights illuminate a modest cabin, and parked next to it, a black Ramcharger. They roll to a stop. When a bright white light explodes from the cabin, Claire feels a flare in her chest, believing it to be a porch lamp, someone welcoming them. Then she realizes what it is, a motion detector, and feels instead like an intruder.

“This isn’t your house,” the boy says.

“No.”

“But you know who lives here?”

“Yes,” she says, and then, “No.”

The heater wheezes. She unclips her seat belt.

“Do you want me to come with you?” the boy says and she says no and he says, “I’ll wait and make sure somebody answers.”

“Don’t worry. Somebody’s home.” And indeed, she feels something, as though she has come upon a place where deer slept in the woods, the flattened grass still warm. Someone is here, if not in the cabin, then nearby.

She swings open her door and shoulders her backpack. She needs the boy to leave, to forget about her. She supposes she shouldn’t have shared the address with him—not knowing what kind of trouble her aunt might be in—just as she shouldn’t have approached the open door of the semi. She needs to be more careful. She has lost her trust in the world. There are too many monsters. “You can go now.”

“Just knock and—”

“
Go
.” The word comes out more forcefully than she intended, and the boy’s face tightens with concern. It occurs to her that he is kind and handsome, that this sort of thing used to matter to her. “Thank you,” she says. “But I’m fine.”

He stares at her another moment, then nods, but instead of driving off he retrieves a notebook from the backseat and a pen from his pocket. He scrawls his name and phone number on a piece of paper he rips out and hands to her. “Just in case.”

She scrunches it into her pocket, and when his hand rises to the gearshift she closes the door on him. The Jeep swings around and putters down the driveway, soon lost from sight except as a ghostly sphere of light floating through the trees.

Her mind feels unnervingly heightened. It is the moon, she suspects, the moon and the attack and the chance that she has finally made it, that she will soon be safe. She shivers not from the cold but from nerves. Anyone else, she supposes, would be in shock right now. She is beyond shock.

A gravel path is the only thing that separates her from the cabin. The longer she looks at it, the longer it seems to grow, taunting her, daring her forward. She squints into the harsh light of the motion detector mounted at the peak of the roof. If the porch beneath it was brightly lit, then maybe she would feel a greater sense of urgency, but the windows are dark, meaning no one is home or someone is sleeping, maybe her aunt or maybe not, and if not, then what? She will have no one; she will be nowhere. She has no defense against these thoughts that flit through her mind like ragged-winged moths.

She tries to command her feet to move—to get it over with already—and at first her body falters, not listening to her. She leans forward and that does it, the weight pulling her onward, one step and then another. Her shadow rolls alongside her, a small black ball, maybe all that remains of the old Claire shackled to her. She crunches down the path and climbs the front porch and knocks at the front door. And waits. She hears no footsteps inside and no crickets in the forest, only the hush of a breeze that carries the smell of snow down from the mountains.

Again she raps her knuckles against the door, more insistent this time, until her knuckles feel like they might split. Someone is here—someone has to be here. She feels it. “Hello,” she says.

From behind her comes a voice: “I’m right here, Claire.”

A
UGUSTUS NURSES CHASE
through the next few weeks. The living room becomes a makeshift hospital. An air mattress replaces the bloodstained tarp. He smears disinfectant and changes bandages. He draws a warm bath and seasons it with alcohol and tincture of iodine. He buys OxyContin off one of his neighbors, a doctor and campaign donor, and dopes away the pain with 160 mg doses. He serves Chase Gatorade to get his electrolytes up, brings him platters of eggs and toast when he has an appetite. All the while Augustus wears a mask, goggles, and latex gloves. Every day he disposes of the black plastic garbage bag that grows big bellied with soiled bandages and washcloths and latex gloves he peels off as carefully as if they were a diseased condom.

He tells the staff, the reporters, that Chase is at a strategy retreat. When they ask if the rumors are true, if he has taken ill, Augustus laughs and says, “He’s, as always, the picture of health.”

When Chase sleeps—and he sleeps often, sometimes sixteen hours a day—Augustus sits at the kitchen table with his laptop open, a pen and yellow legal tablet arranged next to it. He plugs into Google different word combinations involving lycans, lobos, prions. He knows he ought to know more, but as with AIDS, the disease feels so
other
that he has learned only to fear it in the abstract. Here are some of the things he discovers:

The earliest documentation of a lycan can be found in the cave systems of Revsvika, on the island of Moskenesøy, Lofoten. You must worm through a tunnel only a few feet wide until you come to an open cavern full of shamanistic pictographs, one of them a man with the head of a wolf. His hands—with long claws in place of fingers—are held above his head as if in benediction. And at his feet lies the carcass of what appears to be a sheep. Carbon dating estimates the drawing as seventh century.

The latest U.S. census lists persons infected with lobos at 5.2 percent.

Lobos is not a bacteria and it is not a virus, despite its commonly being referred to as such. It is a
prion
—a word derived from
protein
and
infection
and assigned to infectious agents that are made not of nucleic acids but instead of misfolded protein. Prions come in multiple strains, like viruses, capable of producing different symptoms in different hosts. Mad cow disease is another common example, chronic wasting disease another. All known prion diseases affect the brain and neural tissue, creating vacuoles in the nerve fibers that eventually lesion and degenerate into spongiform encephalopathy. The pathogen is untreatable but the degenerative process is slow enough that humans typically do not live long enough for the pathogen to prove fatal.

In an article by Amant J. Dewan, professor of history at Harvard University, Augustus learns that widespread infection began in Scandinavia, where, in the Faroe Islands, the brains of wolves were ritually eaten on the night of the winter solstice. It is believed—through the cross-checking of dozens of runic Old Norse documents—that lobos first broke out in the early seventh century among the wolf population, as chronicled in their loss of balance, shaking, and physical wasting. An apparent incessant itching overcame the animals and caused them to scratch their hindquarters on anything available, even after their fur and skin were scraped away. The villagers had always believed they consumed the strength and cunning of the wolf—but at this time, they feasted instead on highly infectious prions that mutated in their human host.

Everyone responds to the pathogen differently. For some, the incubation period is several weeks. For others, ten years or more. The adrenal gland stimulates the lobos prions. The parts of the brain most affected: the amygdala, which controls anger, and the hypothalamus, which controls hunger. Like a virus, its aim is to reproduce. It does so when the host lashes out. Because the gums bleed during transformation, the prions propagate themselves through a bite, often directed to the back of the neck, seeking out the closest route to neural tissue.

Sweat cannot carry the disease; a cough or a sneeze cannot carry the disease. You cannot get lobos from shaking hands or sharing a soda. You cannot get lobos from a scratch. Like AIDS, it can pass from parent to child and must be blood-borne or sexually transmitted to successfully find a new host. Whether the host is in a latent or heightened (commonly known as “transformed”) state does not matter: the disease is in the host’s blood and that blood remains contagious.

The word
lobos
comes from
wolf
, as does
lobotomy
, an operation that puts one out of one’s mind—and isn’t that the very essence of the infection?

Most people with the disease live healthy, happy lives. Volpexx, lycan groups claim, is merely a safeguard. Lycan attacks are in fact as uncommon as shark attacks—but in both cases, media attention makes them seem more prevalent than they are. The average lycan, one website says, would no more attack a human than the average hunter would turn a gun on a friend.

The Lupine Republic was established in 1948 after nearly two thousand years of dispersal and more than fifty years of attempts to create a lycan homeland. It is located between Finland and Russia, a northern territory largely uninhabited at the time and now populated by several million lycans and U.S. personnel. The country has prospered, with the discovery of uranium reserves, but the past fifteen years especially have been rife with conflict as a result of terror attacks by extremist forces protesting U.S. occupation and advocating state autonomy. They are in the minority, with 80 percent of lycans supporting uranium extraction and U.S. involvement for the economic stability and physical security.

Augustus creates a favorites folder for several dozen webpages—and then pauses for a long time, with his pen in his hand and the glow of his laptop swimming across his glasses, when he discovers there are five prion research centers in the country, one of them based at the University of Oregon.

The showerhead is caked white with mineral deposits. From it comes sulfur-smelling water, but Claire steps into it happily. For too long she has not bathed except to splash herself with water and soap in gas station restrooms. A whorl of dirt forms around the drain and doesn’t go away. Nothing has ever felt so good. She showers until the hot water fades and she begins to shiver. When she pulls aside the curtain, the air eddies with fog as though a cloud has descended upon the room.

She has conditioned her hair three times and even then cannot get the knots out of it. After she towels off, she opens the vanity and finds a pair of styling scissors. She swipes a hand across the mirror and almost immediately the clear patch gives way to fog. She turns on the fan and the fog spins slowly away. For some time she regards her reflection in the mirror. A swollen black bruise veins out of her temple.

She grips the scissors. She holds out a length of hair. She snips, once, and then again. It gets easier with every cut. She tosses big damp clumps in the toilet. She stops when her hair is jaw length and the person in the mirror looks like a stranger.

She steps from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Miriam appears in the doorway of her bedroom and blinks hard at the sight of her. “Hardly recognize you.”

“That’s the idea, I guess.”

Miriam waves Claire into the room. Her bed, a queen with a wrought-iron frame, takes up most of the space. A lamp and a handgun rest on the nightstand. A pine bureau squats beneath one of the two windows, both of them boarded over. Miriam says, “You a size four?”

“Used to be.”

“We’re about the same.” Miriam motions to the bureau and closet. “Try on whatever.”

Weekends, back in Wisconsin, Claire used to sleep ten-, twelve-hour stretches. Around noon her father would knock gently on her door and say, “Claire? That’s enough, don’t you think?” But it never seemed to be—she could never get her fill—a yawn stretching her face as she stumbled down the hall for a cup of coffee, a bowl of Apple Jacks.

Her first few days at the cabin, tired as she is, she cannot fall asleep, and once she does, she cannot stay asleep, so that her days and nights are hazily threaded with dreaming and waking, her eyes shuttering closed when flipping through a novel and then snapping open again at the dinner table with a cold plate of spaghetti before her and her aunt studying her. She is hiking along the shoulder of the road, staring at a dark bank of clouds that might carry rain. She is standing in a gas station restroom, letting the dryer blast her hands just to get warm. She is struggling against the weight of a man in a clown mask, and when she rips it away, a red skull grins back at her. The whole world seems a threat; the whole world wears a mask.

As much as she wants to, she can’t allow herself to relax, can’t feel safe, the weapons arranged throughout the cabin and the plywood planks shielding the windows making her feel as if she has stumbled into an uncertain fortress.

When Claire asks Miriam why—why the stronghold defenses?—she says, “Because there are people hunting me.”

“The same people who came for my parents?”

“Different people. But just as dangerous.”

The dinette runs up against the living room and Augustus sits at the table, spooning into a bowl of cottage cheese, while Chase weakly attempts to exercise. For the past few weeks he has done nothing but sleep and stumble back and forth to the bathroom. He needs to get the blood flowing again, he says, or he might rot away into a husk.

“You understand the way this works, I assume?” Augustus says.

Chase is wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and nothing else except for the bandages that patch his arm and torso. He dips up and down, his face red and wet with sweat. “You get bit by a rabid dog, you get rabies—isn’t that the gist of it?”

“Not exactly. Saliva isn’t enough—thank God—or every sneeze on a subway would infect a dozen people.” The spoon clicks against the bowl and then his teeth. “We’re fortunate that lobos is more like HIV, a blood-borne contagion. A bite doesn’t guarantee infection, but it’s quite possible. A lycan’s gums bleed after they transform, and it’s a great way for the prion to propagate itself.”

“I’m fucked.”

“If by that you mean, ‘Am I infected?’ Yes, I think we can assume as much. But if by that you mean, ‘Am I finished as a politician?’ Not necessarily. Three people know what happened in that room. One of them is dead.”

Chase dips down and tries to hold his position but wobbles and loses his balance. “You think we can hide this?”

“It will require lifestyle changes.” Augustus shoves another spoon of cottage cheese into his mouth and speaks through his chewing, his voice thick and mucousy. “I’m going to look into getting you a prescription for medicinal marijuana. And it looks like I can get Volpexx delivered from Canada—maybe we can try that in low doses. But right now you need to stay calm, stay in control, stay human. That means no more women. No more binges. No more temper tantrums.”

Chase gives up on the squats and walks to the window and stares out into the day. Clouds hang like a dark, low ceiling. A maple sapling, stripped of its leaves, shakes against the wind. “That’s not really my style, is it?”

“No,” Augustus says. “No, it is not.”

Miriam is handsome more than pretty. Claire can see her father in her. The muscular jaw and squared shoulders. Eyes as blue as an acetylene torch. But while her father always had a smile flashing beneath his beard, Miriam seems incapable of humor, her expression stony, her mouth a lipless black slit. She never stops moving and wears a black tank top that shows off arms roped with muscle.

The idea of family has, up to this point, evaded Claire. When she complained about visiting her nana at the nursing home, or about attending a barbecue with her cousins, her mother would always say, “They’re family,” as if that explained everything. Now Claire finally understands it, the importance of blood. That someone like Miriam, who is otherwise a stranger, would take her in without question.

Their conversations, rushed and interrogative, are broken up by long silences. They sit on opposite ends of the couch. Claire has her legs tucked under her and her aunt leans forward with her forearms on her knees. At first Miriam has only questions—“And then what happened?” is one of her favorites—about the home invasion, her father’s note, the seemingly endless passage from Wisconsin. Claire expects more of a reaction when she describes the gunfire erupting downstairs, but Miriam only lowers her head and says, in a muted voice, that she knew, from the moment she spotted Claire on her doorstep, that her brother must be dead.

Then her voice is sharp once more. “Who was that boy? The one in the Jeep.”

“He was nobody.” Claire explains what happened—everything about the night, including the truck driver, whom up to this point she has kept secret. She braces herself, expecting Miriam to pull her into a hug and tell her how sorry she is. Instead her aunt rises from the couch and disappears from the living room. Claire can hear her aunt down the hall, in the kitchen, a cupboard closing, glasses rattling. A moment later she appears with two tumblers of whiskey. Without a word she hands one to Claire. They raise the glasses in a grim toast and drain them. Claire coughs into her fist. Her chest blazes as though she has swallowed a coal.

Miriam sets down her glass on the coffee table with a click. “That was stupid, you know, bringing that boy here. Really stupid.”

“I know.”

“He knows your face. He knows where we live.”

“I know,” Claire says and drops her gaze to the floor, but really, despite the strong poison of what Miriam has to say, all Claire can concentrate on is a single word,
we
. Where
we
live. It makes her want to cry out with relief.

Claire tries to keep busy. She sweeps the floor. She turns the toilet paper around so that it pulls forward. She alphabetizes the books. She washes the dishes, letting the towel linger on a plate before setting it on the rack to dry. She opens up the fridge and stares into its cold white hum. Small tasks, everyday rituals, bring her comfort after living in a free fall.