Red Moon (48 page)

A few seconds later the order came down to kill the lycan.

Chase could have ordered his gunners to fire but didn’t want to burden them with another death. He dismounted and crunched through the snow and sighted the lycan with his M16 but couldn’t abide shooting him from behind. He called out twice. The second time, the lycan spun around and lifted an ice-caked hand feebly to claw the air or warn him away. He was old enough to be Chase’s grandfather. Chase pumped a single round into him and then climbed back in the truck and left the body slumped in a snowbank. He felt wretched but at least the wretchedness was his and didn’t belong to one of the red-cheeked, tattooed nineteen-year-olds under his charge.

That’s what he wants now, an opportunity to cowboy up and take whatever pain or glory comes with it. And he knows he must. There is no other way to secure the vaccine for his immediate use. Without the help of medication, he can keep his condition hidden for only so long.

Buffalo is talking strategy—what needs to happen over the next twenty-four hours—and his voice slows when Chase begins to strip. He kicks off his shoes, then peels off his shirt, yanks away his pants, his socks and briefs, until he stands naked in the pile of shed clothes.

“What are you doing?” Buffalo says. It isn’t time for bed. They need to call a meeting. They need to go to the Situation Room. They need to patch through the CO stationed at the perimeter. Buffalo has already ordered coffee from the House Mess.

“I’ll go.”

“You’ll go where?”

“I’ll go to Oregon.”

Buffalo does not seem to know where to look. He uncrosses and crosses his legs. “You’ll—what?”

Chase walks over to the chair and stands a mere foot from Buffalo. “I’ll go. I’ll go and find the boy.” His stomach looks like stones stacked on top of one another. His arms are a root tangle of veins. His groin is pulsing.

Buffalo turns his head away so that he is staring directly into the lamp. “I don’t understand—what are you—why do you think—”

Chase has been thinking long and hard these past few days. If he only did things himself—if he didn’t simply tell others what to do—this could be a good line of business, a rewarding job. As it was, he only talked, never did anything. He needed to
do
something, and now something could be done. He thinks of all that land—those mountains rolling into hills that then leveled into sage flats gouged out by irrigation canals, Central Oregon a patchwork of brown cheatgrass and bright green alfalfa corralled by barbed wire, the bent-back skin-burned stage of his former life, his father’s life before him, and his grandfather’s before them both, a stage upon which they shot antelope and counted stars and raised horses and cattle and family, all of that stolen by the lycans, gone, nothing left but old wigs of sagebrush, fences kicked over and rotting into the ground. By returning there, he sees a chance to reclaim that part of his life, that part of him. And to own up to what people thought they were voting for. He has sworn the oath and invoked the name of God, but they were just words, spoken too soon, and words do not make someone a leader. People need to be reassured—they need him to instill the confidence he has lost. They need to see him doing a job to believe in him as president. He isn’t sure, until now, that the title has been anything more than a costume.

Buffalo still stares at the lamp when he says, “Surely you’re
joking?
”

“I am not joking.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’m seriously serious.”

Buffalo compresses his lips and bows his head and then something seems to overtake him. He leaps out of the chair. When Chase moves to block him, Buffalo shoves him back a step. “You’re not going. Of course you’re not going. You think you’re some rough rider. You’re not. This is ridiculous and purposeless and dangerous. You’re such a fool sometimes. A goddamned fool.”

Chase shoves him. Buffalo’s back cracks against the wall. He lets out a whimper. His glasses hang crookedly on his nose. He runs a hand through what little hair he has and it stands on end. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with you. Something is wrong with you.”

Chase stalks toward him. He feels as if his heart has experienced an electrical short and the heat of it is still deciding whether to die or catch flame. “I’m going to go find that boy. I’m going to find this magic bullet. I’m going to go get my hands dirty. That’s my decision. Not yours.”

“You’re not listening to me!”

“I don’t have to listen. I’m the goddamn president.”

Buffalo slaps him then. The noise like a popped balloon.

Chase’s cheek smarts and he puts a hand to it. He staggers away and crouches on the floor as if to contain the anger springing in his chest that will not go away. He can only fight it so long.

Buffalo reaches for him with arms like weak lassos. “Oh my. Oh no. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, old friend.” The same hand that slapped Chase now strokes the bare skin of his back. “I’m sorry.”

He pulls his hand away when hair begins to prickle beneath it. He has time to run. He has time to cry out. But he does not. He seems to trust that Chase, his friend, his old friend, will contain himself, will be able to hold back, even when he rises slowly from his crouch and starts toward him with his mouth open as if to kiss.

N
IGHT FALLS
. Shadows deepen between the trunks of trees, firs and cedars and hemlocks, their branches fingering together overhead in a thick canopy that makes Patrick feel safe from any drones or choppers that might pass overhead. The Mexicans dig a shallow pit and gather wood and arrange it into a flaming pyramid to keep the night at bay. Bats and owls swoop through the sparks. The Mexicans sit upon rocks or the misshapen roots that wrestle the ground. They eat jerky and dried fruit. They sharpen their knives and clean their rifles and pistols. The air grows spicy with smoke.

Claire makes a fire of her own, smaller, separate from them, twenty yards away. She sits next to it in a ball, her arms wrapped around her legs. Patrick watches her for a long time. He wants to be near her. More than that, he wants to embrace her, has wanted to since the moment he first saw her earlier that day, but it has seemed impossible. Because they have been on the run, confined to different vehicles as they drove at a perilous speed from the site of the crash—into the asphalt maze of Portland—and then parked on a service road in the Hoyt Arboretum, with five miles of thick woods between them and the mansion, their plan to attack in the morning. And because, these past few hours, whenever Patrick drew near, she stiffened and offered him clipped answers. “I thought you were dead,” he said, and she said, “I might as well have been.” He tried to get her talking, but she wouldn’t give him anything, always turning the question back on him: what exactly are you doing here?

To which he could only say, “Recon.” He was grateful she did not press him further. To tell her anything more would confirm his betrayal.

In his backpack was the inoculation: the vial that made possible her erasure. Only twenty-four hours ago he felt so certain of himself, so positive he had made the right decision. Twenty-four hours seemed now like twenty-four years, his frame of mind so distant, his resolve rotted through with questions.

Above her, through the trees, he can see the moon, a silver sliver brightening the edge of a giant black ball. Sometimes you can see more of what isn’t than what is, and this is one of those times.

She must hear him coming, his feet snapping branches, clunking off rocks, but she does not turn to look at him. And she does not say anything when he sits beside her, but she does not move either.

Every time he looks at her, when that old attraction geysers up inside him, he feels as excited as he does anguished. The image of her—skin and hair reddened by the fire—has made him aware of all those sunken feelings, all those things lost and untested.

He says, “Hi,” and she says nothing and the space between them seems to widen.

He can only guess how hard the past five months have been for her. That’s what he wants to say. That he understands. She must feel she doesn’t have a place in this world. She must be sick and tired of living with a knife to her throat every second, of scrounging for food, of running and running and running. She must have reached the breaking point—and that’s what tomorrow is about—her either fighting back or lying down and closing her eyes forever.

His thoughts are interrupted by Tío. He appears around a tree, tossing into the air his bone-handled knife, the blade as big as his forearm. End over end, a silver flash. Twice, three times, four. It makes a whistling sound with each arc. Tío stares at Patrick while he plays with the blade. “You’re not wearing handcuffs. You’re not roped to a tree. Your mouth isn’t duct-taped shut.” He catches the knife and then slashes at a nearby cedar. A piece of bark falls away, and then another, and then another. “You might be thinking that means you’re free to do as you please.” The blade thwacks the trunk and a crude picture begins to emerge—that of a face, the yellow pulp starkly set against red bark—two long eyes, a gash of a nose, and a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “Today we killed some soldiers. Tomorrow we’re going to kill some wolves. And I want you to know something. I want you to know that if you do anything that interferes with that, I’ll drop you.” He notches away the final curve of the smile and then departs, leaving them staring at the face, which bleeds sap. “I’ll be watching,” he says over his shoulder.

They sit there another few minutes in silence before Patrick says, “Fire is dying,” and gets up and brushes off and collects an armload of sticks to set upon the flames. Sparks dance. Pitch pops.

Then he begins to talk. He tells her about the war as if it were a thing alive, with metal jaws and sulfuric breath and a saber rising from its groin. He tells her about the crystal-cold sky of the Republic and the snow that lies over everything like a wrinkled white sheet. He tells her about his father and his fool’s mission to find him and what he learned when he discovered the doomed lycan squad. He says he is afraid that she is going to appear and vanish again like his father. He says he is sorry. He says he understands why she might hate him. He says he hopes that another universe might exist in which none of this happened and their only concern would be lying on a beach and rubbing oil all over each other and drinking piña coladas right out of the coconut.

Her expression softens and she smiles when she looks to the sky, and he can tell that she sees there the same thing he sees: a life beyond the walls of this place, where rivers rush with clean water and where gardens flower with spring and where children play soccer and couples walk hand in hand through parks and order large Cokes and buckets of popcorn when they go to the movies and where the two of them, Patrick and Claire, might be together without regard for the past, only the future.

She lifts her arm. He scoots into it. And they are holding each other. “Remember what you said about electricity?” he says.

“I still don’t understand it.”

“Me either. But I can feel it.”

T
HERE IS A PATTERN
in the ceiling. The cracks and water damage melting together into the image of a dark-hooded wraith. Miriam tries to look away, tries to rearrange it into another
design
—say, a fish breaking the surface of a murky pond—but try as she might, it is always there. It is waiting for her, she feels certain. Waiting for her to give up. And when she does, it will drop like a bat to seize her and flap away to some cave deep beneath the earth where her bones will become jewelry and her teeth dice and her lungs red accordions, her soul sealed away in a locket worn around a demon’s neck.

It is morning. She knows this from the pink light leaking through the glass-brick window. Right now, maybe only a few hundred miles away, alarm clocks are blaring, people are rolling out of bed, brewing coffee, burning toast. For her, though, morning may as well be night. She has no routine—day’s beginning, day’s end. Sometimes they feed her—sometimes they come to clean her or to fuck her—and sometimes they do not. Otherwise everything remains the same.

Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life—since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits—and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place—then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things—and trying to make sense of them—is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next.

So she cannot be certain, but she believes it has been a week or more since she last saw Puck. Curiously, she has come to look forward to his visits as much as she dreads them. He speaks to her. He listens to her even when all she has to say is fuck off, go to hell. He is keenly interested in her, even if only to see her suffer. That makes her feel important, adversarial. Like she has some role more essential than furniture discarded to the basement. She hates him. She wants him dead. But she also wants him to bite her, to cut her, because if she bleeds, she lives, and this day then distinguishes itself from the last.

It is not Puck who unbolts the door this morning. It is Caliban. Pale haired and slit eyed and round backed. She can’t tell if he is as old as her or old enough to be her father. He carries himself differently than the others do, shuffling about and whispering to himself, more servant than soldier. Sometimes he brings her food and sits on the edge of her bed and reaches the spoon toward her mouth, his own lips always parting just as she bites down. He will not speak to her, no matter what she tells him. And he rarely looks at her, perhaps embarrassed by her nakedness. But maybe he never talks to or looks at anyone. Maybe that is the avoidant way his mind is wired.

He is here to clean her. He carries a metal bowl sloshed full of soapy, steaming water. He sets it down on the floor and draws a washcloth from it and strangles out the water before running it along her face, her belly, her thighs and calves and feet. There is nothing sensual about the act. Nothing rough either. He is simply scrubbing her as he would a floor, spending extra time on her sores, letting the water soak into them, scraping away with a fingernail the dead skin.

He finishes with her groin and plops the washcloth into the basin and goes about stripping the bed. She has just enough slack on her restraints to lean her body sideways, to move her arms and legs enough to position a bedpan beneath her. The sheets on the mattress are rubber—in case she spills—changed every few days. He peels the sheet beneath her and she obliges him. When he leans over her, she notices the keys shining at his waist. He has not shoved them fully into his pocket and they peek out and catch the light and wink at her.

She remembers that when she was a girl, she believed if only she concentrated hard enough, she could move things with her mind. She believed it was like anything else: her mind was a
muscle
that needed exercise. So she would spend minutes every day staring at a red pebble or a pencil, willing it to move, sometimes staring so hard her head shook and her vision walled. More than once, when trapped in this basement, she has thought the same: that if she imagines hard enough, with the same sort of concentration, she might make something happen. She might escape this place. She thinks about her cabin. The green moss sponging the trees, the white bark of alder shining like bones. She is there. She walks naked through the mist, through a field of dew-soaked sedge, bluegrass, bear grass kissing her bare calves. Her husband is there too. And her daughter.

And now that moment has come.

Her wrists are braceleted with sores that break and bleed when she reaches for the keys, reaches as far as she can. She is an inch short. She wills her fingers into magnets. She wills her joints to come undone, her tendons to snap like rotten rubber bands, and allow her to stretch just a little farther. The handcuffs are cutting her deeply now, the skin peeling away, the blood snaking from her wrist. The blood helps. It lubricates.

Slowly her hand creeps forward and she manages to pinch a finger through the key ring. At that moment, Caliban adjusts his body to reach for the other corner of the mattress. The keys pull away from his pocket with a jangle she masks by coughing hard and shaking her restraints and making them rattle.

She has less than a minute, she knows. He will pour the wash water down the drain. He will ball up the sheets under his arm. He will shuffle to the door and close it and reach for his pocket. And by then it will be too late.

There are only two keys on the ring—one for the door, one for her cuffs—and she pinches the shorter of them between her pinky and thumb. This allows her less of a grip but a better reach to her wrist, to the keyhole. Her eyes dart to Caliban. His gaze is elsewhere, following a spider that scurries along the wall. He leaves the sheets half-undone and pursues it and mutters to himself in a language she cannot decipher.

She drops the key twice before she slides it home and twists hard and shakes free the cuff at the same moment that Caliban slaps a hand against the wall and then examines the black smear on his palm. He wipes it clean on his thigh and returns to the bed.

She lies as stiff as a board until he reaches over her again to tidy the sheet. His face hangs over hers. She can see into his mouth, can feel his breath gusting over her. She shoots her free hand into his neck and he looks at her, looks directly into her eyes, maybe for the first time. “I’m sorry,” she says before tearing out his larynx with a sound like an apple bitten.

Patrick is curled up behind Claire, the bigger of two spoons, when he wakes to what he initially mistakes for the snap of a pitch pocket. But the fire has burned down to coals. The woods remain as dark as night, but through the branches he can see a pink dawn spilling across the sky. Then comes the noise again, unmistakably gunfire.

He is only half-awake, and dream logic makes him think, that’s right, we were going to attack at dawn. He is staring dumbly at the face carved into the trunk of the tree when a bullet whizzes into it and opens up a pulpy gash between its eyes. Only then does he realize they are the ones under attack.

Claire rips the enormous .357 from her hip holster. He reaches for his own, but finds his belt empty. He bolts over the berm that separates their campsite from the others, his mind still two paces behind what is happening, certain he will find his pistol where he left his pack. The gunfire is constant now—thundering into a
fusillade
—so that he can barely distinguish the voices calling all around him. Dirt sprays, wood splinters, rocks spark, ferns shake.

Here is Tío yelling out commands in Spanish. Here is a man kneeling behind a stump with a rifle set on top of it. Here is another lying face-first in the fire pit with what looks like a mouth screaming at the back of his head. Patrick steals away the dead man’s lever-action and hunkers against a tree to check the chamber for a live round. He looks to the shadow-soaked woods and waits for gunshots to flare and then fires toward them, emptying the brass, chambering a round, until the rifle empties and he tosses it aside. He does not know who is attacking them, only that they are being attacked, and it doesn’t occur to him until a chopper darkens the sky overhead that he might be fighting his own.

He finds his backpack then, and another body, another gun, a pistol this time, a .22 Ruger, good for a range of only twenty or thirty yards, which seems to be the distance of the advancing soldiers. He nearly tells them to hold their fire, nearly calls out his rank and squad number, but at that moment a stare seals between him and Tío.

The man is lying behind a log, a shotgun cradled against his chest, and he pats the stock and points to Patrick, as if to say,
for you
.

Their gaze breaks when something clunks off a nearby tree and falls to the ground like a heavy pinecone. Fog fizzes from it—tear gas. Another clatters through some branches and falls among them. A man cries out and brings his hands to his eyes.

A bullet passes between Patrick’s fingers with the furious buzz of a hornet. He checks the skin there, a scorched red. It couldn’t have gotten any closer. He won’t be that lucky again.

His eyes are beginning to water and his throat to blaze. He shrugs on his backpack. He needs to escape this place. He tries to account for Claire but can’t see, as if someone has smeared an onion across his eyes and he cannot focus on anything more than a few feet from him. He pops off a few rounds and hunches down and stumbles away.

Miriam has difficulty walking. She trips twice on her way out of the basement cell. She has to will her legs forward, her feet to rise and fall. Her joints feel rusted, her bones brittle, hollow, as if a hard step could shatter them. Her tendons seem to have shrunk. Her calf muscles bunch up like fists and she sits down to massage them, trying not to cry out. She drags herself up, leans against a stack of boxes that rattle.
IODINE
, the label reads. All throughout the basement, she notices stacks and stacks of the same boxes and wonders whether she has been housed all this time at some sort of medical facility.

The thought doesn’t last long, gone once she clambers up the stairs and cracks open the door as slowly and quietly as she can. She spots, hanging from the wall, a tapestry and two oil paintings with gilded frames. She opens the door wider and takes a quick inventory of a marble-topped table bearing a porcelain lamp, a fireplace mantel with a three-faced ornamental clock, a leaf-patterned wooden chair blackened from so many years of polish, an oriental rug that spans the length of what appears to be a sitting room, and assumes she is in some sort of museum.

She leans hard on the doorknob when she steps into the high-ceilinged room. The wainscoting is dark slatted wood. The windows are framed by thick curtains, and through them she can see untamed hedges, knee-high grass in the steadily brightening dawn. She does not have time to wonder at her surroundings. Escape is all that matters.

She tries to imagine the seeming size of a house like this, the rooms stretching on and stacked up all around her, like some vast honeycomb in which barbs and venom lie in wait. The hardwood groans with her every dragging step and threatens to give her away. She is weak, naked, unarmed, but her temper is as hot as blood in the vein when she thinks about anyone stopping her after she has made it this far. She goes to the fireplace—her bare feet cold on its soot-stained tiles—and grabs a poker to serve as a weapon and a cane.

She can see down a short hallway and into what appears to be the foyer. Her way out. She starts toward it and then midway across the room stops short. From this new vantage point she can see a wide spiral staircase reaching upward—and she can hear what sounds like footsteps shuddering down it. Her first impulse is to sneak beside the doorway and raise the poker like a sword—ready to swing its prong into the skull of whoever passes by—but she knows her body is too ungainly to fight, her muscles too weak to even hold the poker wobblingly overhead.

There is a swinging door beside the fireplace. She uses her back to push her way through it, into the kitchen, with its black-and-white rubber-stamp floor and its walls and cabinets painted a blinding white. Something is cooking. Meat. Her body aches at the smell—only for a moment.

In the center of the kitchen is an island. And upon the island lies a naked body. A thin, pale-skinned man with a beard wisping along his cheeks and neck. His mouth and eyes are open and she might think him alive if not for his hollowed-out belly, the skin scissored away beneath his sternum, guts gone. A large metal bowl—the same as the one Caliban used to clean her—sits beside him. Flies orbit the air above. One of them vanishes into his mouth.

She hears a creak. It comes from the sitting room, the hardwood floor depressed by the weight of someone walking. She must hide. She goes first to the pantry, but when she opens the door, she is greeted by another body, a man hanging upside down and bleeding out into a mop bucket. She nearly cries out in surprise. She spins around and sees a square of space beneath the island where someone might stack pots or bowls. It is empty now and she slides into it the moment the kitchen door swings open.

From here, she can see only to his waist but knows him immediately, his trunked legs, his boots big enough for a child to climb inside, the giant Magog. He never visited her in the basement, his one grace, for his weight and size would be an unimaginable torture. He wears black jeans that disappear behind an apron spattered with blood. She hears a
tick-tick-tick-tick
that she at first believes to be the radiator across the room. Then she notices that the poker is tapping the wall of her hiding place, jarred by the slamming of her pulse.

She wants to look away but cannot. She needs to know where he is, needs to know the moment his body stiffens at the sight of her so that she can try to uncurl from her hiding place and stab the poker into his knee or groin. He goes to the counter near the sink. He runs the water, and under the noise of it she shifts her body to better observe him. His red hair spills down his broad back. He picks up a cleaver and sharpens it—fifty times on one side, fifty times on the other—the scraping of the blade, the steel-on-steel sound so tangible that he might have drawn it along her bones. He tests it with a thumbnail and the razor edge peels away a curl.