Red Moon (30 page)

She can ask him about that later. For now, she needs to tell him about Miriam and the videos. His smile fades when he listens. He combs a hand through his beard. “You have no way to contact her outside of email? And no indication of where she might be
staying
?”

She shakes her head, no.

“I want to say she can take care of herself. I believe that. But still, this is disturbing news.” He tells her to get a glass from the cupboard and she does and he pours her two fingers. He raises his glass in a toast and she hesitates a moment before reciprocating with a clink. She drinks and twists up her face. “Tastes like smoke.”

“That’s from the fire it lights inside.” His eyes are kind but rheumy. His belly bulges beneath his shirt. His arms, thin and spotted. His legs, pale and hairless—fat at the thighs, twiggish at the calves. His voice is his power. His voice, low and booming and roughened at the edges from pipe smoke, is what commands an auditorium full of students, is what intimidates her even now, despite the frailty of his appearance.

“I need to know what you’re hiding me from,” she says.

He nods at her pocket, the outline of the knife there. “Will you cut me open if I don’t tell you?”

“Maybe.”

“I almost believe you. You’re like your aunt, a good bully.” He finishes his Scotch. A few drops bead his beard and his tongue darts out and finds them.

“Tell me.”

He glances at the oven clock, its green numbers reading a few minutes after midnight. “Are you up for a walk? They should still be there.”

The shattered lightbulb peppered his feet, his right foot worse than the left, a blade of glass toothing open a gash in his arch. She helped him pull on two pairs of socks, but he still limps a little when they take the short walk to the rec center.

“Sorry,” she says, and he says, “You should be. Abusing an old man.”

A quarter moon cuts the sky like a sickle. They walk past bare-branched trees and dark-needled hedges. The campus is quiet except for the buzz of the occasional lamp. Reprobus points out two does grazing along the edge of the quad. “They’re on the move this time of year. They can feel the winter coming.”

They walk around the rec center. It is built into the side of a tree-studded hill and the ground slopes downward to reveal the lower stories of the building. The trees thicken around them and block out the sky and at first Claire doesn’t see the gravel path that curves off the sidewalk. She follows Reprobus a short distance to a steel maintenance door, a side entry to the rec center. He fumbles out his keys and jangles them until he finds the right one. He jams in the key and swings open the door. “Here we are.”

The smell hits her before her eyes adjust to the light. An animal’s den. For a split second she worries about what she might be walking into, worries she has given herself over too easily to Reprobus. She is so hungry to trust someone that she didn’t think to question his motives in bringing her to this place. She is standing in the doorway, half in, half out, when he grabs her by the wrist and drags her forward. “Hurry.”

Music is playing from some unseen stereo. Thrash metal. A voice hollers, a guitar screams, blast beats pulse. The walls are windowless, the floor concrete. The ceiling reaches twenty feet above them. From its steel rafters hang thick, braided climbing ropes and chains from which dangle heavy bags ripped open in places and repaired with duct tape. Old gymnastics equipment—balance beams, sawhorses, vaults, parallel and horizontal bars—has been arranged strangely around the room. She sees what she thinks is a shredded log set upright in the corner. The floor is smeared with what appears to be blood old and new.

In the flash of a few seconds, she takes this in, before feeling their eyes on her. Then she spots the lycans. They are all men and all naked. Standing next to a punching bag that sways and creaks on its chain. Hanging halfway up a rope by one arm. Crouched on top of a sawhorse. Their mouths are red and gaping. Their bodies thick with hair and muscle. Watching her. Slowly, with the music charging and raging in the background, the one next to the punching bag begins to creep toward her.

His abdomen sinks and expands as if he is inhaling her. His eyes close and his body quakes. He cries out in obvious pain, falling to all fours and arching his back and lowering his head. When he lifts his face to her, she recognizes him, Matthew. It takes him a minute to rise from the floor and straighten his long body and quiver out a breath.

Nearby is an industrial sink, a coil of hose, a pile of towels. He splashes his face with water and towels off the blood and sweat. Someone shuts off the music and in the sudden quiet he looks at her and says, “Hi.”

She tries to focus on his face, not his body, when she says, “What is this place?”

He ties the towel around his waist. “Basically it’s where we go apeshit.”

“Or wolfshit,” Reprobus says. She has forgotten about him. Now he lays a hand on her shoulder. “You’re among friends, Claire.”

T
HEIR CONVOY HEADS
down the hill. The MRAP trucks are slow moving, mine resistant, ambush protected, but Patrick is in a Humvee. It has been up-armored by the mechanics, with greater suspension and ballistic-resistant glass, but he has seen their black carcasses trucked in and knows an IED can crisp and cut metal as if it were paper.

Patrick has been on base so long—walled in, enclosed—that the snow-scalloped field out the window makes him feel untethered, as if the Humvee might lift off the ground and float into space. Then, in a blink, the woods are all around them and the trees shut out most of the sky except a few fingers of light and he feels oddly comforted.

They drop down the valley and through the town of Hiisi—first the neighborhoods where the mine workers and fishermen live in their modest, square homes—and then into a narrow labyrinth of rotting buildings, some of them high and some low, many ruined heaps of wood and stone, all of them close and crumbling into each other except when a fire charred a cavity. They pass a motorcycle with studded tires, a group of children who do not wave, a brightly colored jingle cart carrying goods to a market.

In the windows and doorways, he can sense eyes watching him. Shadows shift. The inside of the Humvee keeps fogging up, so they have the windows cracked and he can smell the reek of sewage and garbage and sour-sweet decomposition.

At the edge of town they pass a graveyard outpaced and overrun by bodies. Some graves are marked and some are not. Some bodies are buried and some are not. Mounded in barrows of snow or laid out in the open air or blanketed with rocks. Half-decayed blackened bodies. Skeletons the color of old ice. A dog trots out carrying a femur in its mouth like a stick. Every now and then a man or two or three will rough a shovel into the stony, frozen soil and dig a fresh grave, but they can’t always keep up with the death, and when spring comes, when the weather warms and the rain falls, decayed flesh will muddy the ground and flies will gather like storm clouds.

He watches this all with passing interest, but his mind’s eye turns inward. He can’t stop thinking about his father and his shed, the notes left behind and what they might tell him. Because of this, the busyness of his mind, he doesn’t feel as nervous as he should. Trevor sits next to him—the wolf pelt still attached to his helmet and draped down his back, a meaty smell puffing off it. Every time Trevor tries to speak, the squad leader tells him to shut his hole. For this, Patrick is grateful.

They drive north out of the valley and then east between two low, flattopped hills, the roads deteriorating further with every passing mile. They skirt the edge of a fjord and a flock of seagulls surrounds the convoy briefly, screeching over the engines, beating their wings outside the windows, before drifting away. Then striped canyon walls surround them and they head up into a narrow winding passage that will bring them into the next valley, where the combat outpost is located.

The sun is directly in front of them—aligned perfectly with the chute of the canyon—and blinding when reflected off the snow. Patrick squints even with sunglasses. The afterimage of the landscape singes into his eyes, the whiteness seeming to infect him so that whiteness is all he sees, nothing distinguished, everything running into the next thing, as formless as spilled milk.

Decker is at the head of the convoy and Patrick hears his voice squawk over the radio. “Slow down. Trouble ahead.” The canyon opens into a U-shaped clearing five hundred meters long and half as wide. At the far end of it, where the road again narrows through canyon walls, a rockslide has blocked their passage.

Trevor curses when he tries to drink from his canteen and the Humvee brakes to a sudden stop. “Goddamn do I have the worst luck,” he says and swipes pointlessly at the spill dampening his chest.

There is a tinkle of glass when the bullet rips through it. Trevor’s head whips to the side. His eye has vanished, replaced by a hole from which blood leaks. His canteen drops to the floor, sloshing and gurgling as it empties between his boots. He shakes, as if in an epileptic seizure, then tips over and lays his head on Patrick’s shoulder.

Patrick isn’t sure how much time passes. Maybe a few seconds, maybe a minute. He is too caught up in the sensation of blood warming his shoulder, the pressing weight of Trevor’s head there. An explosion wakes him from his daze, so powerful that the windshield cracks and the Humvee rocks. Near the front of the convoy he can see a black wraith of smoke twisting upward, blotting out the sun. He is about to ask his squad leader what to do when he realizes he is the only one left in the Humvee. The driver and passenger door are open and the air outside crashes with gunfire. Men scream.

He scrambles for the door handle when another bullet sings through his window and embeds itself in the seat next to him. Because of the way the Humvee is angled, he realizes he is on the battle side of the vehicle and will end up ribboned by bullets if he steps out. He hears another bullet ping and ricochet off the door and he curses and ducks down and clutches his M4 and climbs over Trevor’s body to the opposite side of the Humvee and falls out the door and flattens his body into the snow.

He hears a voice screaming, “Squad vee, squad vee!” Two fire teams forward, one fire team back. Somehow the drivers reacted as they should and the Humvees and MRAPs have parked at a strategic diagonal rather than a straight line against the fire zone.

He peers around a tire and sees one Humvee blackened and broken. Whether destroyed by an IED or RPG, he doesn’t know. He spots three soldiers in the snow, their bodies still and sprawled out, their blood so bright against white. Another dangles backward from the gun turret of an MRAP.

The lycans have positioned themselves against the sun. Patrick is blind to them. He tries to visor his eyes with a hand but can make out nothing outside of their gunfire flaring like sunspots. They seem to be above and below, on top of the canyon walls and dug into the rockslide, how many of them he cannot say, whether a dozen or dozens.

Fish in a barrel, he thinks. That’s what we are.

He recognizes Decker toward the front of the convoy. The sergeant positions a SMAW on his shoulder and steps around the nose of the MRAP and launches a rocket. It spits flame and emits a firecracker hiss when it travels fifty meters through the air and impacts the canyon wall.

There is earsplitting thunder. A giant fist of flame erupts. Rock rains down on the lycans. Patrick tries to remember his training. Firing from rubble, firing from barricade, fighting from prone supported. Alternating between slow and rapid fire so that he might analyze each round and determine a hit or miss. Locating the target by hasty search and if hasty search fails, employing a systematic examination of the terrain with an overlapping strip method, fifty-meter sweep, hundred-meter sweep, one-fifty-meter sweep. All of this and more, clotting his brain, paralyzing him for the space of a few seconds.

Not this. Not again. The fear. The familiar fear from the plane. Calcifying his arms, palsying his legs, choking his breath. Every part of him a tangled mess of nerves that he cannot control. He crouches frozen behind the Humvee even as he despairs of his inaction. His body seems to be caught on hooks.

He hears a dripping and looks down to see the blood pooling from the open door. The blood of Trevor, uncorked by a bullet. It melts the snow into a red slushy pattern that reminds him of those Rorschach inkblot tests. What does he see? The fate that awaits him if he does not act.

Abruptly, like a cracked knuckle, he feels relieved of the tension that seized him—and he loops the sling of the M4 high on his arm and snaps off his safety and forces the butt against his shoulder and swings up and rattles off twenty rounds in the general direction of the rockslide before dropping behind the Humvee again and reminding himself to breathe, breathe, the big gulps of air he takes now hot and sullied by smoke.

He can feel a grenade shake the canyon walls and reverberate through his bones. He can hear a spray of rounds, from one side, and then another, like thunderclouds calling to each other. He can hear the
whang
of bullets ricocheting off metal. He can hear Decker calling his name, telling him to assemble forward. He waits until his breathing settles and then bursts from behind the Humvee. He moves his legs as fast as he can, but he cannot sprint in the snow, every step a sliding uncertainty.

At the top of the canyon, near the blue cutout of the sky, he observes what looks like a lightning bolt. He takes three more steps before the thunder catches up with him. The ground opens up—a volcanic burst of flame that makes snow into steam. Patrick feels like a child picked up and hurled through the air. The strength of the explosion rips off his helmet and one of his boots. The world jars black when he hits the ground ten feet away and then fades back to white.

For a long time he lies there, loose limbed, unable to move. He sees the sky and he sees a snow-mantled cliff and he sees upon it what he first believes to be a tree, the inky spill of it against all that blue. He wonders vaguely how it has survived on such a barren purchase.

Then the tree moves. It lifts not a branch, but an arm, signaling to those below—and then draws away from its vantage point, vanishing from sight, the tree that is not a tree, a lycan clad in black, a smear of darkness on a sunlit day.

The gunfire continues—for how long, Patrick doesn’t know. He does know that it will all be over soon. He knows, too, that if he is still alive in a few minutes, and if the lycans choose to survey the bodies and rummage through their pockets and salvage equipment, then he will be dead. His rifle is nearby but he cannot reach for it, cannot even feel his hands, cannot muster the energy or the will to flop his arms in the direction of the weapon. Something is wrong with his shoulder. He feels something hot and red there and imagines it as a planet, a spinning ball of toxic gas.

He registers in flits and flashes the cold creeping into his skin and the smell of blood and gun smoke all around him. Shock. That’s what this is called, but recognizing the word does not antidote him. His vision wobbles. He believes he might have a concussion, though the letters won’t come together properly in his head and he thinks, concession, commotion, conception? He has a conception?

His mind grows blurrier by the minute, like a window frosting over. He wants to tell someone, anyone,
see,
see, not such a miracle anymore, am I? But he has no audience. At one point, he realizes the canyon is encased in shadow, the sun lower in the sky. Getting close to night. Night is when he sleeps. At the threshold of waking and dreaming, his last thought is how pillowy the snow feels and how much he would like to have a little rest.