Now he approaches a rhododendron and peaks under it and spies the dimpled white ball and feels that old excitement that comes whenever he discovers what no one else can. He holds his breath as he bends over his gut and palms the ball. “So it’s as simple as that?”
“There’s nothing simple about it. But it will work.” Augustus removes his glasses and untucks a flap of his shirt to clean the lenses and inspects Neal as if he might need some polishing as well. “We’re going to make certain you get the support you deserve.”
“Are you?”
“We are.” Two angry red lines run from his ears to his eyes, the skin pinched by the stems of his glasses. “Because once you develop the vaccine, you will be both the governor’s benefactor and beneficiary.”
Chase has given up his search. At the edge of the woods, he leans against a tree with a glassy-eyed look and smokes a cigarette. Neal approaches him and holds up the ball and says, “Found what you were looking for,” and Chase draws on his cigarette and blinks confusedly through the smoke and then reaches out his hands, palms up, as though he hopes Neal will join him in prayer.
Chapter 26
TIME PASSES. How much, Claire doesn’t know, whether minutes or hours or days, with no light except the glow of the LED strand, no company outside of the black stone and black sand, so that she is nearly unconscious, somewhere between sleeping and waking, the cold making her body and mind numb, and even when she tries to collect her thoughts they flutter away like the bats roosting among the cracks. In the corner sits a bucket and a roll of toilet paper. Her feet remain handcuffed, but her arms are free. “I don’t want to make you miserable,” her uncle said when he snapped them into place. “But I need to know I can trust you before I take these off.” She feels no emotion, no panic or anger or fear, just blankness, when she stares at a block of basalt, at the porous holes and knuckly bumps of its black surface like a landscape of its own, like a hidden world within this world, no different from the community that exists in these lava tubes.
She isn’t sure how many lycans there are, maybe dozens, maybe more, but she understands from the electricity flowing through the tunnels and the conversations overheard and the many men who have brought her food—on a tray, no less, with a plate and a glass and silverware and a napkin, venison sausage and a beet vinaigrette salad, rice and rosemary chicken, food that could not have been cooked without a working kitchen—that this is more than a camp; it is a kind of undertown.
She wakes to Puck standing over her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because my uncle told you not to bother me.”
“Some uncle. Handcuffs on your ankles. Nothing but a pot to piss in.”
“I never said I liked him.”
He has been smiling all along, but now the smile grows wider. He holds up his disfigured hand, the one missing its pinky and ring finger, a gummy nub of tissue. The remaining fingers carry thick yellow nails. “Compliments of your aunt. Do you want to know how it happened?” He does not wait for her response. “The slut always walks around in next to nothing. Little tank tops and such. Wanting everyone looking at her, wishing for a peek, hoping for a squeeze. So that’s what she gets. I come up behind her one day when she’s working in the kitchen, cutting some vegetables, and I give her a nice rub. Hands on her shoulders. Real friendly. Not in the least inappropriate. Just wanting to ease some tension. She’s a tense person, your aunt. And what does she do to repay my kindness? Flips around without warning, swings the knife, cuts me to the bone. I’m not one to take my punishment sitting down. We got into a bit of a row.”
She notices his crotch bulging with an erection. His eyes go someplace far away before focusing in on her once again. “I could take those cuffs off, you know? It wouldn’t be much trouble at all.” He takes a step toward her and the cave seems suddenly very small.
All the men carry walkie-talkies on their belts, and his sizzles to life then. A voice calling for him. He unclips it and says, “What?” as if the word were a curse.
There is a shipping problem. A delay. The nitro. They need his help. “Will be right there,” he says and then bites down on the antenna and stares at her.
“I’m going to tell Jeremy about this,” she says, just to say something, to stop the penetrating silence of his stare.
His teeth unclip from the antenna. “Child.” His hair is so white it might be aflame. “You seem to think he’s in charge. He would like that. He would very much like that. But he’s not, not at all. Despite the fact that he’s always rubbing it in my face what a big shit he is.”
“If he’s not in charge, then who is?”
His expression goes slack and his eyes seem to pulse, to widen. “Balor.”
* * *
The .30-06 was a birthday gift when Patrick turned fourteen. It was his father’s, a Mossberg. Walnut forearm, checkered stock, bluish metal, worn leather strap. Holding it, breathing in the smell of gun oil, brings him back to California. Rising well before dawn, his father opening his door, gently saying up and at ’em, a breakfast of eggs and bacon waiting at the table. Blaze-orange jackets and hats. A thermos of coffee set between them on the bench seat of the truck. The empty highway, the gravel side roads, the thick black forest into which they hiked when the horizon began to brighten pinkly with dawn.
He shipped the rifle, along with a few boxes of books and clothes, back in August. That was one of the things his father stressed, how good the hunting was up in Oregon, as though Patrick were headed off on vacation.
Now the rifle is in the bed of a Chevy Silverado and he is crushed into the club cab. There are five of them in the truck, all wearing a blend of camo and denim and blaze orange. Max drives. When they picked Patrick up, he asked where they were going and Max said, “On a wolf hunt.” He says he has a feeling about the hot springs. It’s too random of a place to attack otherwise. Why not a mall or a park or a church service? He figures some lycans came across the bathers by accident, saw an opportunity. They’re in, they’re out, just as the snow starts falling to cover their tracks, and a few days later, when the bodies are discovered, they’re holed up, nowhere to be found.
Before Patrick can respond, Max snaps on the radio. Nobody talks, not that they could, the speakers blasting some punk band called Slovak, the electric guitar sounding like knives on knives, the words garbled into screaming that makes Patrick’s ears feel as though they might bleed. At one point he asks if they can turn it down a little.
“Max?” he says. “Max?”
Nothing. The other Americans stare straight ahead as if so intent on the music blasting from the stereo they do not recognize his voice. Not for the first time, he wonders what he is doing in their company.
They follow paved roads that branch off into cinder and dirt slippery with snow. They drive past houses and single-wides that give way to timber broken up by five-acre clear-cuts. They pass logging trucks, the trees in their beds whittled down to pencils. The Forest Service road they follow angles steeply upward, deeply rutted and choked with weeds, the trees growing closer, the braches occasionally reaching out like icy claws to screech on the windshield until finally they come to a place where a landslide washes out the road and they park beside the tide of boulders and frozen mud.
“Here we are,” Max says and kills the ignition.
* * *
A few years ago, at her friend Stacey’s, Claire was sunbathing in the backyard when a shadow fell across her—she felt the cool of it like a wet towel—and she opened her eyes to find Stacey’s younger brother hovering over them with an air rifle in one hand and a rabbit in the other. He had killed it in the woods near the house. He flopped its body at the girls and they said gross and threatened to rip out his hair and paint his toenails if he kept bothering them. And then something came over Claire—she wasn’t sure what—and she stole the air rifle from his hands. There was a robin singing in a nearby tree and she stalked toward it, wearing her purple bikini, rifle at
her shoulder. She fired. There was a snap sound. The robin dropped from the tree and lay still. Stacey’s brother whooped, but she was quiet when she crouched by the bird and scooped it up. It weighed nothing. Its eyes were glassy—its beak swelling with a bubble of blood. She had never felt so horrible in her life and swore she would never kill anything again—that is, until later that afternoon, when she ate a steak her father had grilled. But still, she felt horrible and preferred not to think about killing as a part of life.
Yet here she is, trying to decide how best to kill Puck—or whoever comes along first; she isn’t picky—and all the different ways she might escape. She needs to stay sharp. She needs to be ready, as Miriam taught her.
So she does as Miriam taught her and transforms. Lets the wolf turn over inside her, at first to test her strength, to see if she can snap the chain, and then to pass the time. She isn’t sure how much noise she makes—she isn’t sure how she gets from one side of the cave to the other—she isn’t sure how her clothes tear or a gash appears in her forehead. Whenever she settles down—when her heartbeat slows and her breathing calms and her body resumes its original form—her memory of the past few minutes is like a cloudy dream.
Her ankles bleed from yanking at the cuffs. But the pain doesn’t bother her. If there is anything the past few months have taught her, it is that the familiarity of pain makes it easier to manage, her body like one big nerve deadened by affliction.
Her senses grow heightened. She notices the whisper of a bat’s wing, the faraway char of meat cooking, the small shifts in the air as the cave breathes. She knows someone is coming—like an image glimpsed in a lamplit window or a conversation overheard in the buzz of a bar—she knows this long before she hears the footsteps in the sand. Soon he will turn the corner. Soon he will be within reach. If it is Puck, and if he comes close enough, she will go for his neck and his eyes. She will kill him.
* * *
It takes Patrick time to make sense of what he sees. The circumference of strewn carcass—the hair and the blood and the bone—reaches fifteen feet across. And then he recognizes the head of a doe, still attached to the spine, a little ways off. A beetle lumbers out of its mouth and creeps along its snout to sample the black pool of its eye.
He is alone. Ten minutes ago, he and the others split up, stalking different sections of the woods. It wasn’t long before their footsteps fell away. Now the wind rises and a drift of ice-polished leaves twirls up into a small cyclone before falling apart with a rattle. There are piles of snow here and there, but much of it has melted and frozen again. He isn’t sure whether he should call out or not, tell the others to come see. But what would a dead deer prove? A cougar could have done this as well as a lycan.
His phone buzzes and he pulls it out, surprised he gets service this far from town. The message, from Malerie, reads, “I was protecting you. But I guess you don’t need my protection.”
He has no idea what to make of this and considers ignoring her altogether but feels enough concern to fire off a question mark in response. Before he can think any further, he hears a thrashing, faint and far ahead, something pressing through the undergrowth. He clicks off the safety of his rifle and starts forward, taking care not to step on a stick or crunch through an ice puddle or kick through a bush. After a minute the sound dies away and he pauses, cocking his head until he hears it again, tracking it. In this stop-and-go manner he proceeds for a good five minutes.
He tries to steady his breathing. It could be one of the Americans after all. It could be anyone, anything. He can feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He imagines the trees parting like a curtain to reveal the lycan from the plane, crouched on a stump like a gargoyle, with a grin full of far too many teeth. Patrick wonders what chance he will stand this time, with no body to drape over him, nowhere to hide. He of course wishes he could run as fast as his legs will carry him, until the forest is a brown blur, back to the truck. But every time he feels rooted in place, ready to turn and flee, he thinks of his father, who would not run.
The sound, he realizes, has not moved. It comes from roughly the same place—now thirty paces ahead, where the ground angles downward into a coulee. He hears the faint trickle of water, and—interrupting it—a splash.
He reaches the lip of the coulee, where the land drops and the trees angle upward like arms crooked at the elbow. He sees, at the bottom of it, through a willow cluster, in the spring-fed stream, the mule deer. Two big bucks facing off.
He lifts the rifle and glasses them with his scope. He tries to count their points and cannot, their crowns tangled together in combat. The larger of the two weeps blood from where a tine punctured its eye. A red trail oozes from its ear—and several more from its neck—where it has been speared. The animals are silent except for the occasional snort, the splash of a hoof when they redistribute their weight, whip their heads around. The water, as dark as blackberry wine, rushes along beneath them, but mostly they are still, seeming to rest against each other. Patrick then realizes their antlers are locked, so tightly entwined they cannot release.
His finger slides off the guard and caresses the trigger as he imagines the racks mounted in his bedroom. He can see them so clearly, it is as though they are already there, anchored above his bed and casting their shadows like forking branches on the wall when he walks in and flips on the light.
He fires. The larger deer collapses. The creek runs over its body like a boulder and makes a foaming collar around its raised neck. Their crowns remain locked and the smaller of the bucks stands frozen in place with its head bowed toward the river as if for an endless drink.
His handheld buzzes. The deer isn’t going anywhere, so he checks the message before reloading. Malerie again. “I know about your mother,” she writes, “and now Max does 2.”
He nearly drops the phone, forgetting all about the woods and the deer and everything else, all his attention crushed down to a single sentence that makes his chest seem to collapse so that he can barely draw a breath, when his mind makes a swift series of calculations—Malerie, Walgreens, the list of names—and still he doesn’t really understand what this means until he looks up and sees Max standing on the other side of the coulee, rifle in hand, looking at him.
* * *
Claire pretends to sleep. She hears the footsteps grow near, hears breathing. She imagines Puck standing there, his hair fluorescent, watching her, maybe toying with his belt or zipper. Her blood goes hot, that catch-flame feeling that precedes transformation. She opens her eyes slightly, just enough to spy through her lashes, and discerns a shadow far larger than she expected. She flinches—sure that the giant is leaning over her, the black flaps of his leather duster opening, spreading as wide as buzzards’ wings—ready to cry out.
But it is only her uncle. He holds up his hands as if she were the threat. “Hey, hey,” he says. “It’s all right.” His face is broad and kind, haloed by thick brown curls, and though she wants to hate him, it’s hard to feel anything but relief when he digs in his pocket and removes a key and nods at her cuffs. “I thought I’d show you around. As long as you promise not to try anything stupid?” At first she doesn’t respond and his hand closes around the key and hides it from view. Only then does she nod, and he says, “Good.”
Her feet, once free, still feel bound, every step she takes somehow wrong. Her leg muscles are at first heavy and unresponsive, and she touches her toes and does a few lunges and jumps up and down before telling Jeremy she is ready.
In the sand their footsteps make sounds like paper shredding. She follows him through the tunnel, which forks and then forks again. She makes an effort to remember the way—in case she should ever get the opportunity to escape—left, left, for starters.
“This is home,” he says, this network of lava tubes, an underground village protected by vast rocky armor. In some places the walls glimmer and trickle, slick with moisture, and in other places they go chalky with calcite and lichen. She follows him up a kind of stairway, flattopp
ed rocks stationed in the black sand, and the tunnel opens up into a vast chamber, as big as a ballroom. She cannot make out the ceiling—the LED lights cast an uncertain glow beyond which hangs the deepest darkness—but from it hang roots, like tentacles, hundreds of them dangling all around them. Jeremy takes hold of one and swings a few feet and trippingly looks back at her with a grin. “Try it.”
She will not.
“You’re upset at me?” he says.
“What do you think?”
“I’m sorry we’ve had to meet this way.”
She asks whose fault that is. She says he’s her uncle, but until a month ago, she didn’t even know he existed. She doesn’t know anything about him.
“That’s not my fault. That’s your parents’. They didn’t want anything to do with us, not the other way around.”
“I don’t know anything about you,” she says again, and he says, “What do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” she says, and then, “Where do you get your power? Electricity, I mean.”
“That’s what you want to know? Where we get our power?”
It is. So he explains how the dams on the Columbia River produce electricity that gets outsourced to California. Many high-voltage and secondary lines are strung across the Cascades, and no, to answer her question, it’s not possible to tap into a twenty-five-thousand-volt structure to run computers or small appliances. Power is stepped down as it goes to homes through multiple levels of transformers that lower the voltage. Less than a half mile away from where they stand, there is a PacifiCorp maintenance shed with a residential transformer in it that brings the voltage down to 120. “That’s our keg to tap.”
Claire asks what if PacifiCorp detects a power drain, what if they get caught?
Red Moon Page 21