Red Moon (46 page)

By the time the meat is ready, the lycans are loose and drunk, nearly frenzied with hunger. They eat with abandon. Balor walks among them, shaking hands, grasping shoulders, laying his palm flat against cheeks. They ask him, won’t you eat? And he says soon, soon, but he wants first to make certain everyone is satisfied.

Eventually he situates himself at the heart of the amphitheater and waits there with his hands held before his heart until everyone goes silent. He thanks them. Not only for coming today, but for making such sacrifices, for serving a cause larger than themselves.

A spearhead of geese glides through the skyscrapers that surround them. Their reflections glimmer along the windows and their shadows stream across the square. Balor squints after them and smiles and then says that he is reminded of a story. The story is about a mother goose and her goslings. They were paddling across a pond one day when an osprey circled overhead. It began to dive. At that moment, the mother goose separated herself from her brood. She splashed and cried out noisily, crooking her neck and beating her wings unnaturally so as to appear injured. The osprey changed its course and bulleted into the mother goose and tore her to shreds. The water went red. The goslings lived. The goslings lived because of her sacrifice.

He speaks slowly, letting each word hang in the air before moving on to the next, and by the time he is finished, the coals in the fountain have reduced to ash and most of the lycans in the square now lie silent in various postures of death. They clutch their bellies or their silverware or the meat-speckled bones they gnawed on only moments before.

“Thank you,” he says, so quietly he can barely hear the words himself, “for your sacrifice.”

Magog rattles open the door to the semitrailer, revealing its empty black bed, and they begin to gather and load the bodies.

P
ATRICK BLASTS
down the middle of the highway, following the meridian through Bend, Redmond, Sisters. He swerves to avoid a dead horse, abandoned cars, fallen branches, mud and scree the spring rains dragged down chutes and across the road.

He guides the bike up and over the Cascade Range and eventually the road levels out in the Willamette Valley, where streams cut through the woods and pool in lowland marshes that give way to blackberry tangles, birch thickets, farmland overgrown with alfalfa and vineyards tangled with weeds, busy with birds that delight in the grapes.

He sees corn growing in straight rows, sees men in the fields with hoes, sees a woman riding a horse, sees a tractor trundling along with a gray scarf of exhaust trailing behind it. At the perimeter he interviewed lycans who spoke about living off the land, who claimed no allegiance to Balor, but this is the first he has seen of it.

He sits straight backed at first and then learns to yield to the road, feeling the asphalt as if he were walking along it, bending his body around turns, the handlebars like an extension of his body. The bike—its beetle-black sheen, its rounded muscular frame, its snarly muffler, its engine humming between his legs, its rich oil smell commingling with the swampy richness of Western Oregon—is a beautiful machine.

He softens the throttle when he enters Eugene. He sees everywhere the face of Chase Williams—on billboards and posters, tacked to trees and telephone poles, taped to the sides of buildings—sun faded and wind ragged and rain blotched. Bits and pieces of his smile fluttering along the gutters. Patrick drives the streets and kicks up behind him mud and leaves and sticks now littering the asphalt as if his bike were a horse divoting the earth with the pounding of its hooves, the neigh and nicker replaced by the Harley’s
pop-pop-pop
and grumble.

He consults his GPS one more time before finding the center and parking his bike on the wrong side of the street in front of a fire hydrant. Sometimes it feels good to be so wrong. He kills the engine. In the parking lot he spots the rag bundles of a few bodies he cannot decipher as male or female, gray-skinned skeletons.

Beyond the gate there is a mess of rubble from an office building carved out by what appears to be a bomb blast. From where he stands he can see into the building as if it were a rotten piece of honeycomb—gray, pockmarked—with birds buzzing in and out and with papers and desks and chairs spilling out of ragged niches and caverns.

He hears a
ping
. Something metallic—struck. He sees nothing and guesses it is a bird or the wind, a pebble knocked onto a car hood. Then he hears the noise again. And again. Coming together into a song he recognizes. He spots the man sitting at the base of an oak tree fifteen yards away. The man appears to grow from the nest of roots and he holds in his lap a guitar that looks as if it has been buried and then unearthed years later, the strings rusted and creaking like barbed wire strung across salt flats. He plays another minute, some country song, maybe Cash. When he stops strumming, when the notes still hang in the air, he stands.

“You don’t look like one of us.”

“What do I look like?”

“Like a big American hero guy.”

“I’m not that either.”

Patrick remembers his mother—he remembers Claire—he remembers the old woman who took pity on him in the Republic—he remembers that being a lycan does not automatically qualify someone as a threat. But this man’s smile cuts through his beard like a razor blade. The guitar, dangling from his hand, falls with a hollow bong that trembles around the edges. He begins to shudder all over and rolls his head back and emits a groan.

Patrick does not wait around for him to transform. He tugs the pistol from his belt and fires a bullet into his throat. The man’s hands rise to dam the blood pumping from him. An arterial spurt escapes his fingers. Patrick fires again, this time striking him in the chest. His body falls in a heap next to the guitar.

It is not Patrick’s first, nor will it be the last. That is the way of things now.

When he walks through the gates, when he follows the rubble-strewn pathways and pokes his head into the burned and bombed buildings, the urgency and purposefulness drain out of him. He’s too late. The air reeks of charcoal. And he cannot help but feel—with the heat of the Harley’s exhaust pipes still clinging to him—that he might be smoldering along with the rest of this place.

Pointless. He has come all this way—risked his life, court-
martial
—for no reason. It’s no wonder that vaccination, once a dominant headline, no longer makes the news or informs any political debate. They lost everything, probably the result of some institution remaining secretive with their intelligence so that they might secure a patent. His body aches from the long ride, his legs shivery, his lower back cramped. A fat black fly orbits his head and he waves it off in annoyance. He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Not a vault harboring some ready-made syringe. But not this either. Not ruins.

Another fly finds him, landing at the corner of his mouth, and he spits it away. More appear, dozens more, buzzing lazily around him in the shape of a net. One lights on his skin and he swats at it. He looks back the way he came—brick buildings, overgrown grass with a narrow path cutting through and edged by maples—nothing that would attract so many flies.

They buzz around him and drown out every other noise in the world. He can feel the vibration of their wings just as he could feel the four-stroke engine trembling through his bones. The day is cloudless, the sun bright and at that afternoon angle that blinds. He holds up a hand to shade his eyes. He rounds the corner of a building and sees the body at the same moment he smells it.

Twenty yards ahead, in the knee-deep grass, in the shadow of a round-roofed building, Patrick can see a splash of dried blood the size of a quilt. In the middle of it lies the body, mangled, recently dead. When Patrick approaches, he smells the blood and the rotten matter of intestines and feels bile rising in his throat and tents his shirt over his nose.

The birds have disturbed the body. The face is gone, as if peeled off, to reveal the gleaming bone beneath. His throat has been torn open, and ligaments, like piano wires, remain taut in their place even as the flesh has been stripped away around them. His button-down shirt is spread to either side of him like wings, revealing the carved-out place beneath his rib cage where something burrowed its snout or claws. Patrick does not brush away the flies that have tasted the body and now taste of him, even as they crawl along his skin with their prickly legs. Instead he kicks the corpse.

The flies rise in an angry swarm. In that moment, Patrick can clearly see the lariat around his neck and the security badge that bears the name, Neal Desai.

He tries to move quietly. Whatever killed Desai killed him recently. Maybe the lycan with the guitar, maybe not. But no matter how softly he depresses his boots, they still crunch through the thousands of shards that once made up the glass entry to the Pfizer building. The interior is cool, high ceilinged, draped in shadows.

He checks all the rooms on the first floor and finds them empty. No chairs, no tables, no equipment, no clutter on the counters or in the cupboards. The facility is so new it hadn’t been inhabited. In researching Desai, Patrick vaguely recalls a photo popping up of him smiling, leaning on a shovel, some groundbreaking ceremony that must have taken place here.

He creeps down the central staircase. The sunlight dims. He pulls a mini Mag light from his cargo pocket and snaps it on and uses its beam to hollow out the darkness, to guide the bead of his pistol. A hallway stretches to either side of him. He can smell something down here—something that distinguishes itself from the smoke-scented air. A whiff of body odor.

He tracks the walls and doorways with his flashlight. Shadows move and lurch and he keeps waiting for one of them to come alive.

Ahead he spots an open door. He notes the keypad, notes the steel frame, a safe room of some sort. The smell is so tremendous he must breathe through his mouth.

He plays his flashlight around the room and spots a rumpled jacket in the corner—and then a laptop, a binder, a pile of manila folders and loose-leaf paper on the counter. He flips through them, noting dosage information, progress charts, chemical compositions that might as well be in a foreign language.

And then the beam of his flashlight reflects off a silver-topped glass container, something that sparkles like a tiny star.

Patrick is flying—he is nothing but air. The road twists through the Willamette Valley, toward the Cascades. With the bike humming beneath him and the wind like a woman’s fingers hurrying through his hair, bearing the smell of pine resin, damp loamy soil, he feels exhilarated. Everything he found in the lab is now in his backpack—including the vial, a vial full of powder, now wrapped up in his watch cap. The label on it reads:
LOBOS VACCINE SAMPLE #342, 5ML, 10 DOSES.

Then he notices a gray cloud of smoke rising in the distance. Too big for a campfire, too indistinct for a burning house or field. And the cloud, Patrick realizes, is moving toward him.

He brakes and rolls onto the shoulder with a slurred crush of gravel. “Something’s coming,” he says to himself. Up ahead the road elbows into the trees. He focuses his eyes there, as if through the crosshairs of a scope, and the rest of the world falls away.

He senses, in a certain vibration of the air and the asphalt, engines. Lots of them.

His throat constricts, a lava-hot rush of blood makes his heart do a backflip, and deep inside him big chunks of black matter, stuff that has been lodged there forever, begins to melt away and infect him with a sick feeling. He has been numb for a long time. But this is fear. Unmistakable, remarkable fear.

Not for him, but for what he carries.

He blazes off the highway—into and out of the drainage ditch, its swampish bottom slippery, the bike almost sliding out from under him. He zigzags through the trees. Stiff weeds and clumps of scrub oak claw at the bike, screeching on its metal, and about thirty feet off the road—which seems too, too close—he brings the bike around a fallen tree and lays it on its side and starts covering it with branches.

The fallen tree is a Douglas fir, its needles a crisp brown, its bark interrupted by a jagged black vein made by lightning. When he pushes his way into its nest of branches, getting right up against the trunk, his hair prickles, his veins tighten. It is as if he can
feel
the residual electricity.

By now a faint reverberation is audible and he ducks down and listens to the noise get louder and louder still, and then around the corner comes a train of vehicles: motorcycles, jacked-up pickups, Cadillacs with red flames painted along their sides. All of them cough up oil like outboards, their ruined shocks and cracked mufflers and shrieking brakes rolling together to make a musical noise, like some junkyard circus, surrounded by a mystically blue exhaust that rises and joins the sky.

On top of one Cadillac, bodies are tied down like trophy stags. If they are not dead they are near it. Blood runs off the roof, down the windshield, where the wipers wipe it away. Patrick can see the man behind the wheel, hunched over and squinting through all that redness, smiling. A rosary swings from his rearview mirror.

Just five minutes ago the world seemed weirdly clean and calm. Now, in the drifting fog of smoke, engines mutter and horns beep and heavy metal blasts from CD players and tattooed men grin into the wind and for a second it’s as if the meltdown never happened.

The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Metal—maybe Pantera or Slayer—blasts from a boom box and nearly overwhelms the noise of the diesel engine. Five men circle a woman in a green bikini and dance—slightly off-kilter from drink or turbulence—their hands outstretched like Halloween scarecrows. They are dirty and they are excited. Several are in a state of transformation.

At the rear of the flatbed a shirtless man swings logging chains above his head. With his pistol, Patrick sights the man’s chest, where excess flesh ripples down his rib cage, surrounding his guts, as if he has begun to melt after too long an exposure to Hanford’s furnace.

Patrick’s chest is a drum. Inside the drum, the fist of his heart bangs away and he feels clenched and jumpy and oblivious to the reckless stupidity of what he is about to do. His finger tightens around the trigger—in pure reflex—but before he can squeeze off a round, before the gun can jump in his hand, time seems to stop.

The music fades, replaced by several thundering cracks that make Patrick first look to his pistol and then to the cloud-swept sky, questioning their source. On the flatbed, a tiny red mouth opens below the big man’s left nipple. Then another at his temple. He doesn’t cry out or clutch his chest—he simply drops. He ceases to live. The physics of the impact work out like this: an ugly twist of limbs thrown from the flatbed, now baking on the hot pavement.

Then one of the rear tires rips apart and the rim gouges the asphalt with a fan of sparks. The semi grinds to a halt. One of the couches rolls off and spills its occupants onto the road. The woman in the green bikini somehow keeps her balance. She is screaming. She is painted with blood. One of the men near her sways in place a moment before falling at her bare feet. Another joins him. The others realize, too late, they are under attack.

Their enemy comes from behind, a dozen dirt bikes racing along the highway, their engines the high whine of a chainsaw. They are ridden by men wearing camo pants and American flag T-shirts and black backpacks. Their heads are shaved. Their outstretched arms carry pistols, shotguns. Puffs of smoke rise with every gunshot.

Patrick is not as surprised as he ought to be. He feels instead that he should have known. He should have known what they, the Americans, were capable of becoming. Their own militia.