Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Then she asks if he is ready to listen and he says he supposes so. She begins to talk. “Some of this you might already know. Some of this you will not.” The light shifts and the shadows darken, when she tells him at length about the Resistance, about their ideology and activity over the past few decades, about her abandonment of them, about their harassment and the eventual kidnapping, the place in the snow where Claire’s tracks ended, taken over by an abominably larger set she recognized.

  “The bad guys,” he says.

  “Definitely the bad guys,” she says.

  “Did they leave you a note?”

  “They didn’t need to leave me a note. I know where to find them and their message was clear. Come back to us. Or else.”

  She tells him she was scouting the woods near their hideout when she heard the gunshot, when she found him enclosed in a knot of bodies. She tells him she plans to return there. She tells him that they will be expecting her and that there are many of them, but despite this, despite their force, she will get Claire back. And she tells him, finally, that he is going to help her.

  “How soon are we going to do this?”

  “We are going to do this now.”

  He feels afraid, very much so, but that is not why he hesitates. He hesitates because he has not said anything about the plane attacks and wonders if he should, wonders if she was somehow involved despite her disavowal. And he hesitates, too, because the beating has left him weak and addled. He worries he’ll be useless. When he squeezes his hands into fists, they tremble like tools capable of breaking down when he needs them most.

  Miriam is leaning toward him, her arms resting on her thighs. Her face is so pointed it is like its own kind of weapon. “You care about her?”

  He is surprised by how automatic his response is. “Yes.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t have come back for her, right? You wouldn’t have gone for your little walk in the woods if you didn’t feel something for her, right?”

  Her voice and expression are so stony he can’t tell whether she is messing with him or not. “Right.”

  “I want you to know that she’s not safe. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that something will happen to her.”

  He tries to harden his face when he says, “Okay,” but really he feels small enough to put in his own pocket. The whole world seems suddenly against him, and he doubts, when he thinks of the Americans in town, or the lycans in the mountains, that he is up to the fight. His headache, at least, is fading to a hum, the ibuprofen numbing him.

  Her hand drops to the table and caresses the pistol. “You know how to use one of these?”

  “A little.” Never pistols, only revolvers and rifles really, hunting deer or blasting pop bottles at the rock quarry.

  She thumbs the safety off, then on. Ejects the magazine and slams it back home. “Seventeen rounds, double-stack magazines. Keep track. Finger on the guard unless you’re ready to kill. Otherwise, bam, bam.”

  She rises and returns with two Magnum flashlights, two penlights, four folding knives with Teflon grips, a sheathed machete, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, stacking them on the table. She goes to the cupboard next to the stove as if to withdraw a pot but instead grabs a half dozen clips of ammo. Then she creaks open the hall closet and pulls from the shelves several holsters, each with a backing plate of saddle leather, worn tucked inside the waistband.

  She tells him to stand up and he does, still shirtless. Without asking for help, she grabs his belt and loosens it by two notches to accommodate the holsters, one on either hip, the pistol butts facing forward for a cross-arm draw.

  She stares at him for a long while and sighs, as if finally recognizing him for the kid he feels like. “Let me put on some coffee,” she says. “Sharpen us up.”

  Outside, the paling sky has the look of a watercolor. She hand-grinds beans and fills a kettle with water to set on the stove while he experiments with the pistols, unlimbering them from their holsters, holding them out before him, like the gunslingers in the movies; only his arms waver no matter how hard he tries to keep them steady. It’s more than the pain in his ribs—like a knife wound—it’s the weakness he feels.

  He thinks of Claire, huddled somewhere in the dark, and imagines her face turning toward him with relief. That numbs his pain more than the drugs breaking down inside him. He saved her once; he will save her again.

  The stove tick-tick-ticks as the burner fails to catch. The smell of natural gas sours the air.

  Patrick says, “So they’ve taken her because of you?”

  The stove continues to tick like a bomb, and she curses under her breath and opens a drawer and knocks open a box of matches. “Yes.”

  “Why do they want you back so badly?”

  She strikes a match and drops it on the burner and a blue flare the size of a child foomps to life and knocks them back a step—and then the flame settles. “Because I’m married to one of them.”

  * * *

  When Jeremy tells her to please sit down, when he cuffs her wrists, when he tells her he enjoyed their little walk and asks whether she needs anything, she almost tells him about Puck, almost.

  Then she realizes this is her chance. Something has been set into motion, something Puck is not a part of, something that will draw from the mountain many men, including Jeremy, who might otherwise bar her escape.

  “No.” She fiddles with the cuffs and casts down her eyes in case they might reveal her excitement. “I’m good. Thank you.”

  She knows it is only a matter of time before Puck comes for her. From only a few conversations, she has gleaned that he desires her, yes—but for reasons even more complicated he will punish her as if punishing Jeremy.

  Her ankles he leaves free. The scissors remain hidden up her sleeve, the blades of them cold against her forearm. She feels her pulse throbbing against the metal, counting down the seconds, the minutes, the hours, until the tunnel system goes quiet, vacated—and then, as expected, she hears the approaching footsteps, kicking through sand like a gathering whisper.

  It isn’t clear where her cell begins—there is no definitive space designated as hers, no bars to peer through and knock a tin cup against. The lava tube simply ends—as if, eons ago, some large worm burrowed through the earth until it expired here, its flesh crumbling to sand, its shape remembered in the rocky husk of the tunnel. But if there were an entrance, a line within which she felt jailed, it is where Puck stands now, ten yards away, the bend in the corridor.

  Neither of them says anything at first. They both know why he is there.

  She can see his jaw working up and down, chewing gum, wetly mashing it with his teeth, snapping it. “It’s snowing, you know,” he finally says.

  “That’s nice.” She isn’t sure what to make of this, him talking about the weather. The weather is what you talk about when there is nothing else to talk about. “I like snow.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but she tries to make her voice as sincere and pleasant as possible. She wants his guard down.

  He pauses his chewing to say, “Really?” With that, he comes forward, one slow step, then another, the look on his face leading her to believe he is as surprised by what she says as by her seeming friendliness. “Most don’t.”

  “This time of year, I do. Christmastime.”

  “But then it gets to be too long.”

  “I guess.”

  His voice lowers. “Around here the winters can be very, very long.” The whites of his eyes glow, but his pupils appear as black as burrows. She feels as if she is falling into them. He has closed the distance between them by half. She is sitting on a rock the size of a buffalo skull, the closest thing she has to a seat, hunched over as if exhausted, but really, she is approximating a crouch, ready to spring forward. She tries to be casual, pretending to scratch an itch, when she pulls the scissors halfway from her sleeve, the blades now tucked sharply against her palm.

  He pops his gum again, the sharp report making her flinch, remin
ding her of the time a boy at school came up behind her and snapped her bra. “Your bitch of an aunt isn’t going to do anything stupid, is she? Isn’t going to tuck tail to the police, spill her guts, tattle?”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Everyone has their breaking point.” He crouches and reaches out an arm to touch her ankle. “Pretty.”

  She shivers. He’s still too far away, faster than her, stronger, and she can’t risk lunging that distance, giving him time to respond. She tries not to be bothered by his touch, but that’s like trying to hold still when a spider dashes across your face. A shiver runs through her and she pulls away her feet. “Stop.”

  “Stop?” He works the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. She can smell it now, something fruity. “You think I’m going to stop? You think any of this is going to stop? We’re just getting started. And if you think I’m going to use common words—like ‘You better obey me’ and ‘You ought to treat me with respect’ and ‘You better shut your mouth’—you’re mistaken. Because we don’t believe in words here. We believe in doing. I’m going to do things to you. That’s how you really get people to listen. You do things to them, and when those things are horrible, they listen very carefully. I want you to listen very carefully. You might think you’re being imprisoned in this far dark corner, but you’re in fact being protected. Forget about Jeremy. I am your protector. I am protecting you. All I need to do is snap my fingers and you’ll be cast out to the wolves. The wolves like to bite and they like to sodomize. You’ll feel like you’ve been turned inside out, like you’ve been fucked by a dozen swords. Maybe after they’re done with you, they’ll keep you around for another round or two, or maybe they’ll be bored and bothered by your whimpering, and if that’s the case, maybe we’ll have a bonfire, a big one. We’ll throw you in it and your skin will melt off and we’ll all laugh and howl and dance around the flames and afterward gnaw on your blackened bones. How does that sound, Claire?”

  He is reaching for her now. He is reaching for her, and if he touches her again, she imagines breaking apart into so many blackbirds that would screech and scratch and peck and finally flap in a dark cloud out of this place and take to the sky. He is reaching for her with his scarred hand, the hand Miriam disfigured with a knife, and now he touches her cheek, softly. Caressing her. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, trembling breath, laced with the flavor of his strawberry-sweet gum, and realizes, by breathing in the smell of him, he is already inside her. His fingers suddenly dig into her cheek and chin, and she snaps open her eyes to see his face transformed, his teeth fanged, his eyes as red rimmed as a smoldering coal. “Everyone has their breaking point.”

  It is then that she swings the scissors upward—into him.

  * * *

  The cratered cheek of the moon hangs low in the sky, soon to be overtaken by a dark bank of clouds. In the Ramcharger, Miriam drives, Patrick sits shotgun, weapons piled and rattling behind them. The road hums under their tires and a light snow falls through the yellow glow of the high beams.

  She pulls off the highway into a gas station with old-time pumps and a cedar-shingle mercantile. She does not stop but drives around back, where she says her husband keeps ten vans and cars and trucks parked. This morning, three were missing. Now it is early evening, and she counts seven of them gone, the empty squares of blacktop dusted white.

  “What does that mean?” Patrick says.

  “That means they’re up to something.”

  He asks if they would have taken Claire with them, and Miriam is silent for the time it takes her to spin the wheel and loop the Ramcharger around and head back toward the highway. “Doubt it. She’d be in their way.”

  They drive another five minutes before hanging a hard left onto a road that branches several times and narrows, hemmed in by pines.

  His mind is sharp with caffeine and adrenaline when they park at a power shed made of corrugated metal and surrounded by a hurricane fence and a metal sign that reads PACIFICORP. The trees here have been razed to make way for the twelve-line high-​voltage high-wire utility poles that march off into the distance. Patrick can hear the electricity humming, as if the forest were alive with locusts, when he steps out of the Ram and they unload their backpacks and hoist their weapons. A lamp glows above the entry door.

  Miriam tells him to wait here. He asks where she is going but she does not respond. She leaves her backpack with him but shoulders her shotgun, the black nylon strap cutting between her breasts. As quick as a cat, she scales the hurricane fence and drops to the other side and walks the perimeter of the power shed until she finds what she is looking for, a hole drilled through the metal siding, a power line the size of a garden hose snaking through it. She pulls down her shotgun, takes aim, and unloads both shells. Fire spits from the twin barrels. A thunderclap fills the night.

  Patrick curses and ducks down behind the Ram and unholsters a pistol and looks around as if expecting shadowy figures to come pouring out of the woods. But the night is still and quiet except for the uninterrupted hum of the electricity overhead and the violent spitting of the severed cord.

  He hears Miriam drop over the fence, her boots squeaking toward him, and when she appears next around the corner of the Ram, he says, “Now they know we’re coming.”

  “They can’t see shit. That’s what they know.”

  He follows her into the woods, hushed as if listening in on their every move, and it isn’t more than ten minutes before they come to the mouth of the cave system. Patrick does not recognize it as such until Miriam draws aside the ice-clotted drapery that covers the entry.

  She disappears into it. For a moment he is alone, trying not to think too deeply about the necropolis he is about to enter, the risk and impossibility of the situation. He pauses, as if drawing a breath before diving underwater, and then clicks on his Mag light and plunges into darkness.

  Chapter 28

  CLAIRE HAD HOPED to hit his throat with the scissors. But Puck was faster than she expected and lurched back in time to save his life but not to dodge her completely. She plunged the scissors into the fleshy spot beneath his chin, knifing upward, into his mouth, the blades coming to a rest in his soft palate. He cries out, but the cry is muffled by a mouth stapled shut.

  Wide-eyed, he stumbles back, a fistful of hair tearing away in her grip. He trembles his hands to the scissors and drags them slowly from his jaw. Blood gushes down his neck and patters the sand. He hurls aside the scissors and they clatter against the wall and he opens his mouth to test it and in doing so reveals teeth sharpening with his rage and fear.

  And then, in a blink, the lights go out.

  * * *

  When Patrick first steps inside and out of the wind, he is surprised by the temperature difference, the cave significantly warmer. His father would sometimes take him spelunking, at Lava Beds National Monument, and he remembers strapping on a hard hat and running his hand along stalagmites and burrowing through crawl spaces and hearing some bit of wisdom from long ago, that caves and caverns year-round maintained a constant temperature, somewhere in the fifties.

  The air smells sweetly fungal, some mixture of mold and guano and the sulfuric oxidation that stains the walls orange in places and yellow in others. The constant hissing of the wind and the dripping of water make it difficult to hear Miriam when she says, “Follow me closely.” They have their Mag lights in one hand, their pistols in the other. The lava tube pitches downward and he sweeps his light across the cave floor and walls, black except for the occasional crust of lichen or sulfite, a white vein of quartz that catches the light and sparkles. The stalactites dangling from the ceiling remind him of nothing so much as teeth.

  He has a knife in one pocket, clips of ammo in another. His belt creaks and his backpack clinks and his breath quivers out clouds. The noise seems impossibly loud. He trips several times over debris and knobs of basalt, always catching his balance, and Miriam looks back at him in irritation. He whispers sorry and feels f
ear and the fear feels something like wasps under his skin, a thrumming of wings, a prickle of legs and stingers.

  * * *

  One moment she is watching Puck. The next moment, darkness. She wonders, at first, if she is dead. If he has somehow already closed the distance between them and ripped her heart from her chest. If a rock has come loose from the ceiling and clubbed her skull. Or if her body has finally decided enough is enough and simply given up.

  Then she hears his long, agonized wail, an animal in pain, and realizes that she is not dead, not yet. But death is close. Death has never been more of a possibility—buried as she is in a sulfuric dark beneath hundreds of thousands of pounds of rock. This will be her grave if she does not act quickly.

  She recalls her last image of the chamber and wonders if she has moved since, if she is still facing the open tunnel. She steps sideways, her hand outstretched, until her fingers jam against rock. She scrabbles her hands along the wall and then shoots them out before her, as if sweeping the air free of cobwebs. She raises her knees high with every step, trying to avoid any debris on the floor, not worrying about her hurried stomping, knowing Puck cannot hear her over his own noise, as he alternately whimpers and bawls.

  She is moving along the tunnel now. Her eyes are wide open but her fingers are her way of seeing, nosing through the dark like many moles that feel her way forward. The wailing behind her grows softer and then silent, and it is the silence that worries her. She tries to be as quiet as she can, but every other step she kicks a rock or sends something crumbling from the wall.

  She remembers the way—left and then left again—noticing the shifts in air, the cold drafts when the tunnel forks. She nearly trips over the first step of the staircase. She clumsily climbs, wishing she knew how many steps awaited her, expecting any minute for something to come rushing out of the dark to seize and caress her. Another minute and her foot falls flat where she expects another step. The walls open up into a chamber. Her breathing and her footsteps sound softer here. She knows it would be wiser to follow the wall, to travel the chamber’s circumference, but she cannot recall if there were other corridors that intersected here and she cannot risk wandering off into some channel that takes her deeper underground. She knows the computer room lies directly ahead. She decides to trust her eyeless sense of direction and starts forward. She smells the earthiness of the roots dangling from the ceiling, the roots that startle a scream out of her when they seem suddenly to swarm her, licking her face like dry tongues.