Red Moon (36 page)

She leaves her suitcase yawning open on top of her bed.

She has come to learn his habits. By seven o’clock every morning he has already gone for his morning stroll and picked up his coffee from the union and will now be in his office reading the paper or grading essays and readying his next lecture.

The door is half-open and she can see him at his desk—an old library table, he once told her, crosshatched with ink and anchored by a Smith-Corona typewriter—with a newspaper spread before him and a dead pipe clamped in his mouth. The walls are lost behind bookshelves and old protest posters ragged and curled at their edges. The overhead light is off, but a jade-green desk lamp glows next to him and pools the room with shadows and brightens his glasses, which turn to observe her now.

Her stomach is an acidic pit of indecision. She knocks at the door even as she steps through it. He lowers the paper until it crinkles in his lap. “Miriam,” is all she has to say, and he brings a finger to his lips.

He pinches a pencil from a coffee mug full of them and scratches down on a piece of paper,
Not safe. Not here.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says.

The morning is still shadowy; the sun hasn’t won the sky. And the campus buildings, in this early wrap of winter, appear the leached gray of tombstones. A few students and professors wander about, most with coffee steaming in their hands, but otherwise, the campus is empty, the ground salted with snow and the grass frozen in white blades that crunch beneath her boots when she strays off the pathway, trying to walk beside Reprobus but finding it difficult because of his size and his meandering gait.

Minutes before, when she handed him the envelope, when he studied the fingers with the bit of bone peeking out of their bottoms, she wondered if he would cry or shout or swing a fist at the air helplessly—his expression was difficult to read beneath his beard—but he only handed her back the package and sparked a match to the bowl of his pipe and blew out a sigh of smoke.

“I’m going to leave,” she says. “I’m going to find her.”

“What makes you think she’s alive?”

She can’t say, not for sure. A sense. For so long Puck has wanted her. Now, at last, she is his. Like a man on the verge of sexual rapture, he will want to prolong his satisfaction.

Reprobus looks straight ahead when he says, “And then what?”

Again he bullies her off the path and she nudges him back with her shoulder and says, “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

His pipe tobacco sizzles with every breath. The sun passes between some clouds and their shadows blink in and out of sight before them. “Something is happening,” he says. “I’m not sure what. Scrutiny and suspicion of William Archer as an institution is nothing new. But there have been government cars in the east parking deck, men in suits wandering through Admissions, Accounting, IT, the provost’s office.”

There it is again, the urge to run. There is a battle to fight here, and another to fight for Miriam, and she can’t get caught up between the two. “I’m sorry, but right now it’s hard for me to care about any of that.”

“I understand. But remember—this moment is bigger than you and bigger than Miriam. We’re under attack. We, as in the university. We, as in you and I. We, lycans.”

The frost crumbles beneath her boots as if she were walking on a fragile shell, and the lights begin to blink on in the buildings around them as students crawl out of bed and professors boot up their office computers and janitors collect yesterday’s garbage.

“What do you think I should do?”

“You don’t know where Miriam is?”

“I think she’s in the Seattle area. Based on the postmarks. Otherwise, all I have to go on are these videos.”

“What about email? You mentioned that you’ve been in email contact?”

“They don’t mention anything about where she is.”

“I was watching a television program the other night. One of those police procedurals. In it, they were able to find a runaway by an email she sent. Some sort of code hacker thing.” He holds out his hands and pretends his fingers are typing—the same way her father might have—the universal code of old men everywhere for the computer. “Do you know anyone who knows anything about that kind of stuff?”

She wakes Andrea by cracking a can of Diet Coke next to her ear and then handing it to her when she groggily props herself up in bed, one eye still shut and mascara smearing her cheeks. It takes another five minutes of half-answered questions—Where was she last night? What’s with the suitcase?—before Claire can get to explaining what she needs.

“No problem,” Andrea says, her hair in a tangle. She crushes the now empty can and lets it fall to the mess on the floor.

Claire opens her laptop and calls up the email and forwards it to Andrea. She remembers Reprobus’s hesitation to speak in his office—she remembers what Miriam said about the Wi-Fi network on campus—but at this point, as she sees it, there is nothing to lose.

Andrea has powered up her computer and pulled back her hair into a ponytail. She pinches her mouth now into a button when Claire asks what she’s going to do. “So let’s say I am at Taco John’s and tapping into their Wi-Fi. That means I get an IP address from them. I then send an email from Taco John’s—and you get it. To figure out where it came from, you can just go all the way down the email and figure out the first received. That’s the one that’s farthest down. So I can look at that IP address—in this case 75.402.157.195—and it will correspond with the location.”

“So do it.”

“I was about to. Until you annoyingly made me explain all of that.”

“Do it.”

“I’m doing it.” Her hands hover over the keyboard.

“What?”

Her tongue makes a hesitant clicking sound against the top of her mouth. “Of course, if the person didn’t want to be found, they could easily spoof this without trying too hard. It’s like a pay-phone analogy. Telecom can tell you the incoming number and where the phone is with that number as far as their records know. Doesn’t mean I can’t unbolt the pay phone and call from some other place in town.”

“How do we know if it’s a spoof?”

“I can tell you whether this IP exists or not, and if it does, you can tell me whether the location makes sense.”

She opens up a website called IP2Location and plugs in the address and a Starbucks in Tacoma pops up.

“That’s it,” Claire says. “That’s the right location.”

Andrea asks if Claire has anything more and Claire says not really. “Just a video.”

“Show me.”

Andrea downloads both the discs and converts and compresses them through a program called Prism and opens them in two small windows and watches them simultaneously, dragging her cursor across them—pausing, jogging back, jogging forward, pausing again.

When Puck’s hand appears in the foreground of the video and rakes the air, she says, “That’s really fucking creepy.”

She asks repeatedly for more information and Claire tells her she can’t. Not because she doesn’t trust her, but because if she shared any more, they would both be in danger. “Right now, you’re just helping me decipher a video. Nothing illegal about that.”

Andrea stares at her for a long few seconds. “Look at you, all black ops and shit.” She readjusts her scrunchie. “Fine.”

She opens up Google. Plugs in “Tacoma, motels.” Dozens of listings pop up. She switches over to maps. The screen turns half-blue with Puget Sound, the Tacoma area fingering into it, lined white and black with roads. Orange dots indicate the many motels sprinkled throughout the city. “She’s near freshwater. So we can eliminate most of these.”

“How do you even know she’s near water?”

Andrea drags the bar at the base of the video and halts on a still frame of Miriam pumping out a set of pull-ups on the playground equipment. She jacks up the zoom 300 percent and drags the screen until it fills with a mass of sagging green branches, one of many weeping willows that edge the park. “Duh.”

Andrea says her aunt looks ripped but still probably wouldn’t run more than ten miles at a time, right? Not in this kind of weather?

Claire says she can’t say for sure. Her aunt is an unusual woman.

“We’ll start there anyway.” Andrea narrows the motels down to eleven based on their nearness to rivers and lakes, almost all of which butt up against parks. She switches over to satellite view and drops down to street level. Here is a motel called the Dew Drop Inn with a concrete porch and yellow-brick walls. Then the Tacoma Inn. The Rainier Inn. The Cascade Motel. No, she says. No. No. Nope. She rushes up to a cloud’s point of view and then down to a sidewalk so quickly, trampolining from address to address.

In this way Andrea eliminates every hotel except for three that don’t have satellite feeds. “Guess we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

She switches her iPhone to speaker and plugs in one phone number, and then another, asking the clerks how many rooms they have—seven the number she’s looking for—unless they have more than one building?

Claire realizes her teeth ache from steadily clenching her jaw. She is ready to give up when Andrea calls the last number, the Bigfoot Motel.

A voice clawed out by cigarettes answers and Andrea asks how many rooms they have.

“Available or total?” the voice says.

“Total.”

“Seven.”

Claire feels something come to life inside of her then, like those ink-wash clouds flickering with electricity that sometimes hung over Wisconsin and boiled into something significant or dispersed into a wash of gray tendrils.

“What does your motel look like?”

“What do you mean what does it look like? It looks like a motel.”

“Is it brown?”

“Yeah, it’s brown. What do you care what color it is?”

“I love brown motels, okay? They’re awesome. And you’re near some woods?”

“Yeah. You love woods too?”

“Yes, I love woods. Can you by chance list off who is staying with you presently? Pretty please?”

“No.”

Claire leans in to the phone and says, “Has anybody checked out on you unexpectedly? Like, in the past week or two?”

“That happens so often I can’t even tell you. You want a room or not?”

Andrea severs the connection and highlights the address. “That’s it. Bigfoot Motel.”

Claire reaches out a hand, open palmed, and Andrea slaps it. The sound hangs in the air and then they say, at the same instant, “Thanks,” and “You’re welcome.”

“You know I used to think you were dumb?” Claire says.

“You know I used to think you were a prude snob bitch monster?”

Claire smiles, but the smile dies, any good humor distracted by a yellow ignition within her no different from lightning. Everything suddenly feels like a double: the two fingers, the two videos, the two names she answers to, the sun and the moon, the infected and the uninfected, the United States and the Republic, the president and his contender, Matthew and Patrick, Reprobus and Miriam. She feels—the world feels—split down the center.

P
ETER DRIVES TRUCK
. Most of the time he works for Amazon, hauling containers packed tight with books and DVDs and clothes and whatever junk people buy online, but sometimes he does independent contracting and sometimes that means hauling from the trains or the docks. A few years ago, for forty-four grand, he bought his own truck, a 2007 Freightliner, a Columbia 120, big white dinosaur—dwarfs his house when he parks it out front—with gray smoke tendrils stenciled along the side. Ten-speed transmission, air-ride suspension, double-bunk sleeper, 515 horsepower, and rear-axle capable of hauling forty thousand pounds. He’s got more than half a million miles on the odometer, mostly statewide miles, but the thing looks brand-new. He waxes it, even talks to it sometimes when running a rag along its monstrous grille, picking the bugs out of its teeth.

They called him. Said they found his number on the independent truckers site. Said they wanted him to haul a container due on the docks November 1, day after the trick-or-treaters scuzz up the streets with their candy wrappers and the pumpkins on porches sink inward like old toothless men. Drop-off point, an Olympia address, maybe 120 miles roundtrip. Yeah, he could do it, no problem.

It was an easy job, they said, and they were right. Funny thing was, they didn’t pay like an easy job. Three Gs for three hours’ worth of work. He was quiet after he heard that, and the voice on the other end of the line, as high-pitched as the shriek of an air brake, said, “We would appreciate your discretion.” He knew not to ask questions. He could use the green. That’s why he got into the independent contracts after all, sometimes putting in sixty hours a week or more. He had his eye on one of those HD LCDs at Walmart. The picture on those things, better than real life.

But a part of him can’t help but wonder, when he latches onto his rig the orange rusted container still smelling like the ocean, when he raises a hand through the open window to wave at the controller, when he grumbles up to speed and passes the squad cars always waiting outside the security checkpoint for random screenings, if he might be in over his head. His GTW was under ten thousand pounds, a light load. He could be hauling a bomb; he could be hauling whores; he could be hauling a hundred bricks of black-tar heroin for all he knew. And if he got pulled over? His ass.

He snaps off the CB so that he can think and lays down the hammer, hoping to get this job done and the bird home to roost before
Monday Night Football
. This is the end of the day—just after five, just after the docks close down for the night and the union foams up the bars with their beer pitchers and whiskey chasers—and the sun has already sunk from the sky. The wind picks up, and when the wind picks up, he feels it, the truck knocked around by the big gusts so that his wrist starts to ache from constantly readjusting the wheel.

He’s got GPS in the rig but called up the address on MapQuest earlier, a gravel lot near a wrecking yard out in the boonies. The voice warned him about the chain-link fence but promised him the gate would be unlocked—and it is, the deadbolt yanked open, the hook of it like a talon. The place is maybe a quarter acre, the wrecking yard to one side, thick woods around the rest of it, trash caught up in the fencing, empty except for a few trucks and cars parked with the weeds growing up around them. He bumps through some puddles from yesterday’s storm and decides here is as good a place as any.

He kills the engine, climbs out of the cab, shoves his fists into the small of his back and massages the hurt, like a bunch of watery marbles shoved between the chinks of his vertebrae, that grows steadily worse year after year and sometimes makes getting out of bed in the morning a goddamn curse. A sodium-vapor lamp buzzes over near the wrecking yard. The air is unseasonably warm, fine for a T-shirt, maybe even a little sticky. The pressure system has shifted; something is blowing through, which usually means
trouble
.

It’s then that he hears—or thinks he hears—a shifting in the container. Though it’s hard to tell, with the wind gusting and the weeds rattling and the gravel crunching under his boots. He pauses where he stands and leans toward the container and waits a long minute.

There it is again, a rasping, like a file drawn across metal.

He’s read stories in the papers about sex workers shipped over from Russia asphyxiating into a tangle of swollen blue bodies. He hopes he’s not part of something like that. He hopes he hasn’t gotten himself into some shit.

He knows he should gun his way out of here, put the container in his rearview, but his curiosity gets the best of him. He makes his way to the rear and unbolts the lock. His hand grips the handle for a long, white-knuckled thirty seconds and then he says fuck it and swings open the door and inside finds tall stacks of cardboard boxes.

Their labels, from a medical supply company, read
IODINE
. A narrow corridor inky with shadow runs down their middle. He calls out, “Hello?” and feels like one of those idiots from the horror movies who ends up descending into the creepy basement when really they ought to be running to their car, slamming the locks, smashing the accelerator.

He keeps a penlight on his key chain and he clicks it on now. It gives off a weak white glow. He hoists himself into the container and works his way forward. He walks sideways, sucking in a pillow-size gut, and still barely fits, his body rasping against the cardboard. As he guessed, the container has a false wall, maybe ten feet short of the end. He knocks his fist against it and it makes a hollow bong and again he says, “Hello?” He doesn’t like how big and tinny his voice sounds in here, like it belongs to somebody else. He jogs the flashlight along the wall and peers around the boxes and spots to his left a slight square recess, what he believes to be a sliding door.

Part of him feels creeped, but another part of him feels convinced that on the other side of that wall he’s going to find a cabin full of sluts like he sometimes chats with online, all tattoos and purple lace underwear and dark roots showing beneath their blond dye jobs and stretch marks marbling their double-D implants. This is enough to motivate him through the next five minutes of hoisting boxes—each at least twenty pounds and rattling with what sounds like pills—to the open end of the container. He breathes hard, soaks his shirt through with sweat, and scolds himself, as he does every day, for not getting more exercise. Maybe with the rest of the money he’ll buy one of those Bowflex things from the infomercials, set it up in front of the new big-screen, rip out some sets while watching
SportsCenter
. He imagines himself with the etched, veiny body of one of those actors on TV and he imagines next to him, staring at his new figure admiringly, one of those Russian sluts in purple lace that might be waiting for him beyond these few inches of metal.

A space has been cleared; the waist-high door has been revealed. He can hear his breath whistling through his nostrils and tries to calm it. He slaps the door twice, waits. When he hears no response, he crouches down and presses his ear to it. The metal is cold against his cheek. Maybe he hears something, but maybe it’s just the wind gasping outside.

He gives the door a tentative push. It gives way and creaks open. He smells something feral, like deer pellets and wet dog hair and ditch water gone stagnant. At first he can discern only a black square. He holds out the penlight and tries to battle back the shadows. Then he hears a shuffling as something advances, a figure that looks, moving from darkness into light, as if it is emerging from a half-developed photograph.

“My God,” he says. It is the last thing he ever says.

The light sputters out. Thunder mutters. Wind hisses. It carries the smell of Puget Sound, the reek of algae glopping the docks and the seaweed strewn along the rocks like clumps of hair pulled from drains. Somewhere, a rusty hinge cries out, a door slams. A plastic bag twists by, skittering along the gravel and then hurled into the sky, where clouds churn. The world seems to be vibrating.

A black Ford Expedition has pulled into the gravel lot and Jonathan Puck and Morris Magog have stepped out of it. Puck stands with his arms crossed and Morris holds by the hook a freshly tailored suit that next to him appears as if it might fit a child. His long red hair and his black leather duster sway with the rising wind.

They can hear a noise. The noise of something moving in the container. Footsteps that against the metal floor bang like hooves. And then the figure appears—a man, an older man—naked and painted in blood. But he does not grunt wildly or cover himself modestly. He appears perfectly in control of himself when he drops down and walks toward them with his posture erect and a smile beginning to form on his face. One of his eyes is ruined and the other unused to the light, the pupil dilated, black like a speck of ash. “At long last,” he says.

Puck bows his head slightly when he says, “Master.”