Red Moon (34 page)

The press conference will take place in a room with an angled ceiling and three concrete walls, the fourth made from floor-to-ceiling windows that glow with pale winter light and look out onto a snowy field that stretches to the chain-link perimeter. A plastic ficus tree anchors every corner, and five rows of aluminum folding chairs have been positioned before a podium.

Fifteen minutes before the press conference—after the mike check, after the Republic and U.S. flags are hung, after the video tripods are arranged at the rear of the room, after the diplomats and dignitaries, hair-sprayed and cologned and wearing dark blue suits, begin to arrive—Chase says he will be right back. He needs to hit the head, lose a cup of coffee.

One of the executives—a thick-shouldered man with a porcupine of a beard—says, “I will show you.”

“Don’t bother. I can hold my own prick.”

Sometimes Chase doesn’t know he’s made a joke until someone laughs, the laughter now uncomfortable and following him from the room and down the hall. He pushes into the bathroom, tiled yellow with two naked bulbs screwed into the ceiling. There is a sink and a stall and a urinal, all of them marbled with veins of mold. He unzips and lets loose a pungent orange jet of urine. The Volpexx affects him worse than asparagus.

The speech will roll on the teleprompter, but he has never been good with tracking, so he always tries to remember as much as he can. He recalls some of the key phrases—
strategic energy planning
,
uranium is the new gold
—and so barely registers the door creaking open behind him. He shakes off and tucks himself in and observes in the tile the reflection of a man sliding toward him with his arms out.

Chase jerks around in time for the man to impact his chest. What he sees next is like a deck of cards tossed upward. Black hair. Teeth gnashing, bubbling with blood. The ceiling tilting back, the lightbulb flaring. Sharp-nailed fingers scrabbling toward him. A tumor bulging out of a neck. Somewhere, amid this flash of images, he remembers the wet floor they skated across earlier that afternoon, the janitor clutching his mop and edging against the wall to let them pass. And somehow—as he falls, in his seemingly endless descent—Chase manages to cry out, “I’m one of you!” before slamming against the floor, his head cracking the concrete and dulling his mind.

The lycan is on top of him. He can see his panicked reflection in its eyes, can smell its bloody breath playing over his face, can feel the fingers lacing around his neck, squeezing. He feels as though he is sucking air through a straw. His vision blackens at the edges; just before it collapses altogether, the bathroom door swings open and the lieutenant comes in with his hand already at his zipper.

He keeps his hand there but does not pause in his approach, hurrying forward to swing a leg and kick the lycan in the ribs. There is a sound like sticks snapping. The lycan yelps and releases his grip and Chase drags in a few ragged breaths through a throat that feels like it has been struck by a dull-bladed guillotine.

By now the lieutenant has drawn back his boot again—and kicks the lycan in the temple. There is no yelp this time. Only a damp thud. The lycan rolls off Chase and lies still a moment before scampering to the corner, a whimpering ball.

The lieutenant is by his side now, touching him all over as if his hands could heal. “Did he get you?”

Chase tries to speak and can’t. He swallows hard. “Nope.” His voice toadish. “Good.”

The lieutenant does not say anything. His forehead is pleated with deep lines. He is studying Chase’s hand. There is blood there. The heat of a wasp’s sting. Chase brings it to his face. There, along the meaty bulge below his thumb, the clear imprint of teeth, as if he were some soft candy tested and disliked.

There is no arguing with the lieutenant. He has been bitten. He will need to be treated and tested. And when the blood work comes back positive, everything will be different; all of this will be over. He sits for a long time, staring at the wound, before rising slowly from the floor. His throat feels collared by hot iron. There is a sound in his head, a sputtery hum, like an electrical short.

“Gun,” Chase says and holds out his hand.

“What?”

He gestures impatiently. “Gun!”

The lieutenant unholsters his pistol and offers it butt-first to Chase, who holds it in his hand a moment and observes on the black barrel the vanishing whorl of a fingerprint.

Chase thinks about how easy it would be to bring the pistol to his mouth, whistle a breath, pull the trigger, and end all of this. The secret of his infection, the static that fuzzes his thoughts, and the disquieting sense that the more powerful he becomes, the less he controls and desires. He should just shoot himself. He should just shoot himself and make it all go away.

The idea is short-lived.

He raises the pistol and fires into the lieutenant’s face and observes the scar along his upper lip twitch in surprise before the top half of his skull opens up and blood slides from it and churns down his face and neck like a red snake before he topples to the floor.

Chase has only a few seconds now. They will have heard the gunshot. They are already coming. They are almost here.

He goes to the lycan, and the lycan, run through with adrenaline, remains transformed. A pink mess of blood and tears dampens its cheeks. It holds up its hand—and the hand trembles as if controlled incompletely. How fragile it looks, how slight of wrist and thin fingered. It is hard to imagine its cruel strength, wrapped around his throat a moment before, squeezing. Then Chase looks closer and notices the nail, yellow and long.

Chase keeps the gun steady and imagines what he looks like from below, from the lycan’s vantage point, his body stepping forward now, blotting away the lightbulb overhead. The pistol swings enormously into view, allowing the lycan to observe the black, gaping maw of the chamber. When he squeezes, the trigger will give with a snap, like the striking of a match. And then the pistol will jump back and a bullet will leap from the muzzle, but the lycan will never see it move, already elsewhere.

T
HE VIDEO INSTANTLY
goes viral. Somehow, someone snuck a smart phone into solitary confinement, and Jeremy Saber has recorded and uploaded a five-minute rant. He is barely recognizable—in part because of the grainy image and in part because his hair has been shaved down to stubble and his face appears sunken, black hollowed; he is a wraith of a man. “I have nothing to lose. I have no political office to gain, no money to make, no power to attain.” His voice is whispery and interrupted by a cough—but resolute. “So please listen to me when I say that you must resist. You must. You cannot roll over. You cannot obey. You cannot play the bad dog they want you to play. Do you know how many lycan attacks occur in the country every year? Eleven. Less than a dozen. More people are attacked by sharks. But that’s not how they’re treating us. So we might as well live up to their expectations. Fight back. Bite back. The public registry and the abolishment of antidiscrimination laws are equivalent to hate crimes. They are crimes against humanity. Lycans are human. We are
human
.”

The T-shirts appear soon thereafter. They are handed out in malls, on street corners, in schools. They are handed out at William Archer—in the post office and cafeteria—and they read
HUMAN
in black lettering across the chest. Posters and evites and chalked sidewalks announce that everyone should gather on the quad at noon. Claire does not have a Facebook account—Miriam forbade her from opening one—but Andrea shows her how everyone has changed their profile picture to a raised fist and updated their status with a single word,
Solidarity
.

On the horizon, banks of cement- and plum-colored clouds boil and blur the air with what must be snow or sleet, but the sky over the campus is clear when Claire and Matthew join several hundred students on the quad.

There is something different about him, Matthew. It is less the way he looks and more the way he carries himself: he is less unfinished than most of the other boys, more a man. Her heart whirs when he touches her, as he does now, guiding her by the elbow into the mass of students. She feels protected by him. And with threatening packages appearing in her mailbox and strange visitors asking about her on campus, when she knows she is being watched but not by whom, protection is what she wants.

The day is cold and their breath steams from their mouths, like something boiling over. The media are waiting for them. Similar protests are going on all over the country—in parks and town squares—but the William Archer organizers sent an announcement to every major news outlet, and they have responded and the focus is here. Dozens of reporters corral the mass of students. Their cameras and microphones carry the logos of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC.

There are no chants, no speeches. There is no march. The students simply stand in place—in relative silence—while the reporters thumb in their earpieces and chatter into their microphones. Claire can hear the
rip-rip-rip-rip
of cameras firing off shots at shutter speed, can hear people coughing, stomping their feet to kick the cold out of them, can hear a boy she recognizes from her calculus class—long hair, Birkenstocks, ankh tattoo on the back of his neck—talking to a reporter with a video camera aimed at him like a cannon.

“We just want to be ourselves, you know. We just want to be ordinary and treated like anybody else. You can’t let the few define the many. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy didn’t make the world turn against all thirty-something white males as a bunch of crazy-ass serial killers. We’re not a bunch of terrorists—we’re just people.”

“You don’t think you’re dangerous?”

“I think
people
are dangerous. Period. I’m not going to bite anybody. I don’t want to bite anybody. Why would I want to do that? That’s messed up. You’d have to be crazy to do that, just like you’d have to be crazy to shoot up a school or bomb a building. It’s just a matter of being human. Some of us are mean. It’s like my professor was saying the other day—humanity is a flawed creation—all of us are all different kinds of fucked up.”

“Who is your professor?”

“Reprobus. Professor Reprobus. He’s the
man
.”

“Did he have anything to do with organizing this?”

The student goes silent for a beat before saying quietly, “No.”

Through the wall of reporters, on the steps of the union, with the bruised banks of clouds gathering overhead, Claire spots the blond boy from her class. Francis. He is more than sixty yards away but easy to recognize with his standard uniform of a collared shirt and chinos. He is looking in their direction with a cell phone pressed to his ear. His mouth is moving, the hole of it black, as he tells someone about them.

At a protest in Berkeley, on the central green of the campus, the police gather in a long line. They wear riot gear—black body armor that exaggerates and squares their musculature—and they hold their batons two-handed, at their sides and aimed forward, like the spears of some ancient army. One of them lifts a bullhorn to his mouth. It squawks. His voice booms through it when he says everyone in the area must immediately disperse and anyone who remains will be arrested and anyone who resists arrest will be dealt with accordingly. Then he drops the bullhorn and waits. One person gathers up his backpack and takes off running. The rest of the two dozen protesters remain in place. They hold homemade signs made of cardboard boxes and wobbly poster paper that read
ENOUGH!
and
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL
and
THIS SHIT IS FUCKED
. They cross their arms. And they remain in that posture even when the police begin, in a line, to march toward them.

At a protest in New York, in Central Park, near the zoo, one hundred people have set up a tent city. They—lycans and nonlycans alike, many of them twenty-somethings with ratty beards and wool caps and army surplus backpacks—will occupy the park until their demands are met. “What are your demands?” a reporter asks them, and they say, “An end to second-class citizenship,” and when the reporter asks them to be more specific, one of them says, “I haven’t seen my family for seven months because I can’t get on a plane,” and another says, “I’ve been told to look for new work in the New Year,” and still another says, “I ordered a burger and a beer at a bar the other day, and when they saw my ID, they asked me to leave.” When the squad cars roll up, flashing their red-and-blues, the protesters form a seated circle around the tent city and link their arms. The cops give them a thirty-minute warning, and when it expires, they pull on their goggles and shake their cans of pepper spray and calmly walk around the tent city and soak the faces of those seated along its perimeter—one by one by one—until their bodies wither and the air sharpens with screaming.

At a protest in Oxford, Mississippi, in the shadow of city hall, two groups assemble: demonstrators on either side of the issue. They yell at each other, spit, shove. The police have laid construction cones between them but otherwise remain separate from the gathering, leaning against their squad cars, their thumbs hooked into their belts, watching. And they continue to watch even when someone lobs a brick, a bottle, when a fistfight breaks out, when the crowd surges one way, then another, when a man falls underfoot, when blood is spilled.

On C-SPAN, a Democratic congressman from California speaks on the House floor about the precedent of the past. “Have there been unprovoked lycan attacks? There have. Every year there are a few. Usually someone who is unstable. Off their meds. They bite somebody. And then? Does that person, once bitten, go wild and bite somebody else who bites somebody else who bites somebody else? Of course not. We do not live in a world where some crazed wolfman is going to jump out of the bushes. The infected seek help. They solve their problem. They control the disease that can lead to harmful impulses. Nothing needs to change. The system is not broken. A few terrorists have made us believe otherwise. They are the problem. We need to hunt them down and bring them to justice. That should be our focus. Not these measures we are taking, which will not increase our safety, which will instead provoke an otherwise nonbelligerent, law-abiding people.” He pauses here, waiting for applause that does not come.

And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an older woman named Mattie Spencer scratches out a grocery list on a slip of paper and puts on her favorite purple jacket and gathers her purse and punches the garage door opener and there they are. Maybe twenty of them. She clutches her keys and they spike between her swollen knuckles like a weapon. The figures are wearing black ski masks and they are scattered across the driveway and the lawn and the sidewalks and the street, as still as statues.

She feels her expression shift along with her heart as she feels confusion and then recognition and then horror. A trembling runs through her body and her voice when she says, “What do you want?”

One of the men—they are all men as far as she can tell—says, “We saw you on the website. Saw you on the registry.”

She thinks she recognizes the voice and the build of the man and says as much, “Joel? Is that you, Joel Rawlings? You’ve seen me most days of your life and never had a problem.”

The man takes a step back and looks up and down the street.

She shakes her keys at them. “You come after me, threatening me, and what does that change?” Finally she says, “Well?”

They don’t know what they’ve come for—except to lash out at something—but maybe seeing her now, with her round face and shivering dimpled chin, makes them realize she isn’t what they are looking for after all.

“Bunch of fools,” she says.

Slowly she retreats to the back of the garage and hits the button and the door jars down, and when it does, none of the masked figures make a move to stop her.

Later, at William Archer, after the students disperse, after the six o’clock news airs, after rolled-up rubber-banded newspapers thump onto front porches, a long line of pickups come barreling up the hill and through campus, revving their engines and blaring their horns and flashing their lights. They hurl eggs and beer cans out their windows. They slide around corners with blue smoke rising from their tires. They rock over curbs and do doughnuts in the grass. They run students off the sidewalks before tearing down the hill again, the smell of exhaust lingering like a fired gun.

Claire watches this from the patio of the union. The tables are empty and barnacled with ice, a black cavity at their center from the sun umbrellas long ago tied off and toted to storage. She and Matthew, drawn outside by the noise of revving engines, hold paper cups of coffee steaming in their hands. They watch the fleet of pickups, jacked-up Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s with floodlights along the roof, until their coffee has gone cold, the bitterness pronounced.

They return inside to gather their things, to return to the dorms, and Claire says she wants to first stop by the PO. They pass a few students wearing
HUMAN
shirts and whispering harshly to each other—otherwise, they are alone, their footsteps echoing down the marble hallway.

She kneels at the bank of mailboxes and spins the dials and hears the tumblers fall into place. She yanks her box open. Above her a light flickers on and off with an insectile buzz. Her mind is elsewhere, so it takes a moment to register the manila envelope crammed into the slot. It catches and tears when she draws it out. She fits her finger into the tear—noting the postmark, noting the name, “Hope Robinson,” in letters that look slashed by a sword—and rips open the package. There is an odd weight to it and a bulge at its center. When she reaches inside, she does not understand at first what she has, a quart-size ziplock bag rolled up, and within it, something red and familiar.

And then she understands. And then she begins to scream.