Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  He was muscular and taller than her by a few inches and had bright green eyes that would alternately stare hard at her and then turn shyly away. His hair was a dark brown and cut short, and she could tell it would have a little curl to it if he grew it out. The other day, when he came for her, she could smell him—she could smell everything, the residual effects of transforming—and he smelled good, even when a little sweaty, like black dirt. She liked how still he was, only moving when he had to. And the way he talked, slow and careful with his words, making sure each one mattered.

  It was a relief to talk to someone her age, to anyone besides Miriam.

  And so she drank up everything he told her. She asked where he was from and he said California and she said to tell her about it and he did, talking about his father’s hobby farm. How he spent his childhood collecting eggs from beneath hens and ducking under barbed-wire fences and firing slingshots at jackrabbits and cutting the tails off lizards to keep in a glass jar and swiping grasshoppers from the air to toss in a spider’s web. He told her about Big Sur. He told her about driving Highway 1 on the back of his father’s Indian motorcycle. He told her about the fog breathing off the ocean. The clang of buoys and the barking conversation of sea lions. He told her about San Francisco, fishing off the wharfs, jumping onto the back of a moving trolley.

  “Sounds like you miss it.”

  “Yeah.” He did, but less so than before. He said he had been through so much, and when he looks back, that life seemed to belong to someone else.

  “I know the feeling,” she said, the feeling that she wasn’t the only one holding back, who could have said more. She felt a tug then. Like those stories her father used to tell around the fireplace, the ones about ghosts that grabbed you around the neck when you were sleeping, by your ankle when you were swimming, and never let go. He had her.

  Now her boots whisper through the calf-deep snow. The windward sides of the ponderosas are clotted with white, making the exposed bark startlingly red. Branches slant downward, weighed and frosted with snow. She walks among the white, huddled shapes of the underbrush—and then runs a few steps, just for the thrill of it.

  Yesterday, with the temperature plummeting, she heard, way off in the woods, what she at first mistook for gunfire. Echoing cracks. “Don’t worry,” Miriam said. “It’s just the trees.” Freezing and splitting in half. One explodes next to her now, an old pine that breaches, its two halves ripping away from each other with a splintery rasp. She cries out in terror and then covers her mouth with her hand, muffling the laugh that follows.

  She pauses next to a mound of snow, what must be a boulder frosted over. The wind rises and she sees the shape of it in the scarves of snow that blow all around her. The chatter of her thoughts quiets and she realizes the only sound is the wind and the only color, white. The mound trembles. She notices a red strain of moss—what looks so much like hair but can’t be—curling out of all that white.

  She turns around in a circle. Something is wrong. She senses it in the air, like the echo of a scream, some disturbance she can’t quite hear. The snowbank pulses again, as though breathing—and then explodes upward, making a small blizzard. She cannot seem to move, and a vast stretch of time—enough time for her to feel her breath leaving her, her eyes widening in terror—seems to unfold before a massive set of arms encircles her.

  * * *

  Patrick is at the kitchen table, his head full of fog. He spent most of the night with his back against the locked door of his bedroom, a baseball bat resting across his lap. A few minutes ago he woke and tromped downstairs when he heard the pipes clanking, the downstairs shower spitting on.

  Now he spoons into his cereal and sips a Mountain Dew and turns to watch his mother clatter down the hall in her high heels. She wears a black pantsuit with a cream collar that matches the pearls strung around her neck. “You look good,” he says, and she curtsies and then winces.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She rubs her knee. “Just my joints. Getting old, I guess.”

  He tells her he thought he heard something last night. He does not tell her that he searched the house with his baseball bat cocked and ready to swing, that he found her room empty and the back door open, breathing in and out slightly, snowflakes fluttering into the house to perish on the floor.

  He unlocked his phone then, ready to punch 911, when he saw her old text message and remembered that she hadn’t come home that evening, that she was staying over with a friend who was “having some trouble,” and that she would see Patrick the next morning. In his dream-addled state, he had forgotten.

  She ceases her rubbing, her body frozen for the space of a breath. Then she is on her way to the kitchen, where she opens a drawer, rattling with silverware, and closes it without pulling anything out. “Well, like they say in the movies, it was probably only the wind.”

  “They’re always wrong in the movies.”

  She gives him a rigid smile and pulls a carton of orange juice from the fridge and a glass out of the cupboard and fills it and drinks it in a gulping way. “Something has come up. Not going to be here tonight.”

  Again. She is gone so often these days, at least two nights a week. He thinks about the thin man stepping out of his house, nodding at him. He thinks about spotting his mother’s car heading toward his home in the middle of a workday. “What’s come up?”

  “A convention.”

  “Another one? But it’s the Sabbath.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her eyes are on her hands, not him, picking at a hangnail. “Busy, busy, busy.”

  He notices then the black bruise along her cheek that not even her makeup can hide. “Who gave you that?” He brushes a knuckle along his cheek and she raises a hand to touch the purplish swelling.

  “Nothing. Nobody. I was doing a showing the other day and walked into an open door. Stupid of me. Really embarrassing.”

  A twenty-inch TV sits on the kitchen counter. She picks up the remote and punches the power. The volume kicks on before the image. “What’s the worst part?” That’s the voice coming out of the darkness—the voice of Anderson Cooper, it turns out, reporting live from the Lupine Republic, wearing a down jacket and holding out a microphone to a soldier. His ears are bright red and his face appears windburned. Beyond them, the snow-covered landscape matches the sight seen out their kitchen window.

  “Worst part?” The soldier wears winter cammies patterned with white and black and gray blotches. His face could be anyone’s, obscured by goggles and a helmet. “Carrying your buddies on a litter to the birds. To the medevac. That’s the worst.”

  Cooper gives a brief history lesson, talking about the Republic as a melting pot of cultures, all of them united by their infection. “The world’s biggest leper colony,” Chase Williams, the governor of Oregon, recently called it. Virtually everyone, besides the U.S. personnel stationed there, is infected. Some have lived there for several generations, but families who want a homeland they can’t find elsewhere immigrate every day.

  The segment then cuts to Tuonela, the largest uranium mine in the Lupine Republic and a major U.S. supplier. Cooper dons a hazmat suit, readying for a tour of the facilities, while his voice-over describes the codependency of the U.S. and the Republic—and how a small militia of extremist lycans continues to threaten that relationship.

  His mother hits the remote again and the TV goes dark. She mutters something about nothing but bad news anymore and then says, “Your father is fine, you know. If anybody can take care of himself…Your father is fine.”

  Patrick almost says, What about my mother?

  She pulls her jacket out of the hallway closet and digs around in the pockets until she jangles out her keys. “So long,” she calls over her shoulder when she closes the door to the garage behind her.

  He doesn’t respond. He’s still looking at the black rectangle of the TV. He pulls out his handheld. He hasn’t heard from his father in three days; the last email Patrick didn’t understand. “Breakthrou
gh!” it read and nothing more. Whether he meant success in a military campaign or something else, Patrick doesn’t know, and the reply he sent—“???”—remains unanswered.

  He shoots his father another email: “You okay? Tell me about this breakthrough thing.” He hesitates, his thumbs hovering over the keypad, before writing, “Nothing new here,” when of course the very opposite is true, but his father has so much already to worry about, like staying alive.

  * * *

  By the time Miriam discovers the cabin empty, the snow has stopped. Her stomach is sour and her brain sluggish, but she manages a few clear thoughts. The child has merely disobeyed her. That is what teenagers do. She is testing boundaries. When Miriam peers out the front door, squinting against the brightness of the snow, only a single set of tracks runs from the porch into the woods, and Claire is tethered to the end of it. That’s what Miriam tells herself as she throws on a jacket and steps into her Sorels and snatches a Glock off the bureau and hurries outside, pausing briefly to puke between her boots, before running a sleeve across her mouth and continuing on.

  The air has that special hushed quality, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting. The only sound is the snow creaking underfoot and thumping off branches and hissing across the ground in serpenty wisps. The tracks are gray with shadow and half-filled and Miriam wonders what she would have done if there were no tracks, if the snow kept falling and erased them completely. She puts the thought out of her mind. Best not to think about the worst that can happen.

  But the worst has happened, she soon realizes, when she comes to that place in the trees where the tracks vanish into a messy crater of exploded snow. She stands still for a long time, breathing through her nose, and then she circles the crater, a muddle of prints, another set heading off deep into the woods. Claire’s tracks were the same size as her own—following them felt as if she were following herself. But these tracks, when Miriam sets her boot inside them, are twice the size of hers, swallowing hers up.

  Magog is alive. After she fired through the roof, after she heard him fall heavily to the ground, she checked outside and found no body but enough blood to make death a possibility.

  Now he has come for Claire. And though they are long gone, she can feel them—their smell and taste like a memory imprinted in the air. She kneels down and scoops a handful of snow brightened by a spot of blood and crushes it in her hand until it becomes a red ball of ice.

  She sees something nearby, caught in a bush, white and flapping like a bird’s wing. A piece of paper. It makes a rasping noise when she pulls it out—and reads, in blocky handwriting, the boy’s name, Patrick.

  Chapter 24

  THE MOON IS FAT and aglow and seemingly balanced on the chimney of the house Patrick stands before. A few minutes ago, he parked his Jeep on the snowy shoulder of the road. Though he duct-taped the hole Claire tore in his roof, the cold still finds its way in, and he is shivering from the drive when he walks the unplowed tire-rutted driveway. The wind is at his back. He hopes the dogs will remember his scent.

  They do. A few preliminary barks give way to mewling and whining and huffing, and he tells them shh and kneels down to face their slobbering tongues, flopping their ears and making their legs kick with his rough scratching. As he suspected, his mother’s car is parked nearby, glowing as white as the snowbound woods around him.

  When he circles the house and crunches through the drifts and peers in the windows, the dogs trail him, nudging at his hand with their cold noses. In every room he expects to find his mother cowering on the floor with her hand held over a swollen eye, a bleeding mouth. She divorced his father more than fifteen years ago—she can see who she pleases; he understands that—but if this man is hurting her, then Patrick plans to hurt him back.

  But the house is seemingly empty. He is surprised by what he sees, every room clean and sparely decorated with the kind of modern hard-edged bright-colored furniture on television shows that take place in fancy apartments in LA or New York. Not what he expected from a guy who owns twenty dogs and lives in an outlying neighborhood whose defining landmark is the city dump.

  Then he hears a scream. Muffled as if filtered through a pillow. He pounds up the front porch and tries the door, the knob loose. He pushes inside. Vanilla candles burn on the kitchen counter. Soft jazz mumbles and hoots from the stereo. He hurries through the house, checking every room twice, not sure whether he should call out for his mother—and then he hears it again, almost a squeal, from behind a door in the kitchen.

  He yanks it open and the floor falls away, a wooden staircase with rubber grips leading into the dimly lit basement. There is a terrible tang to the air—like the worst the zoo has to offer—that he barely registers when dropping down a few steps and leaning over the railing to take in the view.

  His guts go cold, as if he has just gulped down an icy glass of water.

  At first he isn’t sure what he’s looking at, the splatter of bones and blood, and then he spots the tufts of white fur and realizes it must be a goat. Perhaps. It’s difficult to tell. Hunched over it, with the posture of buzzards, are two naked figures. They are feeding. He remembers the cat his mother brought here the other day and wonders if it met a similar fate.

  He cries out for his mother—and then, too late, brings a hand to his mouth. They both swing toward him at once. The white stripe of hair gives her away, though her face is otherwise unrecognizable, deformed and bloodied. The man is covered with a thick down of hair, everywhere but his head, which remains ridiculously bald. His mother rises and moves toward him, and her feet smear the concrete with tacky prints the color of molasses. Her mouth is moving—she is either gnashing the air or trying to speak—but he doesn’t wait to find out.

  * * *

  Claire is not sure how much time has passed. A day, maybe two. She has messed herself. She has not eaten or had anything to drink. She has slept some, but even when awake, she might as well be sleeping, the world dark and unavailable to her. Her hands are cuffed to her opposite ankles, making an X of steel chain that rattles when she moves and makes it impossible to pull the burlap sack off her head. She finally does so by rubbing her head against the stone wall and licking the sack upward with her tongue. When it peels away, she sees that she is at the end of a shadowy corridor. The floor is black sand. Along each wall hangs a strand of LED lights that give off a blue glow and lend to the air an underwater quality.

  She can see that the ribbed lava tube reaches for twenty yards before elbowing to the left. She guesses she is deep underground—the air is still and musty, smelling of mud and sulfur—in one chamber of many that network the ground.

  She has called out for help a few times before with no response. But this time, after fifteen minutes, someone comes. She hears first his whistle. A low-noted song that comes from a long way off and that she does not recognize until the distance closes. “All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel.” The slowness of the song is maddening. It reverberates with an eerie echo, sounding like many more than one whistler coming toward her. “The monkey thought ’twas all in good fun.” And with that he steps into view, his body slowly bending around the corner when he whistles the final notes. “Pop goes the weasel.”

  His hair is the color of electricity. That’s the first thing she notices. The way it glows weirdly in the light thrown by the strand of LEDs. And then his size, as small and muscular as a gymnast. He wears black boots and black jeans and a black leather jacket. Now in the room with her, he has his hands in his pockets and kicks his way through the sand, kicking a small wave onto her when he comes to a stop a few feet away.

  “Hello, little missus,” he says, his voice high and vaguely accented, maybe British.

  “Little,” she says. “Look who’s talking.”

  He smiles without humor. “Got a mouth on you, do you? Just like your bitch of an aunt.” He takes his right hand out of his pocket. It is a small hand, made even smaller by his missing two fingers, the ring and pi
nky, the place where they ought to be mucked over with scar tissue. But it grows bigger a moment later when it curls into a fist and comes speeding toward her, filling her vision.

  She hears a muffled thud and realizes it is her head impacting the cave wall.

  When she comes to, her nose is throbbing and swollen, crusted with blood. She cannot breathe through it. She is on the floor, her head pillowed by the sand that crumbles off her cheek when she raises her head to observe the three men standing nearby.

  There is the man who hit her—who seems more sprite than man, someone out of a fairy tale—someone you’d come across on a dark forest path who would try to trick you or knife you. And there, next to him, the man who stole her away. The giant. As unreasonably wide as he is tall, his head nearly touching the cave’s ceiling. Long red hair, long red beard obscuring what little face she could see, two small eyes that seemed to look nowhere and everywhere. A black leather duster flaps loosely around him like a set of baggy bat wings. Hands that could palm and crush a basketball. She knows their strength from when they clamped hold of her, dragged a bag over her head, tossed her over his shoulder, where she spent the better part of a day jostling through the woods.

  The third man she recognizes but at first cannot place. He has a broad face with a pile of brown curls surrounding it. His cheeks are dirtied with week-old whiskers. He wears jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms tattooed with running wolves whose bodies melt into each other in a surging wave of hair and paws and fangs. He is pacing, raking a hand through his hair. “You’re out of control.”

  Peroxide Hair has his arms crossed. His voice is high and reedy when he says, “Some say the same of you.”

  Then the man with the sleeve tats says something Claire doesn’t understand, something about a hot springs, about the foolishness and impulsiveness of his actions, about how he has put everyone at risk. Then his eyes fall on her. “Don’t touch her.”