Red Moon (17 page)

T
HE TEMPERATURE SHARPENS
and the wind picks up and the sun cuts a shorter arc across the sky. Patrick has not answered the phone, though Malerie has called him more than a dozen times in the past few days. Three voice mails, the first cheery babble, the second a long sigh, the third asking him what the hell was going on. “Patrick? Seriously. You better call back.” Here her voice grew cruel. “Or maybe it’s time Max finds out about us.”

He doesn’t know what he’ll do after the long weekend, the Sabbath on Monday, when she seeks him out at school—tell her the truth? That he had fun? More than fun—the swell of her breasts, the vacuum of her mouth, the thrill of sneaking around—but he’s just not feeling it anymore? Screwing around with her is no way to repay the kindness Max has shown him?

He is sitting upright in bed, a pillow braced behind his back, with the laptop warming his thighs. Outside, the sky is a dying purple. The lamp in his room is dim and at odds with the bright glow the screen makes. His eyes ache. He feels mildly nauseous, mixed up inside.

He browses the news sites. First the nationals, hunting for updates about the Lupine Republic. He knows there will be casualties, and there are, but every one of them brings him a sick kind of relief, because he knows some must die—that there is a quota to fill—and one man dying means his father goes on living. He reads an editorial titled “Extremist Groups Do
Not
Define Lycans,” all about how a small percentage of radicals are defining the larger population of peaceable lycans in the U.S. and in the Republic. He reads about a raid in Florida, a terrorist cell that had been building a fertilizer bomb. He reads about the lycan no-fly, now more than three months old and facing legal opposition from the ACLU. He reads about how the security threat level has dropped from red to orange but airports and train stations will maintain increased security and random passenger checks.

Then Patrick hits up the local papers, the
Oregonian
, the
Old Mountain Tribune
, to read up on the governor, whom everyone seems to have a loudmouthed opinion on. Here is an article about Chase Williams advocating nuclear energy and endorsing a power plant along the Columbia, and here is an editorial that claims the governor’s plans will only tighten the collar on the uranium-rich Lupine Republic.

He spots a headline that reads “Blood Bath at Blood Bath.” Yesterday, a naked woman—identified as Alice Slade—was discovered along the shoulder of the Santiam Pass, naked and hypothermic and babbling about wolves in the woods. After hospitalization and questioning, it was discovered that an alleged lycan attack took place at the remote Blood Bath Hot Springs north of Sisters. She is believed to be the wife of local insurance agent Craig Slade, whose corpse was found at the springs, along with eleven others, some of them mangled beyond recognition.

He clicks on an ad for a new phone plan. He clicks on an ad for Victoria’s Secret. Click, click, click. He opens ESPN and checks the scores on the Saturday football games. He tries to instant-message a few pals from back home—to catch up; he’s been neglectful—but everyone is away from their computers. He watches a video for the Marines in which a young soldier slays a dragon with a sword. He downloads a few college applications—UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine—to fill out later, the deadlines a few months away.

Then he stares out the window, watching the stars brighten in the sky. The wind rises and makes the glass shudder. Snow is expected tonight, the first winter storm. When he turns back to his computer, he opens Google and plugs in Blood Bath Hot Springs and finds it on the map and sees it is no more than an hour’s drive from here. He thinks of the girl, Claire. In truth he has thought of little else lately. She is always flitting at the edge of his mind like a moth with a sinister pattern on its wings.

She finally told him her name in the woods. He didn’t initially respond, not knowing what to say. Nice to meet you? Though they had already met, and the circumstances then and now were hardly nice.

“And you’re Patrick,” she said, still not looking at him, tromping ahead. “Don’t worry, Patrick. I’m not going to kill you. Though I think my aunt might have if we didn’t get away from her.”

When he drove out there, he had planned their conversation, readying every smooth response. But now everything had changed. She was not who he thought she was. And when he reached for that store of memories now, his hand passed through it, all the words evaporated. She was a lycan. And not just a lycan but unmedicated. An illegal, a resister. Max calls them a plague. The governor calls them the biggest threat to this country, a threat he is working brutally to remedy. Even as Patrick was aware of this, he could not catalogue his feelings, nor could he reconcile the political rhetoric with the sight of the pretty girl walking before and then slowing next to him.

“Thank you again,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you’re back. Because I didn’t thank you.”

“That’s not why I’m back.”

“Well, thank you.” She leaned suddenly toward him and he stiffened and threw up his hands, thinking she would bite him—her mouth open, only inches from his face—and he noticed then the blackness of his fingertips, stained from the spray paint that soaked through his gloves the other night. He dropped his hands and said, “Sorry.”

She did not seem offended, studying him another moment before she said, “Ever kissed a lycan before?” She seemed as surprised by the question as he.

“No,” he said.

Her lips lingered for a beat on his cheek. “Now you have.”

Then she began to talk, her words coming fast, as if they’d been dammed up. She said she moved here from Wisconsin. Or maybe
moved
was the wrong word. She came here from Wisconsin. And how, growing up, for the longest time, that was all she wanted, to get out, away from the snow and boredom, off on her own for the first time. But now she wishes she hadn’t gotten her wish after all.

She went quiet then and he supposed he ought to say something. “Isn’t that how it always works? In the stories about genies, people end up screwing themselves up with all their wishing.”

She nodded. “It’s better not to wish.”

They stood there, in the middle of the woods, under a sky simmering with clouds, half looking at each other. He kicked at a buried rock that coughed out of the frozen ground. It sparkled with quartz. His father knew everything there was to know about rocks, minerals, and the two of them used to go hounding on the weekends, the bed of the truck full of shovels and picks. On their front porch he kept a geode the size of a child’s skull, carved open to reveal a violet crystal core. Sometimes they would visit old hardrock mines in California, and when they moved through the tunnels framed with old timbers, his father would tell him about silver. It is designated by the chemical symbol Ag, for
argentum
, Latin for
shining
. It has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed that it had medical abilities, the power to heal, to fight infection and disease, and it was used widely in medicines and ointments during the world wars—and now most famously in Volpexx. When his father held a flashlight to a vein of silver, it shimmered like an underground river.

When Patrick thinks about all the years those minerals were rolled and grinded and baked by the earth, the precious veins hidden away by a hard ugly shell, until one day along comes somebody with a pile of dynamite to ravage a mountainside and reveal its glimmering guts—he thinks maybe that was what the girl, Claire, had done. Cracked him wide open.

He is not sure why he wakes up. But when his dreams blur away he discovers he is sitting upright in bed. Still fully clothed. His laptop in sleep mode beside him. The light of a streetlamp pours through the venetian blinds and decorates the wall with shadowed bars.

And then he hears it. A quiet padding and scratching in the hallway. His door is closed, but beyond it, he is certain he can distinguish the sound of something trying not to make a sound. He swings his legs out of his bed. He cringes when the box spring creaks. He creeps forward, depressing his weight slowly. He brings his ear close to the door and tries to open it up to accept every sound in the world. In the distance a train rattles along to some midnight destination. A long, lonely whistle cries out—the noise hushed by the snow but still loud enough to eat up anything he might have heard in the hallway. He waits for it to pass—the seconds dragging on—and then it is gone, a fading grumble.

The loaded silence of the house takes over. And there it is again, the sound.
Click-click-click
. Like someone teasing chalk across a chalkboard. Close. Right outside. The knob does not move, but the door clatters softly in its frame, barely displaced, the way it would if a window opened or someone braced a hand against it.

He keeps a baseball bat beneath his bed. He can’t understand why he didn’t grab it on his way across the room. He feels naked and small. He raises his trembling hand and lays it flat against the wood, not pushing back, not yet, but ready if the door bursts inward. Two inches of wood, not even, the door hollow core. On the other side of it, he imagines a shadow figure mirroring his own, its arm also outstretched, its mouth tusked with teeth.

His mind flips through a Rolodex of possibilities. It could be Claire’s hard-faced aunt, convinced he would expose them. Could be Malerie, her eyes raccooned by mascara, gone all
Fatal Attraction
on him with a butcher knife in her hand. Could be some lycan, connected to the cell that took down the planes, come to finish him off. Or it could be nothing. It could be he is imagining things.

He waits for a long time, so long he fades in and out of sleep, so long he can’t be sure he ever heard anything, before his free hand rises to the knob and depresses the spring lock. The noise is a startlingly loud
snap
, the tumblers falling into place like the hammer of a gun.

Whatever is on the other side of his door lurches back. He hears, moving across the landing and then dropping quickly down the stairs, what must be claws
click-click-click-clicking
their way to the entryway, where the hardwood turns to tile, the noise changing its timbre then, louder, more echoey.

His phone is on the night table—and he grabs it and nearly powers it on to call the cops. He could call them and he could stay here, stay safe—the door locked, his back against the wall. He shoves the handheld in his pocket instead. No more hiding. Not with his mother downstairs. He retrieves the baseball bat and strangles his hands around the grip and swings open the door and steps into the dark throat of the hallway.

O
VER THE CASCADES
rolls a bruise-black cloud bank. From it, snow falls. Big flakes. It clings to Claire’s hair, her clothes, fills an outstretched palm when she steps outside, early this morning, for a walk.

Miriam is sleeping off a hangover. Sometimes her aunt seems like an alien, cold and unfamiliar with human emotion, but every now and then, she’ll do something that surprises Claire. Pour some tea and say, in a Cockney accent, “You want a little sugar with that, guvnah?” Or snort out a laugh when paging through a novel. Or go silent and drink whiskey and lock herself away in her room. From behind the door Claire will discern a high, keening sound and the occasional sniff that sounds like a tissue tugged from a box.

This is what happened last night, when Claire finally asked whether she had a cousin. “The children’s books,” she said. “I keep looking at them on the bookshelf.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table and Miriam was sawing her knife through her round steak. Blood pooled around it. “Had.”

“What?”

“Had a cousin.” She brought her fork to her mouth and then changed her mind and set down her silverware. “You had a cousin. I had a daughter.”

Claire didn’t need to ask what happened. Miriam told her, in a flood of words, as if Claire had taken a knife to a seam in her throat that had been holding all this back. Her name was Meg. She was seven, nearly eight. Curly brown hair like her father. Smart as hell. Could name all the capitals and recite the alphabet backward. Her father was building fertilizer bombs. He planned to enter six floats in Fourth of July parades across the state, detonating them at once, ripping apart all the clowns shooting water guns and ladies tossing their batons and children racing for candy. “Instead he ripped his own child apart. We don’t know what happened, not exactly. We know the bomb went off. That’s what we know, and I suppose that’s all there is to know. This was in an open-air shed with a tin roof. She was snooping or playing one moment, dead the next. I remember running and looking into the sky and thinking it was full of bats. But it was tin, smoking pieces of tin, twisting their way to the ground.” She is not crying. She has dried herself out with all her crying. She grips the knife on her plate with such strength that her knuckles go white.

“Your parents were right. They were right to step away when they had you. I realized that too late.”

Miriam has told Claire, over and over, not to leave the cabin without her, not to let her guard down for a second. But Claire is tired of the paranoia. She has been here more than a month, and during this time, despite Miriam’s constantly fingering a weapon, peering out the window, nothing has happened, no shadow has slipped from the forest to their doorstep. Especially in weather like this, the air a blinding whirl of flakes, what danger could possibly present itself?

She needs to escape, antidote the day’s drag of hours. Her wrist aches in the cold. She wears boots that shush through the snow. A hooded sweatshirt beneath the old Carhartt jacket that her aunt wanted to burn but Claire wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. “It’s like a graduation tassel or something.” Paper crackles against her hand and she withdraws from the pocket a torn slip with Patrick’s name and phone number scrawled across it. She smiles and feels a snowflake catch against her lip and melt.

He was muscular and taller than her by a few inches and had bright green eyes that would alternately stare hard at her and then turn shyly away. His hair was a dark brown and cut short, and she could tell it would have a little curl to it if he grew it out. The other day, when he came for her, she could smell him—she could smell everything, the residual effects of transforming—and he smelled good, even when a little sweaty, like black dirt. She liked how still he was, only moving when he had to. And the way he talked, slow and careful with his words, making sure each one mattered.

It was a relief to talk to someone her age, to anyone besides Miriam.

And so she drank up everything he told her. She asked where he was from and he said California and she said to tell her about it and he did, talking about his father’s hobby farm. How he spent his childhood collecting eggs from beneath hens and ducking under barbed-wire fences and firing slingshots at jackrabbits and cutting the tails off lizards to keep in a glass jar and swiping grasshoppers from the air to toss in a spider’s web. He told her about Big Sur. He told her about driving Highway 1 on the back of his father’s Indian motorcycle. He told her about the fog breathing off the ocean. The clang of buoys and the barking conversation of sea lions. He told her about San Francisco, fishing off the wharfs, jumping onto the back of a moving trolley.

“Sounds like you miss it.”

“Yeah.” He did, but less so than before. He said he had been through so much, and when he looks back, that life seemed to belong to someone else.

“I know the feeling,” she said, the feeling that she wasn’t the only one holding back, who could have said more. She felt a tug then. Like those stories her father used to tell around the fireplace, the ones about ghosts that grabbed you around the neck when you were sleeping, by your ankle when you were swimming, and never let go. He had her.

Now her boots whisper through the calf-deep snow. The windward sides of the ponderosas are clotted with white, making the exposed bark startlingly red. Branches slant downward, weighed and frosted with snow. She walks among the white, huddled shapes of the underbrush—and then runs a few steps, just for the thrill of it.

Yesterday, with the temperature plummeting, she heard, way off in the woods, what she at first mistook for gunfire. Echoing
cracks
. “Don’t worry,” Miriam said. “It’s just the trees.” Freezing and splitting in half. One explodes next to her now, an old pine that breaches, its two halves ripping away from each other with a splintery rasp. She cries out in terror and then covers her mouth with her hand, muffling the laugh that follows.

She pauses next to a mound of snow, what must be a boulder frosted over. The wind rises and she sees the shape of it in the scarves of snow that blow all around her. The chatter of her thoughts quiets and she realizes the only sound is the wind and the only color, white. The mound trembles. She notices a red strain of moss—what looks so much like hair but can’t be—curling out of all that white.

She turns around in a circle. Something is wrong. She senses it in the air, like the echo of a scream, some disturbance she can’t quite hear. The snowbank pulses again, as though breathing—and then explodes upward, making a small blizzard. She cannot seem to move, and a vast stretch of time—enough time for her to feel her breath leaving her, her eyes widening in terror—seems to unfold before a massive set of arms encircles her.

Patrick is at the kitchen table, his head full of fog. He spent most of the night with his back against the locked door of his bedroom, a baseball bat resting across his lap. A few minutes ago he woke and tromped downstairs when he heard the pipes clanking, the downstairs shower spitting on.

Now he spoons into his cereal and sips a Mountain Dew and turns to watch his mother clatter down the hall in her high heels. She wears a black pantsuit with a cream collar that matches the pearls strung around her neck. “You look good,” he says, and she curtsies and then winces.

“What’s the matter?”

She rubs her knee. “Just my joints. Getting old, I guess.”

He tells her he thought he heard something last night. He does not tell her that he searched the house with his baseball bat cocked and ready to swing, that he found her room empty and the back door open, breathing in and out slightly, snowflakes fluttering into the house to perish on the floor.

He unlocked his phone then, ready to punch 911, when he saw her old text message and remembered that she hadn’t come home that evening, that she was staying over with a friend who was “having some trouble,” and that she would see Patrick the next morning. In his dream-addled state, he had forgotten.

She ceases her rubbing, her body frozen for the space of a breath. Then she is on her way to the kitchen, where she opens a drawer, rattling with silverware, and closes it without pulling anything out. “Well, like they say in the movies, it was probably only the wind.”

“They’re always wrong in the movies.”

She gives him a rigid smile and pulls a carton of orange juice from the fridge and a glass out of the cupboard and fills it and drinks it in a gulping way. “Something has come up. Not going to be here tonight.”

Again. She is gone so often these days, at least two nights a week. He thinks about the thin man stepping out of his house, nodding at him. He thinks about spotting his mother’s car heading toward his home in the middle of a workday. “What’s come up?”

“A convention.”

“Another one? But it’s the Sabbath.”

“Uh-huh.” Her eyes are on her hands, not him, picking at a hangnail. “Busy, busy, busy.”

He notices then the black bruise along her cheek that not even her makeup can hide. “Who gave you that?” He brushes a knuckle along his cheek and she raises a hand to touch the purplish swelling.

“Nothing. Nobody. I was doing a showing the other day and walked into an open door. Stupid of me. Really embarrassing.”

A twenty-inch TV sits on the kitchen counter. She picks up the remote and punches the power. The volume kicks on before the image. “What’s the worst part?” That’s the voice coming out of the darkness—the voice of Anderson Cooper, it turns out, reporting live from the Lupine Republic, wearing a down jacket and holding out a microphone to a soldier. His ears are bright red and his face appears windburned. Beyond them, the snow-covered landscape matches the sight seen out their kitchen window.

“Worst part?” The soldier wears winter cammies patterned with white and black and gray blotches. His face could be anyone’s, obscured by goggles and a helmet. “Carrying your buddies on a litter to the birds. To the medevac. That’s the worst.”

Cooper gives a brief history lesson, talking about the Republic as a melting pot of cultures, all of them united by their infection. “The world’s biggest leper colony,” Chase Williams, the governor of Oregon, recently called it. Virtually everyone, besides the U.S. personnel stationed there, is infected. Some have lived there for several generations, but families who want a homeland they can’t find elsewhere immigrate every day.

The segment then cuts to Tuonela, the largest uranium mine in the Lupine Republic and a major U.S. supplier. Cooper dons a hazmat suit, readying for a tour of the facilities, while his voice-over describes the codependency of the U.S. and the Republic—and how a small militia of extremist lycans continues to threaten that relationship.

His mother hits the remote again and the TV goes dark. She mutters something about nothing but bad news anymore and then says, “Your father is fine, you know. If anybody can take care of himself…Your father is fine.”

Patrick almost says,
What about my mother?

She pulls her jacket out of the hallway closet and digs around in the pockets until she jangles out her keys. “So long,” she calls over her shoulder when she closes the door to the garage behind her.

He doesn’t respond. He’s still looking at the black rectangle of the TV. He pulls out his handheld. He hasn’t heard from his father in three days; the last email Patrick didn’t understand. “Breakthrough!” it read and nothing more. Whether he meant success in a military campaign or something else, Patrick doesn’t know, and the reply he sent—“???”—remains unanswered.

He shoots his father another email: “You okay? Tell me about this breakthrough thing.” He hesitates, his thumbs hovering over the keypad, before writing, “Nothing new here,” when of course the very opposite is true, but his father has so much already to worry about, like staying alive.

By the time Miriam discovers the cabin empty, the snow has stopped. Her stomach is sour and her brain sluggish, but she manages a few clear thoughts. The child has merely disobeyed her. That is what teenagers do. She is testing boundaries. When Miriam peers out the front door, squinting against the brightness of the snow, only a single set of tracks runs from the porch into the woods, and Claire is tethered to the end of it. That’s what Miriam tells herself as she throws on a jacket and steps into her Sorels and snatches a Glock off the bureau and hurries outside, pausing briefly to puke between her boots, before running a sleeve across her mouth and continuing on.

The air has that special hushed quality, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting. The only sound is the snow creaking underfoot and thumping off branches and hissing across the ground in serpenty wisps. The tracks are gray with shadow and half-filled and Miriam wonders what she would have done if there were no tracks, if the snow kept falling and erased them completely. She puts the thought out of her mind. Best not to think about the worst that can happen.

But the worst has happened, she soon realizes, when she comes to that place in the trees where the tracks vanish into a messy crater of exploded snow. She stands still for a long time, breathing through her nose, and then she circles the crater, a muddle of prints, another set heading off deep into the woods. Claire’s tracks were the same size as her own—following them felt as if she were following herself. But these tracks, when Miriam sets her boot inside them, are twice the size of hers, swallowing hers up.

Magog is alive. After she fired through the roof, after she heard him fall heavily to the ground, she checked outside and found no body but enough blood to make death a possibility.

Now he has come for Claire. And though they are long gone, she can feel them—their smell and taste like a memory imprinted in the air. She kneels down and scoops a handful of snow brightened by a spot of blood and crushes it in her hand until it becomes a red ball of ice.

She sees something nearby, caught in a bush, white and flapping like a bird’s wing. A piece of paper. It makes a rasping noise when she pulls it out—and reads, in blocky handwriting, the boy’s name, Patrick.