Red Moon (22 page)

He is reaching for her now. He is reaching for her, and if he touches her again, she imagines breaking apart into so many blackbirds that would screech and scratch and peck and finally flap in a dark cloud out of this place and take to the sky. He is reaching for her with his scarred hand, the hand Miriam disfigured with a knife, and now he touches her cheek, softly. Caressing her. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, trembling breath, laced with the flavor of his strawberry-sweet gum, and realizes, by breathing in the smell of him, he is already inside her. His fingers suddenly dig into her cheek and chin, and she snaps open her eyes to see his face transformed, his teeth fanged, his eyes as red rimmed as a smoldering coal. “Everyone has their breaking point.”

It is then that she swings the scissors upward—into him.

The cratered cheek of the moon hangs low in the sky, soon to be overtaken by a dark bank of clouds. In the Ramcharger, Miriam drives, Patrick sits shotgun, weapons piled and rattling behind them. The road hums under their tires and a light snow falls through the yellow glow of the high beams.

She pulls off the highway into a gas station with old-time pumps and a cedar-shingle mercantile. She does not stop but drives around back, where she says her husband keeps ten vans and cars and trucks parked. This morning, three were missing. Now it is early evening, and she counts seven of them gone, the empty squares of blacktop dusted white.

“What does that mean?” Patrick says.

“That means they’re up to something.”

He asks if they would have taken Claire with them, and Miriam is silent for the time it takes her to spin the wheel and loop the Ramcharger around and head back toward the highway. “Doubt it. She’d be in their way.”

They drive another five minutes before hanging a hard left onto a road that branches several times and narrows, hemmed in by pines.

His mind is sharp with caffeine and adrenaline when they park at a power shed made of corrugated metal and surrounded by a hurricane fence and a metal sign that reads
PACIFICORP
. The trees here have been razed to make way for the twelve-line high-
voltage
high-wire utility poles that march off into the distance. Patrick can hear the electricity humming, as if the forest were alive with locusts, when he steps out of the Ram and they unload their backpacks and hoist their weapons. A lamp glows above the entry door.

Miriam tells him to wait here. He asks where she is going but she does not respond. She leaves her backpack with him but shoulders her shotgun, the black nylon strap cutting between her breasts. As quick as a cat, she scales the hurricane fence and drops to the other side and walks the perimeter of the power shed until she finds what she is looking for, a hole drilled through the metal siding, a power line the size of a garden hose snaking through it. She pulls down her shotgun, takes aim, and unloads both shells. Fire spits from the twin barrels. A thunderclap fills the night.

Patrick curses and ducks down behind the Ram and unholsters a pistol and looks around as if expecting shadowy figures to come pouring out of the woods. But the night is still and quiet except for the uninterrupted hum of the electricity overhead and the violent spitting of the severed cord.

He hears Miriam drop over the fence, her boots squeaking toward him, and when she appears next around the corner of the Ram, he says, “Now they know we’re coming.”

“They can’t see shit. That’s what they know.”

He follows her into the woods, hushed as if listening in on their every move, and it isn’t more than ten minutes before they come to the mouth of the cave system. Patrick does not recognize it as such until Miriam draws aside the ice-clotted drapery that covers the entry.

She disappears into it. For a moment he is alone, trying not to think too deeply about the necropolis he is about to enter, the risk and impossibility of the situation. He pauses, as if drawing a breath before diving underwater, and then clicks on his Mag light and plunges into darkness.

C
LAIRE HAD HOPED
to hit his throat with the scissors. But Puck was faster than she expected and lurched back in time to save his life but not to dodge her completely. She plunged the scissors into the fleshy spot beneath his chin, knifing upward, into his mouth, the blades coming to a rest in his soft palate. He cries out, but the cry is muffled by a mouth stapled shut.

Wide-eyed, he stumbles back, a fistful of hair tearing away in her grip. He trembles his hands to the scissors and drags them slowly from his jaw. Blood gushes down his neck and patters the sand. He hurls aside the scissors and they clatter against the wall and he opens his mouth to test it and in doing so reveals teeth sharpening with his rage and fear.

And then, in a blink, the lights go out.

When Patrick first steps inside and out of the wind, he is surprised by the temperature difference, the cave significantly warmer. His father would sometimes take him spelunking, at Lava Beds National Monument, and he remembers strapping on a hard hat and running his hand along stalagmites and burrowing through crawl spaces and hearing some bit of wisdom from long ago, that caves and caverns year-round maintained a constant temperature, somewhere in the fifties.

The air smells sweetly fungal, some mixture of mold and guano and the sulfuric oxidation that stains the walls orange in places and yellow in others. The constant hissing of the wind and the dripping of water make it difficult to hear Miriam when she says, “Follow me closely.” They have their Mag lights in one hand, their pistols in the other. The lava tube pitches downward and he sweeps his light across the cave floor and walls, black except for the occasional crust of lichen or sulfite, a white vein of quartz that catches the light and sparkles. The stalactites dangling from the ceiling remind him of nothing so much as teeth.

He has a knife in one pocket, clips of ammo in another. His belt creaks and his backpack clinks and his breath quivers out clouds. The noise seems impossibly loud. He trips several times over debris and knobs of basalt, always catching his balance, and Miriam looks back at him in irritation. He whispers sorry and feels fear and the fear feels something like wasps under his skin, a thrumming of wings, a prickle of legs and stingers.

One moment she is watching Puck. The next moment, darkness. She wonders, at first, if she is dead. If he has somehow already closed the distance between them and ripped her heart from her chest. If a rock has come loose from the ceiling and clubbed her skull. Or if her body has finally decided enough is enough and simply given up.

Then she hears his long, agonized wail, an animal in pain, and realizes that she is not dead, not yet. But death is close. Death has never been more of a possibility—buried as she is in a sulfuric dark beneath hundreds of thousands of pounds of rock. This will be her grave if she does not act quickly.

She recalls her last image of the chamber and wonders if she has moved since, if she is still facing the open tunnel. She steps sideways, her hand outstretched, until her fingers jam against rock. She scrabbles her hands along the wall and then shoots them out before her, as if sweeping the air free of cobwebs. She raises her knees high with every step, trying to avoid any debris on the floor, not worrying about her hurried stomping, knowing Puck cannot hear her over his own noise, as he alternately whimpers and bawls.

She is moving along the tunnel now. Her eyes are wide open but her fingers are her way of seeing, nosing through the dark like many moles that feel her way forward. The wailing behind her grows softer and then silent, and it is the silence that worries her. She tries to be as quiet as she can, but every other step she kicks a rock or sends something crumbling from the wall.

She remembers the way—left and then left again—noticing the shifts in air, the cold drafts when the tunnel forks. She nearly trips over the first step of the staircase. She clumsily climbs, wishing she knew how many steps awaited her, expecting any minute for something to come rushing out of the dark to seize and caress her. Another minute and her foot falls flat where she expects another step. The walls open up into a chamber. Her breathing and her footsteps sound softer here. She knows it would be wiser to follow the wall, to travel the chamber’s circumference, but she cannot recall if there were other corridors that intersected here and she cannot risk wandering off into some channel that takes her deeper underground. She knows the computer room lies directly ahead. She decides to trust her eyeless sense of direction and starts forward. She smells the earthiness of the roots dangling from the ceiling, the roots that startle a scream out of her when they seem suddenly to swarm her, licking her face like dry tongues.

The cave is as black as bile. As black as ink. The black of a place sealed by stone and buried deep beneath the earth—a place no one should ever go. Penetrating, infectious, a black that soaks into her and drowns her lungs and leadens her muscles and makes her want to shrink into a ball and wait for the worst to happen because the worst seems an inevitability when lost in the dark with something fanged in pursuit.

She stops to listen. There is movement in the darkness. A rustling. Then footsteps. The noise, the soft padding over rocks, the shooshing through sand, grows louder, closer. The darkness invites the worst of her imagination, and instead of Puck creeping toward her, she imagines the man in the clown mask, his eyes black pools, his lips the red of fresh meat. When he found her, when he sniffed her out, his mouth would open as large as this chamber before swallowing her.

She feels the wolf welling inside her, willing her to let go, but so far she resists. She does not trust her wild mindlessness once transformed and worries she might end up, panicked as she is by the dark, clawing at the walls until her fingers peel away to bone.

She keeps
trying
to see. As if, by force of will, she will develop extrasensory sight. The strain makes her eyeballs ache as if full of too much blood. She hears Puck bark out a laugh, but it’s difficult to place him, whether five or fifteen or fifty yards away, the noise echoing off the curved walls and toothy ceiling of this chamber and carrying through the many rooms and pits and corridors that reach into the darkness all around her.

Then she screams when right next to her she hears a voice damp and bubbling with blood: “I can smell you, pretty.”

By his best guess they have been underground an hour. They have heard things—sand whispering, bats fluttering, rocks coming loose from the ceiling with a click and then slamming the cave floor with an echoing boom. At one point, something with red eyes scuttled through their flashlights’ beams, never to be seen again.

He taps Miriam on the shoulder and she flinches at his touch. He asks how much farther and she says, “How much farther to what?” her annoyance obvious even at a whisper.

“To where they’re keeping Claire.”

“I have no idea. She could be in one of twenty different places.”

His flashlight sweeps the kitchen into sight. He is surprised, not for the first time, with their civility. He doesn’t know what he expected—straw and animal skins for bedding, a fire pit with gnawed bones stacked around it—but certainly not this. Glasses and knives and pots wink back at him. The fridge is messy with magnetic poetry. A can of Diet Coke is tipped over on a counter with a small brown puddle around its mouth. The smell of chili hangs in the air.

Miriam opens and closes the fridge, her hand lingering on the handle, as if she is remembering something.

He hears the trickle of water and seeks out the source among the cabinets. Here the cave wall sparkles with water. A ladle flashes silver. A stream of water seeps from the wall into a pool big enough for him to dive into with a splash.

It is here that he first sees her. Reflected in the moisture of the wall. A warped rippling figure darting from a nearby tunnel and coming rapidly toward him. He swings the flashlight and his pistol at once, almost firing and then nearly crying out when he recognizes her, Claire.

She is running toward him, toward the flashlight, as though traveling down a tunnel of light, the white eye of the beam shrinking to home in on her chest. He feels such excitement he does not notice her expression, gray with fear and spotted with blood, until she is upon him. He catches her and she struggles against him a moment. He says her name and recognition dawns on her face and she says, “Run.” She is pushing him, dragging him away.

He is about to question her when a half-glimpsed shape knocks him to the cave floor. His ribs scream with agony. He nearly blacks out. His Mag light skitters away and the shadows reel and make the kitchen swarm with black wraiths. He can smell blood, maybe his own. A figure crouches nearby, encased in shadow, unseen except for the faint glow of what must be hair, almost phosphorescent. It is breathing heavily, and every breath has enough damp throatiness to sound almost like a word.

Patrick is on his back and crabbing backward on his hands and legs when the figure blurs toward him. Gunfire shouts. Amplified painfully by their enclosure, the sound echoes around him, clapping off the walls and making one shot into a fusillade. Patrick is so stunned he can’t register who has been shot, if anyone, until a flashlight arrests the figure—a man, Patrick can now see, a lycan with a narrow face and a body barely bigger than a child’s. He is crumpling sideways, clawing at the air with one hand and clutching his belly with the other.

Miriam has both arms outstretched, casting the beam of her Mag light and firing her pistol into its glowing funnel. She fires again, and again, and every gunshot brings with it a blast of daylight that dies as soon as it appears. She marches forward, and the circle thrown by the Mag light grows smaller until it pinpoints the lycan. She fires again. The lycan’s eyes roll back in his head and his body shakes as if possessed by a spirit he is trying to resist.