Red Moon (47 page)

They do not slow their speed when they approach the semi. Their formation splits and they fire from either side of the flatbed when they pass it. Bodies drop. Blood mists the air. A lycan leaps onto one of the bikes and drags its driver to the pavement and they skid and spin together for a good twenty yards before going still.

Soon everyone is dead except the woman in the green bikini. She has transformed and crouches on all fours and cries out gutturally when one of the Americans—Max, Patrick feels certain, from his bullet-shaped head and short, round stature—climbs onto the flatbed and approaches her. He runs a blade along her neck and then her hairline. Her scalp he shoves into a trash bag.

He is certain the clouds will break and the sun will glint off the Night Train’s exposed muffler and one of the Americans will point a finger in his direction and yell, “There!” And that will be it—he will be dead—the vaccine will be lost. The Americans will surround him, as they did that day in the woods, and finish the job they started then.

But no, they climb on their dirt bikes and growl off into the distance, aware of nothing but themselves.

Nearby a bird shrieks the all clear and the forest returns to its business, twittering and chattering. With a gush of air Patrick realizes he has been holding his breath.

He is not sure what he expected to find at the labs. Answers. An answer may be what he has found. But what will come of this answer only makes more questions pour through his head like cement. His first impulse is to run. Escape to safety. But once he crosses the border there will be consequences. Consequences for him. And, if the military is able to draw from the vial something of value, there will be consequences of a much larger order. Consequences for all lycans. It’s hard to know whether he is talking about wiping out a disease or an identity, what has essentially become its own race or species. Though at first Patrick felt elated, as if he found in the vial something given up for lost, his body now suffers some weird jolt—a power surge of fear—followed by a draining sensation.

The breeze picks up, and when he breathes it in, when he heaves a sigh, he can smell blood and gunpowder in the air. Plagues don’t just kill people—and that’s what lobos is, a plague—they kill humanity.

He returns his pistol to its holster and hauls up the Night Train and rolls it over to the road. He tries not to look at the bodies strewn across the highway, the blood pooling around them like oil slicks, when he gets on the bike. He lets the engine run for a minute, then guns the accelerator, spraying dust everywhere, his eyes black bagged and full of haunting questions, like the wounded who return home from a lost war. He needs to think. He needs to find a place to hole up and think this through.

S
TORMS BREW
, but no rain falls. Thunder mutters and lightning ripples and the air grows unnaturally dark and almost solid with humidity. Weather vanes and cell towers and mailboxes and doorknobs and flagpoles sizzle with blue electricity. The wind rises. On the porch of the farmhouse, a rocking chair rocks on its own. A chime dances, its reeds clattering out a skeletal song.

It is evening when Tío gathers the men in the chapel. Candles glow and sputter. Wind gasps through the cracks in the walls. The men sit in the pews and Tío paces before them, pausing only to speak in rapid-fire bursts of Spanish. The men hold bones in their hands, like drumsticks, that they clack together whenever Tío says something declarative, the same way one might offer up an
Amen!

Claire watches this from outside, the ceiling of the sky occasionally lit by lightning. She hears a soft padding in the grass and discovers Roxana standing nearby, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes are prickling with tears. Her mouth is opening and closing without any sound. In her face there is terrible fear and hatred. “You’re going to kill some wolves with my
tío
.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re a wolf.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not all the same.”

Claire approaches her and reaches out and combs some pine dander from her hair. “No, we’re not.”

“Some are good and some are bad.”

“Same as people.”

“You’re one of the good guys, right?”

“I think so.”

“I ran away from them when they were drunk, when they were sleeping. But I wish I hadn’t. Run away. I wish I had stayed. And killed them.” The candles reflect off the girl’s eyes, little gold sunbursts mixed into the brown pools. “I hope you blow all their guts out.” Roxana says this point-blank, without a trace of humor or pity, and then takes a few steps back, as if to escape the memory attached to her words. Thunder grumbles overhead. Tío barks out something in Spanish and the men clack their bones.

Claire’s father used to read westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. In those wrinkled paperbacks, the heroes spend a lot of time seeking revenge. If somebody, usually a guy with a black mustache, kills a friend or a family member, it is your
duty
to pay him back in lead. It is the just and courageous thing to do, the
only
thing to do. Right now she feels this way about Balor, about the Resistance. Putting bullets and blades into them feels like the only thing to do. Tearing into them, one by one, reciprocating the pain they have caused. Even if she is outnumbered,
even
if her head ends up on a pike, she feels she owes it to Roxana, she owes it to Matthew, she owes it to Miriam, she owes it to her parents, she owes it to the hundreds of thousands displaced and ruined by the meltdown, herself included, seeking some sort of absolution.

She looks to the sky. The clouds have torn open in places to reveal stars. Some look to the sky and see wishes, heavenly possibilities. She sees a morgue bright with the glinting white of bones. She is ready to kill. She is angry, and the anger is good. It means there is something still flaming inside her. It means she hasn’t yet gone to ash.

Inside, Tío’s voice grows louder and the men clack their bones faster and faster until the sounds merge into one terrible war cry.

The low-slung sun smolders through the clouds as if they were a shriveling purply brown piece of hot plastic. Twilight rises from the mountains like smoke, fingering its way across the sky. Thunder sounds. Lightning flares. Patrick zigzags along some side roads and discovers, down the end of a long driveway, hidden in a thicket of trees, a cabin made of peeling gray logs. One bedroom, one bath. Only a few windows. No place anyone would ever want to live. Safe.

There is a stream nearby. The water is white with minerals and comes from the old glaciers way up in the Cascades. He strips off his clothes and climbs into it and grinds his teeth against the cold. When he bathes, when he dunks his head and scrubs his skin with sand, huge trout curl around him and dart all up and down the river, their rainbow scales glowing beneath the water. Sometimes the fish taste Patrick, taking his toes or fingers into their prickly mouths, chewing, and he finds the sensation strangely pleasant. For a moment he worries whether the water is cleaning him or dirtying him—the radiation washed right off the mountains and into his skin—but then he stops worrying. He has room in him for only so much.

Before locking up the cabin and dropping the blinds, Patrick stands on the porch to survey the night. Especially at this time of day, when darkness settles in and the towns no longer glow, the broken streets and empty buildings and burned-out cars as black as charred wood, the bats swooping and the frogs peeping and the Cascades a cutout against an ink-wash sky, it is easy for him to believe that all other human life has been extinguished.

He lights up the cabin with flashlights he finds in drawers, a propane lantern he finds in a closet. He eats an MRE, guzzles a canteen of water. A shelving unit in the living room is loaded with books—westerns, romances, science-fiction stories—and though he has never liked reading much, he paws through them now not just for entertainment, but also for the comfort of following smart people who say all the right things and in the end figure stuff out.

Fifteen minutes later he hasn’t made it more than a few pages. Every time he tries to read a word, the letters scramble away from him. He ends up tossing the book aside and staring at the wall. There is too much in his mind, too many possibilities branching before him depending on what choice he makes.

A long time ago, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a great job, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need has become an abstraction and he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness. Not just the want to go back to California—the want to spin the globe backward like a clock and rediscover that moment in life.

In the vial lies that very possibility. A cure for a sick world.

Any anxiety Patrick might have—about getting court-martialed, about handing over the vial—is laid to rest now. The world needs to move on, to heal.

He kneels beside his backpack and pulls out the satellite phone and hesitates only a second before punching it on and dialing the base. “This is Patrick Gamble,” he says. “I am contacting you from beyond the perimeter. And I have located what I believe to be the lobos vaccine.”

C
HASE WATCHES
the fights from the concrete bleachers. This is at the fairgrounds outside Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an open-air building normally used for showing farm animals. The roof is steel; the floor is dirt. Some of the lycans grow their hair long and spike it into Mohawks. Others keep it short and shave lightning-bolt designs into the sides. Some grease-paint their faces into skulls, sneering demons. They wear outfits made from leather or spandex or polyester jeweled with rhinestones that catch the light and sparkle when they explode from doorways, hurrying through the applause, the jeering voices, the concrete bleachers and aluminum folding chairs, toward a dirt ring awash in fluorescent light.

It is a pit more than a ring. There are no ropes and there are no posts. There is only a concrete perimeter, a ten-foot-high wall that encases twenty square yards of dirt scratched and pitted and muddied with blood. Five black house-party speakers carry the booming voice of the announcer introducing the pit fighters with names like Wolfsbane and Hooded Justice.

The fights are hosted by Combat Zone, an indie circuit that promises ultraviolence. Chairs, ladders, thumbtacks, razor blades, light tubes, and barbed wire are standard weapons of the trade. So are teeth and claws.

The lycans leap into the air as if flying. They grapple with each other upright and on all fours. They crunch windpipes with their fists and snap arms behind backs and rip out clumps of hair and bite out hunks of flesh and seem to pleasure in the pain, both given and received, because the pain feels good. That’s what Chase thinks. The pain feels good. Because it reminds you you’re alive. Unlike the numbing fog of Volpexx.

A few weeks ago, he visited a lycan detainment center, one of a dozen established around the country for those accused or suspected of terrorist activity. Voices echoed down cement hallways. In the cells paced shirtless, hollow-eyed men whose ribs came together like claws above their sunken bellies. They pressed their faces against the bars and pleaded and spit and muttered nonsense. He felt bad for them. But he feels good for the lycans in the pit. Jealous even.

Chase cheers along with the rest of the audience. He wears jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a ball cap pulled low over his face. He has not trimmed his beard in days and it has a mossy quality. He is flanked by two Secret Service agents who do their best to appear as civilians—wearing Redskins Windbreakers—but they are so obviously wooden and watchful that Chase has to nudge them with his elbow every few minutes and tell them to relax, lighten up. They did not want to bring him here. But he demanded it, threatened their jobs if they didn’t do as he said. Special agents Trice and Houston. Those are their names. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, he calls them. He can barely keep anyone straight outside of a nickname. Secretary of the interior, secretary of commerce, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the cabinet secretaries, the administrator of NASA, the Joint Chiefs, the court justices. Too many faces, too many names, all of them unified by their desire to get him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

He has been working out three hours a day. Hitting the treadmill, hefting weights. His whole body feels like it is throbbing with pleasure every time he clips another hundred pounds on the bench press, every time he slams a fist into the speed bag, his body surging, exploding with the feeling of power.

Watching the men in the ring gives him a similar sensation. His hands open and close into fists. He pants more than breathes. His muscles jump. When he feels himself on the verge of losing control, when he tastes blood coppering his mouth, he leans in to one of the agents and says, “Time to go.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the two agents say.

The recon site is south of Salem—a spread of pasture used regularly as a drop point for ground troops. A county highway runs alongside it. During the night, fog spills from the woods and ditches, filling up the world, making the air seem full of ghosts. The recon task force is scheduled to arrive at dawn, their point of contact now delayed until visibility clears.

For hours, Patrick waits. Moisture gathers on the Night Train like sweat. His clothes and hair dampen. The excitement and resolve he felt through most of the night have given way to paranoia. Sounds travel strangely in the fog, and at times the breeze breathes in his ear and makes him spin around. A pinecone falls. A squirrel chatters. A snapped stick makes him think of a charged rifle.

Earlier, when he drove slowly through the fog, a mule deer bounded across the highway and sprang into the air, so impossibly high, hurdling a barbed-wire fence with a white swish of tail, disappearing into the fog, where a milky hole appeared and then fused together.

“Did you see that?” Patrick yelled and then realized no one could hear him. “That was beautiful.”

He felt so good then. Confident. Purposeful. He wishes he could bottle that feeling. It is unavailable to him now as his watch ticks its way toward noon and the fog disperses to filaments wisping around his legs. Last night he spoke apologetically to his lieutenant and then the CO. He did not barter a deal. He did not feel the need. They cussed him out, called him a damned fool, as he expected. What in the fuck he was thinking—following a hunch, risking his life, disobeying every rule in the book—they did not try to understand.

“Sir,” he said, “with deference and with respect, I apologize, sir.” He explained what he thought he had in his possession, and there followed a long silence, after which he was told the coordinates by which they would meet the next day. They were bringing him home.

Perhaps, he thinks, his efforts would not be commensurate with his rewards. Perhaps he was about to land his ass in the brig. Perhaps the vial was nothing but a vessel of glass and ash, nothing of value. He glasses the horizon with his binoculars. Clouds hang here and there in cottony clumps, but otherwise, the sun has the sky to itself. Hills roll over and become mountains, the sharp white tips of Hood, Jefferson, stabbing the blue. The choppers will come from the east, he guesses, two Blackhawks, maybe more. He runs his vision along hillside ridges, mountaintops. Nothing.

He drops the binoculars. The wind races through the forest and shakes the trees, hushing through the trunks and branches. And then it hits him, a warm wave that carries grit in it and blows away the last traces of fog. He closes his eyes and lets it play across his face. When he opens them again, it is just in time to see the line of trucks and Jeeps pause on the road that runs along the edge of the field, ten yards away.

The wind dies and he hears the engines, like the grumbling of a big animal. The doors swing open. Out step twenty men with glowering faces, Mexicans.

There is no point drawing his pistol. They already have several shotguns trained on him. He stares into their black bores and waits for the buckshot to come. He wonders if he will hear the gunshot that kills him. He hopes not. He hopes death will come quickly, every sensation wiped clean at once, silence, darkness, peace.

He flinches when he hears a word, “Patrick,” as if it were a trigger’s snap.

She pushes her way through the men. He recognizes her immediately, but the image of her standing before him now and the memory of her sitting beside him in his Wrangler come together in his brain like a constellation he can’t quite figure out. They have a conversation with only their eyes. Their eyes speak of their confusion and delight. Their eyes say that she looks older, and he does too, as if the collapse of the world has knocked the youth from them, rushed them into adulthood. Their eyes say,
I can’t believe it’s you.

“It’s you,” she says.

“It’s me.”

Before they can say anything more, the air grows busy with the stuttery whir of helicopters, and their eyes swing to the sky.

Chase has not yet reached for the light switch—and the door has not yet clicked closed behind him—when a lamp snaps on across the room. In its orange nimbus sits Buffalo. His glasses are aflame with the reflected light. For several seconds his hand remains on the pull chain while Chase stands with his jacket half off. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been out.”

“Where?”

“Out.”

Minutes ago, when he walked through the buzzing metal detector, when the usher approached him and asked for his jacket, Chase said to screw off. He could hang up his own clothes. Now he peels off his jacket and tosses it on the floor. “I had to get out.”

Buffalo does not raise his voice when he says, “You are the president of the United fucking States. You don’t go out.” Chase hates him then. Hates the way his stern expression and forbidding eyes match the portraits hanging in the East Wing—all of them watching—all of them supportive so long as he behaved in a particular way, performed a particular job as they saw fit. He can’t go anywhere alone—he can’t make any decisions on his own. He wouldn’t be their flunky; he wasn’t their Mr. Smith. “I assume you’re here for some other reason than to lecture me.”

“Something has happened.” His stillness is unsettling. “Something big.”

Chase doesn’t wait around to hear it. In the bathroom, he unzips, pisses, makes Buffalo wait for him or talk over the noise of the bowl. He takes his time washing his hands.

When he emerges from the bathroom, Buffalo remains in the chair, legs crossed, hands folded over his knee. He asks if Chase remembers Miracle Boy, the punk kid, the sole survivor, the one who made news for playing dead and later enlisting.

“How could I forget? That’s when this whole mess began.”

“He just pulled a stunt that could be a publicity dream. Or nightmare.”

Buffalo tells him what he already knows. At the same time the Hanford site detonated, the Resistance torched the vaccination labs. Everything was lost. Other private facilities picked up where Desai left off, but they remained a year away from inoculation, and inoculation is precisely what this presidency needs. Miracle Boy claims to have found it. He went AWOL, snuck into the Ghostlands, discovered a safe room in the research facility. He found Desai, his papers, his laptop, and what he believes to be the
vaccine
.

“What exactly is the problem? This sounds like a wet dream.”

“He’s gone missing.”

At first they do not move, as if the choppers might not notice them, should they stand as still as deer. The two Blackhawks circle the meadow once, twice. The grass flattens and the trees shake with the gusting rotor wash. Grit bites their faces. The choppers hover like wasps, black bodies with lean, long tails. Their stammering roar is such that Patrick can barely hear the voice that screams in his ear, “These your friends, GI Joe?” Before he can respond, someone grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks his pistol from his holster and shoves it into his throat.

All around him the Mexicans swing to the sky their rifles and shotguns—among them an AR-15—and begin to fire. Bullets spark the underside of the choppers. Glass shatters and falls in a sparkling rain. One of the birds banks hard and rises steeply. Its rotor blade clips the rear stabilator of the other Blackhawk. There is a sound like a fork caught in a garbage disposal. The four-blade rotor snaps, and one of its blades swings wildly through the air and impales a truck with a deafening screech.

The Blackhawk, destabilized, tilts into the line of trees walling the road. The remaining three blades slash through branches, embed themselves in trunks, and then crack and separate from the craft. The chopper smokes and whines when tumbling through the air. The nose falls first, the tail reaching upward like the fletching of an arrow. There is the terrible crunch of metal meeting stone. The impact does not open into a ball of flame. The aircraft simply screams onto its side. The engine winds down. Smoke and dust rise from the wreckage.

The sky is empty, the other chopper departed. Patrick is released, shoved to the road, where he batters his knees against asphalt. He looks for Claire and spots her among the Mexicans. She does not look horrified, as he imagined. She does not weep or cry out. She does not bring a hand to her mouth. Instead she stands there holding a revolver the size of a cannon, the muzzle still smoking. Her mouth is a white line as if she has bitten away any emotion.

A few of the Mexicans approach the fallen bird and try to yank open the carrier door. But it is smashed shut. So they fire into the windows and then reach through the holes they have rendered in the glass and finish off those still strapped to their seats.

Buffalo explains the aborted rescue attempt, the downed helicopter, the suspected abduction, the signal traced from Miracle Boy’s satellite phone, and he does so dramatically, his hands moving and making a kind of shadow theater on the floor, so that Chase can’t help but imagine himself there, among those twisting shadows, caught up in the fight.

“One vial?” Chase says. “He has one vial?”

“That’s it.”

“Just one.”

“Yes.”

“How many doses are in one vial?”

“Ten, I believe. Maybe fewer. I’m not sure.”

“We get our hands on it, we can replicate it.”

“Hypothetically.”

“How long would that take?”

“I can’t say.”

“One vial.”

“Yes.”

“Our magic bullet.”

These past few weeks Chase has been dreaming again. When he was on Volpexx, his dreams were empty, a dying blackness overcoming him every evening. Now his dreams sometimes seem more wakeful and vivid than life. The woman—the woman with the charcoal skin and smoldering eyes—has returned. So have others. Last night he dreamed of the man he killed on patrol on a two-lane highway south of Niflhel. His platoon was clearing the road for a supply convoy, and in the dream he was there again, truly there, every klick of the road and every detail of the city familiar, as he drove past a sewage canal, decaying tenements, shacks sculpted out of tin and mud and snow, carts sloshing with half-frozen jugs of milk. They came across a man crawling along the side of the road in a state of transformation. His hair was as white as the snow piled everywhere. He was barefoot and wore only tattered slacks and a long-sleeve thermal. He seemed not to recognize the rumble of vehicles beside him. He stared straight ahead, blood drooling from his mouth and weeping from his eyes, while dragging himself forward one arm after the other. Chase got on the platoon net and ordered the other trucks to stop, then switched over to the battalion frequency, reported their location, a sit-rep. Sometimes the prions, in a later stage of development, made the brain bleed and gave the infected symptoms equivalent to dementia. “Think we got ourselves a rabid dog.”