Red Moon (32 page)

The escort for the reporters is held up another ten minutes as the guards search and chemical-reactant test their bags and camera equipment. Chase can feel the Volpexx deadening him—the equivalent to a three-beer buzz—and closes his eyes and rests his chin on his chest and watches the clouds of colors play across his retinal screen.

When the reporters arrive, when their Humvee parks alongside his, he takes a deep cleansing breath and climbs out and approaches the Alliance Energy representatives who now wait on the sidewalk edging the parking lot with smiles on their faces and hands extended for a shake.

P
ATRICK IS AWARE
, first, of the sphere of pain in his right shoulder. If he stays still, its heat remains focused, but if he moves—if he so much as sighs heavily—the sphere cracks open and sends hot, nauseating knife twists of pain into his chest, down his arm.

He lies on the floor of a one-room gray-wood house. Wind rasps through the cracks. The roof creaks under the weight of snow. The floorboards are soft and squawking beneath him. The logs in the woodstove collapse into embers. The whole place struggles to stay upright. The air reeks of fish and onions. Herbs and jerky hang from the rafters. Old dusty spiderwebs—jeweled with the husks of flies—thread the corners. Pots bubble on the woodstove.

He does not notice this all at once, but in one-eyed glimpses as he rises intermittently from a sleep that won’t let go. He feels out of focus, outside of himself. He can’t tell whether he keeps fading in and out due to his injuries or whether she has drugged him. She, the lycan woman.

Her back is hunched, her breasts flattened by age. Her neck is as thin as a wrist. A cluster of long white hairs hang off her chin and tremble when she sucks at her toothless mouth. When at first she does not respond to the English or the little Finnish and Russian he uses on her, only stares at him with that mummified face and those eyes dulled by cataracts, absent of any curiosity, of any emotion altogether, he figures her deaf or senile. Or maybe he never says anything. Maybe he speaks to her in his mind, his tongue unable to find traction enough to form words.

He dreams about his rifle shuddering in his arms. He dreams about a lycan staggering back and hitting a rock wall and smearing it with a frond of blood. He dreams about the old woman standing by the window, her pale mottled skin appearing translucent so that he believes he can see her blood and sinews coursing and surging, like some dark presence living beneath the surface of her. He dreams about her sucking on a pipe, the smoke coiling around her, as she studies him sharply, with suspicion glowing in her foggy eyes. He dreams—or maybe he is awake?—about a wolf watching him from a shadowy corner.

Then she crouches next to him with a pile of rags, a pan of steaming water, and a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Your fever won’t break and your skin is going dark,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “Need to get that metal out of you.”

She speaks. She holds a knife between them. He does not agree or disagree. He just turns his head away so that he doesn’t have to watch her work. He supposes, if he were on an operating table, he would be strapped down. But he doesn’t have the energy to arch his body, to flinch away, when he feels the probing sting that turns into a hard jolt of pain. The sphere explodes. He hears the
tock
and
pick
of shrapnel hitting the floor and feels a hollowed-out relief in his shoulder—and in the flash before he passes out from the pain he thinks of his father and finally makes the connection.

He wakes in a daze, not knowing how long he has slept but knowing it has been a long time. It is dark outside, but it is dark so often here that the hour could be four in the afternoon or four in the morning. Outside he can hear the chattering and howls of wolves, whether natural or lycan, he is not sure.

He feels better, somehow lighter, as if the shrapnel weighed so much it was pressing him into the floor. He sits up for the first time and realizes he is naked only when the pelts that cover him roll away from his chest and pool in his lap.

His shoulder is sticky with a mudpack that smells fungal. A woodstove roars in the corner, giving off waves of heat, but the air is otherwise cold enough to crystallize his breath. On a three-legged table small enough to be a stool, a candle sputters, its dim, flickering glow the only light in the cottage. He is alone. A few feet away, his uniform is folded neatly next to his boots.

He rises naked from the floor. The room spins, then settles. His muscles are tight and unused to movement. He keeps his bad arm tight against his side when he creeps to his clothes. He finds them clean, smelling of pine soap. He almost pulls them on and then remembers his final thoughts before passing out.

He fingers through his pockets until he finds it, the sheets of paper—some printed in the MWR, some pirated from the toolshed. He unfolds them clumsily with his one hand and carries them to the candle.

He was being poisoned by the metal, infected by it. The old woman saved him, as if knifing away a bruised section of peach, by excising it from his body.

In the flickering light of the candle he flattens the wrinkles from the paper. Some of the ink has splotched and warped, but he can still read the words. The protection of cells, the regulation and detoxification of metal, such as silver. Silver. One of the principal components in Volpexx was silver. Some of the old mythology was true: the metal was septic to a lycan. The two largest suppliers in the country come from Alaska, he remembers reading, the Red Dog Mine and the Greens Creek Mine producing somewhere around three hundred metric tons a year, with Pfizer as their majority stockholder.

Keith Gamble lost his wife more than fifteen years ago, but all this time, he was still trying to save her. He knew he couldn’t kill the wolf, but he thought he could kill the drug. The metallothioneins would somehow detoxify the Volpexx, Patrick guesses, allowing for a positive blood test without the emotionally deadening side effects.

He wonders in how many different ways and over how many years his father has been chasing some kind of cure. At home, his father often worked in his shop, built onto the garage, a room with a sloping floor and central drain, stainless-steel tables scattered with vials and tubes and decanters, like some mad scientist’s laboratory in the midnight movie. He kept it locked except when working in it and allowed Patrick to observe him only if he didn’t speak and remained seated on a stool in the corner. He said he was working on home-brew recipes. But Patrick can clearly recall the gleam of syringes on the counter—and can remember, too, the many dogs he had as a child that died so often of “cancer” he stopped making up new names and just called them all Ranger.

He looks at the other sheets. The University of Oregon emails. Ndesai. Ndesai. Ndesai. Over and over again. Correspondence traded back and forth for what appears to be two years. Neal. It was Neal, the old college friend his father was always talking about, always chatting with on the phone, always telling Patrick to visit. The footer at the bottom of each email identifies Desai as a university professor and the director of the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. He would be hearing from Patrick as soon as he could get to a computer.

At that moment the door creaks open and reveals a black rectangle. A snow-caked animal, what could be a dog or a wolf, trots through it—followed by the old woman. A cold wind rushes inside and gutters the candle and freezes Patrick where he stands. The dog shakes off a cloud of snow and ducks its head and flattens its tail and growls. The old woman shoulders the door closed and secures the latch. She carries three bloody white rabbits by the ears. She uses her free hand to unwrap her shawl. She stares at Patrick a moment—her eyes dropping from his face to his body—and only then does he remember his nakedness. He tries to cover his crotch with the paper. The wind rises to a whistle outside. Then her face breaks into a smile with no teeth.

She turns away from him and peels off her mittens and kicks off her boots and shrugs off what seems more like a robe than a coat and arranges it all near the fire to steam. It is an odd dance, her undressing and him dressing. She is slowed by age—and he by
injury
—and they finish around the same time and look at each other across the room as if to say, what now?

“You’re hungry,” she says, not a question. She knows he is. Terribly hungry, aching inside, as if he has been pitted.

He watches as she skins a rabbit. Yanking out its guts and splatting them on the floor for the dog to gobble up. Peeling away its pelt to reveal its candy-red musculature. Fingering the meat from the bone, knifing it into cubes, tossing it into a pot filled with snow and roots and bones that boil down into a stew on top of the woodstove. Together they sit at the table and she clunks a steaming bowl before him and he says, “Thank you.”

Claire feels, no other word for it, happy. Buoyant even. As though, if she opened her window and spread her arms, the wind might puff her away. For the first time since arriving on campus people know her by a name other than Hope. For the first time she has a sense of community. For the first time she has friends, if that’s the right word for it, someone to sit with at the cafeteria, wave to across the quad. Were they her friends? Would they say the same of her? She thinks they might.

She barely notices the election signs that pop up all over campus—signs that read
VOTE
NADER
or
IMPEACH
WILLIAMS
. She barely registers the conversations about the vaccine program under way or the spike in voter approval ratings for the Oregon governor now that he has departed for the Republic.

She knows it is irresponsible of her, but after months of gut-
tangled
anxiety, she has momentarily lost herself to pleasure. She feels as she did, so many years ago, when traveling a nighttime highway with her parents. One minute they were tunneling through the black, listening to NPR—and the next minute, her
father
was wrenching the wheel, screaming, “Son of a bitch!” Out of the darkness tumbled bicycles. Dozens of them. Claire didn’t know this at the time, but up ahead, at seventy-five miles an hour, a trailer hitched to a church van on its way to the Northwoods had come undone. When it flipped and crashed against the asphalt, bicycles spun every which way. Her father cranked the wheel hard right—and then left—dodging a pink Huffy, a white Trek—some of the bicycles skidding along with a trail of orange sparks, others bouncing wheel over wheel, haloed by their headlights only a second before vanishing. The red flash of a reflector. The dark rush of pavement. Their screams turned to laughter, when they swerved their way down the highway, thrilled and enchanted and somehow unscathed—alive!—after so many near misses.

The past week, she has joined them every night in the gym. The three men, all teaching assistants for Reprobus. The Pack, he calls them. They wore clothes at first, unsure how she would feel, but after two nights she said, “Can I trust you?” and Matthew said, “If we don’t have trust, we’re no different than the pure breeds.” She was fairly certain this was a line stolen from Reprobus—who was always muttering platitudes and prophecies that felt somehow half-baked and devastatingly true—but if so, it was a good line and one worth repeating, because that was one of the things most lacking in her life, trust.

She stripped naked and they did the same. A guttural rumbling filling their throats. She knew, if she was going to be all college textbooky, that modesty was a by-product of human intelligence, irrelevant when the animal took over. Transformation was all about tapping into impulse, forgetting about what was outside you. She knew this. She did. But she still felt, with her clothes in a pile at her feet, as if she might throw up.

The hours spun away on the wall clock as she ripped at the heavy bags, leapt over sawhorses, swung from ropes, eventually stumbling away from the gym feeling languid and frayed and emptied, as if she had just screamed her way through the greatest orgasm in world history. She has forgotten the goodness of letting go, unleashing herself. How the adrenaline rushing through her feels like the hit of some delicious drug. How coordinated every sensation becomes. She remembers reading, in an anatomy and physiology course, about how the senses operate at different speeds—the mind processes light more slowly than sound—and then tastes and smells, slower still. That does not feel true any longer, every signal seeming to spark her brain at once.

Does she think of Patrick? She does. But not so much, not anymore. He is part of another world, and this is her world. Matthew is right now, right here. When she thinks of Patrick, she wonders whether she was simply starved and knows that the starved, with no standards of taste, will hunger for anything—dirt, a browned banana, a half-eaten sandwich pilfered from a garbage can.

Waking up is difficult. So is completing her homework. Her joints feel full of ground bits of glass. Her toothbrush comes away from her mouth bloody, so she sticks to mouthwash. She tells Andrea she has met a boy. Every morning, a few minutes before class, she rolls out of bed and pancakes her face with makeup to hide the bruises, then rushes off.

For this reason she misses the news about the Howling Bill.

It isn’t until she walks through the light snow that has fallen overnight and makes the campus sparkle like white fire—it isn’t until after she kicks off her boots and enters the auditorium—it isn’t until after she looks for Matthew and spots him conferring at the front of the room with Reprobus—that she notices the upset buzz of conversation around her. It isn’t until she takes her seat and unzips her bag and observes Reprobus climb to the stage and cross his hands over his belly and address them in a solemn voice that she realizes something terrible has happened.

“We are at an interesting juncture,” he says and waits for silence to settle over the room. “History is being made. History that will one day be taught in this very course, assuming this university continues to exist, which I very much hope for but very much doubt all the same. Yesterday, Congress rushed the bill, an amendment to the Patriot Act, using a procedural trick normally reserved for noncontroversial laws. They made significant changes from an earlier version, never making the new draft available for public review prior to the vote. Only two representatives voted against it. The bill now goes forward to the Senate, where it is expected to pass.”

The snow in her hair melts and drips to her shoulders and lap. She takes out her pen but there is nothing to write, so she holds it like a knife.