Black Moon

by L. A. Weatherly

  Kay stepped out of her skirt. Her small, slim form had excited him so many times. Now he just felt hollow. He took in the mole on her ribcage, remembered kissing it.

  Kay wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. As she crossed to her closet, she glanced at his hand and gave an ugly laugh. “You don’t have to wear that thing, you know.”

  “We’re married,” he said quietly.

  “I only married you to play you.”

  “Really?”

  Her face tightened. Her motions abruptly more furious, she grabbed clothes from her closet and dressed quickly: a plain, inexpensive skirt. A worn blouse like a struggling secretary might wear.

  Collis had listened to newscast after newscast on his long drive. They’d simmered with turmoil, confusion. Conflicting reports of the final battle had streamed out of New Manhattan. Collis had twice heard that Manfred had died – then a mention that Barton, the new squadron leader, had merely been “left in charge”. No explanation was given. Other reports told of the Calgary bombing. The details of the city’s destruction had sickened Collis but he hadn’t snapped off the wireless.

  “It beggared description,” a woman had said, her voice heavy. “There was a ball of fire, a tremendous noise…words are inadequate tools, I’m afraid.”

  They really are, thought Collis now, gazing at Kay.

  She pulled her hair back in a plain style and then donned a scarf, tying it under her chin. She glanced quickly at the bedroom window. Oak trees nestled close, their branches wide and inviting.

  Collis cleared his throat. “Where will you go?”

  “As if I’d tell you,” Kay muttered. Then she glanced at him, her lips a thin crease. “Where will you go?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What?”

  “I’m staying.”

  She laughed, looking honestly amused. “They’ll arrest you.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Kay stepped very close. He could smell her perfume, just like when he’d woken up that first time, his bullet wound throbbing, and she’d come in and adjusted his pillows.

  Her blue eyes glinted. “They’ll make you the scapegoat,” she said with relish. “If they don’t have me, they’ll blame everything on you. The whole world will hate you.”

  Collis nodded slowly. He gave an almost-smile. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “As long as I don’t hate me.”

  She frowned, studying him. Then they both jumped at a cascade of knocks from the next room. The doorknob rattled. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Kay Pierce!” shouted a voice.

  Kay sucked in a breath. She snatched up the bag, flung its strap over her shoulder. She ran to the window and heaved it open.

  “Wait,” said Collis.

  She gave him a wide-eyed, frenzied look. He went to her and pulled out his wallet. As the door started banging behind them, he took out all the bills that he had.

  “Here,” he said quietly, offering them. “You never carry much cash.”

  Kay’s face seemed to crumple as she stared up at him. Briefly, the look in her eyes was the same as when she’d married him, and something in him tightened.

  Then her chin jerked up. She grabbed the money and stuffed it into her bag.

  She slapped him hard across the face.

  Collis didn’t react. Kay sat on the window sill and strained for a branch. She glanced back at him, her eyes bright.

  “I hope they hang you,” she said.

  Leaning far out, she snagged one of the tree’s branches and then hooked her leg over another one. As Collis watched, she made her way down, the leather bag thumping against her side. Distantly, from the front of the Zodiac, he could still hear chanting.

  When Kay reached the ground, she didn’t look back up at the window. She smoothed her clothes and hooked on a pair of sunglasses. Then, her hands in the pockets of her plain skirt, she walked briskly from the trees to the road.

  Behind him the door banged and shuddered, the heavy bureau slowly scraping across the floor. In the late afternoon sky, he glimpsed a faint full moon, already rising, and remembered: the eclipse was that night.

  Black Moon.

  Collis watched Kay grow smaller. He lost her through the trees for a while and then her blue scarf appeared beyond the complex’s gates. As she moved against the flow of pedestrians streaming towards the Zodiac, her stride looked brisk, resolute.

  She vanished into the crowd.

  Collis straightened. He felt oddly happy – and didn’t know whether it was because he’d never see her again, or that she’d escaped.

  He slid the window shut.

  The door was almost open now. As Collis crossed to the front room, he paused. He took off his wedding ring and placed it on Kay’s dresser.

  He glanced at himself in the mirror and smiled slightly. Probably not what Mac would have done. It still felt okay.

  Collis headed for the door, breaking into a brief jog. “Wait,” he called out.

  He heaved the bureau aside and opened the door. A group of armed men stood there, breathing hard and glaring at him.

  “You took your fucking time, Reed,” snapped one as they pushed past.

  A few of them held rifles on him as the rest searched the apartment in a frenzy, banging doors open.

  “She’s not here!”

  “Damn it!”

  “Where is she, Reed? Where?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  A man got close, his face red. “Did you help her escape?”

  “I guess you could call it that. I gave her some money. I didn’t try to stop her.”

  Someone grabbed him and jerked his hands behind his back. Collis felt handcuffs go on. He didn’t struggle.

  “Well, we’ve got a warrant for you, too, Reed. You’re hereby under arrest for the crimes of Kay Pierce’s regime,” spat the man.

  The cold metal weighed heavily against his wrists. Below, the shouts continued, but here in this apartment it seemed quiet, almost peaceful.

  “I’ve committed plenty of crimes that had nothing to do with Kay Pierce’s regime,” Collis said. “I’ll tell you all of it. Whatever you want to know.”

  The men hesitated, staring at him. Collis knew that Kay’s wish that he’d be hanged would probably come true. He still felt light. Free. Somehow he knew he’d never have the nightmare again.

  Finally one of the men grabbed his arm and yanked Collis forward; he stumbled.

  “Come on, you filthy scum,” he muttered.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  June, 1943

  There was no pain. I lay in the cockpit, dimly aware that there was a fire nearby. Its steady crackling was the only sound.

  As I gazed up through the shattered windscreen, I watched the moon get eaten by a red invader. First a small arc was slowly nibbled. Then I blinked and all of it was covered.

  Black Moon, I thought dreamily.

  Not black though. Coated in blood. When I looked again the moon had been washed clean. It stared down at me – a bright, shining eye that frightened me. I whimpered. I tried to turn my head to hide from the moon. I couldn’t move.

  I shuddered and closed my eyes. My eyelids felt sticky… wrong…but I knew that the moon couldn’t see me if I couldn’t see it and this was comforting.

  The fire crackled. I drifted away.

  Dawn on the snow. Reds and pinks. I gazed fearfully at the colours and knew the moon must still be there, hiding.

  The fire was almost out but it was a magic fire because I was still warm.

  So warm.

  “Amity!”

  The voice came from far away.

  “Amity!”

  Closer now. The speaker sounded familiar and something ached within me. I tried to speak. My mouth wouldn’t move and I moaned.

  “Shh, it’s all right. It’s all right.”

  I felt myself being gathered up in someone’s arms.
Part of me seemed to be there and part of me didn’t.

  How could that be?

  The thought was distant. The person carrying me staggered a little, their breathing ragged. But my head was against their shoulder and the smell of them was warm and spicy and so familiar I wanted to cry.

  I knew then I was safe. The moon was gone. There was the sun.

  When I woke up, I was in a hospital room. Everything hurt.

  I saw Ingo and started to cry.

  Wincing, he got into bed beside me and held me close, his touch gentle on my bruised body.

  “I thought you were dead,” I whispered.

  “No…no.” His curls brushed my skin as he kissed my temple, my cheek. “I thought you were.”

  Alive. As the world dimmed at the edges again, I pressed against him and let out a long breath. I didn’t know where I was, or how he’d gotten here.

  I didn’t care.

  The next time I opened my eyes, Ingo was gone.

  A nurse stood at my bedside, checking my pulse. I licked my lips and looked around me. The movement brought pain. “Did I dream him?” I murmured.

  “He’s fine,” the nurse said, and terror swamped me. I tried to sit up and she gently put her hands on my shoulders.

  “He’s fine,” she repeated. “He was exhausted and injured; it’s a miracle he did what he did in his state. He collapsed this morning and one of his broken ribs punctured a lung. He needs to be on oxygen for a few days. But he’ll be all right.”

  I melted against the pillow. “How…how is he still alive?” I whispered. “A fitter told me that he’d died in a crash.”

  The nurse shook her head as she poured me a glass of water. “He didn’t say. But there was so much confusion during the battle…conflicting reports every hour.”

  “I have to see him,” I said hoarsely.

  Her gaze snapped to mine; she put the water down. “Miss Vancour, you’re—”

  “I have to. Please.”

  “This will hurt,” she said finally. She got a wheelchair and helped me into it, half-lifting me. Pain burst through me and I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out. My left leg lay in a stiff cast. Bandages covered my left foot and my right hand.

  The nurse wheeled me to another room. The wheelchair had Property of Yellowknife Hospital stamped on it. Outside a window we passed, I could see snow-capped mountains and pots of flowers.

  Ingo lay in a bed with his eyes closed, his dark curls stark against the pillow, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. His breathing was shallow and obviously hurt him. His arm was wrapped in a bloodstained bandage.

  The nurse manoeuvred my chair close to his bedside. He opened his eyes; they widened as he saw me. “Five minutes,” the nurse said softly. “Please don’t try to talk yet, Mr Manfred.”

  Ingo reached for my hand. I gripped the miracle of his fingers and the nurse faded from existence. He looked haggard. He gave a faint smile and rubbed his thumb across my palm.

  I wanted to kiss his fingers – stroke his hair back. It hurt too much to move.

  “I love you, Ingo Manfred, do you know that?” I whispered.

  As the weeks passed, we healed together.

  Though still sore, Ingo was up and around in a week. At first he didn’t discuss the battle. Then one rainy afternoon, he told me everything, his tone steady but his eyes haunted. So many dead. Harlan.

  We held each other.

  Like so much of the news that day, the story that the fitter heard had been only half-accurate. Ingo had commandeered Henderson Square Garden, been shot down over Centre Park – but he’d flown in the final battle.

  “The second it was over, I called Atomic Harmony Devices,” Ingo said. “At first they said you hadn’t been there. Then they claimed it was classified.”

  He’d departed New Manhattan at once, leaving Barton, the next highest ranking former Tier Two, in charge. Everything had been chaos then, Ingo said. The early news reports had gotten garbled.

  When he’d finally reached the factory in one of the long-distance planes, I’d taken the bomber eighteen hours before and no one was looking for me. The Doves sent after me hadn’t returned either. The WU personnel had seen the flash of light. Venturing up to Harmony Five was pointless, said Commander Sheridan. Clearly we were all dead.

  Ingo forced him into action, pointing out that if people knew Amity Vancour was missing after saving humankind from itself, and that World United hadn’t even tried to find her, there’d be uproar.

  “I don’t know when I’ve ever been so angry,” he said softly, looking down and playing with my fingers. “I think I might have killed him if he hadn’t agreed.”

  Sheridan had. He outfitted two planes with runners for the snow, and Ingo and another pilot flew north. They’d found us miles from the blast. The pilots of the Doves had been killed, but I was somehow still alive.

  The Cusp had been ripped in half. The nose of the plane, with me inside, had buried itself in a deep snowdrift. I hadn’t hallucinated the fire. A large part of the tail had apparently been in flames nearby for some time.

  There was hardly a part of me that wasn’t bruised. My left leg was badly broken; the doctor said the bones might need to be reset later. I’d lost my right little finger and half the ring finger to frostbite. I’d also lost two toes on my left foot – which was unfortunate, said the doctor, because my left leg was already weakened from both the break and the old bullet wound. Walking would probably always bring pain now.

  I was lucky…in more ways than one.

  Later, experts said that the mountains that had forced me to fly so low to hit my target would also have absorbed the initial radiation blast. With only a low wind, the fallout had been contained by the deep valley where Harmony Five lay.

  Though the mountains had worsened the shock wave’s impact – making it buffet me from all directions as it ricocheted around them – in the end, the terrain that had once housed Harmony Five had saved my life.

  “It’s not exactly made for crutches, is it?” I sat propped up on pillows, contemplating my right hand’s strange new shape. It throbbed, stumps aching.

  Three weeks on I was still bed-bound with my shattered leg. I’d just tried crutches for the first time and had almost fallen.

  Ingo half-lay beside me, dressed in street clothes. “Not the ones they have here, anyway.” He rubbed my arm. “We’ll get special ones made if we have to.”

  I nodded. The cast would be on for several months, but I needed to be mobile sooner than that. When I’d been in the hospital for a week, Mac had called. My eyes had welled to hear his voice.

  “You did it, kiddo,” he’d said, huskily. “I knew you could – I’m proud as hell of you. And listen…I’ve got a proposition for you and Ingo both.”

  We’d talked for almost an hour on the crackling long-distance line. A few times I’d put Ingo on the phone.

  We had agreed to what Mac proposed.

  When I hung up, Ingo and I looked at each other. “Your home,” I murmured – now Ingo still wouldn’t see it or his family for some time.

  “It’ll wait.” He took my uninjured hand and kissed my fingers. He jostled my hand gently. “Besides – didn’t you know? My real home’s right here.”

  For the present, my world was still this hospital room. A deck of cards lay on my bedside table; Ingo and I played sometimes. As my gaze caught on them, I thought again of Harlan – all those nights spent playing poker together.

  Hey, Vancour! How the hell d’you join the Resistance in this town?

  Damn you, Taylor, I thought bleakly. Why couldn’t you have held out for just a few more hours?

  Ingo seemed to realize. The sorrow for Harlan, for all of them – Vera, Dwight, Tess, Fern, everyone – came over both of us at times.

  He put his arm around me, and I leaned into his side. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

  Surprise stirred. I glanced at him. He smoothed a strand of my hair back.

  “It’s not a platitud
e, my love,” he said in a low voice. “You will be.”

  He still looked haunted sometimes. The images that he’d shared of the battle haunted me too. Now it hit me anew, with an aching wonder. I touched Ingo’s face, tracing its angles.

  So many deaths…yet somehow this one man had survived.

  And so had I.

  I pressed against him and he wrapped his arms around me. Caressing the long line of his back, I shut my eyes, savouring his steady heartbeat.

  Finally I straightened and cleared my throat. “We’ll both be fine,” I said. “No platitudes here, either.”

  Ingo smiled ruefully. “We’ve never been very good at them, have we?”

  “No. So we’re not starting now.”

  “Agreed.” He bent his head to my lips. The shiver that ran through me felt like a promise. I ran my hand through his hair.

  “I want to be out of this hospital,” I murmured against his mouth. “I want to be in a bed alone with you again.”

  “The thought’s crossed my mind too,” Ingo said. “Once or twice.” He kissed my cheek, my neck. “We’ll make up for lost time later,” he whispered.

  “I’m so glad you never say anything you don’t mean,” I said, and felt him grin.

  “So am I, in this case.”

  When we drew apart, Ingo held me, my back to his chest. “Look,” he said, nodding at the window. He laid his scarred cheek against mine. “Perfect flying weather.”

  We gazed out at the sky: pure blue, with high, sweeping cirrus clouds. I nodded, reaching up to stroke his curls. “It looks like that painting in the book of prints you gave me.”

  “It does. The one by Magnini.”

  I smiled, still studying the clouds. “Yes. Exactly.”

  We talked about our future.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  August, 1943

  Mac and Sephy stood in the strong summer sunshine, watching with thousands of others as a young girl carrying a folded flag walked past down New Manhattan’s Concord Avenue. A band marched behind her. The plaintive notes of the Appalachian national anthem were almost the only sound.

  Behind the band came the surviving pilots who’d protected New Manhattan. They wore dress blues. Some were in wheelchairs being pushed by others; some had arms in slings or missing limbs.