Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Chase gives up on the squats and walks to the window and stares out into the day. Clouds hang like a dark, low ceiling. A maple sapling, stripped of its leaves, shakes against the wind. “That’s not really my style, is it?”

  “No,” Augustus says. “No, it is not.”

  * * *

  Miriam is handsome more than pretty. Claire can see her father in her. The muscular jaw and squared shoulders. Eyes as blue as an acetylene torch. But while her father always had a smile flashing beneath his beard, Miriam seems incapable of humor, her expression stony, her mouth a lipless black slit. She never stops moving and wears a black tank top that shows off arms roped with muscle.

  The idea of family has, up to this point, evaded Claire. When she complained about visiting her nana at the nursing home, or about attending a barbecue with her cousins, her mother would always say, “They’re family,” as if that explained everything. Now Claire finally understands it, the importance of blood. That someone like Miriam, who is otherwise a stranger, would take her in without question.

  Their conversations, rushed and interrogative, are broken up by long silences. They sit on opposite ends of the couch. Claire has her legs tucked under her and her aunt leans forward with her forearms on her knees. At first Miriam has only questions—“And then what happened?” is one of her favorites—about the home invasion, her father’s note, the seemingly endless passage from Wisconsin. Claire expects more of a reaction when she describes the gunfire erupting downstairs, but Miriam only lowers her head and says, in a muted voice, that she knew, from the moment she spotted Claire on her doorstep, that her brother must be dead.

  Then her voice is sharp once more. “Who was that boy? The one in the Jeep.”

  “He was nobody.” Claire explains what happened—everything about the night, including the truck driver, whom up to this point she has kept secret. She braces herself, expecting Miriam to pull her into a hug and tell her how sorry she is. Instead her aunt rises from the couch and disappears from the living room. Claire can hear her aunt down the hall, in the kitchen, a cupboard closing, glasses rattling. A moment later she appears with two tumblers of whiskey. Without a word she hands one to Claire. They raise the glasses in a grim toast and drain them. Claire coughs into her fist. Her chest blazes as though she has swallowed a coal.

  Miriam sets down her glass on the coffee table with a click. “That was stupid, you know, bringing that boy here. Really stupid.”

  “I know.”

  “He knows your face. He knows where we live.”

  “I know,” Claire says and drops her gaze to the floor, but really, despite the strong poison of what Miriam has to say, all Claire can concentrate on is a single word, we. Where we live. It makes her want to cry out with relief.

  * * *

  Claire tries to keep busy. She sweeps the floor. She turns the toilet paper around so that it pulls forward. She alphabetizes the books. She washes the dishes, letting the towel linger on a plate before setting it on the rack to dry. She opens up the fridge and stares into its cold white hum. Small tasks, everyday rituals, bring her comfort after living in a free fall.

  She finds flies in the sinks. Flies on the windowsills. Flies on bedcovers, flies even beneath her sheets, buzzing. The cabin hasn’t been opened in a long time and the air has a stale, rank quality. She has longed for a roof over her head, but she finds herself so used to the open sky that the boarded-up windows make her feel trapped.

  She tells her aunt as much. At that moment Miriam is peering out one of the window slits, and when she glances at Claire a band of light divides her face. “You want to chop wood?”

  “Anything. So long as it’s outside.”

  Miriam returns her gaze to the window and uses her teeth to shred dry skin off her lower lip. “I suppose it’s safe. So long as we’re armed. And you stay close.”

  “You think somebody might be out there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not right now. But somebody came for me a few weeks ago.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Miriam makes her hand into the shape of a gun and points it at Claire. “Bang.”

  * * *

  Chase appears in the statehouse rotunda in dress uniform—peaked cap, midnight-blue jacket with red trim and a standing collar. Behind him, when he tromps down the marble stairs, follow members of the Oregon National Guard. He approaches the podium, its front adorned with the Oregon seal, and pauses there as the soldiers perform a traditional march. Their swords slash the air and their boots thud the stone floor and make the air tremble. They come to a stop beneath a massive American flag suspended between two pillars.

  Chase snaps off a salute and removes his hat to set on the podium. “Thank you,” he says, first to the guardsmen and then to the reporters who sit in folding chairs twenty rows deep. Their cameras flash and create a strobe-like effect that blinds him. For three weeks he has not made a public appearance. After appearing everywhere, he was suddenly nowhere, and the media took note. His official statement claimed he was hunkering down for a restful strategy session, but many believed he had fallen ill. The press conference is Buffalo’s idea: a show of strength and a bold declaration that will distract from the gossip of his sudden absence.

  Despite his rigid posture, despite his small smile, Chase does not feel well. He doesn’t feel like himself—maybe that’s a better way to put it. He is a man divided, host to a pathogen that can overtake him at any moment. Sometimes his heart races and his breath comes in hurried pants. His muscles ache. His toothbrush pulls away from his mouth bloody. He rakes a hand through his hair and finds it wet with sweat. He can smell himself, his armpits and crotch damp musky pockets. His consciousness sometimes feels as though it has short-circuited, whirling with lights, through which dart, alternately, the silhouette of a man, and then a wolf.

  Buffalo warned him about this. It will take time to get used to his condition, physically, emotionally, an alien pregnancy capable of tearing through his belly, strangling him with its umbilical cord. Symbiotic is the word Buffalo used. Cursed is how Chase thinks of it. Volpexx will make things easier. Volpexx—Buffalo promised, once they get their hands on a shipment of it—will be the equivalent of a choke chain.

  Good thing. The infection has a tumorous effect on the adrenal glands, causing them to double in size. The section of the brain known as the amygdala—which controls emotion—is part of the limbic system and communicates with the hypothalamus, where hormones take effect. Rage or fear or excitement results in a hormonal cue results in an adrenal flood. The effect on the body, during transformation, is equivalent to a towering dose of PCP.

  The reporters lower their cameras and the white haze of his vision solidifies. “I stand here a proud, humble Oregon boy.” He pauses and cocks his head, at first wondering what he hears, realizing it is their pens scratching across paper, like the noise of hundreds of insects chewing something fibrous. All of his senses have amplified these past few days especially. He can feel the tags on his shirts and the stitching in his socks. Nothing tastes right—even tap water carries strange flavors of fluoride and metal. He can smell a dead squirrel rotting beneath a bush three blocks away.

  Beyond the crowd of reporters stands Buffalo, who makes a get-on-with-it motion with his hand. Chase clears his throat. “My family has lived in this state for three generations. My great-​grandfather laid roads in Eastern Oregon. My grandfather designed the lumber mill that was for so many years the industrial heart of Old Mountain. My father ran a six-thousand-head cattle ranch. My roots go deep.” He almost never speaks from scripted material, but Buffalo says that has to change, that he can no longer leave anything to chance and risk a flash of fear or anger.

  Somewhere in the distance he hears a siren. A police cruiser, he feels certain, though really he has no idea how to tell the difference between the wail of one compared to that of an ambulance or fire truck. Regardless, someone is in trouble.

  “Some of you might remember ther
e was a time when the billboards at our state’s border read WELCOME TO OREGON. NOW GO HOME.” Many in the audience smile. “It was a joke, but not really. Oregon is a treasure. And we did not want it spoiled by outsiders. Which is exactly what has happened. We’ve become a haven—​especially those liberal enclaves of Eugene and Portland—for lycans. We have compromised our borders and our safety. One thing I know as a rancher, you’ve got to build good fences.

  “I am introducing legislation that I hope will be approved by year’s end.” He pauses when the cameras flash again and the reporters whisper among each other, the sound like a gathering wind. “Initiatives include stricter testing, criminal penalties, and lifetime supervision as well as a public registry containing names, photographs, and addresses, accessible online. We will also reconstitute the Lycan Advisory Board—dissolved in the 1970s—and I have asked Chief of Staff Augustus Remington to serve as chair.”

  For the moment no one speaks—no one looks up—all of them bent over their notebooks and laptops, writing furiously. A cell phone rings and goes unanswered. He spots the red eye of a video camera blinking at him. He stares into it. “There should be absolutely no mercy shown to any lycan offenders in our state, and our legislation serves to impose the strictest standards of supervision to ensure that we are protected. Our old way of worrying about who might be offended must be radically altered to account for keeping people safe. New policies will require open minds, a willingness to do things differently, more strictly. The expense to some will be to the benefit of many. This state can benchmark the nation’s policies. And to those who think my goals are too high, too extreme, I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  He ends the speech by facing the flag, placing a hand over his heart, and offering a somber rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

  He doesn’t field questions, but they ask them anyway. When he escapes up the stairs, he can hear every one of their voices calling after him. But as Buffalo predicted, not one of them wants to know about job growth or corporate income taxes or commercial property taxes or whether it’s true he’s taken ill.

  * * *

  The chopping block is a scarred, ancient stump. Next to it sits a pile of freshly chainsawed logs that smell of pine resin. They heft the logs, one by one, onto the stump to split twice over. Then they carry the armful of sticks to the woodpile stacked the length of the cabin.

  This was her favorite fall chore. Her father would buy a permit and the two of them would drive along Forest Service roads and buzz down a few tagged trees and shave away the branches and load the logs into the bed of the truck to take home and spend the next few weeks splitting.

  She thinks of him now, the pain in her heart matching the pain in her wrist, which she tries to ignore when she hefts the splitting maul. The two women sweat, despite the day’s chill. They take off their sweatshirts, and their forearms rash over from carrying the wood. Miriam keeps her eyes on the forest and occasionally touches the Glock holstered at her belt for reassurance.

  The ax’s wooden handle is polished to a hard gloss from the hands that have constantly gripped it. Claire swings it in an arc and it catches, with a sound like a cough, in the log, which hasn’t been properly seasoned, its wood hard to split, as white and wet as an apple’s core. Some of the logs are so tight grained they must use a sledgehammer and a wedge. Her arms ache pleasantly.

  They work in a comfortable silence that Miriam finally breaks. “How much do you know about your parents?”

  Claire has been waiting for this moment, has been waiting for what she doesn’t know how to ask. Her swing falters and the ax blade catches in the log and she wobbles it back and forth and then kicks the log to release it. “My mother likes to quilt. She doesn’t wear makeup. She cans beets and pickles and tomatoes. She reads a book a week, usually something historical or political. Her favorite color is yellow.” She realizes she is talking in the present tense and doesn’t bother correcting herself. “My father—”

  Miriam steals the ax from Claire and lifts it over her head. “You’re saying you don’t know anything.”

  “They’re the most boring people in the world. What’s there to know?”

  Miriam steps forward and drops the ax and the wood splinters and the blade buries itself in the anchor log. “You have no fucking idea.”

  * * *

  The sky is closing down and dark is coming. It’s that time when the day isn’t really gone but isn’t really here. Augustus escorts Chase to his home in Keizer, a white neocolonial with black shutters. He does not entertain visitors, so the walls are as white and bare now as they were the day he moved in, the rooms mostly empty except for an IKEA table and chairs in the dinette, a couch set before a wide-screen television in the living room, a mattress and box spring in the master suite upstairs. The office is the only room that matters to him, and it is busy with file cabinets, crowded bookshelves, and two desks arranged in the shape of an L.

  The basement remains unfinished, the ceiling bare studs, the walls cinder block, the floor a sloping concrete with a central drain. Three naked lightbulbs offer meager light. Augustus stuffed the recessed windows with insulation and covered them with plywood to muffle the sound and prevent anyone from peering inside. He hired a security firm to install a steel cage, its panels built out of heavy-duty six-gauge wire welded at every wire contact point. The swinging door is hinged with flanged head bolts and fitted with an industrial padlock made with a case-hardened alloy steel shackle.

  A garden hose runs from the industrial sink into a coil on the floor. Later, he will use it to spray away the shit and piss and blood, the foaming tide of it swirling down the central floor drain.

  Chase pauses before the cage and says, “I hate this,” and Augustus says, “I know,” and puts a hand on his shoulder to show his support and encourage him forward. “Take off your clothes,” Augustus says. “You don’t want to ruin them like the last time.”

  It is not that he grows larger. It is that he soils himself in excitement, claws himself in agitation. Chase peels off his uniform and tosses it into a ball outside the cage. Thin scars crosshatch his shoulders and chest where the claw marks healed over. His left forearm is a lumpy mass of reddish scar tissue.

  The door clicks shut and the padlock snaps into place and Augustus settles into the aluminum folding chair and adjusts his glasses and rests his hands on his knees like a theater patron who waits for the lights to dim, the curtains to part.

  Every night, he transforms. Augustus demands it. To get it out of his system and exhaust his body. To normalize it, control it. Transformation does not come easily, he has told Augustus, every bone seeming to break, his skin crawling with angry wasps. He cries out and falls to the floor. His body contorts itself as if run through with electricity. From what Augustus has read, this will get easier over time, like a nerve deadened by repeated blows.

  “This never would have happened,” Augustus says under his breath, “if you had just listened to me.”

  As if in response, Chase hurls himself against the bars of the cage. He would have made a fine berserker, Augustus thinks, those Norse lycans who so long ago worked themselves into a frenzy, transforming before battle and fighting in a savage trance.

  This would take time, months maybe, but Augustus, as a boy, owned several dogs, and with discipline and patience they all learned to fetch his slippers and shit outside. He has no doubt the same will be true of Chase. “Isn’t that right, old friend?”

  Chase circles his enclosure. His arms lash at nothing but air. His teeth snap together as though chattering out some code. He presses his face, wild-eyed and misshapen and split by a fanged grin, against the cage.

  There is a fridge in the corner, and Buffalo withdraws from it a package of raw hamburger. He tears off the plastic and crushes his fingers into the bloody mess. He molds tiny red balls and tosses them into the cage and, with a peculiar little smile, watches Chase devour them, one after another.

  Chapter 16

&nbs
p; A FROG LIES on a black dissection tray, the flaps of its belly pinned open to reveal guts like damp jewels. Patrick prods it with a scalpel and scissors and makes notes on his lab report. He breathes through his mouth and can vaguely taste the smell of formaldehyde. His right hand, gripping the scissors, still hurts. It has been a week since the full moon—since he saved the girl from the side of the road—and when he woke the next morning, he wasn’t sure if she was real or the shades of a dream that settled into the bruises ruining his knuckles.

  Across the room, the teacher—Mr. Niday, a goateed man with sweat stains constantly darkening his armpits—comments on a three-legged frog, how common mutations are due to pesticides and parasites and how frog populations are declining precipitously and how something needs to be done and—

  Patrick’s attention turns to his pocket as it buzzes twice. He checks to make sure Mr. Niday is still occupied with the three-legged frog and pulls out his handheld. A text from Malerie reads, “Skip lunch. Meet @ ur Jeep.”

  He is so distracted that, when a few minutes later Mr. Niday appears behind him and asks how he is doing, Patrick says fine even as he slices through the heart he didn’t know was there.

  He has been avoiding her. But now—God knows why; sometimes he can’t help himself—he is driving around Old Mountain with her. The day is bright and washed of its color. She has the radio up and the windows down. She sings the Stones around a lit cigarette—“Well, you’ve got your diamonds and you’ve got your pretty clothes”—the lyrics carried by clouds of smoke.