Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  At the far end of the lot he finds a spot and hauls from the backseat his pack and slams shut the door. As he walks, the Jeep seems to walk with him and he realizes in a panic that it has begun to roll. He curses and tries to wrestle it to a stop with his hands and then jumps into the cab to engage the emergency brake, the only way to keep the vehicle in place.

  He looks over his shoulder twice when crossing the lot, in part to make sure the Jeep hasn’t rolled away or lost a tire or burst into flames, but his gaze is full of longing too as he considers climbing behind the wheel, revving the engine, driving over the mountains, then south along the coast without glancing a single time into the rearview.

  Two thousand students and he knows not a single one. He brings his fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinches. Ever since he moved here he has had a vague headachy pain behind his eyes. His mother blames it on tension and altitude. He blames his bed. His mother bought it from a neighbor, a woman whose son had a job and a fiancée in Portland, so she was changing his bedroom into the guest room and upgrading from the twin to a queen-size. Every time Patrick rolls into bed, he finds it unsettling, with the impression of someone else still in the mattress, a dent where another body had been, just one more reminder that this place is not his own.

  He doesn’t mind the landscape. The deep-rutted glaciers glowing from the Cascades. The thickly forested foothills with their hiking trails and bear-grass meadows and white-water rivers. And then, to the east, the sprawl of the sage flats interrupted by the occasional striped canyon, the bulge of a cinder cone. Hanging above all of this a sky, that high-altitude sky, as glassy and blue as the stripe inside a marble.

  But his mother is a stranger and his bed reminds him of a coffin and he wakes up in the night to pee and crashes into the wall or the bookcase because the room isn’t his own. Twelve months, he thinks to himself, pushing through the glass-doored entrance, shouldering through the crowds of students. Twelve months and his father will be home, which means he will be home, and it will be as though he never climbed aboard Flight 373.

  The morning passes in a blur. He forgets his locker combo. He tries to navigate the many crowded hallways and won’t ask for directions and ends up slipping late into each of his classes and facing the students’ hooded eyes. Teachers wearing glasses and ill-fitting slacks lick their fingers when walking up and down the desk rows, laying down syllabi, reading aloud course expectations in voices that seem already half-stunned with boredom.

  He has a difficult time paying attention. He feels hopped-up, jittery. He can’t seem to get enough oxygen. The lights are too bright. The chairs are too cold and rigid. He chews a hole in his cheek and drinks his blood. The clock clicks its way toward noon, and its sound reminds him of a detonator.

  He remembers, in grade school, the Magic Eye books that were so popular at the time. You would stare at a patterned page until your eyes went out of focus—and then an image would rise from the page and startle you. He remembers one page in particular, a page carrying the shape of the moon—and out of its cratered grayness rose a skull. He had slammed shut the book and for some time avoided looking at the moon too closely, always closing his blinds at night for fear that it would roll past his window and grin down on him.

  In this manner his day progresses, the ordinary sharpening into the dangerous. A slammed locker is a bomb. A snapped pencil is a broken bone. A girl with her hair dyed black and her face powdered white is a corpse.

  He jerks his head, hearing his name muttered everywhere, but never directly to him. “Patrick,” they say under their breath. “Patrick.” At the drinking fountain, after a splash of water, he turns to find a girl with long bangs staring at him through her hair. When he says, “What?” she half gasps, half giggles, before jogging away.

  He wonders if he is hearing things, imagining things, or if anyone actually recognizes him. He hopes they don’t. His photograph, he knows, was splashed across newspapers, magazines, television reports, including the Oregonian and the Old Mountain Tribune. “Miracle Boy,” they called him. But a month has passed. And he has always thought of himself as rather nondescript—brown hair, medium height, ropily muscled, ball cap pulled low, his only distinguishing feature the red birthmark shaped like a half-moon next to his right eye.

  But their eyes are on him—he is certain of it now—every face in the hallway turning to regard him, every teacher lingering on his name at roll, blinking hard when he raises his hand. He tries to shrug off the attention. Most of these students, after all, have taken classes, played sports together since they were in grade school. People notice the new guy. That’s all he is to them: the new guy. They’re sizing him up, trying to figure out who he is, where he’ll fit.

  But a group of skinheads—he thinks that’s what they are, their eyes hard and their hair razored down to a bristling shadow—has him worried. He has spotted a dozen of them. Or maybe the same three or five people keep wandering past him, staring. They wear white shirts tucked into khakis, combat boots. He spots on the backs of their hands a tattoo he can’t quite make sense of, some symbol that looks like a bullet.

  But that isn’t who knocks his hat off in the hallway. A hand cuffs the back of his head and he watches his hat flip forward, the brim of it clattering to the tile, spinning to a rest. Slowly Patrick blows out a sigh and turns around.

  “Hey there, Miracle Boy.” He wears cowboy boots and tight jeans with a rodeo buckle shining from the belt. He’s big, nearly a head taller than Patrick, squarely built and jowly like a bulldog. “We haven’t met.”

  Patrick shrugs off his backpack and it thuds to the floor next to his hat.

  “All day long, I’m hearing about you. People talking about Miracle Boy this, Miracle Boy that.” He smiles without humor. “You’re famous. I never met anybody who’s famous before. You going to sign me an autograph?”

  In the crowd eddying past them, people are beginning to slow and stare and whisper. Something is about to happen, they know, and whatever happens, Patrick knows, might determine how he fits into this place. “Fuck yourself,” he says, his voice more like a shrug than a threat.

  “That’s no way to treat a fan.” He mocks sadness, pooching out his lower lip. Then, in a flash, his body surges forward, his huge hand slapping the side of Patrick’s head, knocking him off-balance, mussing his hair. “Miracle Boy, I’m wanting to ask you a question.” He goes to slap Patrick again, this time with the opposite arm, but Patrick dances back from the swing and feels only the breeze it displaces. “Shouldn’t you be dead? Why didn’t you die along with everybody else?” His eyebrows rise into the shapes of crowbars. He circles Patrick and Patrick pivots to follow him. “Not a scratch on you, Miracle Boy. Hardly seems fair.”

  His arm shoots out again, cuffs Patrick on the side of the head, an openhanded hammerblow that makes his ear momentarily deaf, so what the boy says sounds a long way off. “Does that make you lucky or a hero or a ghost?”

  People gather around them like a lasso. Some of the faces are smiling. Patrick looks to them for help, and when it doesn’t come, they blur away. His mind hums like a wasp’s wings. He breathes in a gulping way, as if he is choking. He has thought endlessly about what he could have done on the plane, how he might have pulled off his belt and used it to strangle the lycan, ripped the fire extinguisher from the rear cabin and bashed in its skull. Now, with his body trembling all over, it’s as if all those thoughts finally find an outlet. He feels a darkness rising through him, drowning him, a wonderful, horrible feeling.

  Patrick doesn’t aim. He doesn’t arrange his legs in a boxer’s stance. He simply whips his fist into the boy’s face and sends him reeling back, blood geysering from his nose and mouth. The pain catches up a moment later, a sharp volt that sizzles from his knuckles to his wrist. He shakes it off and then stares at his hand, the skin torn and raw, like a tool he doesn’t recognize.

  The boy hunches over and twitches, an apron of blood running down his face and chest. He keeps touching his nose
and seems baffled by the red smeared across the tips of his fingers. Somebody laughs, a haw-haw-haw that sounds a little like a crow’s cackle. At that the boy gathers himself upright and rushes Patrick with his arms out.

  At the last moment Patrick leaps aside with his leg angled out to trip. He has never moved like this in his life. The boy falls heavily, his body impacting the tile with a thud, his face with a thwap. He rolls over, screaming a scream that is muffled by the hands he tents over his mouth. His eyes well with tears and stare up at Patrick with a furious sadness, like he can’t figure out how this has been done to him but he will find a way to rectify it.

  Principal Wetmore has a stiff broom of a mustache. He wears a baggy tan suit and a Bugs Bunny tie. His office is eerily dark, lit only by a tall lamp with a heavy shade that tints the room mustard. His bald head flashes with the light and so do his squarish glasses when he leans forward and lays his elbows on his desk. “One day in and we’re already talking, huh?”

  “Afraid so,” Patrick says. He opens and closes his right hand, the knuckles chewed up and throbbing with what feels like an electrical current.

  The walls are busy with bookcases and diplomas and a family photo taken in a JCPenney studio where the principal smiles proudly over the shoulder of his permed wife and their twin boys. On his desk sits a half-eaten bowl of peanuts with a halo of salt around it. Next to it is a nameplate that reads THE BIG CHEESE in inlaid gold lettering. The door is closed. But windows surround them, one of them looking out into the hallway, the glass-paneled trophy case. Students drift past and goggle their eyes at Patrick. He tries to imagine he is looking through a portal at the bottom of the sea and the students are strange fish with needly teeth and translucent skin.

  “He started it, right?” Wetmore says. “Seth?”

  At first Patrick isn’t sure whether he is being sarcastic or not, so he doesn’t respond except with a searching look.

  “Obviously he started it. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that’s how you’ll remember your first day here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “To be honest, to be perfectly frank, I’m glad you did what you did. Don’t repeat that! But it’s better that you laid him out rather than the other way around. But that’s between you and me, mano a mano. You got me, amigo?”

  Patrick nods and looks to the door, wishing himself on the other side of it.

  “Now hopefully people will leave you alone. But I can’t have fighting!” He raises his finger in the air and wags it. “I just can’t.”

  Patrick bounces his knee, chews at the dry skin of his lower lip.

  “Next time, do me a favor? Walk away?”

  Patrick glances out the window. Through the crowd of students milling by, he spots two of the skinheads. They lean against the trophy case, as still as the golden runners behind them, with their arms crossed and their eyes on him. He nods at them. They give him nothing in return.

  “Patrick?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

  “Look.” Wetmore steeples his hands. “You’ve been through a lot. Publicly. I thought about inviting you in here—did you know that? were your ears warm?—I actually thought about inviting you into my office a few weeks ago when I heard you’d enrolled. Just to say hello. I honestly wanted to tell you that I honestly didn’t know how the students were going to treat you. Whether they would resent you for what you’ve been through or love you for it. Maybe a little of both. I just didn’t know. I do know that it’s always hard coming to a new place. Maybe not for you, but maybe so, probably so. And if so, we want you to let us know what we can do. Okay? Okay.”

  They stand and Patrick glances again to the window. The skinheads are gone. When he looks back, Wetmore has his hand extended for a shake. Patrick says, “Sorry,” and raises his own, bloodied and trembling, in an apologetic wave.

  Chapter 6

  CLAIRE DOESN’T LIKE wide-open space. It makes her feel exposed and untethered, as if she might float off with a gust of wind. From where she stands—in the weed-choked parking lot of a Shell station in Frazee, Minnesota—she can see three different weather systems at the same time: a mushrooming collection of thunderheads that appear bruised and intermittently veined with light; an enormous cloud that reminds her of a gray jellyfish trailing its poisoned tentacles; and an anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud that sponges up the light of the sun. She knows its name, cumulonimbus, because her father taught her all of them, along with the different types of trees, knots, birdcalls, constellations.

  She can remember lying on the driveway with her father, every light in the house extinguished, the stars sprinkled across the black reaches of the sky—this is how they spent so many summer evenings. And as the constellations wheeled past, he would test her, her eyes tracking his finger when he pointed there, and there, and there. The stars would web together into designs that seemed to glow brighter. “Carnia,” she would say, spotting the keel of a ship floating in a midnight sea. “Leo. Gemini. Hydras.”

  Now she imagines her father’s upraised hand becoming translucent, the stars glowing through it, and then vanishing altogether. She pushes the thought from her head and tries to concentrate on something small and good. The endless night taught her that. If she doesn’t focus on something else, she doesn’t move, and if she doesn’t move, they will find her. She doesn’t understand why, but they want her. The men chasing up the staircase—and, waiting for her on the sidewalk, the Tall Man in the black coat. Above her—for the moment anyway; she knows better than to count on anything anymore—is a broad patch of blue sky. That is something to be grateful for.

  The wind hasn’t stopped blowing since the Twin Cities, like a draft from an open door. It rises now and kicks up a tiny whirlwind of trash and grit that dies a moment later. She sinks into her Carhartt jacket—given to her by a trucker—two sizes too big and the color of the hard-packed soil and browned grass that stretches to the horizon. In one pocket rest a Snickers bar and a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, and in the other, a wad of cash and the letter from her father. She wears sneakers and jeans and a long-sleeve, blood-spotted shirt. Otherwise she has nothing—hardly even a memory of last night, so much of it a blur.

  She remembers transforming, the fury and adrenaline turning over inside her like a big black dog. She remembers crashing through the glass and tumbling through the night and staggering off into the woods. She remembers the Tall Man.

  In the distance, dogs bayed. Flashlights cut through the falling snow. She hoped that the wind would blow away her scent, that the snow would fill up her tracks. Her friend Stacey lived only a mile away, and Claire raced there with the intent of pounding at her window, begging for help. In her panic she almost did exactly that, stopping short, sliding in the snow and bracing herself against a tree, when she noticed, at the last minute, the black cars parked in the driveway. Every window blazed with light interrupted by moving shadows. They had come for her family too. She watched them escort Stacey and her mother out the front door and lock them in the back of a car. She watched them drag the father’s body down the steps and roll it into an open trunk. And then she watched the house grow bright with fire that reached through the windows and made the snow steam.

  She had run then. Run without thinking—through the night, the skeins of snow—gnashing her teeth and trying to ignore the pain in her wrist and her heart. It wasn’t her plan to jump the train—she had no plan except the single-minded impulse to escape—until she heard the banshee cry of its whistle.

  Tracks cleaved through the center of town, and she could see the freight cars snaking darkly through the trees. The ground tremored—even the air seemed to shake—when she burst from the woods and scampered slantingly up the gravel berm. The train was long and she could not see the engine, but she heard the faraway blast of its whistle and guessed it was nearly within city limits. The cars slowed. The wind tried to push her back. The wheels kicked up ice. The clattering roar took over every other sound in the world. She raced perilously clos
e, reaching out with her good hand—its knuckles furred over, its fingers curled into pointed tips—and snatched hold of a short steel ladder. Her feet dragged behind her, skidding across the snow and gravel, until she hooked her other arm onto the ladder, bracing her elbow against a rung. She used her last bit of energy to haul herself up and crawl to the rear platform of a freight car, where she curled up on herself, trying to create a pocket of warmth, and only then, when she retreated into her human form, did she cry.

  Deep in the night, the train lumbered into Minneapolis and came to a screeching stop at a grain elevator. She rose wearily from the freight car and wandered away in a daze, her ears aching, her body humming. She was in an industrial area. Factories. Storage centers. Big metal warehouses stained with murals of rust. Machinery hummed. Steam rose in arching columns like bridges to the moon. There was no snow here, or if there was, it had melted, but it was cold all the same and she crossed her arms against the wind and the pain nested in her wrist. She found a road with no sidewalk and walked along its grassy shoulder. She had no plan. She just wanted to feel as though she was moving, putting distance between her and whoever she felt still pursued her.