Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  “That won’t happen,” he says. “Because we work for PacifiCorp. Just as we work for UPS and the Port Authority and Nosler and Union Pacific and American Airlines.” He lists off names and holds out a finger for each one until he runs out of fingers. He smiles when he says, “We’re everywhere.”

  They move through the roots, brushing them aside, some of them as thickly clustered as hair. They approach a brightly lit chamber. Voices mutter from it, voices that go silent when they enter, ducking their heads through the low entryway. The room, twenty yards in circumference, is shaped like a dome. The floor is a mess of black and white cords that vine from tables crowded with desktop and laptop computers, printers, a scanner, a blinking green modem and wireless transmitter. A map of the country hangs on the wall right next to a map of Oregon, with different colored pins quilling them both. White Christmas lights are strung overhead in an impression of a starlit sky.

  Ten men, seated at computer terminals or standing around a table littered with paper, are staring at them. At Claire. Some of them are as pale and swollen as grubs, and some of them are leathery and appear clownish in their mismatched clothing, a too-large Gap shirt and pants sewn out of doeskin and stitched with sinew.

  “The latest?” Jeremy says.

  One of the pale men, dressed in a Darth Vader sweatshirt and blue jeans, says, “Problem solved.” His eyes flicker to her and back to Jeremy. “Freight from Canada is delayed but on its way. We’ve got a truck on standby at the intermodal rail yard. He’ll meet us at the farm in Sandy. We won’t have long to get ready.”

  “Then we better get moving.”

  She filters out the rest of the conversation—because nearby, peeking from beneath a pile of paper, she has spotted a pair of scissors. She tries to be casual when she rests her flattened hand on the table. She thinks about lurching forward, grabbing the scissors, swinging them into Jeremy’s temple. Then she spots a web hanging between two computers, a spider balanced in the center of it like the pupil of an eye watching her. So she swings the scissors, and then what? And then what would she do? They would have her on the floor within seconds. She creeps her hand around the blade and secrets it up her sleeve. She can be patient.

  Another minute and Jeremy leads Claire from the room—down a corridor lined with yellowed newspaper clippings that flap and whisper with their passing. She glances at the headlines. “Terror in the Air,” they read. “Hundreds Dead.” “Nation of Fear.” “Lycan Uprising.” She slows when she spots the front page of USA Today. “Miracle Boy” is the headline, and below it she spots a familiar face. The boy, Patrick.

  She nearly cries out to him, like a friend spotted in an unfamiliar city. He is surrounded by police who usher him toward an ambulance. He is staring directly at the camera, staring directly at her. A spot of mold darkens one of his eyes.

  “What are you planning?” Claire says.

  Jeremy keeps walking, not looking back at her when he says, “You’ll know soon enough. Along with everyone else.”

  * * *

  “Is something wrong?” Patrick says. He doesn’t know what else to say. He has to say something—has to break the long silence that hangs between them, Max on one side of the coulee, him on the other.

  No response outside of an unblinking stare. Maybe his words were lost, carried away by the rushing water, the wind whining through the trees. Maybe he is jumping to conclusions. Maybe Max doesn’t know what Malerie said he knows.

  “Is something wrong?” Max finally says. “Is lying wrong? Is betrayal wrong? Is fucking somebody else’s girlfriend wrong?”

  Patrick has never heard him swear before, so the word seems as sharp as a sword. “We never did that.”

  “You did enough!” Max screams this, his voice filling up the forest, drawing from it other figures, the Americans. They step from behind trees, their eyes hooded, their boots dragging through the pine needles. “Half-breed.”

  “I’m not a lycan.” He realizes this will make no difference to them, realizes they have already made up their minds to hate him, but he can’t stop himself, as if to affirm his identity. “She was bitten after I was born.”

  “That still makes you a son of a bitch.” Max points his rifle at him.

  He raises his own in defense. They have brought him here to hurt him. Deep in the woods. A place where no one will hear him scream. A place where he will never be found. He isn’t sure what they are capable of—but he is about to learn.

  Max keeps his eyes on Patrick but speaks to the others. “He hasn’t reloaded. Get to him before he does.”

  They leap off the ledge and kick their way down the hill and splash through the stream and scramble up the other side, moving steadily toward him, and all the while Patrick stands there, as frozen as the deer in the river, too tired to run, too tired to do anything but ratchet the breech and eject the cylinder, not bothering to reload. “I’m sorry about Malerie,” he says.

  “Too late for sorry.”

  The boys close the distance quickly, clambering over the lip of the coulee, racing in his direction with their arms out. He can’t fight them—there are too many and their punishment will be that much more severe if he puts up a struggle—so he tosses the rifle aside and crouches down in a ball and they are on top of him. He is ready for the pain. Their fists and their boots thudding against his spine and ribs, his ass, the back of his head. First the impact, then the bruised heat that follows, until his entire body feels inflamed, every throb like an ember glowing orange beneath his skin.

  Somehow, through the tangle of bodies, he makes out Max on top of him. His belly is soft and damp, like a pillow soaked with water. His voice pants in his ear. “We could kill you, you know. Say it was an accident. No one would know. Maybe I’d even speak at your funeral, run a hand along your coffin, which would be closed of course, since your skull would be split open like a cantaloupe.”

  Somebody punches him in the ear, a hand as hard as a sledgehammer. A steady rain of black spots falls along the edges of his vision, and he ends up on his back—staring through the animal bodies looming over him—staring at the sky beyond them, where jets rumble and their contrails crisscross the pale blue like badly cast fishing lines across the surface of a lake.

  He wishes them safe travels.

  * * *

  Jeremy shows her a room with a groined ceiling. Three moldy couches are arranged around an old wood-paneled television with a VCR and DVD player stacked on top of it. And then they walk past a sleeping chamber full of cots and a supply room busy with bags and boxes and crates, some arranged on shelves, some heaped and scattered on the floor. The tang of gun oil hangs in the air.

  The kitchen is a space similar to the computer lab. Six mismatched lamps are staggered through the chamber to give off enough light to cook by. A skinned headless deer hangs from a rope, turning slowly, the rope creaking and knotted through its hind hock. The scent of blood comes off it and she resists the peculiar desire to slide a finger along the haunch and lick it.

  Next to the deer sits a dented gas stove with a dirty propane tank hosed up behind it. And then a woodstove piped out through a crack in the wall, some other channel that sucks away the smoke. Several folding tables are pushed against the walls, their tops cluttered with cutting boards and knife blocks and cutlery jars packed with spatulas and wooden spoons like vases full of flowers. An old yellow fridge hums in the corner, surrounded by stand-alone cabinets, many of them without doors, their insides jammed with pans, pots, glasses, plates, spices.

  Claire notices a trickling sound and goes to it, a spring dribbling from a hole in the wall and pooling in a rock basin the size of a bathtub. Jeremy kneels down and unhooks a ladle with a screened filter and dips it into the spring. He drinks from it and dips it again and asks, “You thirsty?”

  She is more than thirsty, her lips cracked and peeling, and she nods and brings her mouth greedily to the ladle, the same place his mouth had been. She fills it four times before she nods to him and their tour
resumes.

  “Who’s Balor?” she says.

  “Where did you hear that name?”

  She shrugs. “Who is he?”

  “Tell me about your aunt.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you want me?”

  “Because I want her. She’ll come for you. Can you tell me about her?”

  “I’m guessing she’s a whole lot of pissed off and worried sick right now.”

  “I’m counting on that,” he says. “I’m hoping we’ll be seeing her soon.”

  She can feel a breeze now, as they move up an incline, the floor a jumble of boulders. They hold out their arms for balance and leap from rock to rock, moving upward, the air steadily growing brighter.

  “She hasn’t mentioned anything about the police?”

  “Why would she?”

  “Going to them, talking to them? She hasn’t mentioned that?”

  “She just wants to be alone. You should leave her alone. Why do you want her anyway?”

  “I need her. A wife should be with her husband.” He blinks rapidly, and then his voice grows louder and hurried as if to overwhelm what he has already said. “And she’s an important part of what we’re doing here. She’s an important part of the revolution.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

  “We’re the revolution.” He slips on a slick rock and catches himself with his hands and scrambles to right himself. “We’re the leather-fringe revolutionaries fighting against the blood-coat British. We’re the blacks boycotting the buses in Montgomery. We’re the fist-pumping protesters who took over Tahir Square. This is grassroots democracy.”

  Claire realizes the illogic of what he’s saying—a true democracy would leave Miriam alone if she voted to separate herself from the group—just as she realizes the brokenhearted can create any sort of justification, can make sense out of no sense. His daughter died. His wife abandoned him. He wants to fill up the emptiness he feels. Claire can relate.

  But she is also a teenager, so she views everything through a cynical lens, and she finds it annoying that he is costuming his desire to regain his wife with political zealotry. He sounds like an actor reciting lines he hasn’t quite mastered. She can’t hold back the sarcasm. “Did you say democrazy?”

  He frowns and stops climbing and stares until her eyes drop. “Are you making a joke?” he says and she senses for the first time how he could be dangerous to her if pushed too far.

  “You kill people.”

  He takes a step toward her, stepping across a black gap of air, onto her boulder, less than a foot between them, but she doesn’t back down. She can feel his breath on her when he says, “People die. That’s what they do.”

  “Like your daughter.”

  He hits her openhanded. She doesn’t see it coming—the slap hard—a sting followed by a swelling flush. She imagines, on her cheek, the white shape of a hand blooming bright red.

  His eyes, at first black slits, soften. He hangs his head and turns away and continues to climb upward. “Come on,” he says, and, after a moment, she follows, her hand holding the place his had been.

  The air brightens. The incline flattens and they come to a door made of cross-stitched nylon rope—messy with browned vines—that parts like a curtain. This is one of four entrances, he says, and the netting provides camouflage and blocks the worst of the wind but also keeps the cave system breathing. “Essential, considering the smell the raggedy lot of us gives off.” His voice full of humor, as if what happened a moment before did not.

  Outside the sun is red and the trees are black. Dawn. She has lost all sense of time underground. She tries to take in as much of her surroundings as she can. A tangle of manzanita, stacks of lichen-encrusted rocks, a valley shoulder busy with scree. They are high up, near a lava cone frosted with snow, the Cascades rising jaggedly behind them. She imagines, at night, she would be able to distinguish—in the distance—some town, the faraway grid of streetlights. But now, squinting against the rising sun, she can distinguish nothing but hundreds of miles of woods that eventually give way to a wash of desert.

  “Where are we?”

  He looks at her with eyes the same color as the winter sky above them. “Your new home.”

  * * *

  Max picks up Patrick’s rifle and tests its weight in his hands as if it were a baseball bat. Then he swings into a tree, once, twice, three times, the bark chipping away, revealing the pulpy yellow wood beneath—and the rifle shatters, the stock splinters.

  Patrick does not so much as lift his head in protest, his cheek to the forest floor, one of his eyes swollen to a slit. His mouth is full of blood and his tongue feels like an eel twisting around in it. Everything hurts, his entire body a pulsing wound. A headache tightens like a hot belt around his skull.

  Max kicks at the remains of the rifle and shakes off the pain in his hands, and then, after one final withering glance at Patrick, he heads back the way they came with the other boys trailing him. One of them asks, “What about the deer?” and Max says, “Let it rot.”

  Patrick lays there a long time, feeling sorry for himself, caught up equally in the pain and humiliation of the moment. The woods seem suddenly leached of color, a nearby pine gray and gaunt and pocked with woodpecker burrows.

  They have abandoned him here. A ten-mile hike from the nearest asphalt road, and from there, forty miles or more to Old Mountain. But he is alive. He rolls onto his side, bringing his knees to his chest, and imagines the bruises darkening his skin. He breathes through the pain in his ribs and listens to the trickle of the stream and the far cry of an owl.

  Then he hears what he at first mistakes for the blood-pounding pulse in his ears—footsteps. Moving toward him. The Americans returning to finish him off. He lifts his head and blinks away the blood that films his vision and still he cannot make sense of what he sees. Walking along the edge of the coulee, a woman in full-body camouflage, Miriam.

  “You’re not dead anyway.” She holds out a hand. “Come on. Get up.”

  Chapter 27

  SOMETHING IS HAPPENING. When Jeremy escorts her back to her cell—she isn’t sure what else to call it, the dark sandy recess she is consigned to—men rush through the underground passages, many of them speaking into walkie-talkies, one of them carrying a tangle of cords and video equipment, another huffing along with an oil-stained cardboard box that rattles in his arms. Jeremy says things to them—like “Go time” and “Let’s do this”—and in their passing he pats them on the back or grips their shoulders.

  Then, when the two of them descend the staircase, the corridor curls around a corner and she sees him, Puck. Unlike the others, he is not moving. He is leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, with no other task except to wait for them. “I was told I won’t be joining you in the field,” he says, his voice as high-pitched as a bat’s screech. “I was told I would be staying behind.”

  That stops Jeremy, who—head down, lost in his thoughts—hadn’t yet noticed Puck. “Your work is here.”

  “You’re punishing me? For the hot springs? Because I didn’t ask for your approval?” This last word said with more than a little venom.

  Jeremy looks at Claire, looks at Puck, and says, “We’ll talk about this later.” He starts down the staircase again, and Claire reluctantly follows, crossing her arms, walking directly behind Jeremy as if he were a blind. She feels electricity in the air, the crackling possibility of violence.

  The corridor is thin and Puck does not move to accommodate them, so that Jeremy and then Claire have to brush against him, and when she does, she feels as she might when brushing up against a lightning-scarred tree, the char rubbing off on her, staining her with its shadow. She tries to keep her head down but can’t help glancing his way, and when she does, he slides his tongue between his teeth and bites down.

  * * *

  Patrick isn’t sure what it is, maybe the sight of the knives on the counter or the pist
ol holstered around her shoulder, but he can’t help asking, “You’re not bad, are you?” The most childish question in the world, he knows.

  “No,” Miriam says. “Are you?”

  He can’t tell for sure, since her back is to him, but he thinks he detects a smile in her voice. He is in her cabin once again, feeling no less like a prisoner than last time, but something has changed, her attitude toward him softer. He sits at a round wooden kitchen table and she stands at the sink, wearing camo pants and a black tank top that reveals black wings tattooed across her shoulders, their color the color of her hair.

  Next to the table sits an openmouthed trash bag full of driver’s licenses. A dozen of them, like a strewn deck of cards, are spread across the table, all bearing photos of young women who look an awful lot like Claire.

  Miriam fills a bowl with hot soapy water and carries it steaming to the table. She sweeps away the licenses and arranges a chair opposite him and dips a washcloth into the bowl and wrings it out with a splash. “Hold still,” she says and begins to clean him. The washcloth is as rough as a cat’s tongue. He closes his eyes and tries not to wince at the pressure against his swollen, cracked skin. All the while she hums, something barely audible, a lullaby. Before long the water in the bowl is flat and pink. She pats him dry with a hand towel and then unpeels several Band-Aids to hold together the places his skin split.

  He has his arm wrapped tightly around his chest, hugging his ribs. “Better take off your shirt,” she says, and he tries, but it hurts too much to lift his arms over his head. She helps him peel away the shirt to reveal a torso colored with angry red welts, a purplish black bruise along his rib cage.

  He can see in her fingernails the telltale thickness of a lycan. He remembers Max talking about that, about the different ways you could detect infection, and fingernails were one of them, as thick as teeth, as thick as bone. His mother’s are not so noticeable since she keeps them painted and filed. He can feel her nails on his skin now when she runs a hand along his ribs. “Maybe broken,” she says, “maybe not. Either way, you’ll live.” She retrieves a bottle of ibuprofen from the bathroom and rattles out four pills, which he swallows with a tall glass of water.