Red Moon (31 page)

E
VERYTHING IN
western Washington is draped in moss and smells of earthworms. Rain falls more often than not. Cars are rust flecked from the salt breeze coming off the ocean. In September, Miriam found a motel outside Tacoma that didn’t ask questions and let her pay by the week in cash. The walls were paneled with pine and the carpeting stained and the overhead lamps darkened with dead moths. Smoking was permitted. Lawn chairs and Old Smokey grills sat outside of three of the seven rooms. This was a place people lived, among them a toothless man she suspected of cooking meth and a whore with dishwater-blond hair who wore the same purple miniskirt every day.

The federal detention center is located twelve miles south of Seattle. No fencing surrounds it. No guard towers loom along its perimeter. Because the inmates remain indoors, in total isolation. It is located in an oddly public place, nearby a Rent-A-Wreck and the Bull Pen Pub and an All Star Grocery where she regularly parks her Ramcharger and sits looking at the FDC, an institutional gray building that resembles nothing so much as a medieval castle that could not be stormed.

There is a Starbucks on every corner of the city and she taps into their free Wi-Fi and does her research. The facility was built in 1997 and meant to accommodate 677 prisoners. Some are sentenced and some are awaiting sentences. Their crimes range from crypto-anarchy to wire fraud to aircraft theft to bank robbery to domestic terrorism. A phone call from a pay phone revealed that Jeremy was not listed as an inmate, but that means nothing.

She does not trust and does not have the patience for the red tape she will have to go through to request blueprints, so she researches the architect and finds him easily through a Google search and one night breaks into his firm and steals the plans along with three computers to make it look like a proper robbery.

She unrolls the blueprints on her butterfly-patterned bedspread and weighs them down with her mud-caked sneakers and paperback detective novels bought from grocery stores. She does not like what she finds. Every hallway and stairwell has alarm-triggered lockdown doors. The heating ducts are built with bars staggered through them to prevent the possibility of a crawl space. Every floor has a checkpoint, including the two that run belowground. The cells here are windowless and labeled high security. That is where he will be found.

Her mind plays through so many different scenarios. She imagines walking through the front door with a shotgun pressed to the throat of a hostage. She imagines short-circuiting the transformer to kill the electricity and then lighting a fire in the furnace ducts and sneaking in with the firefighters. She imagines following a guard home and duct-taping him to a chair and interrogating him about the layout and procedures of the center before donning his uniform and hoping she can somehow bluff her way inside.

She exercises every day—getting ready for what exactly, she doesn’t know. She only knows that she owes it to her husband, whom she no longer agrees with but of course still loves, to try to set him free. She has no doubt he is being tortured. She has no doubt he will be put to death. She thinks of him when she runs the hiking trails that thread the woods and when she dons a wet suit to swim in Puget Sound and when she uses the play structure at a local park for pull-ups—wide arm, close grip, underhands—and leg-lift crunches.

She can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched and carries a knife or a gun on her at all times and pauses often in doorways and on street corners. At night the motel window is like a liquid black eye that peers at her, and she draws the curtains over it and sleeps with a shotgun in the bed beside her like a lover whose oily smell and indention linger on the pillow.

One day the meth-head calls her sweetie and she gives him the finger and he calls her a cunt. The next morning she finds the Ramcharger’s front left tire slashed and she walks directly to his room and kicks open the door and finds him tweaking in the bathroom and smashes his face into the mirror and brings down the lid to the toilet tank on his back and tells him if he ever fucks with her again he will die.

She parks at the All Star Grocery and rolls down the window and studies the FDC, not knowing what she is looking for but not knowing what else to do. She imagines her husband somewhere in the belly of the building. The first thing he ever said to her was that he liked the way she smelled. It wasn’t a line. It was how he felt, his nostrils flaring. He has always been like that, direct and aggressive and hungry and pursuant. That is what made him such a good leader and a bad husband. She has followed him all these years. Even now she follows him, his priorities her own.

One time, when they were still dating, still students at William Archer, they were tangled up on a futon and he said he was going to make love to her and there was nothing she could do about it. She said to him, “Do you always get what you want?” and he said, “Most of the time,” and she said, “Me too,” and grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him toward her.

When he spoke at rallies or gave lectures, she felt as she did when he made love to her—as if some glowing ball of energy was swelling inside her, heating her—and from the rapture in everyone else’s eyes she knew they felt the same. Sometimes, though, she tired of the ideology. Sometimes she pined for a normal life,
normal
conversation—paint the porch this and mow the grass that—soccer games and park playdates, backyard barbecues with neighbors. When their daughter died, that ball of light inside Miriam, that glow that sustained her over the years, unraveled into many strands that went black like burned-out lightbulb filaments.

Today she goes for a ten-mile run. A light rain mists the air. Wind comes off the sound and carries the smell of algae and dead fish. Crows gather in a tree barren of leaves and make its branches appear heavy with some black, poisonous fruit. They depart when she runs beneath them, their wings stirring the air, their shadows swirling all around her.

When she finally makes her way home to the motel, her lungs hot and her legs heavy, she keys the lock and checks the dusting of talcum powder on the floor. She keeps a tin by the door and every time she leaves she gives it a few shakes to see if anyone has tracked their way inside. Nothing.

She peels off her track pants and sweatshirt and stretches naked for a moment before walking to the bathroom and staring at her red-nosed reflection in the mirror. A hot shower will scald the chill out of her. The curtain is the same dark orange color as the carpeting. She drags it aside to crank on the water—and the tug of her arm reveals the giant crouched figure of Morris Magog waiting for her.

She is an old woman, a lycan, though it is hard to tell beneath the gray cover of her long coat and head scarf, her appearance more like a twisted branch or crooked pillar of stones. A few stray white hairs have escaped her trappings and blow around her face. She is slow moving, some of her steps crunching through the snow, some of them carrying her on top of the hardpack. She carries a quiver of arrows and an ash bow crossways over her shoulders. A large dog follows her—thick necked and long legged, with the sharp snout of a wolf—dragging behind it a sled mounded with snowy white rabbits, their bodies soon to be skinned and gutted and cooked, every last ligament and ribbon of meat harvested. They were killed by arrows or by snares and their bloodied furs match the battlefield that makes the woman pause and the dog whine.

She comes from a side channel that spits into this canyon and stands for a long time at its exit, surveying the wreckage. The Humvees and the MRAPs are still smoldering and she knows that whatever happened here happened not long ago. The canyon walls are pitted from bullets and RPG blasts, halos of black imprinted on stone. The wind shifts and the dog whines at the smell of cooked flesh, burned rubber. There are many bodies, a junkyard of broken bodies, all of them so still.

She goes to them. The snow glimmers with ejected shell casings. She withdraws a knife from some secret fold of her coat. At one body, and then the next, she does not bother struggling with buttons and snaps. She draws her sharp blade through nylon and canvas and hurries her way through pockets and belts, tossing some things aside and placing others in the sled. Bullets, matches, knives, first-aid kits, wipes, belts, canteens, binoculars. One soldier is missing half his head. Another seems to be smiling, with his belly and chest shredded by bullets. Another has tried to crawl to safety and a thick viscous slug’s trail of blood follows him to his resting place thirty yards away.

One of the soldiers lies flat on his back. The dog whimpers and huffs and paws at the snow near his head. His face is obscured by blood and soot and sunglasses. A boy. His shoulder is torn up—whether by a bullet or shrapnel, she doesn’t know. His helmet is gone. So is one of his boots. She crouches down and removes her mitten—leather, lined with rabbit fur—revealing a skeletal, leprously spotted hand. She snatches off his sunglasses. His eyes are half-lidded, telling her nothing.

She digs beneath his high collar and touches his neck to see if she can find a pulse. Right then his eyes snap open and closed so quickly that she would have missed it had she not been searching for some sign of life. She stands and looks around, looking to see if anyone is watching her. The sun flashes off her knife.

N
EAL STANDS
in the open doorway of the toolshed. Everyone keeps saying that the day is unseasonably warm, that he should be grateful, that the winds in the Republic are sometimes so severe that a minute of exposure can freeze a finger and snap it off at the knuckle. To him, thirty-five degrees is cold enough. His eyes peer out beneath a wool hat with a pom-pom on top. Otherwise his body is wrapped completely in a down parka and scarves and mittens and boots. Chase tells him he looks like the Michelin man.

Chase is always calling him something. Tubs. Doc. Captain Curry. Neal wouldn’t mind stabbing the fool in the eye with the syringe he keeps in his pocket—capped, but ready with a 30 cc dose of sodium thiopental strong enough to knock Chase out. Just in case his emotions get the best of him and the pills can’t contain the animal. That’s what Neal is here for—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself. Everyone calls him doctor but here he is merely a nurse. It is insulting, and he would not have come except for two men he is indebted to: Augustus, his leering benefactor; and Keith Gamble, his longtime collaborator, his friend.

They arrived several days ago and his mind still hasn’t adjusted to the time change, his days feeling like nights, his nights days. He checks his wristwatch—he is always checking it to ascertain the time, as if he has trouble believing in the sun’s place in the sky. Another hour and their convoy will roll out of the base and head to the Tuonela Mine, where he and Chase will meet with diplomats and executives before holding a press conference.

He steps out of the wind and into the shed’s dim interior. A lightbulb hangs overhead, but when he pulls at the string, nothing happens. His eyes adjust and he spots the desiccated carcass of the wolf that makes the workbench above it appear like a squared shrine.

The lab conditions are laughable. But the value of Keith’s work has always been conceptual more than practical. So many conversations with him began with the phrase
What if?
Kirk and Spock. That’s what people called them, and that’s how they dressed up one Halloween. Keith was the dashing rogue and Neal was the wearying bore. Wearying bores did well in biochemistry. Wearying bores could tolerate the endless stream of data, the endless pile of grant applications, the political hurdles, the pompous lunacy of academics—everything Keith referred to as bullshit. When his friend first became a brewmaster, Neal told him it was a waste, a waste of his great talent. But he was wrong. This—Keith’s death in the Republic—that was the waste.

There is nothing of use to him in the toolshed. He is here to say good-bye. He pulls off his mittens and slowly fingers the beakers and vials, flips through the notebooks, the binders, their pages yellowing along the edges. Everything is coated in dust that his fingertips streak through.

“It’s just like you described it, old friend.”

There is another video circulating online. The second Balor has released. Augustus clicks on it eagerly. He has watched the other—with the door to his office closed and the sound lowered, as if he were indulging in some pornographic fetish—more than thirty times. He can play it in his head now—can see Balor, the tic at the corner of his eye, the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes heavily—can hear the screaming and meat-mouthed feeding—as if it is happening to him.

He cannot say why he is so fascinated, but when he stares at the screen, he grips the mouse tightly in his hand and from it a tingling signal seems to run up his arm and into his chest and rush the blood through his body. This is his enemy. This is what Augustus has committed thousands of hours to eradicating. Balor believes the video empowers him, but Augustus believes the opposite: every new hit and post might as well equate to a vote for Chase Williams. The video strengthens them, fortifies their posture.

A part of Augustus cannot help but wonder about the soldier Balor tore to pieces. He was not a person—he was food, though not even that, since hunger was secondary. The man was an implement and Balor was using him. He does not see Chase in quite the same way—they are friends, after all, the closest of friends—but the connection does not escape or bother him.

The wall behind Balor appears paneled with wood. There is no overhead light, what must be a table lamp throwing shadows sideways across his face. An insectile hum, maybe a generator, nearly swallows his voice. A hint of a smile plays across the corners of his mouth. He is smiling at Augustus. He is smiling at everyone who stands in his way as if ready to swing a scythe through them. “Do you know how much money it would take to destroy the United States? I do not mean to interrupt or injure the economy. I do not mean to blow up a bridge and make people feel sorry for those who died or blow up a landmark and make people feel hot with patriotic fever. I mean destroy. Do you know how much money it would take?” Here he runs a tongue across his lips. “It would take thirty thousand dollars. I will show you. Soon. Soon.”

“Bring it on,” Augustus says and starts the video again.

Chase doesn’t eat much for lunch, not because the chow hall is serving Jell-O and green beans and gray mushy chicken cubes, but because his nerves have left his stomach in a twist. He excuses himself and waits outside, next to the convoy of Humvees parked and idling in the mud like prehistoric beetles. The cold air hones him, chases away the nausea.

He knows what the media are reporting. The Patriot Act amendment, the vaccine hearings. The hard-line, no-compromise rhetoric. The pending trial of Jeremy Saber. The good-gosh down-home campaigning of his running mate, Pinckney Arnold, who drives from small town to small town and gives stump speeches and kisses babies and shakes hands and sings “God Bless America” with his hand over his heart. The publicity photos of Chase and Neal roaring across the Atlantic on a Curtiss Commando transport with several hundred newly deployed soldiers. All of it has worked. Just like Buffalo promised.

Every smear campaign has failed—because Chase admits to everything, the groping, the drinking, the fighting, none of it illegal, all of it tied into his platform: brutal honesty. The election is a week away and every phone poll lists him as the front-runner. Chase doesn’t respond to the soldiers calling him Mr. President, doesn’t feel as excited as he ought to, the Republic distracting him from every emotion except fear, sometimes alternated by remorse and guilt-absolving defiance.

That morning, when he arrived at the Tuonela Base, when the CO invited him into his office, he made an offhand comment about the weather, saying how nice it was, how warm. The CO—a gray-haired toad of a man with no neck and a broad, fleshy mouth—said he’d take negative forty over this any day. “Keeps the mutts in their pens.” Two days ago, an ambush wiped out an entire platoon. “A real dick up my ass. And now you’re here.” He sipped his coffee and choked a little on it. “Don’t think they don’t know. They know. Which means some shit is bound to happen.” The CO mentioned Balor then. Chase asked what they knew about him. He has seen the videos, he has read the articles, he has been briefed by Buffalo—but what does the CO know that he might not?

“What’s there to know you don’t already know? Might say he’s the alpha of the pack. Been in the computer for years, more than two decades. Worked for us—bet you didn’t know that—though you might soon. Some fucker at
The New Yorker
has been sniffing around about us supplying him and a few other mutts with arms in the eighties to drive out the Russians. Now he’s turned the crosshairs on us. Now he’s gone from low level to big shit. He says something, the rest do it. Whoever gets his head on a pike will get so many medals pinned to them their tit will fall off.”

“What’s wrong with his eye?”

“Fuck do you care? Fuck am I supposed to know?”

“Just curious.”

Now Chase scoops up a handful of slush and packs it into a ball of ice that he lobs like a grenade toward the high wall of the perimeter fence. It falls short. He is joined a minute later by the lieutenant who will be serving as his PSD escort to the mine. Nathan Streep, a twenty-four-year-old with a boyish face that doesn’t look like it’s ever needed a razor. A scar curls from his upper lip like a worm. He pulls out a pack of Marlboros and knocks out two cigarettes and offers one to Chase and they light up and smoke in companionable silence.

The day is bright but the sun seems to warm nothing. A shadow slides across the ground and a few seconds later Chase hears the boom of a jet streaking overhead. He knows they are always overhead, easy to hear and hard to spot, as gray as the surrounding hills, their missiles sometimes giving them away, sun silvered at the tips. But he can’t help it: he covers his head and lets out a whimper. Most people, he knows, are unable to imagine their own death. They can worry over a grandparent, choking on a half-chewed bite of ham sandwich or slipping in the shower and snapping a hip; and they can worry over a child, imagining a pigtailed girl toddling after a ball and being crushed by a passing car, the bloodied tread of the tire imprinted on the asphalt until the next rainstorm—but their own death remains a denial, and then a vague possibility, and then, only in those final foggy-eyed years, an inevitability. He is not sure quite how this happened, but ever since he was bitten, he has felt age settling over him like a black blanket, and for the first time he feels death is not only foreseeable but also imminent.

He straightens up as quickly as he can, thankful the photographers remain inside. The lieutenant watches him curiously. Chase can’t tell if it is a smirk or if the scar makes his lip naturally upturned. “You all right there?”

“Fine.”

“How long has it been?”

“Near eleven years.” In his pocket he carries the pocketknife his father gave him, the one he carried through all his time overseas, and he squeezes it now.

“Not so long.”

Long enough for the anchor-and-eagle tattoo on his shoulder to fade to the color of a bruise, but not long enough to shake off memories as vivid as last night’s nightmare. He remembers the tracer rounds and mortar explosions, the thunderous pulse making his ears pop, the dripping chandeliers of white and yellow and red light making him pause and marvel at the beauty of it all. He remembers the rattle of a chain gun and the rotor wash of a Blackhawk and the hushed air that seemed to hang around bodies zipped into black bags. He remembers attacking a cave system—a hive, the CO called it—and the lycans that came rushing out of the dark at them. He remembers lighting up a woman with a flamethrower—the same woman who visits him sometimes at night—and the way she kept coming even after her eyeballs burst and her skin crisped to ash so that he had to unholster his pistol and drop her with a shot to the head.

He takes a deep breath and can hear his cigarette sizzling at the tip and flicks it away in a sparking arc and nearly gags on the smoke.

He realizes, when the convoy starts down the hill, that he doesn’t know the name of anything here. He knows the valley, the mine, the base all share the same name that now escapes him. He eyes a stunted evergreen, a bush bright with red berries, a deer as big as an elk darting between the trees. He likes knowing the names of things. Without them, he feels lost, as though he hardly knows who he is.

Ten minutes later, when they push out of the woods and into town, they brake next to an apartment complex under construction. A forklift drops a pallet of rebar with a boom. A welding torch glows blue. A saw whines. The workers, in orange hard hats, stare at the convoy until it departs. A few blocks away, they pass a building carved out by a bomb. It was the same old story when Chase was here—their mission unclear: building and destroying.

They drive through an alleyway busy with murals to commemorate a World War II battle in which hundreds of Nazis were killed by lycans—and then the convoy parks at a nearby square, where a crowd has gathered. “Check it out,” the lieutenant says. “Some unfriendlies are hosting a potluck.” A gnarled leafless tree rises in the middle of the square and a straw effigy draped in a U.S. flag hangs from it. A group of young bearded men stand around it and stab it with pitchforks and then cut it down and finally throw it on the fire they have kindled nearby. The smoke darkens and the flames lick upward and everyone lets out a cheer. In the weak sunlight, a lamb is spitted and two teenage boys crank it around and around over the fire. Men roll cigarettes and drink hard cider from jugs, while women arrange plates of sausage on a folding table. Children run among their legs, playing tag and pretending themselves into wolves.

Chase tries to smile off the pitchforks—but can feel, with every thrust, an imagined prick scraping between his ribs, into his heart. Neal sits in the seat behind him. He leans forward and rattles a container of Tic Tacs in his ear. “I think you need two of these.”

They aren’t breath mints at all, but Volpexx. The doc is here to make sure he chokes them down when needed. He rattles some into his palm and dry-swallows.

“Hey, my breath stinks,” the lieutenant says. “Can I steal one of those from you?”

“No,” Neal says and tucks away the bottle. “They’re ours.”

Chase will need every one of them. Just as he needs Neal to dole them out slowly. Because the first pill leads to a second and then a third and then he tends to lose count and sometimes slips into the black fuzz of those beer benders that defined his twenties, after which he would rise feeling as though he had sawed himself in half.

The mine grows larger and larger with their approach, its smokestacks and blackened metal making it look like a factory where nightmares are made. The fence line begins a long way out—reaching on for miles and miles and miles—surrounding a strip mine so cavernous that the dump trucks trundling along its bottom might be toys. He imagines the millions of tons drawn from this crater, bored by drills and chewed by dynamite, and can’t help but think about the tunnels within his own body that house a poisonous ore.

They pass through a security checkpoint with undercarriage mirrors and tire shredders and a reinforced steel gate and after a brief questioning drive for several hundred yards before they arrive at a parking lot, the distant fence line necessary so that no RPG fired or bomb detonated at the checkpoint can damage the facility.