Red Moon (3 page)

She doesn’t know that her father and mother are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking their way through a bottle of Merlot, not holding but squeezing each other’s hands in reassurance as they watch CNN, the coverage of what the president called “a coordinated terror attack directed at the heart of America.”

So she doesn’t know that, when the front door kicks open, splintering along its hinges, her father is holding the remote in his hand, a long black remote that could be mistaken for a weapon.

She doesn’t know that he stands up so suddenly his chair tips over and clatters to the floor, that he screams, “No,” and holds out his hand, the hand gripping the remote, and points it at the men as they come rushing through the entryway, the dark rectangle of night, with snow fluttering around them like damp shredded paper.

She only knows—when she hears the crash, the screams, the rattle of gunfire—that she must run.

She hasn’t changed often, only a handful of times. Not only because it is forbidden, because she could be jailed for it, but because she doesn’t like the way it makes her feel. So grotesquely
other
. And bruised for days afterward, her body’s sudden shifting like the growing pains that make children twist under their sheets and cry out at night. But her parents have occasionally insisted she do so, when they have taken her to Canada. Full-moon retreats, they call them.

She can smell the men now, deodorant and aftershave, cigarettes and gum. Gun oil. The sulfur of their weapons’ discharge. She can hear their harsh breathing, their voices calling out, “Clear!” from different corners of the house. She can feel their footsteps pounding up the stairs, toward her.

Her skin itches horribly, as if bubbling over with hives, and then the hair bristles from it in a rush. Her gums recede and her teeth grind together in a mouth not yet big enough for them. Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another. She always cries. Tears of blood. This time her tears and mewling come from the pain—and also the dawning realization that everything, in an instant, has changed.

But these thoughts are fleeting. The wolf in her has no time for them. Her mind sharpens to a singular focus. Survival is what matters. There is nothing else, no love or sadness or fear or worry, only a needle stab of adrenaline that surges through her, sends her loping toward the window, toward the reflection she barely recognizes, hunched and misshapen and growing larger by the second. Then she crashes through herself, through the window.

The glass shatters, and shards of it bite at her. There is no roof to scuttle across, no lattice or gutter to climb down. There is instead the blackness of the night, the emptiness of the air she falls through, flipping and twisting as the wind shrieks in her ears and the ground rushes up to meet her. Splinters of glass, mixed up with the snow, sparkle all around her.

Two inches have already accumulated, but that isn’t enough to cushion a fall from a second-story window. She lands on all fours, rolling and thudding forward, sliding across the short expanse of lawn, smearing away the snow in a ragged teardrop to reveal the green grass beneath. A tree at the edge of the lawn offers a hammer blow to her chest. Her breath is gone. Her wrist blazes as if stabbed through with a hot poker. Glass bites at her. The night seems to close upon her for a moment—and then she draws in a sucking gasp.

Her window throws a square of light broken up by triangles and hexagons of yellow and orange that spotlight her body, the spotlight blackened a moment later when the men charge into her room and pursue her exit.

She shakes away the pain and leaps to her feet and sees the man. The Tall Man in the black suit. Twenty yards away, he observes her with his head cocked curiously, and then he begins to walk—and then run, his long arms slashing the air—toward her.

She departs this place, her home, bounding off into the trees. The snow whirls around her. It is as though she is entering a cloud—with vaporous edges that thicken into a cottony tangle out of which occasionally appear windows that glow like ball lightning and tall pine forests as dark as thunderheads. Into their cover she hurries.

M
IRIAM WAKES EARLY
and pulls on her jeans and a thermal and goes to the living room window. Her hair is as black and ragged as a crow’s wings. Her face is as sharply angled as her body, as if honed to an edge, made to cut through things. She is in her late thirties, her age evident only in the hardness of her expression. In the half light, the tall, thick-waisted Douglas firs are swaying, bending, and creaking with the wind. The cracks around the windows and the front door emit the hollow tones that come from blowing across bottle tops.

Next to the cabin, a short clearing in the shape of a half-moon—fireweed, Indian paintbrush, moss, and stone. Her truck, an old black-and-silver Ramcharger, sits in the cinder driveway that cuts through the meadow and into the woods. It would take someone less than a minute to rush from the trees to her porch, and she keeps her eyes on the shadows between them.

Something is out there. She can feel it in the same way worms and toads can a storm, the changing air pressure making them squirm to the surface of their muddy burrows. She wouldn’t be alive today if not for her heightened senses, her ability to
know
. Her eyes are narrowed and her ears seem to prick forward.

Ten minutes pass like this, and then the morning begins to catch up with her and she withdraws from the window and heads down the hall to the kitchen to brew some coffee. If something is coming, she might as well be awake for it.

She doesn’t flip on the light when she enters the kitchen. The single window—looking out into the woods, much closer here, the white trunks of cottonwoods like bony teeth grinning across the glass—provides enough light. Beneath it, an L-shaped counter bends around the room, the Formica a spotted gray made to look like granite. It is interrupted by a four-burner stove and a deep-bellied sink next to which squats her coffeemaker. She grinds the beans and measures out the water, and while the pot gurgles and pops, she pulls open the silverware drawer and reaches past the knives and forks to withdraw something a little sharper still, a Glock 21, one of several weapons stashed throughout the cabin, this one a .45-caliber pistol with thirteen hollow-point rounds loaded in the magazine.

She tucks the Glock into the waistband at the small of her back. The sun is rising and the shadows are receding from the cabin, shrinking into its corners, when she splashes full her mug and returns to the living room. She stops so suddenly her coffee waves over the lip of the mug and scalds her fingers. The front door has a frosted oval of glass cut into it, and it is presently darkened by the shape of what could be a boy or could be a man, so diminutive is its shadow.

The wind is gusting. Her coffee is steaming. She sets the mug down on an end table and moves across the room, toward the door, depressing her bare feet slowly so as not to bring a creak from the wide-board flooring. She reaches for the door handle and a blue spark of electricity snaps at her when she lays a hand on it. She does not undo the lock, does not turn the handle, but lets her hand rest there and leans against it as if to buttress the door.

“Leave me alone, Puck,” she says, her voice loud enough to carry through the glass.

The shadow does not respond.

“I don’t want any part of it.”

“We need you.” She has always hated his voice, uneven and shrill, like a poorly cut flute. “Open the door.”

“Go away. Get the fuck away from me.”

“We need you.” The wind gathers strength. She can feel it breathing around the door, a taste of snow in it maybe, with winter coming that much earlier at five thousand feet. “We want you.”

She mouths the word:
Fuck
. She thumps her forehead softly against the wall, snaps the deadbolt, and throws open the door. A cold wind envelops her. Her hair lifts from her shoulders while behind her a newspaper on the coffee table flutters its pages.

On the porch stands a small, muscular man, his feet apart, his hands at his sides. He wears a tight black T-shirt tucked into dark blue jeans. His peroxide hair—so blond, almost white—has been gelled back in a carefully messy way. This is Jonathan Puck. He is smiling at her, chewing gum. He raises his right hand in greeting, the pinky and ring finger missing from it, replaced by nubs of creamy scar tissue that she knows match the claw marks hidden beneath his clothes, along his back and chest mostly, as if he is riddled with worms. She knows because she is responsible for them.

“Come any closer, you’ll lose the rest of them.”

His hand drops. His smile trembles a little before growing wider. “I smell coffee.” His nostrils flare. “Aren’t you going to invite me in for a nice cup?”

“No.”

“I would love some coffee.” He snaps his gum. “Why don’t you let me in, dear?”

“No. I said leave me alone.”

He lets his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “Fair enough. I am the uninvited solicitor. We’ll talk here.”

“Whatever you have to say I don’t want to hear.”

“You’ve been watching the news? You have, haven’t you? You know what we’ve done, don’t you?”

As if in response, the newspaper in the living room snaps and riffles, a page of it blowing off the coffee table and onto the floor. “I know what you’ve done,” she says.

Her covered porch opens up between two pine columns to a stone staircase that sinks into a pea-gravel path that coils into the driveway. On it—she is not surprised to see, the two of them rarely apart from each other—stands a beast of a man, Morris Magog, more than seven feet tall and seemingly half as wide. The only parts of him visible, beyond the mess of his long red hair and long red beard and long black leather duster that the wind whips around him, are his empty blue eyes and his hands, enormous and pouched. She has heard him speak on only a few occasions—once to ask Puck if he could have a bit of candy, please—his voice like shifting stone.

“You’ve had your time to grieve,” Puck says, “and we’re glad for that. We’re surely glad you’ve had that time.” Though he continues to smile, his voice has a severe edge to it. “But that time is done. Because we’ve got plans. Big plans. And you’re a part of them. And we’ve come for you now. And you’re to come with us now. And that’s the end of it.”

She knew this day was coming. She knew, when she left her husband, when she walked away from the caves, when she abandoned the Resistance, that they would allow her only so much time. These past few months she has sensed their presence, glancing often to the woods and the nighttime windows that gave back nothing but her reflection. She has discovered, on several occasions, signs of their trespass, a footprint pressed into the mud beneath her window, the lingering smell of cigarettes in the cab of her unlocked truck. They wanted her to know she was being watched.

“I won’t,” she says.

They stare at each other, Puck blowing a pink bubble that breaks with a hiss. “You really don’t have a choice, you know.” He throws a glance behind him, and—as if he has issued some silent command—Magog takes a step forward and leans his huge body toward the cabin, as if ready to break into a run. She hears a huff that could be his breath or could be the wind. “You can’t be hiding any longer. Not in times like these. Every hand on deck. That’s what your dear husband says. That’s why I’m here. To fetch you.”

She chooses this moment to reach behind her back and withdraw the Glock. Not to point it. Just to show it off.

For the first time since she opened the door, Puck stops smiling. His eyes are on the pistol when he says, “We’ll keep coming back.”

“Don’t bother.”

The light now streaming through the trees makes a series of yellow slashes across the porch. Puck wears a gold watch and it catches the sunlight and spits it on the ground like a tiny fluorescent bug. “Hey,” he says. “Look at that.” He rotates his wrist and makes the bug slide across the porch boards, where it momentarily settles on Miriam’s foot before traveling up the length of her body, zeroing in on her eye. The pupil contracts.

She lifts the Glock and stares with her good eye down the line of it. “Stop that.” She knows how fast he can move, has seen his body blur into action.

The refracted sunlight drops from her face, leaving behind its afterimage, so that for a few seconds she sees Puck surrounded by a red aura. He chews his gum slowly, considering her. “Fine. Okay. You need some time to think it over? I understand.”

Perhaps her husband sent them. Perhaps they came on their own. Puck has always wanted her, has tried to make her his—that’s why his body is gummed over with scars. Regardless of why they are here, it is based on some man’s desire, not her obligation to or importance within the Resistance. “I’m done, Puck. I’m done. And if you step onto this porch again, I’ll put a bullet in your mouth.”

He retreats from her, his feet sliding along the porch, scraping the wood—and at the top of the steps he pauses to turn over his gum a few times with his tongue. “Not unless you’re dead you’re done with us.”

Later, she ties on two ankle scabbards and stabs into them a matching pair of Gerber serrated combat knives. To cover them she yanks down her jeans and shoves her feet into steel-tipped cowboy boots. She straps on and tightens the shoulder holster for the Glock and pulls on a black denim jacket. She steps outside and waits on the porch for a good five minutes, listening, the wind gone now, the forest a whispery hush interrupted by the occasional bird calling, twig snapping.

She then clomps down the steps and crunches down the gravel path and circles the Ramcharger, peering in its windows and quickly under its hood, before climbing into the cab and locking the doors and keying the ignition.

Her eyes dart between the mirrors and the road when she drives the quarter-mile driveway that leads to a pitted strip of county two-lane that snakes down the mountain before connecting up with a highway that takes her to La Pine, Oregon. Along the way her foot feathers the brake and her eyes scan back and forth across the road as if something might burst from the woods that wall her in.

At the grocery store she fills her cart with canned vegetables, dried fruit, bags of jerky, boxes of cereal, and granola bars; and at the pharmacy she collects some gauze and disinfectant, a needle and thread, an
Us Weekly
; and at the Ace hardware she buys an electric drill, an electric handsaw, a steel entry door, ten sheets of plywood, three two-by-fours, four motion-sensor lights, four Magnum flashlights, five packs of D batteries, three boxes of four-inch screws, and two empty five-gallon water bottles. On her way out of town, she swings into the service station, one final stop, where she picks up two five-gallon gas containers and fills them with unleaded.

It takes several trips to unload the truck, and she pauses to survey the woods again every time she steps outside. An open-air shed, cluttered with garbage cans, yard tools, a wheelbarrow, rusted rolls of chicken wire, stands a ways off from the driveway. She collects an extension ladder from it. The cabin is shaped like a shoebox, with its porch and entryway on the shorter face of it. She climbs the ladder to install two motion detectors beneath its gables and centers the other two along the broad sides of the cabin.

She opens the entry door and uses a hammer and flathead screwdriver to knock the pins from the hinges. She is strong enough to wobble only a little when she picks up the wooden door and lays it on the porch and excises its knob and deadbolt and hinges and then screws them into the steel door with the price still stickered to it. After thirty minutes the new door is hung, not strong enough to keep Magog out, she knows, but enough to slow him down.

Inside, she snaps her measuring tape along the windows and jots down their dimensions on a piece of paper she pockets. There are ten windows in the house, all of them the same size except for the bathroom, the kitchen, and the big bay window in the living room. She lays out each sheet of plywood in the yard and uses the measuring tape and a Magic Marker to sketch out their shape. From the shed she collects two sawhorses with lichen furring them over and sets them in the front yard and heaves the sheets up on them and sets to work cutting their edges and then, into their centers, a foot-wide slit big enough to accommodate her eyes or the muzzle of a gun.

This takes a long time because she lets the saw spin for only thirty seconds at a time, its blade spitting out sawdust like freshly fallen snow, and then she lifts her finger from the trigger, the whine of the blade receding as she surveys the woods.

There is a tall stack of firewood at the leeward side of the cabin, and she tosses the litter of plywood there before dragging the freshly cut sheets inside. Twilight has come and she claps out the remaining light by hanging the plywood blinds, bracing them with a raised knee, screwing their four corners into the window frame. Across the front door, the only door, she hammers three two-by-fours.

She fills her cupboards with the groceries. She shoves the gas containers to the back of the broom closet. She feeds batteries into the flashlights and staggers them throughout the cabin. She can’t fit the water bottles in the sink so she undoes the hose from the washing machine and runs it into them, splashing them full and setting them aside.

Her dinner she doesn’t taste—the chicken and pesto left over from last night—and barely remembers eating it either, surprised to scratch her fork against an empty plate.

She pads the bathtub with several blankets and a pillow, and next to it lays down a ten-inch silver dagger with a textured grip, two Glocks, six clips loaded with silver hollow-points, a shotgun with a shoulder-strap decorated with red cartridges packed tight with silver ball bearings, and finally, the photo she always keeps next to her bed, the photo of her daughter, whose face she touches before killing the light and crawling into the tub to stare at the darkness and wait for sleep.