Red Moon (28 page)

P
ATRICK ROTATES
onto knock-and-talk and then rotates again onto patrol. Sometimes they would drop off crates of Volpexx in the barrows. That’s what they called the outlying tenements, the barrows—where the welfare cases lived—the rows and rows of concrete apartment buildings with trash stacked up on the curbs and music thumping behind windows and figures shrinking back into doorways and corpses lying frozen in alleyways. Every two weeks, on street corners, the convoy unloaded several dozen shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes, each filled with one hundred bottles rattling with one hundred pills. The lycans are given the choice—that’s what the commanding general says—they are given the choice as to whether or not they will control their disease. The military enables that choice. And the choice, for some of the lycans, is to crush and snort the drug and drift off into fog-filled dreams and become hollow husks of the people they once were.

As far as Patrick could tell—from his mother, from Claire, from many of the locals here in the Republic—lycans can control their symptoms just fine without the help of meds. Sometimes his unit would drive through the fishing villages and visit with families. Meet-and-greets or knock-and-talks, they called these trips. They would crouch down and hold out Kit Kat bars to cautious children and say, “Come here, come on,” as if they were dogs. They would accept invitations into homes and stand sweating in their gear and watch women with big pillowy arms rolling dough in the kitchen and old men smoking pipes and mending fishing nets and young children playing dominoes on living room floors. Eating sandwiches and drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Their houses are small, sometimes one big room, lumber and pipes and sleds and skis stored in the ceiling beams. The smell of grease and fish hanging in the air. Tools and belts hanging near the door along with jackets. Fishing poles hung from the walls like artwork alongside dreary gray-smeared paintings of the sea. They would eat cookies that seemed made of nothing but butter and flour and that sucked all the saliva from his mouth. They spoke Finnish. They spoke French and Russian and German and Chinese and Spanish and English. They said how thankful they were for the military, for the mine. “You keep us safe,” they said.

Occasionally Patrick would ask, on his own or through an interpreter, a question about his father, but no one knew him—they could only shake their heads and hand him another cookie and ask him whether he liked the snow. Rarely did their squads encounter any young men, and when Patrick asked about this, Sergeant Decker looked at him distractedly and said, “Because, you fucking idiot, they’re the ones we’re fighting.”

And sometimes they would, when on patrol, drive into a fight. The sky was often heavy with clouds and the air thick with snow, and when machine guns rattled and RPGs blasted, the orange-and-yellow flashes and the thunderous explosions that followed gave the impression that a summer thunderstorm had descended upon them.

He misses this.

After a couple of two-week rotations on the base, he feels like the concrete and cinder block and Constantine wire are contracting, closing around him, and soon he will have nowhere to go; soon they will rip through his flesh. He feels like he is getting soft. He feels like time is slowing down. He feels like he has lost another month to what he realizes is a failed hunt for his father. The lycans win. He might as well accept that. It’s no use.

He has just finished sweeping and mopping the National Guard bunkhouse. He slops the mop into the brown-watered bucket and stands over his father’s old bed. He has been here many times before, but this is his first time alone. Gray light comes through the windows. The air smells of bleach. A spider crawls from under the mattress and across the sheets and comes to rest on the pillow. Patrick hurriedly flicks it off. His hand hovers above the pillow a moment, and then he strokes the hollow where a head has rested.

He sits down. The frame creaks. He waits a minute in silence and then swings back his legs and lies where his father once did. He wonders if a part of him is still there, dissolved into the sheets and floors and walls of this place, watching him.

He stares at the spring slats of the bed above him. A honeycomb design. He notices something then. What he first thinks is a tag, the kind that you see stapled to mattresses, the kind that warn of your arrest, or something, if you scissor them off. But the quality appears more brittle and yellowed along the edges.

He reaches up, and sure enough it slips against the pressure of his fingers, slides through the grating. A piece of paper folded once and once again. He sits up in such a hurry that his boot hits the mop bucket and it rolls a few paces away and sloshes loudly and he checks the room to make certain he is still alone.

He doesn’t know what he expects. Certainly not this. Not a paper scribbled over with hieroglyphics. He recognizes the blocky slanted handwriting, but he can’t make any sense of the notes about cell concentration, viability, vitality, yeast strain, yeast propagator, hemacytometer, methylene blue, pH, yeast slurry, flocculation, dissolved oxygen, yeast nutrient, or the word that comes up most often, metallothionein.

Then he sees a sentence that makes him blink hard and remember the pit full of blackened bones.
Lobos subject #14: two days of improvement and then death
.

The platoons rotate again, and Patrick is assigned to the QRF. He will be out on the wire soon enough. Finally. He has been working nonstop with the glass cleaner and floor polish. After an eight-hour shift, no matter how hard he scrubs off in the showers, he can’t shake the ammonia and bleach smell. Nobody knows when—the schedule classified for security reasons—but presidential candidate Chase Williams will be visiting the base at some point in the near future and the CO wants the place photo-op ready.

But that’s no longer Patrick’s problem. Yesterday he sat through a briefing. In a clearing next to the armory, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Bennington, an ash-haired West Point graduate, stood before a vast diagram constructed from snow, mounded and carved to mimic the surrounding landscape. It was twenty meters in circumference and captured one hundred klicks of territory. He used food coloring—blue for water, green for military, red for enemy—and stepped over hills and trudged through valleys as he indicated various problem areas they would likely attend. Chief among them: Ukko, a combat outpost seventy klicks from here and home to a company of soldiers from the 1/167th Battalion. They had come under repeated mortar attack and expected more trouble in the coming week. “The pressure system changes tonight. We’re in for a warm spell,” Bennington said. “And warm weather means
trouble.
”

This morning, Patrick wakes to the sound of water dripping from the eaves. He pulls on a fresh pair of camo pants, olive-drab shirt, shoulder-patch knit sweater. He clips a radio to his belt, mandatory for all assigned to QRF, so that when the call goes out, everybody comes running.

The ground is a sticky mix of snow and mud when Patrick heads over to the MWR. The line for the computers is always long, and this morning it takes him more than thirty minutes before he’s stationed in front of a Dell with a gasping fan. All around him keyboards tick and people yell and cry and joke their way through Skype conversations with their families. Every now and then they glance around embarrassedly, knowing they are being overheard. More than they know, Patrick thinks. He once talked to his mother and later that afternoon received a visit from the lieutenant. She was a registered lycan and communicating with her so freely compromised base security. No matter if she was his mother. He could send her letters.

He checks his email first and opens a message from Claire. “Just wanted you to know,” she writes. “These emails matter to me. They mean that I matter to someone. And that means I actually
exist
.”

He reads it twice. Then begins to peck out a message about how he remembers when he told her he was leaving. They were on the porch of the cabin and he wishes very badly he could go back to that moment. He hasn’t lived long enough to know for sure, but he guesses in the end life adds up to one long string of regrets like this. Memories of should-haves and might-have-beens that will sneak up on him when he least expects it, when he’s soaping his armpits or driving a nighttime highway. There is no going back. The trick is looking ahead, anticipating and remedying the mistake before it occurs.

He writes that
this
is what he would do if he could go back. When she stood from the bench and stomped across the porch and slammed the door on him, he wishes very much that he had told her to stop. And when she turned, he would have taken her face in both hands. To kiss her, yes, but first to memorize her. He has thought about it many times. Then there would have been a physical marker to tether them all this time.

He sees it now. Sees the mistake he made. Letting her walk away. “If you offered me a million dollars right now or a kiss,” he writes, “I’d take the kiss.” He isn’t sure whether this qualifies as a good line or a bad one, but he means it. He really does.

He hits send and heaves a sigh, then takes the piece of notebook paper from his pocket and unfolds it and flattens it on the desk beside him. He calls up Google and plugs in the word his father kept using:
metallothioneins
.

Every webpage takes a maddening length of time to load, the images staggering downward like a stiff set of blinds. Eventually he finds what he is looking for on bestenbalt.com, an entry that tells him metallothioneins are presently in virtually all forms of life. Their function is not entirely understood, “but experimental data support participation of metallothioneins in regulation of Zn and Cu, detoxification of toxic metals like cadmium, silver, copper, and mercury, and in protection of cells against reactive oxygen species and alkylating agents.”

He reads this three times and slumps back in his chair. He doesn’t know what this means, but it means something. He hits print and folds the paper into his pocket.

The Tall Man visits regularly. Sometimes he asks Jeremy questions—about the Resistance, about addresses, about email and phone communication, about money and management and infrastructure, about Puck, Miriam, Claire, and a hundred other names—and sometimes he removes a small black notebook from within his suit coat and jots a few notes down in it.

But mostly he hurts Jeremy. That is their primary mode of communication: suffering. The Tall Man electrocutes him with live sparking wires. He pulls out clumps of his beard, and then his armpit and pubic hair, with a pair of pliers. He makes him eat a live scorpion. He burns him with cigarettes. He rubs salt into his eyes and open wounds. He drowns him in cold water and scalds him in hot.

At first Jeremy coped. He left behind his body and escaped into his mind and found himself, day after day, walking down that same dirt path in the forest and approaching the gnarled pine tree and pulling down on its lever of a branch and stepping into the dark yawning entrance that led him belowground. That was his safe place.

Then it became too much—the vast, intricate networks of pain that seized every nerve so that his attention became singular with the injury coursing through him. It was not like something on a television program. The Tall Man would not ask a question and then prod Jeremy to receive an answer. Instead, in silence, he would torture Jeremy for hours—just watching, his eyelids never seeming to lower—pleasuring in the screams, the flash and curve of his many tools. Then he would slump back in his folding chair and unscrew a bottle of water and gurgle a swallow and smack his ruined mouth and say, “What do you think? Do you think you’re ready for a break?”

The break lasts only as long as he talks. These days, Jeremy is always ready to talk, always ready for a break. Though he once clung stubbornly to his silence, that time has passed. His old life and loyalties are so far removed from his current situation that they seem like a story he once read. When he talks to the Tall Man, he is simply recounting a plot, somebody else’s fancy, the information harmless, meaningless.

Sometimes he talks about his daughter and the way the bomb tore her into many meaty pieces that he collected in a black trash bag. Sometimes he talks about how, when he was a student at William Archer, he was called into the office of Alan Reprobus to discuss a paper he wrote about violence as protest, a paper the professor called brilliant and incendiary, a paper that would go on to become the first chapter of his book
The Revolution
. Sometimes he talks about how the professor would hold late-night meetings at his house during which they would discuss political issues and plan protests and design flyers—mostly harmless—but once in a while Reprobus would take a few of them aside—the trusted ones, he called them—to design an act of terror: mail a bomb, slash brake lines, trash a construction site. Sometimes he talks about the semester he spent abroad in the Lupine
Republic
—building houses and teaching English—and how the Master sought him out during this time. That is how he refers to Balor, as the Master, and the Tall Man is very interested in the Master, very interested indeed.

And sometimes, when Jeremy runs out of stories, he invents new ones, anything to keep the Tall Man from growing bored.

If his father was brewing, he had a workspace hidden somewhere on the base. Patrick feels stupid for not realizing this earlier. Months ago, when one of the lieutenants mentioned in passing that his father made a hell of a beer, Patrick figured he was a fan of Anchor Steam. He has a few off-duty hours to spare and spends them searching.

He checks behind the mess hall, thinking the cooks might have hooked him up with space and supplies. He checks the storage rooms at the rear of the MWR. He checks the maintenance bay, the hangar, the armory.

Outside the latrine, he turns a corner and spots Sergeant Decker marching along with that half-stooped posture of his. Patrick ducks back the way he came and knobs down the volume on his radio and waits for the footsteps to fade, and then his eyes settle on the middle distance, past the melted ruins of Lieutenant Colonel Bennington’s snow diagram, where he spots an old toolshed near the east guard tower.