Red Moon (13 page)

She finds flies in the sinks. Flies on the windowsills. Flies on bedcovers, flies even beneath her sheets, buzzing. The cabin hasn’t been opened in a long time and the air has a stale, rank quality. She has longed for a roof over her head, but she finds herself so used to the open sky that the boarded-up windows make her feel trapped.

She tells her aunt as much. At that moment Miriam is peering out one of the window slits, and when she glances at Claire a band of light divides her face. “You want to chop wood?”

“Anything. So long as it’s outside.”

Miriam returns her gaze to the window and uses her teeth to shred dry skin off her lower lip. “I suppose it’s safe. So long as we’re armed. And you stay close.”

“You think somebody might be out there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not right now. But somebody came for me a few weeks ago.”

“What happened to him?”

Miriam makes her hand into the shape of a gun and points it at Claire. “Bang.”

Chase appears in the statehouse rotunda in dress uniform—peaked cap, midnight-blue jacket with red trim and a standing collar. Behind him, when he tromps down the marble stairs, follow members of the Oregon National Guard. He approaches the podium, its front adorned with the Oregon seal, and pauses there as the soldiers perform a traditional march. Their swords slash the air and their boots thud the stone floor and make the air tremble. They come to a stop beneath a massive American flag suspended between two pillars.

Chase snaps off a salute and removes his hat to set on the podium. “Thank you,” he says, first to the guardsmen and then to the reporters who sit in folding chairs twenty rows deep. Their cameras flash and create a strobe-like effect that blinds him. For three weeks he has not made a public appearance. After appearing everywhere, he was suddenly nowhere, and the media took note. His official statement claimed he was hunkering down for a restful strategy session, but many believed he had fallen ill. The press conference is Buffalo’s idea: a show of strength and a bold declaration that will distract from the gossip of his sudden absence.

Despite his rigid posture, despite his small smile, Chase does not feel well. He doesn’t feel like himself—maybe that’s a better way to put it. He is a man divided, host to a pathogen that can overtake him at any moment. Sometimes his heart races and his breath comes in hurried pants. His muscles ache. His toothbrush pulls away from his mouth bloody. He rakes a hand through his hair and finds it wet with sweat. He can smell himself, his armpits and crotch damp musky pockets. His consciousness sometimes feels as though it has short-circuited, whirling with lights, through which dart, alternately, the silhouette of a man, and then a wolf.

Buffalo warned him about this. It will take time to get used to his condition, physically, emotionally, an alien pregnancy capable of tearing through his belly, strangling him with its umbilical cord.
Symbiotic
is the word Buffalo used. Cursed is how Chase thinks of it. Volpexx will make things easier. Volpexx—Buffalo promised, once they get their hands on a shipment of it—will be the equivalent of a choke chain.

Good thing. The infection has a tumorous effect on the adrenal glands, causing them to double in size. The section of the brain known as the amygdala—which controls emotion—is part of the limbic system and communicates with the hypothalamus, where hormones take effect. Rage or fear or excitement results in a hormonal cue results in an adrenal flood. The effect on the body, during transformation, is equivalent to a towering dose of PCP.

The reporters lower their cameras and the white haze of his vision solidifies. “I stand here a proud, humble Oregon boy.” He pauses and cocks his head, at first wondering what he hears, realizing it is their pens scratching across paper, like the noise of hundreds of insects chewing something fibrous. All of his senses have amplified these past few days especially. He can feel the tags on his shirts and the stitching in his socks. Nothing tastes right—even tap water carries strange flavors of fluoride and metal. He can smell a dead squirrel rotting beneath a bush three blocks away.

Beyond the crowd of reporters stands Buffalo, who makes a get-on-with-it motion with his hand. Chase clears his throat. “My family has lived in this state for three generations. My great-
grandfather
laid roads in Eastern Oregon. My grandfather designed the lumber mill that was for so many years the industrial heart of Old Mountain. My father ran a six-thousand-head cattle ranch. My roots go deep.” He almost never speaks from scripted material, but Buffalo says that has to change, that he can no longer leave anything to chance and risk a flash of fear or anger.

Somewhere in the distance he hears a siren. A police cruiser, he feels certain, though really he has no idea how to tell the difference between the wail of one compared to that of an ambulance or fire truck. Regardless, someone is in trouble.

“Some of you might remember there was a time when the billboards at our state’s border read
WELCOME TO OREGON. NOW GO HOME
.” Many in the audience smile. “It was a joke, but not really. Oregon is a treasure. And we did not want it spoiled by outsiders. Which is exactly what has happened. We’ve become a haven—e
specially
those liberal enclaves of Eugene and Portland—for lycans. We have compromised our borders and our safety. One thing I know as a rancher, you’ve got to build good fences.

“I am introducing legislation that I hope will be approved by year’s end.” He pauses when the cameras flash again and the reporters whisper among each other, the sound like a gathering wind. “Initiatives include stricter testing, criminal penalties, and lifetime supervision as well as a public registry containing names, photographs, and addresses, accessible online. We will also reconstitute the Lycan Advisory Board—dissolved in the 1970s—and I have asked Chief of Staff Augustus Remington to serve as chair.”

For the moment no one speaks—no one looks up—all of them bent over their notebooks and laptops, writing furiously. A cell phone rings and goes unanswered. He spots the red eye of a video camera blinking at him. He stares into it. “There should be absolutely no mercy shown to any lycan offenders in our state, and our legislation serves to impose the strictest standards of supervision to ensure that we are protected. Our old way of worrying about who might be offended must be radically altered to account for keeping people safe. New policies will require open minds, a willingness to do things differently, more strictly. The expense to some will be to the benefit of many. This state can benchmark the nation’s policies. And to those who think my goals are too high, too extreme, I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He ends the speech by facing the flag, placing a hand over his heart, and offering a somber rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

He doesn’t field questions, but they ask them anyway. When he escapes up the stairs, he can hear every one of their voices calling after him. But as Buffalo predicted, not one of them wants to know about job growth or corporate income taxes or commercial property taxes or whether it’s true he’s taken ill.

The chopping block is a scarred, ancient stump. Next to it sits a pile of freshly chainsawed logs that smell of pine resin. They heft the logs, one by one, onto the stump to split twice over. Then they carry the armful of sticks to the woodpile stacked the length of the cabin.

This was her favorite fall chore. Her father would buy a permit and the two of them would drive along Forest Service roads and buzz down a few tagged trees and shave away the branches and load the logs into the bed of the truck to take home and spend the next few weeks splitting.

She thinks of him now, the pain in her heart matching the pain in her wrist, which she tries to ignore when she hefts the splitting maul. The two women sweat, despite the day’s chill. They take off their sweatshirts, and their forearms rash over from carrying the wood. Miriam keeps her eyes on the forest and occasionally touches the Glock holstered at her belt for reassurance.

The ax’s wooden handle is polished to a hard gloss from the hands that have constantly gripped it. Claire swings it in an arc and it catches, with a sound like a cough, in the log, which hasn’t been properly seasoned, its wood hard to split, as white and wet as an apple’s core. Some of the logs are so tight grained they must use a sledgehammer and a wedge. Her arms ache pleasantly.

They work in a comfortable silence that Miriam finally breaks. “How much do you know about your parents?”

Claire has been waiting for this moment, has been waiting for what she doesn’t know how to ask. Her swing falters and the ax blade catches in the log and she wobbles it back and forth and then kicks the log to release it. “My mother likes to quilt. She doesn’t wear makeup. She cans beets and pickles and tomatoes. She reads a book a week, usually something historical or political. Her favorite color is yellow.” She realizes she is talking in the present tense and doesn’t bother correcting herself. “My father—”

Miriam steals the ax from Claire and lifts it over her head. “You’re saying you don’t know anything.”

“They’re the most boring people in the world. What’s there to know?”

Miriam steps forward and drops the ax and the wood splinters and the blade buries itself in the anchor log. “You have no fucking idea.”

The sky is closing down and dark is coming. It’s that time when the day isn’t really gone but isn’t really here. Augustus escorts Chase to his home in Keizer, a white neocolonial with black shutters. He does not entertain visitors, so the walls are as white and bare now as they were the day he moved in, the rooms mostly empty except for an IKEA table and chairs in the dinette, a couch set before a wide-screen television in the living room, a mattress and box spring in the master suite upstairs. The office is the only room that matters to him, and it is busy with file cabinets, crowded bookshelves, and two desks arranged in the shape of an L.

The basement remains unfinished, the ceiling bare studs, the walls cinder block, the floor a sloping concrete with a central drain. Three naked lightbulbs offer meager light. Augustus stuffed the recessed windows with insulation and covered them with plywood to muffle the sound and prevent anyone from peering inside. He hired a security firm to install a steel cage, its panels built out of heavy-duty six-gauge wire welded at every wire contact point. The swinging door is hinged with flanged head bolts and fitted with an industrial padlock made with a case-hardened alloy steel shackle.

A garden hose runs from the industrial sink into a coil on the floor. Later, he will use it to spray away the shit and piss and blood, the foaming tide of it swirling down the central floor drain.

Chase pauses before the cage and says, “I hate this,” and Augustus says, “I know,” and puts a hand on his shoulder to show his support and encourage him forward. “Take off your clothes,” Augustus says. “You don’t want to ruin them like the last time.”

It is not that he grows larger. It is that he soils himself in excitement, claws himself in agitation. Chase peels off his uniform and tosses it into a ball outside the cage. Thin scars crosshatch his shoulders and chest where the claw marks healed over. His left forearm is a lumpy mass of reddish scar tissue.

The door clicks shut and the padlock snaps into place and Augustus settles into the aluminum folding chair and adjusts his glasses and rests his hands on his knees like a theater patron who waits for the lights to dim, the curtains to part.

Every night, he transforms. Augustus demands it. To get it out of his system and exhaust his body. To normalize it, control it. Transformation does not come easily, he has told Augustus, every bone seeming to break, his skin crawling with angry wasps. He cries out and falls to the floor. His body contorts itself as if run through with electricity. From what Augustus has read, this will get easier over time, like a nerve deadened by repeated blows.

“This never would have happened,” Augustus says under his breath, “if you had just listened to me.”

As if in response, Chase hurls himself against the bars of the cage. He would have made a fine berserker, Augustus thinks, those Norse lycans who so long ago worked themselves into a frenzy, transforming before battle and fighting in a savage trance.

This would take time, months maybe, but Augustus, as a boy, owned several dogs, and with discipline and patience they all learned to fetch his slippers and shit outside. He has no doubt the same will be true of Chase. “Isn’t that right, old friend?”

Chase circles his enclosure. His arms lash at nothing but air. His teeth snap together as though chattering out some code. He presses his face, wild-eyed and misshapen and split by a fanged grin, against the cage.

There is a fridge in the corner, and Buffalo withdraws from it a package of raw hamburger. He tears off the plastic and crushes his fingers into the bloody mess. He molds tiny red balls and tosses them into the cage and, with a peculiar little smile, watches Chase devour them, one after another.

A
FROG LIES
on a black dissection tray, the flaps of its belly pinned open to reveal guts like damp jewels. Patrick prods it with a scalpel and scissors and makes notes on his lab report. He breathes through his mouth and can vaguely taste the smell of formaldehyde. His right hand, gripping the scissors, still hurts. It has been a week since the full moon—since he saved the girl from the side of the road—and when he woke the next morning, he wasn’t sure if she was real or the shades of a dream that settled into the bruises ruining his knuckles.

Across the room, the teacher—Mr. Niday, a goateed man with sweat stains constantly darkening his armpits—comments on a three-legged frog, how common mutations are due to pesticides and parasites and how frog populations are declining precipitously and how something needs to be done and—

Patrick’s attention turns to his pocket as it buzzes twice. He checks to make sure Mr. Niday is still occupied with the three-legged frog and pulls out his handheld. A text from Malerie reads, “Skip lunch. Meet @ ur Jeep.”

He is so distracted that, when a few minutes later Mr. Niday appears behind him and asks how he is doing, Patrick says fine even as he slices through the heart he didn’t know was there.

He has been avoiding her. But now—God knows why; sometimes he can’t help himself—he is driving around Old Mountain with her. The day is bright and washed of its color. She has the radio up and the windows down. She sings the Stones around a lit
cigarette
—“Well, you’ve got your diamonds and you’ve got your pretty clothes”—the lyrics carried by clouds of smoke.

He turns off the radio and she keeps singing another moment without it. In the silence that settles between them, he licks his lips, not sure what to say. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“We skipped school and now we’re driving around.”

“You and Max. You’re together.”

The tip of her cigarette burns as bright as a cherry. “He’s all right.”

“If he finds out there’s something between us…”

“Scared?”

Something in the engine block whines. His odometer flips over to 145,000. “I don’t like trouble. I’ve had too much trouble.”

The road angles and the sun flashes through the window and settles on her hair to create a blazing red halo. “I’m hungry.” She snaps on the radio again and says over the music, “Where are you taking me?”

He shakes his head, not knowing whether to smile or kick her out the door. A few miles later, he pulls in to Hamburger Patties, where they order shakes and burgers, a basket of waffle fries, splats of mustard and ketchup in tiny paper cups.

“You believe in Max?” he says. “The Americans and all that?”

“And all that.” She shrugs and finishes off a bite of hamburger. “It’s something to do, people to be with.” She darts her tongue out and tastes her milk shake, her tongue lingering in it before curling upward, like a beckoning finger, back into her mouth.

“Jesus,” he says. “You are pushing all kinds of buttons.”

She wants to drive around. Someplace remote. He knows better but can’t stop himself. When she touches him on the shoulder or the hand, it’s like a jolt from a live wire. “I think I know a place,” he says.

He glances at his handheld to study a map of the town he hasn’t yet memorized. The app boots up and displays his last entry, Battle River Drive. He hesitates—too long; he can feel her eyes on him—before thumbing
save
and then views a map of Old Mountain and orients himself.

They trail a garbage truck on its way to the dump. A damp sheet of newspaper flutters out of it and splats onto his windshield, flattening there, the Sunday comics. Malerie screams with delight. The sun soaks through the paper and colors their bodies with squares of light. Patrick kicks on the wipers and the newspaper is gone and they are driving past the dump and hanging a left onto a chained-off driveway that leads to the abandoned lycan school. He takes the Jeep off road, to avoid the chained entry, and then chunks back onto the driveway, which opens into a weed-choked parking lot. Broken asphalt mutters beneath the tires.

Malerie smears ChapStick across her lips and pops them. “You know Max is straight edge, right?”

Patrick negotiates the Jeep through an old basketball court, the chain nets like rusted chandeliers, and then they are behind the school, out of view from the road. “He said kind of.”

“Yeah, kind of.” She snorts more than says this. “No drugs, no smoke, no booze.” He parks the Jeep and kills the ignition. “He doesn’t even let me do this.” She unbuckles her seat belt. His eyes dart to meet hers just as she drops her head to his lap.

There is a car coming toward him when he hits his blinker and gets ready to turn back onto the road—a Camry, as white as a polished bone. Behind the wheel he spots his mother. She has her cell phone pressed to her ear and doesn’t see him, he’s sure of it, distracted by her conversation.

He hesitates a moment before ignoring his blinker, heading in the opposite direction, pulling onto the road behind her, following as she heads out of town.

“What are you doing?” Malerie says.

“I want to check on something.”

His dashboard clock reads 88:88. Malerie hits it with the heel of her hand, then goes digging in her purse, withdrawing a hot pink Motorola Razr to check the time. “I need to get to work soon.” Three afternoons a week, she doles out pills at Walgreens as a pharmacy tech, and he agreed to drop her off.

“This will only take a minute.”

He keeps a hundred yards between her car and his. Another mile and his mother pulls off into the Juniper Creek development, as he guessed she would. He taps the brake and slows nearly to a stop.

“What?” Malerie says.

“Nothing.”