Red Moon (38 page)

But he is twice her size and she knows his breast bulges with a nylon holster.

Still, she cannot stay here, cannot simply hide. Every nerve in her body says no, but she ignores good sense. She needs to know why he has come. If for her, and that must be the reason, then at least she will know. She will know where he is and she will know what he wants. Knowing will make her more powerful than cowering in her room.

She leaves the laundry and pushes out the door, where she loses her breath to the cold and almost turns back for her coat upstairs. She doesn’t have the time, she knows, so she hurries forward in sneakers and sweatpants and a hoodie, pulling the hoodie over her head for warmth and camouflage. She keeps her face down, pretending to look at her feet, though her eyes strain upward, tracking him, waiting for him to sense her and swivel on his heel. She imagines him pointing at her, his mouth widening, an alarm blaring from it—and from all around campus droves of men in black Kevlar will swarm toward her.

No stars. The sky churns with big-bellied clouds that look as if they might snow soot. It is early evening and the walkways are busy with students heading to dinner. When he threads between them, Claire expects them to turn and look at the Tall Man, recognize the enemy among them, but they seem not to notice. A suited adult on a college campus is nearly invisible—a professor, an administrator, an irrelevance.

She isn’t sure, but he might be whistling. The farther they walk, the more she regrets following him. The more she feels as if she is underwater. She feels as if she is underwater in a dark river and a current is muscling her deeper and deeper, an undertow that will press her against the muddy bottom and hold her there until she dies. What can she possibly accomplish—an unarmed girl in sweatpants?

There is a windmill stabbed into the hillside over campus. She can see it now, its red light blinking through the snow. It belongs to William Archer and she remembers during orientation hearing something about how it supplied six million kilowatt-hours of energy, nearly a third of what the campus needs every year. She walked up there once, just for the sake of walking, and at its base she could hear the electricity coursing through the
stanchion
.

She slows her pace when he takes a sharp right onto the walkway that leads into the administrative building, Skinsheer Hall, a limestone rectangle with a domed rotunda. He climbs the stairs two at a time and swings open the heavy oaken door, which sends the snow whirling and thunks closed.

She approaches the short stone stairs that lead into the building. In the snow she can see his footsteps leading to the door and stands where he did a moment ago. The tip of his toe reaches another five inches beyond hers. She pauses here, uncertain how far she is willing to go, when one of the windows darkens briefly with a silhouette.

She makes certain the walkways are empty, then climbs past the hedges and tries to ignore the snow that bites and numbs her ankles. She creeps up to the window that glows with orange light. She is just tall enough to peer in between the two rich red curtains that frame the glass.

She sees a tall wooden bookshelf neatly arranged with leather-bound volumes and curiosities such as an antique train and a shiny brass clock and a magnifying glass with what looks like a polished bone handle. And then a face appears before her so suddenly she almost screams.

It is Francis, the blond boy from her class. She is about to run when she realizes that he cannot see her, that the light inside reflects off the window, making it into a mirror. He is studying his reflection. She stands perfectly still when he leans into the glass and picks at a pimple on his chin. He stubbornly works at it until it bursts and bleeds. With a look of contentment on his face, he wipes at it, smearing the blood.

Then he startles and turns. He has heard something, a knock at a door she cannot see. He vanishes from his place at the window and now she can take in the rest of the room, a wide wooden desk squatting at the far end of it and facing outward. Here sits a man—one of the deans, she realizes, a short, white-haired man who always wears brown suits that bunch at the ankles and billow loosely around his middle—and he stands now to hold out his hand.

The Tall Man steps into view and the two of them do not shake hands so much as they grip each other forcefully. Then the dean pulls his hand away and tucks it into his pocket. They begin to talk. She is not certain what they say, but she can guess, from their stonelike expressions, from the way the dean seems to shrink inside his own skin, that it is nothing good.

Francis passes by the window again, still fingering the popped zit and speaking now on his cell phone. She does not feel particularly surprised at his presence here: he has always felt to her more shadow and bone than flesh and blood. He is an informer. She can hear his voice more clearly and makes out the words
imminent
and
campus shutdown
.

That is enough to send her racing into the night. Midway across campus she observes the windmill. Even now, from several hundred yards away, she can hear the hum, along with the blades
whir-whir-whirring
as they cut the air. A red light blinks a warning.

T
HE EXECUTION WILL
take place at eight p.m.—the very minute the presidential polls close.

The tribunal that convicted Saber deliberated less than an hour before recommending he be put to death. The defendant’s remorseless courtroom monologue—in which he questioned who the real monster was and demanded that lycans rise up against the American war machine—only convinced the tribunal that they made the right decision. The judge was permitted to reduce the death penalty to life without parole, but he did not. He imposed the sentence—and now, on this November evening, with ice in the air and stars in the sky, with no possibility of an appeal or stay of execution, the sentence will be carried out.

After the verdict was imposed, Jeremy was transferred thirty miles south of Denver, to the supermax detention center, a white-roofed, brick-walled structure with a lake of asphalt around it that spreads into brown-grass plains.

The crowd began gathering earlier that day, soon after the president released a statement that said, “Saber met the fate he chose for himself nearly a year ago. The matter will soon be concluded, and then our country can move on.” At first a few dozen people appeared, and then twice as many, and then twice as many more, every few minutes another vehicle pulling in, until the visitors’ lot was full and the cars and trucks began to park along the road they followed in from US 67. Some wore William Archer sweatshirts and some carried signs that read
RESISTANCE NOW
and
BETTER DEAD THAN DRUGGED
.

By lunch the guards had arranged themselves in a wall between the protesters and the facility. They wear riot gear—black hard-shell armor, goggles, helmets, pistols at their belts—and they hold their rifles diagonally before their chests. And by dinner a long line of squad cars, with their blue and red lights flashing, pressed through the crowd and parked in a defensive line and asked everyone, through a loudspeaker, to disperse. No one did.

At seven thirty, they begin to stomp. One foot and then the other. As if they are trying to kick their heels through the asphalt they stand upon, as if they are trying to crack the very shell of the earth. They know the noise can be heard for many miles, can be heard through the cement walls, can be heard by Jeremy Saber when he is escorted by the priest and the two guards down the long hall to the glass-walled execution chamber, his ankles and his wrists bound by hinged cuffs. Their stomping keeps its cadence, like the drumbeats that precipitate war, and when a few minutes later Jeremy is strapped into the chair and a stream of drugs is administered through a needle in his right leg, the noise will still be in his heart.

He found them online. Or maybe they found him. He was mouthing off in one of those Internet chat rooms when he got the request for a private chat and then one thing led to another and here he is, however many months later, piloting a Cessna single-engine Skyhawk through a rain-swept sky. It is a little hard to process.

His name is Marvin. No one ever remembered his name. He hated that. Hated that he was so forgettable. “You look like the most ordinary person in the world.” That’s what a girl named Tiffany once told him. He remembered her name. He hated her and for a long time imagined different ways to kill her—pushing her in front of a school bus, slamming her head repeatedly into her locker, strangling her with an athletic sock. He hated her and he hated school. He hated his stupid teachers and the stupid students and the stupid books in which the letters kept moving, crawling all over each other like ants.

But they remembered his name. They treated him like he was somebody. They gave him things. An Xbox, they gave him that. They gave him a gun, a Hardballer .45. For his eighteenth birthday, they gave him a woman. That was nice. Except that she wouldn’t kiss him even though she would let him do everything else. So he ended up just putting his mouth over hers and breathing into it. There have been many since then, most recently a black-haired woman whose sharp face makes him think of a bird. They keep her wrists and ankles handcuffed to a steel frame bed. He doesn’t mind that she spits, that she tries to bite him when he lies with her. He doesn’t mind that at all.

He trained for two months—the medical exam, the forty hours of flight time—and when he learned that it cost three thousand dollars he said he couldn’t possibly pay for that and they said not to worry. They would take care of him. He would never have to pay for anything again. That was nice. He had trouble reading the books, so they read the books to him. That was nice too, being read to. It made him feel like he was their child, like they were his parents. He could remember what he needed to remember—about ground check and throttling to two thousand rpm and checking your magnetos and suction and oil pressure and all that—but he had trouble putting the letters down. They had a copy of the test and they made him practice it over and over again until he got it right. When he got it right, they told him he was smart and he liked that. It was nice. He had never smiled so big in his whole entire life.

Everyone talks about Balor. Balor this, Balor that. He isn’t sure what to believe, but he likes to believe it all. That Balor punched a hand through a chest and tugged out a heart and took a bite of it like an apple. That Balor could rip a tree from its roots. That Balor could see things with his dead eye that others could not, could see right into your soul and know whether you believed or did not believe, so you had better believe. And he, Marvin, believed.

The engine whines and the propeller spins in a gray blur. He cruises along at eighty ktas with his hands tight around the yoke, trying to hold steady and correcting against light turbulence, keeping his eye on the directional and elevation, everything thrown off by the heavy payload he’s carrying. Yesterday, they unbolted the seat and filled the belly of the plane with C-4. A postdoc chemist made the C
₃
H
₆
N
₆
O
₆
in their basement lab, where they mixed the powder with water to make a slurry and then polyisobutylene to bind it and then they sucked out the water by drying and filtering and then added a plasticizer to make it gummy and the end result wasn’t so different from a bunch of gray Play-Doh. Marvin watched all this and understood it because science is something he understands so much better than those dumb novels and poems and plays his dumb English teacher is always assigning and talking about breathlessly as if they mattered and people didn’t spend all their time watching TV anyway.

At the moment of ignition, the C-4 releases nitrogen and carbon oxides that expand at more than twenty-six thousand feet per second and knock flat and rip to pieces anything and everything within its reach. Less than a pound of C-4 can reduce several people to meat. A little more than a pound can open up a truck like a soup can. In the fuselage behind him, he has more than five hundred pounds of clay. That’s a lot. That’s enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe.

They taught him all of this. They taught him so much. They taught him how to veer off his flight plan—from SeaTac to Tri-Cities—after about twenty minutes, when he neared the Columbia River, the timing such that the explosion ought to correspond roughly with the execution. They taught him to cut his lights. They taught him to ignore air traffic and snap off his radio. They taught him to bring the plane down to ten thousand feet and then five thousand and then two thousand feet and press the nose downward and aim for the black mouth of the Columbia Generating Station, at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

They taught him to ignore the fear that might take hold of him—his heart crashing, his body like a drum—and to remember that it would all be over soon. And then he would be in the newspaper. Then he would be a hero. Everyone would know his name. Even Tiffany.

The explosion will have two phases. First, the gases will expand like a terrible wind, but in doing so they will suck everything out of the heart of the explosion, which makes a vacuum. Second, after the initial blast, everything will rush back and create another energy wave. He likes the idea of that. He likes the idea of everything rushing toward him. All that energy channeled inward. For the next few days, months, years, he will be the center of the world.

He asked if many people would die, and they said yes. And he asked if even babies would die, and they said yes. “Sometimes,” they told him, “terrible things must be done.” Did he understand? He did.

He banks left and makes a yawing motion with the rudder and tries to eyeball the red blinking lights of the power plant over the nose of the plane. Once east of the Cascades, the rain lifted and he can clearly see the Columbia, a great black snake, and the gridwork of electricity next to it, the Tri-Cities, and then, closer by the second, the tiered stacks of buildings and the six steaming cones of the reactors that squat like giant mushrooms. He pitches the nose and reduces power and steadies the throttle as he heads toward them.

They are headed toward darkness. A black bank of clouds piles up on the Cascades. Though it is a moonless night, Claire can discern them from the way they blot out the stars. This is November 6, Election Day, and the clock reads 7:50 and a crumpled Burger King bag lies at her feet and she and Matthew are a few hours out of Spokane, just north of Yakima, crossing the scablands of eastern Washington on their way to Seattle. When she thinks about what is ahead and behind her, when she thinks about Jeremy’s execution, the burger she ate goes sour, and she fights the urge to empty the surge in her stomach.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’re in trouble. I want to help.”

“Is that your thing? Girl in danger?”

“Maybe.”

She makes a show out of rolling her eyes, though he can’t see her except by the glow of the dash.

She remembers one time, on a road trip to northern Minnesota with her parents, along Lake Superior, she squatted behind some dunes to pee. After she zipped up she noticed that three white butterflies had already drunk from the moist spot she left in the sand. They were beautiful, but as they drank greedily she wondered if their wings shuddered from pleasure or from poison. She cannot help but feel this way about the two of them, about whatever it is they have, which can’t possibly be sustainable. She is toxic. No good comes to anyone close to her.

He keeps jogging through the radio stations, mostly sermons and country songs, hunting for something about the election or the execution. She feels torn in too many directions at once and can only concentrate on the road ahead, on Miriam, on the possibility of finding her. She hears something over the radio, the buzz of a horsefly. Somehow it has survived the cold and stubbornly clings to life. It drones past her head, a greenish blur, and batters the windshield, looking for a way out. Matthew leans forward in his seat and swats at the windshield, missing, sending the fly into a wild buzzing panic. “Leave it,” she says.

Outside the window she can make out a browned-grass ditch and then miles of shorn wheat fields punctuated by the clustered lights of farms. The state is so divided, like Oregon, the high desert soon giving way to rain forest, where mushrooms and ferns press upward from the mossy earth. She looks forward to getting there, the greening of a world otherwise gone dun and gray. She reaches out and takes his big hand in hers. “Tell me things are going to turn out okay.”

“Things are going to turn out okay.” He squeezes her hand—and the pressure seems to send all the blood to her chest.

It is then, in a white flash, that the horizon explodes.