Red Moon

  The cave is as black as bile. As black as ink. The black of a place sealed by stone and buried deep beneath the earth—a place no one should ever go. Penetrating, infectious, a black that soaks into her and drowns her lungs and leadens her muscles and makes her want to shrink into a ball and wait for the worst to happen because the worst seems an inevitability when lost in the dark with something fanged in pursuit.

  She stops to listen. There is movement in the darkness. A rustling. Then footsteps. The noise, the soft padding over rocks, the shooshing through sand, grows louder, closer. The darkness invites the worst of her imagination, and instead of Puck creeping toward her, she imagines the man in the clown mask, his eyes black pools, his lips the red of fresh meat. When he found her, when he sniffed her out, his mouth would open as large as this chamber before swallowing her.

  She feels the wolf welling inside her, willing her to let go, but so far she resists. She does not trust her wild mindlessness once transformed and worries she might end up, panicked as she is by the dark, clawing at the walls until her fingers peel away to bone.

  She keeps trying to see. As if, by force of will, she will develop extrasensory sight. The strain makes her eyeballs ache as if full of too much blood. She hears Puck bark out a laugh, but it’s difficult to place him, whether five or fifteen or fifty yards away, the noise echoing off the curved walls and toothy ceiling of this chamber and carrying through the many rooms and pits and corridors that reach into the darkness all around her.

  Then she screams when right next to her she hears a voice damp and bubbling with blood: “I can smell you, pretty.”

  * * *

  By his best guess they have been underground an hour. They have heard things—sand whispering, bats fluttering, rocks coming loose from the ceiling with a click and then slamming the cave floor with an echoing boom. At one point, something with red eyes scuttled through their flashlights’ beams, never to be seen again.

  He taps Miriam on the shoulder and she flinches at his touch. He asks how much farther and she says, “How much farther to what?” her annoyance obvious even at a whisper.

  “To where they’re keeping Claire.”

  “I have no idea. She could be in one of twenty different places.”

  His flashlight sweeps the kitchen into sight. He is surprised, not for the first time, with their civility. He doesn’t know what he expected—straw and animal skins for bedding, a fire pit with gnawed bones stacked around it—but certainly not this. Glasses and knives and pots wink back at him. The fridge is messy with magnetic poetry. A can of Diet Coke is tipped over on a counter with a small brown puddle around its mouth. The smell of chili hangs in the air.

  Miriam opens and closes the fridge, her hand lingering on the handle, as if she is remembering something.

  He hears the trickle of water and seeks out the source among the cabinets. Here the cave wall sparkles with water. A ladle flashes silver. A stream of water seeps from the wall into a pool big enough for him to dive into with a splash.

  It is here that he first sees her. Reflected in the moisture of the wall. A warped rippling figure darting from a nearby tunnel and coming rapidly toward him. He swings the flashlight and his pistol at once, almost firing and then nearly crying out when he recognizes her, Claire.

  She is running toward him, toward the flashlight, as though traveling down a tunnel of light, the white eye of the beam shrinking to home in on her chest. He feels such excitement he does not notice her expression, gray with fear and spotted with blood, until she is upon him. He catches her and she struggles against him a moment. He says her name and recognition dawns on her face and she says, “Run.” She is pushing him, dragging him away.

  He is about to question her when a half-glimpsed shape knocks him to the cave floor. His ribs scream with agony. He nearly blacks out. His Mag light skitters away and the shadows reel and make the kitchen swarm with black wraiths. He can smell blood, maybe his own. A figure crouches nearby, encased in shadow, unseen except for the faint glow of what must be hair, almost phosphorescent. It is breathing heavily, and every breath has enough damp throatiness to sound almost like a word.

  Patrick is on his back and crabbing backward on his hands and legs when the figure blurs toward him. Gunfire shouts. Amplified painfully by their enclosure, the sound echoes around him, clapping off the walls and making one shot into a fusillade. Patrick is so stunned he can’t register who has been shot, if anyone, until a flashlight arrests the figure—a man, Patrick can now see, a lycan with a narrow face and a body barely bigger than a child’s. He is crumpling sideways, clawing at the air with one hand and clutching his belly with the other.

  Miriam has both arms outstretched, casting the beam of her Mag light and firing her pistol into its glowing funnel. She fires again, and again, and every gunshot brings with it a blast of daylight that dies as soon as it appears. She marches forward, and the circle thrown by the Mag light grows smaller until it pinpoints the lycan. She fires again. The lycan’s eyes roll back in his head and his body shakes as if possessed by a spirit he is trying to resist.

  Chapter 29

  THE CEREMONY IS to take place at nightfall, only minutes away, the sun cutting the sky with one last blade of light before sinking from sight. The windows of Fox Tower and the surrounding mall and office buildings glow yellow. Pioneer Courthouse Square—known affectionately as the living room—is a tiered and bricked crater in the heart of downtown Portland. A full city block decorated with fountains, now dry, and potted plants, now empty, and edged with pillars and trees through which, like a tangled spiderweb, hang garlands and strings of lights. The light-rail rolls by, its bell mixed up with the bell rung by the Salvation Army volunteer stationed at the corner.

  On this cold November night, thousands of people have gathered. Breath plumes from their mouths. They stamp their feet to stay warm. They wear fleece and wool caps and red-and-green holiday sweaters. Daughters in Santa hats roost on their fathers’ shoulders. Boys sip from paper cups of hot cocoa and ask, dozens of times, how long it will be until the lights come on, and their parents say, soon, soon. All eyes are on the dark-limbed seventy-five-foot Douglas fir erected in the center of the square.

  A fat, white-bearded man in a Santa suit walks through the crowd, ho-ho-hoing and patting heads and handing out tiny candy canes wrapped in clear plastic and crouching down to gaze kindly at shy children who hide behind their parents’ legs.

  The sky is clear, but when the wind rises, it appears to snow, ice crystals blowing off the buildings and trees, making the darkened air sparkle.

  Reporters from KGW and KATU and KOIN, wearing red scarves and black peacoats, stand before video cameras on tripods. They say that any minute now, the governor will appear for the annual Christmas tree lighting, any minute now—and wait—they bring a hand to their earpieces and listen and look over their shoulders and say, here he is now.

  He wears a cowboy hat, a sport coat, and jeans. His teeth are bared in a smile. His cheeks are reddened from the cold. He works his way down a set of stairs, flanked by a seven-man security detail. He shakes hands, claps shoulders. There is applause, but under the applause, some muttering, a few boos.

  Another minute and he is at the bottom of the amphitheater, standing before a microphoned podium with a rounded top, its dark wood polished to a glow, making it appear like an upright coffin.

  “It’s that time, friends,” he says, his voice becoming many voices that boom from speakers stationed throughout the square. “The most wonderful time of the year.” He takes in the sight of the tree, a black silhouette against a purple sky, and his eyes crinkle with seeming wonder when he talks of Christmas, the season of peace and giving, of goodness.

  He makes no mention of lycans or of a presidential run or of any of the other sound bites he is so well-known for these days. Instead he talks about candy canes and sugarplums and the magic of the season and the gift of kindness. He talks about Christmas growing up on the cattle ranch. He quotes Charle
s Dickens. For a few minutes everyone feels good—everyone looks at him with kind crinkly eyed smiles—as if they each carried inside them invisible candles that he has lit so that the square seems illumined before he even flips the switch, as he does now, and everyone gasps with delight and applauds as the tree explodes with colored lights that chase the shadows from every face and make every wide-open eye glimmer like a star.

  The choir from Oregon Episcopal, a group of teenagers dressed in red and black, gathers before the tree and sings, “Chestnuts roasting by an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose,” their voices as clear and bright as the pillar of light that rises behind them. Children sway and smile and husbands kiss their wives on the cheek and they hug arms around each other.

  All this time a white windowless van circles the block. A decal along the body reads DEDMEN PARTY AND CATERING SHOPPE, a cluster of colored balloons rising above the black capital letters. The reflection of the Christmas tree streams across the black windows. The fifth time it circles the square, its engine shouts and it gathers speed and lurches sideways, off the street, into the square. Its tires thud over the curb.

  The first few people don’t even have time to scream, hammered by the grille, lost beneath the tires, their bodies cleaved. And then, all at once, as if everyone is connected by an invisible string, the crowd comes alive with a collective shout. Bodies shake, surge one way, then the other.

  The choir is still singing when the van drops into the amphitheater. Their voices call out beautifully—soon lost against the harsh metallic bang when the undercarriage first slams the brick. The noise that follows is like the crash and crunch and shriek of the heaviest toolbox in the world hurled down a stone stairwell. Yellow sparks, like those of a failed Zippo, spit from the wheel wells.

  The van is nearly to the tree when, in an orange flash, it is gone. A great boom sounds. Blackened strips of metal fling through the air, the shell of the van peeled away by its explosive core, the flames fingering their way outward, seizing and igniting so many bodies, flinging fistfuls of nails and screws and stainless-steel balls that blister brick and concrete and tear through flesh like buckshot through a road sign.

  The brightness of the explosion—which for a few seconds chases away all the darkness and brings a hellish daylight to the square—has been replaced by a charred and smoking crater. Bodies lie in heaps, some of them moving, some not, their skin blackened and marred by many strange openings like diseased mouths.

  A woman sits on a bench; the top of her skull is gone. The grayish nub of her brain peeks out. Threads of blood run down her face and dampen her jacket. She seems unaware of her injury, staring into the glow of her smart phone as if deciding whether or not she ought to call someone.

  A man staggers by nearly naked, the clothes shredded off him, what remains hanging in blackened and bloody tatters like old bandages. His genitals are missing and blood streams down the insides of his legs. Another man walks by with no nose, another with no teeth, another with no lower jaw, his tongue dangling from a ragged toothy cavity.

  “Help,” says a woman in a Rudolph sweater. “Can somebody help me?” But even if someone could, she wouldn’t be able to hear them. Her eardrums have ruptured and made her red sweater even redder along the shoulders. Rudolph’s red nose—powered by a battery pack—blinks a distress signal.

  Santa’s body lies sprawled out in the shape of an X. His head is missing.

  Chase sits in the center of the square. He cannot hear anything except the ringing in his ears. Only ringing is the wrong word. This is more like screaming, the screaming of a thousand cicadas. Around him he sees all these victims, bloodied and charred, some of them crawling and some staggering and some motionless. He sees them through the roiling smoke, sees them lit with flame, and his concussed brain believes he is at war again.

  A man rushes toward him, a man in a smoking sport coat. He carries a pistol. Chase vaguely recognizes him. His mouth is moving but all Chase can hear is the sound of screaming insects. Another man joins him. And then another. More and more come out of the smoke, crowding around him, opening and closing their mouths, but the only noise is this terrible insect rasp that seems to emanate from them. He would love to run away, but his limbs feel loose in their sockets. He would love to close his eyes and pretend they didn’t exist, but they reach out and touch him all over, trying to move him, to wrestle him up, and as they press upon him, he lashes out and screams something garbled.

  He sees, through the smoke, in the deepening black of the sky, a crescent moon. He feels a heat rising inside him. For the past twenty-four hours, at Buffalo’s orders, he has not taken Volpexx. He needed to be present for the ceremony. So long as he stayed calm, everything would be fine, Buffalo assured him. They talked about breathing—peach in, green out—good in, poisons out. They talked about what to do in case of hecklers. They talked about enjoying the moment.

  Chase can feel his heartbeat crashing in his chest, can taste the blood in his mouth, can feel the wolf turning over inside him. He is breathing out of his mouth and he is rolling onto his knees and arching his back when he feels a sharp stabbing pain in his left buttock.

  He flips over with a shriek and finds Buffalo leaning over him, drawing him into a suffocating hug. He says sh-sh-sh. In his hand is a tranquilizer the size of a fountain pen. He has stabbed it into Chase and already he feels its effects, a dopey calmness overtaking him, numbing any fear or desire.

  Buffalo. Chase studies his old friend. His enormous forehead is bleeding and Chase wants to ask if he’s okay but can’t manage the words. One eye of his glasses is sooted over, but the other is clear and in it Chase can see his reflection. Though the air is cold, sweat has sprung from his skin and he takes on a paler color so that there seems to be something about him already embalmed.

  Two of the news cameras are still rolling. They will close in on the governor, and then swing suddenly away. There are a series of pops, like the gunshots of a .22, that draw their attention skyward, finally settling into wobbly focus on the tree, which has caught fire. It begins with a yellow edging along some of the branches. Then, as the fire eats its way quickly through the needles, the swish and snap of flame grow louder, overtaking the screams and car alarms and sirens in the distance.

  The Christmas lights—big red and green and blue lights the size of bell peppers—explode, two pops, then six pops, then fourteen in rapid-fire—filling the air with tiny clouds of glass powder, sparkling and seemingly motionless.

  In less than a minute the flames have overtaken the entire tree, now a towering cone of fire that breathes heat that sends the survivors scurrying from the square and melts the glasses and wristwatches and rubber-soled boots of the corpses left behind. A black cord of smoke coils upward, beyond the reaches of any skyscraper, to bring a tremendous black cloud to an otherwise clear sky.

  Chapter 30

  PATRICK PARKS HIS JEEP and sits with his hands on the wheel and the engine idling for a long time. The strip mall in front of him houses a Shopko, Supercuts, Pizza Hut, Old Mountain Liquor, and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center. This is December, six days since he turned eighteen and nearly a month since the three of them emerged from the caves, filthy and bloody and bleary-eyed, but alive. They drove down the mountain together, silent in the cab of the Ramcharger. Claire sat in the middle of the bench seat, her head resting on his shoulder. He remembers how he felt then, trembling with relief and excitement, so utterly alive.

  Night had given way to day during their time underground. The rumble of the engine and the tick of cinders in the wheel wells and snow falling off a tree branch in a crystalline scarf and the sun flaring in the blue dome of the sky with little puffs of clouds hanging under it and the weight and warmth of Claire’s head on his shoulder came together to give him an overwhelming sense of peace and relief. The worst was over and new things were coming. A knot inside him seemed to loosen, unravel.

  Until they pulled up to his house and discovered the sedan with military
plates in the driveway. He did not say anything. He did not think anything. A dark instinct sent him leaping out of the Ram and storming toward the house. He pushed open the front door and stood in its dark rectangle and called out for his mother even as he saw her on the love seat with the two men seated on the couch opposite her, the CNO and chaplain in military dress with their hats in their hands and their biceps darkened by black bands.

  His mother stood at the sight of him. “What’s happened?” they said at the same time. She was referring to his black lump of an eye, and he was referring to what really mattered, the reason her tears washed away her makeup. When she didn’t respond, he looked away from her, looked to the street, where through the glare of the Ramcharger’s windshield he saw the faint image of Claire looking back at him.

  Just as he is looking now at the windowed door of the recruitment center, glazed with a cataract of ice, so that in a few minutes’ time someone outside could barely see a figure—whether a boy or a man, it would be too hard to tell—approach the reception desk and shake the hand of the officer sitting behind it.